Sabio Alum Jared Topples His Expectations and Lands Amazing Tech Job
“I always thought these alumni interviews were tailored because it just sounded impossible to me. I just want to let you all know that this is actually what can happen.”
Jared spent his entire civilian career working in sales but was never satisfied. One day on a whim, he tried out coding and immediately fell in love with it. His friend recommended coding bootcamps and Jared, a natural skeptic, tentatively took a leap of faith. Now he works from home making 90K a year and here’s his story.
S: Jared, thanks so much for speaking with us. We’re so happy for your success and everything you’ve been able to achieve for yourself through learning to code. Can you tell us a bit more about how you got to Sabio?
J: I was in the navy for 8-years without any real direction. When I got out I did mortgage loans for 4-years, but as the economy started changing, the job just became harder and harder. I started developing a real interest in coding and tried out this thing called The Odin Project. After doing that I realized that I liked coding and wanted to learn a lot more. I had a friend mention that there were these coding bootcamps out there, so I started doing some research and looked for ones where I could use my GI Bill. When I found out about Sabio and how it was in the LA area I thought, why not? I signed up for the 17-week program that included 4 weeks of guided Pre-Work and went all in.
S: That’s great! We know that doing any sort of bootcamp comes with its ups and downs. Can you talk about some of the challenges that you faced and how you overcame them?
J: I feel like there were challenges every day, whether it was personal or bootcamp specific. You’re learning so much at once but as soon as I started taking it one day at a time, sometimes one minute at a time, it became less overwhelming. I also looked to other people for connections which were easy to find at Sabio. A lot of people in my cohorts were veterans, so that was instant, but even the people who weren’t, everyone was just down to support each other. I feel so fortunate to have found such a good team. We communicated every day on Slack and Zoomed as well- sometimes all day long! It was just nice to keep each other company. So much of Sabio is learning how to figure things out for ourselves, but it was really nice to have a group of classmates to motivate each other and keep each other accountable throughout the program. I felt like almost every day I didn’t know what I was doing, but the thing is, neither did anyone else, and we were all learning at the same speed and had each other for support along with the great group of Instructors. I just kept asking questions and between that and the Instructor and student cohort support network that I had, it all just started clicking into place.
S: We’re so happy to hear that. What real-world project did you and your team work on?
J: I was part of MyVet, which was a very cool mobile app to help veterinarians streamline their workflow. My piece was to start just working on the basic part of the landing page but eventually led me to build the chat application. What was very cool is that the work and learning never stopped. When I did get to the chat application, I felt like that’s when I started becoming a software developer. You have the instructors there to help you when you need it, but it’s often something you have to just learn how to do on your own. Every day was like starting fresh by doing research and discovering how you were going to get to that next step. It was an amazing experience!
S: Fantastic, and tell us about your job interview process.
J: Well, I started putting in about 75-100 applications a day. I think by the end I put out over 2,100, but Sabio said, "just apply, apply, and keep applying." And like everything else, their methods worked! From all those applications I got about 10-15 interviews, 5 second-round interviews, and 3 of those got me to the final round of interviews! I'll always remember Gregorio Rojas (Sabio’s CTO & Co-Founder,) saying, "never let your pipeline run dry', a method I remember very well from sales. It doesn’t matter how many interviews you have scheduled for this week, it’s how many you have for next week and the week after, and so on. In the end, I ended up with two fantastic job offers, so it definitely paid off.
S: Congrats and I’m sure Gregorio will be happy to hear that! Can you tell us more about those jobs and what influenced your decision to go with the one you’re at now?
J: Sure! So I received two offers, one for 80K, and one for 90k. They both almost had identical perks, including 401Ks, health insurance, dental, vision, and the whole 9 yards. Both were also fully remote and oddly enough, both healthcare companies were based near Nashville and both were willing to have me work on PST, aside from the pay difference, the 80K one was a job where I'd be working on about 15-20 tickets a day, so I felt like that would be more of a grind. The work/life balance sounded a lot better at UnitedHealth Group, so I ended up accepting their offer and I couldn’t be happier.
S: Anything else you’d like to add for our readers?
J: For the people just starting at Sabio, I would say don’t get hung up if you don’t completely understand something. Sabio is going to give you enough stuff to where you need to stay ahead of the curve as much as possible.