Collin did all his Sabio Courses remotely from the Philippines, using a cheap little mobile router and now makes $80k a year.
Strapped for cash and waiting out the United States immigration process for family in the Philippines, Collin realized he needed a “rare unicorn” of a job. His job had to be remote, complicated, and something you could make a decent living off of it. As a US veteran, he began searching VET TEC-eligible programs. “Sabio was at the top of the list as one of the preferred program providers for VET TEC.” And since Collin had the good fortune of being near a small cell tower in the remote town Alicia Bohol, he was able to complete the entire Sabio Coding Boot Camp with a “little mobile router.”
Sabio was a grind for him but what made it unique from other boot camps was the culture of the program. “This program is not just teaching you languages. It's showing you the mentality and the person that you need to be in the software engineering world to be successful.” So if you’re a self-taught person who thinks learning to code is something that can be forged through YouTube videos and blogs, think again. The culture of Sabio, the “spirit of the program,” is something you can’t get from random, disparate sources.
Upon graduation, Collin made it his full time job to find a job. And Sabio provided him with all the resources he needed. “What Sabio will do is they'll give you a spreadsheet, a blank template type of spreadsheet, and I listed every single job that I applied to.”
As he was casting his net out to a hundred employers a day, he finally started to get bites. “The first job tried to offer me $100,000 pesos a month,” he explained, “which in the Philippines is great money, but in the United States it's garbage. That's like $1,700 a month.” But he used this as leverage for his next job offer. When asked if he had any other offers on the table he responded, “Actually I have an offer in hand right now, but I'm not going to take it because I don't really like it. But if you can offer me over 80, I'll be interested.” The tactic worked and Collin signed on with an awesome Software Company as a full stack engineer for that figure.
The languages he learned at Sabio made him a “unicorn” in the eyes of his employer. “The fact that you have .NET training, that you work with SQL databases and React, we don't find anybody else like you,” his employer told him in the interview. Just like at Sabio, he does twice-a-week “stand ups” with his company, all from the comfort of his home in the Philippines.
Coding is a contact sport, as Collin heard time and again from chief instructor Gregorio Rojas. “If you're going to learn coding, you've just gotta put your hands on the keyboard and you've just got to work through the issues that you come up with.”
This hands-on approach transcended even the remoteness of his actual location and gave Collin the very real result of an 80k-a-year job.
Now, thankfully, the immigration waiting process will not involve worrisome glances at a dwindling bank balance.
Collin was hired by: 