Chris S Alumni Spotlight

CHRIS:

If I had to start over again, what would I tell myself? I'll probably just tell myself to, you know, just push yourself just a little bit harder and just take advantage of the instructors while they're there. Because you won't always have that.

Before coming to Sabio I actually was an entrepreneur. Basically, I would repair devices like iPhones, laptops. When I went to the info session for Sabio, I thought, you know, it might be a good skill to add to my tool belt with coding and everything. So while I was going to Sabio, I had a tragedy and a good thing happened in my family. My sister passed away while I was going to Sabio, but the next day I had a baby. It was the craziest thing in the world. And just like switching from JavaScript to C#, that was like, that period of time, sometimes I feel like that was probably the most difficult part of Sabio for me, and I overcame it just by staying on the queue, staying in communication and always having good contact with Gregorio, Liliana, and even the instructors. You’re lucky to be in a position where you're at somewhere like Sabio where they care about you because I've completed other bootcamps, not coding, but I've done cybersecurity bootcamps where they wouldn't have helped like that.

Q: What was the job search process like?

CHRIS:

Right after I finished my resume, I started applying for jobs and applied for a lot of jobs like I was doing maybe 40 to 50, maybe 60 applications a day. And how I actually ended up landing the job was I put my resume on a site called hire.com and they reached out to me.

Q: What languages are you using at your job?

CHRIS:

They're learning new languages there. They don't use the same as Sabio. But with the skills that I got at Sabio, I'm super confident in being able to pick up the programming language and go.

Q: How did you deal with the experience question?

CHRIS:

Anybody who knows me knows that I got a I guess you would call it a mouthpiece where I could talk to people. So I just explained to them like, hey, I picked up these languages like this. I know I could pick up that language and I just said it with no doubt in my mind, look ‘em straight in their face even if we're on Zoom and I just leave no doubt in their mind.

Q: Did you negotiate your salary?

CHRIS:

They offered originally like $85,000. But, they came back and they were like, oh, well, we only want to pay you $80,000. So, you know, of course, the first thing I did was I hit up Liliana on Slack and I was like, you know, what should I do? And we kind of came to a solution. And it was basically to wait until the 90 day review. And if the 90 day review was good to add the extra $5,000 back on. And I'm still waiting to hear back from them for that. But I'm pretty sure that they're going to take it.

Q: How many of your classmates have jobs?

CHRIS:

I don't think it's too many people that don't have jobs because like I remember last month,

it was over half. It'll work, it'll work. Just have confidence and, you know, don't be scared of them people, man. You can do it. I got confidence in you.