Bradley landed a great Software Engineering role after graduating Sabio

Bradley: What I will say about tech is that it empowers you to do what you want. You're so marketable. You have so many employers that want to hire you. You can kind of demand what you want and what's best for you.
I was a tank mechanic in the Marine Corps, and then I started working construction. I was in the local 433 ironworkers union while going to college full time. I was going for civil engineering and I just started doing some math in my head and I was like to make an entry salary of about $60-$70,000 a year. And I was like, Man, that kind of sucks. So I posted on my Facebook story, I was like, has anyone broken into tech without a degree? Can anyone help me out? And a Sabio alumni from C114 told me about the cohort, I signed up next month, and led me to where I’m at today where I'm a full stack software engineer.

Q: What did you find difficult at Sabio?

Bradley: The first thing I noticed with Sabio is that it's kind of like trying to drink from a fire hydrant. It's a lot of information. You kind of need to take what you can get and then figure out as you go. And just kind of trust in the process I think was what was really hard for me. A lot of people who struggled, a lot of people who didn’t make it is because they had a problem with a student or they had a problem with an instructor. They let themselves become very high school and I think avoiding that probably was my biggest advantage in the course.

Q: Do you have any advice for students at Sabio?

Bradley: I like thinking of coding as learning a language. I taught myself Spanish and when I was teaching myself Spanish, what I did was I just listened to a lot of Spanish music and then I started watching TV with Spanish. Didn't understand a word, but slowly, just the familiarity, hearing the sounds of the language. In the same way, spending time with the code, by just staring at it, even if you don't understand what it says, by staring at it, you're going to start being able to pick out pieces. It's going to start making sense.

Q: How many applications did you send out?

Bradley: About two weeks after I graduated, I had already applied to over 5,000 applications. I was in bed relaxing, watching TV. I always had indeed on my phone, I was applying. I applied to any job that utilized my skills. So if it had SQL, whether that was software engineer, whether I was a data analyst, whether that was a database administrator.
That Friday, before I graduated got my first offer. The day after I graduated, I got an offer for that database administrator role. That Wednesday, I got another offer that I'm at right now. That Friday I received another offer from a consulting firm. And then about a month after that, they there was a little slow, I got a government contracting gig. So in total, I got six offers ranging from $60k year all the way up to $103k a year.
I went with the 80k option. And then the selling point was that it’s remote. I mean, the fact that I can work wherever I want. I’m actually kind of looking at buying a property out in Mexico, to be honest.

Q: What was the interview process like?

Bradley: There's three types of interviews. The first one is going to be a unicorn. And it's very casual. It's more of a personality interview and then they give you an offer. Those are very rare. The second type of interview is the whiteboarding interview. And I would say about 30 to 40% of all technical interviews are whiteboarding interviews. You need to be hitting your LeetCode, you need to be hitting data structure and algorithms. I’m going to be totally honest, I have never gotten an offer. Anytime I’ve had a LeetCode interview, I've failed. The most common one is what I like to call the the trivia interviews where they just start firing off 50 questions at you. You know, Hey, what's the difference between an abstract class and an interface? Hey, can you describe what the degrees of normalcy are in SQL? Hey, what React Cook would use in the situation? And I'm going to say probably 70 to 80% of those questions come off of the Sabio interview questions.

Q: Do you have any tips for the interviews?

Bradley: Please, please take the tip because no one ever does it. And you set yourself apart and you out and you can avoid just getting quizzed. Instead of letting him just fire off 50 questions at me, he asked about interface and I said, Actually, here, let me show you my interface. I shared my screen, started talking the interface. Then I showed them the service file and then I showed him the controller. I'm just talking, talking. And they liked it so much they actually brought another developer onto a meeting for my next interview and they just wanted me to talk him through my code.

Q: What kinds of benefits do companies offer?

Bradley: Once you have two, three companies on your resume, like this whole job process that we're fighting with right now, it's no longer a thing. Like even right now, I'm having offers roll in. Honestly, like I'm having interviews rolling. I'm in final stages for interviews for multiple different types of jobs. And so they know that, they want to keep you engaged with their company. They don't want you, they don’t even want you to apply because odds are you'll get a better offer. They just want to keep you there. That's the tech world right there.