In this episode we'll talk to Yasiin, who is a graduate from the Coders Campus Bootcamp.

We dive into his story about how he started his coding journey as a Restaurant Manager, and went through two Coding Bootcamp before landing his first job.

Yasiin shares a ton of great insights and tips for beginner coders who are hoping to get a job, so be sure to listen to the whole episode.

Interested in starting your coding career?

I'm now accepting students into an immersive programming Bootcamp where I guarantee you a job offer upon graduation.

It is a 6 month, part-time, online Bootcamp that teaches you everything you need to know to get a job as a Java developer in the real-world.

You can learn more via www.coderscampus.com/bootcamp

Episode Transcript

0:09

Welcome to the coders campus podcast, where you'll learn how to code from one of the best teachers in the industry. Whether you're an absolute beginner or a seasoned pro, the coders campus podcast will teach you what you need to know to master the art of programming. And now, your host, Trevor page.

0:28

All right, ladies and gentlemen, fellow coders. Welcome to this next episode in our coders campus podcast series. This is a slightly different one. And as promised in the in the last episode, I am now delivering this interview. So this is an interview between myself and yes, seen who is one of our bootcamp graduates. And, yeah, I just want to sit down and have an honest chat with your scene about his experience, a little bit about his story, and to understand sort of what his path is, and was in terms of learning how to code, right, this is not going to be a sugar coated story, this is not going to be one where I asked him to pretty up all the details. I'm just asking him for his honest feedback and his honest opinion about his journey thus far through not only my boot camp, but another boot camp as well. And sort of what obviously, the outcome was in terms of, you know, the job and whatnot. And, yeah, this is a really good raw interview, I have not edited anything out of this interview. So you can just sit back and enjoy it and hear a story unfold and in before your very ears, if you will, from someone probably just like you who started out in an industry that has nothing to do with coding, and made the transition into becoming a software developer. So without further ado, let's jump into that interview. So yeah, I guess we get started by by sort of, you know, getting an introduction to who yes, seen is getting to know a little bit about your background of who you were sort of before, I guess the boot camp that I run before you join that boot camp, even start give us a little blurb. Yeah, who are you? What were you doing? So my name is Yasiin. I'm a junior developer right now for a company called Brooklyn bedding. It works in manufacturing industry. Before I got started with my journey, I actually was working in restaurants, I worked restaurants for almost 15 years of my life a long time, and managed to complete a server bartender did everything you could think of in a restaurant with a cook at one point in time when I was really young. Besides that, I actually decided I wanted to do something different in life. Um, after managing for a while, I wasn't being challenged enough to like, just keep myself going. And the brain, they were very monotonous job of coming in at same thing every day. And, you know, you always think yourself, you want something a little bit more. So that led me to a boot camp, which was a boot camp, local University of Arizona, and they had their web development boot camp, which is great to start off with understanding your HTML, your CSS, a little bit of JavaScript, and they touched on Java as well, which was great, because it had to give me a good foundation to understanding what what actually coding was, you know, a lot of times you hear about coding, you don't really know what industry or what you're doing, you hear about these coders making six figures, and it's always going to be a guaranteed job, you go to your boot camp, you come out, you make your six figures, which, you know, that does happen for some people, but it's not for everybody. That's something that it takes a while to build up, you have to keep working at it. That's something I found out just, you know, I'm taking a boot camp and trying to get a job right after and you're like, Oh, you don't have an experience. So then you got to grind yourself out, you know, experience wise was great. I actually after my first boot camp, I didn't get a job right away, I actually took another boot camp and then I was able to get a part time job was a hourly wage, which was great, I found that to be the most developing wise, because the kind of challenge meant will the real world like working experience, because you don't really know if you've never worked in the industry before, what it's going to be like to actually work on a project. That's something that you got to you have to actually be in the industry and working in it and you have to get first job or internship or, you know, pretty much I would say take the first job you get no matter what the pay is just because you want that experience experience is gonna make you 10 times better than what you were. I wasn't very confident in the beginning. That was something that was kind of lacking just because you don't really know like you've never worked in industry. I worked in restaurants my whole life. Like I don't really know what happens and the development industry. Now I get to see the days and days out and you know it's a different side of things.

5:01

Yeah, so that's a really good, really good. I have a few million questions that came up as you were talking. So in terms of so you didn't restaurants for 15 years? How How would you rate yourself in that period when you're working with restaurants? In terms of your technical abilities? Were you like one being, I don't even know how to operate or turn on a computer and 10 being Yeah, I worked at Google or something. Well, you say your your skill set was, you know, while you were working in the restaurant industry, well, my skill set was never my skill set around computers with great because I went to I grew up in on technology engineering school. So from grade school, pretty much from first grade all the way through high school, I went to engineering technology, magnet schools, which are they're based, that's what they're teaching you the basis. So our foundation is that and we learn everything else with it. So I could operate a computer, I knew how to surf the web, I knew how to, you know, look at different stuff we mostly use like Excel sheets. And I remember in through that through, I even want to hit college, we took I took one of the classes we built, we built a website, but I think I was using Dreamweaver at the time. So a bunch of stuff. And I didn't really know what was going on. And the way they built made it build a website wasn't like building a real website. It was, you know, some of the questions I remember, she was like, I forgot the thing, but just changed it a little icon on the top of the tab page. That was one of the questions we had to do for one of our assignments, VIP credit for that, which, you know, that's something that stuck in my head, just just doing that this little stuff. So I had experience to it. But I didn't realize at the time before I started software development, what experience I had until I actually got into it. And that's that's pretty common. Most people have familiarity with a computer, they know how to surf the web, they know how to use Google, you know. So that's sort of what in terms of my boot camp or what I run, those are some foundational things that you just sort of have to have, if you don't know how to use Google, you're you're not in the right place, you got to go learn that skill first. So that's good to hear. And in terms of you mentioned, you took a different boot camp, first through the University of Arizona. And first, how long was that boot camp? If you remember, the boot camp, I want to three was 24 weeks, put in four weeks, about about six months. That's about that's a life length, the size boot camp. That's that's a good size. And you learn about some of the fundamentals of the web. So HTML, CSS, you mentioned Java, did you do like a little bit of JavaScript there? Yeah, a little, mostly JavaScript, Java was just touched at the end, we didn't go too deep into it. And we were already building projects. And we worked a lot with React what they had as the foundation they had to build in. And and so you did the six month thing you did, you know, essentially a front end development that's in terms of the industry. And you know, knowing what I know, that's sort of what that job, potential job could be as a front end developer. But you said you graduated, then didn't get a job. So can you talk more about that? Why What Why do you think that didn't happen? Why do you think you didn't get a job? Were you looking for like, a two weeks? And then you gave up? Or was it six months? Or sort of how long was that journey and that kind of thing. It was mostly just building my LinkedIn and applying to jobs that popped up. And, you know, a lot of experience when you look at it says, oh, I want five years experience and two years experience. And, you know, sometimes it's a two year experience, but then they wanted a senior developer and then you know, you look at everything. And no matter what, when you apply to that a lot of no responses were you know that we need a little bit more experience, we're looking for someb