Megan Alumni Spotlight

MEGAN:

If you look at the Reddit reviews, which I feel are more real than anywhere else, so many great things are said about Sabio, just people that have had incredible careers that are now working for Amazon, that are now working for Google. And they all got their start in Sabio. And I was like, well, me next! 

My name's Megan. I'm 34 years old. I was in the Navy for six and a half years, got my degree in nursing, but about two weeks doing that COVID hit and I was like, I’ve had enough war zones in my lifetime. I'm getting the hell out of nursing. And I finally was like, I'll just get into tech. I've loved coding pretty much my entire life. 

If you're around my age. You probably heard of a website called Neopets. So like my love and passion for coding kind of slowly stemmed from that. And then I was making fan sites for Harry Potter, the Marvel series. So I did have some experience with like HTML, CSS and JavaScript, but nothing more than that. I did the 17 week program, which is the one where you do pre-work in the class. But I did start the pre-work probably about a month and a month and a half before I joined Cohort 14. 

Q: What did you work on in your cohort?

MEGAN:

We worked on a site called Interrogas and we created an interactive map and a website for tracking elections in Mexico. I know way more about Mexican politics than I ever needed to. 

Q: What was the job search process like?

MEGAN:

I went hard on job interviews, like what's the point of doing this program to get a job if you're not going hard on trying to get a job? So I was putting out 50 to 80 applications a day. You have to keep learning and pushing and going through these interview questions and picking up new skills. “Oh, they asked me this question, this job interview. I didn't know what it was.” So go and do a whole bunch of research on that question and figure out how to do things and then add that to your list of interview questions that you have. Like the amount of work that you're putting in right now into the program is the amount of work you need to be putting in once you're applying for jobs. I graduated end of April, got the job in October. It took six months.

Q: How did you stay motivated during the job hunt?

MEGAN:

Go to Clay's classes every single week. They were the absolute most helpful thing besides data structures and algorithms, which I still slightly ignore, that this program offers. Oh, and motivational Mondays.

Q: Did you negotiate your salary?

MEGAN:

Having vacation time was very important to me. So they only wanted to start me off at 4, but I was able to bump that up to 6 and then they wanted to start me at $70,000, but I ended up being able to come in at $80,000 because I told them I'm going to be one of your best developers. I'm going to come in, you're going to be impressed with me, you're going to love me. Let's renegotiate my salary in three months. December 31st, they bumped up my pay to $100,000. 

Q: Can you talk about your company and what kind of tasks you do?

MEGAN:

So I actually work for a nonprofit. So many of my veteran friends have attempted suicide or committed suicide or been in crisis. And I just I love what I do every single day, like being able to help support these people that are on the front lines of stopping suicide. It's life changing a little bit. All that I do is just debugging in C#, making APIs, doing MVC. That's one of the things I wish I would have spent more time on when I was going through the school. Like personally, I kind of just rushed through the C# section and I wish I would have sat down and spent more time with it because every single interview that I did post-Sabio, they were asking about C#. I probably missed out on four job opportunities because my C# skills weren't the best, and that's probably my biggest regret because I think I'd be doing even better than I am now. 

Q: What is the work-life balance like?

MEGAN:

I work fully, completely, 100% remotely. This is my office and my bedroom. I have an incredible work-life balance. I literally just messaged my boss like, Hey, I need to take my dog to the vet. And they're just like, it's fine. Come back tomorrow. You're good for the day. The bigger corporations, they're going to be a lot stricter with those things. I'm only required to be in the office for one week out of the year. And if I didn't live in the state they would fly me out here and that's for team building and company stuff. And we just actually had it. We went out to dinner every single night and they catered lunch. We all worked in the office together. I'm telling you guys, nonprofit life is the way to go.