From Pizza Delivery to Senior Software Developer: Andrew's Unexpected Rise in Tech
Andrew was delivering pizzas in Florida while attending unsatisfying college courses in computer science. “I wasn't happy with the education I was getting to learn to write software. Everything that I was learning there, it was either like handwriting or I was thinking of the theories behind things.”
He knew he needed to take his coding to the next level so he enrolled in Sabio. As one of the only programs that accept VA benefits – Andrew is ex-military – and the fact that he could do it remotely made his decision a no-brainer. “Here in Florida, there aren’t any genuine coding bootcamps. I feel like the education I got from Sabio was far better than what I could expect to get from one of these places.”
In cohort 114, Andrew worked on a project for Trainsquare and finally got to hone his skills in a real-life situation. The work was hard but what posed the biggest challenge was a personal issue that arose toward the end. Thankfully, Sabio management prides itself on its ability to accommodate students’ life situations. “I know that Sabio and the instructors, they preach, if anything happens, come to us…But then when it actually happened to me and I had to reach out to Liliana it was such a breath of fresh air, how quick they were to be accepting of the issues. And she told me to take a day, breathe, we'll get back to it tomorrow. And that's what we did.”
The job search process was another major hurdle. He put out thousands of applications and only got a handful of interviews, which is to be expected but still disheartening, especially if the interviews lead to nowhere like they were for Andrew. At one point he almost gave up.
But as fate would have it, just when he was ready to throw in the towel, his big break came. “The next day I woke up and I told myself, I'm going to put in a couple more interviews later today. If I don't get anything by the end of the week I'll start applying to regular pizza jobs again or something.” That day Andrew got the call from what would become his employer. Soon he was on the phone with the owner of the company and a few days later he was signing start paperwork.
What’s more – his job is no walk-in-the-park junior developer one. It’s senior-level and he puts in long hours, managing a team of software engineers, and attending multiple meetings a day. Andrew isn’t coding as much as he would like but he hopes to get back at it on his next job. As he puts it, “My resume is going to look great this time next year.”
Throughout Sabio and in the beginning of his job, Andrew admits he had a lot of imposter syndrome. But who wouldn’t? The jump from pizza delivery guy to overseeing a team of engineers isn’t exactly a small one. But Andrew urges others to do the same and says, “Grass is greener over here.”
Andrew was hired by:
Luke & Associates, Inc 