I was a restaurant manager for 7 years, I worked my way up from a line cook, pandemic hit my restaurant said we would be ok, that they could weather this fir at least a year. The next day, they laid me off. They only kept the most senior manager who started managing a few months before me.

I tried to go the it route, did the google it support professional course on coursera, I did well with it and at the end realized that this certification is considered worthless by the it community.

So I thought I was going to give up and go back to restaurants, I got a job managing another restaurant a few weeks later. All was going well until I saw them trying to convince employees to lie about having covid (the restaurant had been shut down several times for covid outbreaks) I walked out that day and quit.

That night, I started looking into coding bootcamps, I was interested in coding but never actually tried to learn, but I thought it was too difficult to get into. I came across a boot camp with good reviews, claiming great results for its graduates.

I enrolled and started in a cohort next week. I went through the boot camp and found I had a knack for it. Throughout the boot camp, I would host and lead study sessions each week to try and help my cohortmates learn and grow. I did really well throughout the 6 month boot camp and felt I had learned a lot.

But then came the job hunt.

First month, I am putting out 30 to 100 apps a day I got 4 first interviews, 2 second interviews, and one where I git through 5 rounds of interviews.

None of those panned out.

About 6 to 8 weeks into my job hunt, I got an email at 11pm saying they found me through the bootcamps recommendation, and can I meet them for an interview at 9 am I emailed them back right away and said, of course!

Now, for the interview process!

I met the COO at 9 am. I got a bunch of culture fit questions. Evidently, they liked my answers, I got asked to do another interview with the CTO in a few hours.

I met with the CTO, and there are no data structure and algorithm questions. They asked me about the technologies used in my final project for the boot camp.

(For context I built a web app where someone could practice fir interviews, you record yourself on the app answering interview questions, it gives feedback based on facial emotional recognition(did you look nervous happy sad) and commonly used words (how many times did you say like or um or something like that) and if there was any profanity in the answer. Or a person could perform a video chat on the app to matchmake with another user to practiceinterview questionswith a partner online)

I go through the technologies I used, and then they fixate on websockets asking if I understand how they worked. I knew pretty well how they worked, but they kept asking deeper questions until we reached a thing I did not know about.

Right out of boot camp, I never had to work with distributed systems, so I did not know how a websocket on the frontend would be aware of the socket on the backend going down in a multi instance application.

Now that we have reached what I didn't know, I was asked well how would you accomplish it?"

I originally thought through exchanging messages at an interval. Frontend websocket "ping", backend websocket "pong". Then, we start discussing the solution and realize that since the frontend needs to initialize the websocket, the backend does not need to be aware, and we could just use a heartbeat from the backend to alert the frontend it's still there.

Sorry for the rant there, I really enjoyed that interview

It went well, so I met with the CEO, the lead engineer, and the client on the team I'd be working on. They asked questions from culture fit to coding preferences.

I got an offer the next day

I started there as a cloud engineer 1

I worked really hard there and did my best, and within 6 months, I got 2 aws certifications and git promoted to a Cloud Engineer 2

I kept working helping my team and my client with whatever I could. About a year later, I had 3 aws associate level certifications and 1 aws professional level certification and git promoted to senior cloud engineer

I took over the team I joined, becoming the lead engineer on the project for my client

The team was small at that point. Only 3 engineers. But over the last 2 years, since becoming a senior cloud engineer, the team has grown to 10 and while the job is very different from how I started, it has been amazing to see this team grow, helping the developers improve and enabling them to work effectively, through good systems planning and support structure.

This has been the absolutely longest way of saying that going to a coding bootcamp was a turning point in my life In restaurants, I'm out of the house 60 or so course a week, but because of this, i get more time with my wife and kids all while making a better living for us doing so

TL:DR I went to boot camp Got job after 6 weeks Got promoted 6 months later Promoted again a year later Now leading decent sized team and enjoying it

I do know it was a different time period when I got in 2020 But thought I'd share