From Couch to Coding: How Carlos Casually Starts His Work Day
A Marine Corps veteran, Carlos was not without coding skills prior to joining Sabio. During his time in the field, he was the guy in his “sleeping bag with an iPad just trying to learn HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.”
But it wasn’t until he got out that he decided to see if he could make coding his career. After looking around at all the VA-supported programs, he eventually landed on Sabio. What made him convinced Sabio was the right fit? As many guys will relate, it was his wife. She said, “Hey I got a feeling that you should go to Sabio.” Less than a week later he was enrolled in the program.
Using React, C#, .NET, SQL and many other languages, Carlos learned a lot at Sabio and when he struggled, he leaned on his classmates. “I'm not going to lie. I got a little bit burned out, but I had like three good friends there. And we would always be like talking to each other. I think it's crucial.”
The job search process posed its own challenges. During one interview series, which Carlos thought was going really well, he faced a really hard coding challenge in his third round. The task? Connect to an API using full PHP.
“I don't know nothing about PHP. I said like, you know what, I'm going to try. And I was close…I managed to figure it out using Google search real quick and the spare time.” But it didn’t convince the interviewers and after that rejection, Carlos was feeling really down.
But he thought to himself, “You know what, I made it this far. Why am I going to quit now?” That pick-yourself-up military mentality really pulled him out of his rut. As fate would have it, a few days later, he had the interview that turned into his job.
His advice when on the job? Constantly be learning, fully absorb everything that you’re doing. “Don't be like chasing every tutorial that you see [and] if you have time, maybe in the weekend, start looking into Soft Skill. I cannot emphasize it enough.”
He works at a university in their IT department. And since coding is his passion, something he just does out of curiosity, it doesn’t feel like work for him. He wakes up and “chills on his sofa watching TV” and will casually open his laptop and start working. “Like, it's something I just think I do automatically. I just get bored, open the laptop and I start reading and trying some code. Like for me, my work, it feels surreal. It feels like, dude, literally a university is paying me instead of me paying the university to go there. It is like a university is paying me to create a website.”
Carlos was hired by:
Temple University 