So my little bro has been sleeping on my Air mattress in my living room for 2 weeks now. No job yet, but lots of job leads! I'll keep you posted on how things turn out with this "coding thriller" :-)
My coaching client in Denver just started interviewing, he has 2 - 3 phone screens so far for this week. We will see if the mock interview training sessions and my secret interviewing techniques pay off! I also decided to double my coaching prices in the next 10 days.
WHY???
Simple. I love coaching and think I am really good at it, but the key to my success in helping people change their lives, is time. Coaching people to land jobs in a short amount of time, is only possible because of the amount of contact and time I spend with them. If you look at other online bootcamps or programs, they simply give you course work material and a "mentor" that you can email weekly. I talk to all of my students almost everyday if not multiple times a day. I don't want to have a course that I give to people, I want to know all of my students on a very close level.
I absolutely love coaching! But, like I said it is a ton of time so I only want to focus on a few people and not try to take on tons of clients. So I'm doubling my prices :-)
Anyway in other news, working at the new huge corporation job has been challening in a good way. It is soooo different than when I worked at ZipList where there was 15 - 16 people in the office and shoes were very optional. Every Friday was Happy Hour followed by a round of "office golf"!
I love that I have a mid level engineer position at a massive corporation. It's been great in the span of 2.5 years to have been at a small Start up ( 15 - 20 employees ), a small company ( 100 employees ) and now a large corporation with over 40,000 employees.
The good news is, all of these companies no matter the size all want the same thing. People who have experience, know some common software tools and can code. They aren't only after degrees or stuff like that, if you can code you can land a great job fast!
Several people have left comments, and several people have emailed me asking why I am using Javascript, when I like Ruby more and am better at Ruby? The reason is simple:
I don't recommend learning Javascript as a first language for complete beginners, but Javascript is super popular right now, and if a company is willing to pay me good money to code in it, why not???
My old boss at ZipList told me:
"The best thing you can do is to land a job with a technology you don't know. You'll get paid and 2 years later you will have a whole new set of skills that you can use to land your next job."
Bottom line, if a company will pay you to use a technology that you aren't very good at, take it! When I first interviewed at ZipList I totally bombed the interview, I failed 80% of the questions most of which were related to HTML and CSS ( my weakest areas at the time ).
I somehow got the job and then went on to make 500+ of ZipList's partner site's Headers ( they were called "white label" sites, basically just the top of a website ) like:
Rachael Ray
Martha Stewart....
Guess what? I got really good at Html ( Haml ) and Css ( Scss ). I think my current position is similar, I'm not as green as I was with Html and Css, but the principle is still the same. If you get to write code everyday you will have to improve or else get fired :-)
Alright peeps, I hope you are making progress learning to code and landing a junior job! None of this is rocket science, it simply takes time. Keep coding peeps, you can do this!
