Megan went to Sabio and now she makes 100k/yr
At a fully remote nonprofit with 6 weeks vacation and a $100k salary, Megan still has time to take her dog to the vet: “I'm telling you guys, nonprofit life is the way to go!”.
After 6 years in the Navy, Megan thought she would go into nursing. But her first two weeks were during the outbreak of COVID-19 so she made a quick career pivot. Her reasoning was simple: “I’ve had enough war zones in my lifetime. I'm getting the hell out of nursing.”
So she gave tech a shot, drawing on the basic coding skills she picked up as a kid toying around with – throwback alert – Neopets and fan sites for Harry Potter and Marvel series. While shopping for coding bootcamps she was struck by Sabio’s street cred on Reddit. “So many great things are said about Sabio, just people that have had incredible careers that are now working for Amazon, that are now working for Google. And they all got their start in Sabio. And I was like, well, me next!”
Megan jumped into the 17-week program, doing the in-class pre-work. Her cohort 114 worked on interactive maps and data tracking for Mexican elections. As Megan recalls, “I know way more about Mexican politics than I ever needed to.”
When she graduated from Sabio, Megan didn’t just kick back and send out a few applications. No. She went hard. Her reasoning: “What's the point of doing this program to get a job if you're not going hard on trying to get a job?” She was putting out 50 to 80 applications a day, and not only that, Megan was constantly learning from the interviews and improving her skills. If they asked something she didn’t know about, she would “go and do a whole bunch of research on that question.” In short, when you finish Sabio, that intense work ethic should just be extended throughout the job search process.
It’s a slow burn, an unrelenting grind. It took Megan 6 months to finally land a job, but she couldn’t be happier with the one she got. “So I actually work for a nonprofit. So many of my veteran friends have attempted suicide or committed suicide or been in crisis. And I just I love what I do every single day, like being able to help support these people that are on the front lines of stopping suicide. It's life changing a little bit.”
But not only is the work fulfilling, the pay is satisfying too. She pulls in $100k a year, a salary she worked up from an initial $70k offer. To top it off, she was able to lock in 6 weeks of vacation, up from 4. And working at a nonprofit has its own pros. As Megan happily reports, “I have an incredible work-life balance. I literally just messaged my boss like, Hey, I need to take my dog to the vet. And they're just like, it's fine. Come back tomorrow. You're good for the day. The bigger corporations, they're going to be a lot stricter with those things.”
Her two pieces of advice for Sabio graduates – “Go to Clay's classes every single week. They were the absolute most helpful thing besides data structures and algorithms.” And don’t slack off on C#. Megan insists she missed out on four job opportunities simply because her C# skills were not up to par. “Every single interview that I did post-Sabio, they were asking about C#.” Ironically, she now works all day in C#, debugging, making APIs, doing MVC.
She’s since more than caught up in this language, so maybe everything happens for a reason, but Megan believes she could be doing even better than she is now. Although it’s pretty hard to complain when you make six figures from your bedroom without any micromanagement. Maybe deciding what to do with the 6 weeks vacation is the hard part.
Megan was hired by: 