The Job

Why am I doing this? What is my end game? I ask these questions about everything, to the point it can be a nuisance at times. More often than not though, this line of internal questioning has resulted in informed and confident decision making. These questions have helped me throughout my career in analyzing and improving standard operating procedures across industries. However, when I applied this method to my decision to enroll in a coding bootcamp, I was unable to clearly define what my end game was. Why am I doing this? To gain the fundamental skills necessary to transition into the technology sector. What is my end game? Uhhh… to get a job in tech. That answer wasn’t satisfactory. I needed to better hammer this out.

When I enrolled in culinary school, my goal was far more specific than simply getting a job in a kitchen… I enrolled to acquire the skills necessary to get a job in an elite fine-dining kitchen and my end game was a career doing something I love, with which I could ply my trade anywhere in the world. Setting out these intentions from the very beginning enabled me to achieve all of these goals in my culinary career. Now, as I am enrolling in a program to study software engineering, all I can come up with for an end game is “a job in tech”?! WTF does that even mean?

Despite not yet having a solid end game, I decided to move forward with enrolling in General Assembly’s Software Engineering Immersive. Since I was having trouble defining my goals on this new path, I shifted my approach. I was now going to begin identifying the types of roles and sectors within tech that I wanted to avoid. This came far easier.

Johnny Mohawk’s List to Avoid:

The Government, The Banks, Insurance & Pharmaceutical Companies, Big Law, Meta & Friends and lastly The Government. I mean no offense to any of the entities or those who work for them (except for the government).

That was easy, but got me no closer to honing in on what I am actually looking FOR in this chapter of my career. I kept thinking about it… but my thoughts sounded like Goldilocks and I felt like an asshole. If it hasn’t become clear to this point, I am a proponent of living with focused intention. I lay out plans, establish checkpoints and milestones along the way, and then set them in motion. But in this context, that felt impossible.. I was just going to have to go against my instincts and go with the flow. Luckily, my bootcamp was starting soon and hopefully the “career outcomes” portion of the program would help me establish my path.

Enter the wonderful Jen Harrold. Jen is my career coach from General Assembly, and I started bugging her on day one of the program with my compulsive need to roadmap. I explained my dilemma, and she assured me that “tech” is such a vast umbrella term that now encompasses every industry and there is a job out there for everyone. To be fully honest, I was disappointed with this response at first. It sounded like a canned answer. The message conveyed by the first session of the career outcomes portion of the bootcamp was that if we put in the work the foundation would be laid for a rewarding career in tech. We heard from several grads who reiterated this message and shared their personal journey and how their lives had improved since completing the program. This attached human faces to the message to drive it home. I was low-key worried that I may have accidentally joined a cult…

Putting this fear aside, I diligently followed the curriculum that Jen and the career coaching team had put together. The first major assignment was to create a personal brand document outlining our skills, achievements, passions, motivators, and career goals. This document was not to be turned in, it was to serve as the foundation for all the other work during the course. While I was no closer to defining my goals in tech, writing this all out made me begin to look more at my own career history in a different way, and see trends and constants that I had not seen before. Things were beginning to click, so I chose to put my full faith in Jen and the GA program on this front.

I moved through the program, crafted and honed the Johnny Mohawk brand, and started to form an idea of where within tech I wanted to target my job search upon graduation. There were four sectors that piqued my interest: EdTech, FoodTech, Crypto, or anything involving the arts. With these as a focus, and with the program coming to an end, I began applying to positions that potentially fit the bill.

I was shocked when I heard back from the first company I applied to. It was a FoodTech startup, and on paper it seemed like a good fit. I had my first interview with them a couple days before graduation. I felt awesome! Well, up until the whiteboarding portion of the technical interview, then reality set in. As anyone with any experience in the area would expect, my first whiteboarding challenge was an extremely humbling experience. My interviewers were very nice, but it did not go well. I felt like sh_t… I knew I had a lot of continued work to do.

By this point the crux of the program had come to an end, but the career outcomes portion of the program continued to meet on a bimonthly basis until everyone landed a job. This is another one of the reasons I chose General Assembly. The program’s marketing materials stressed continued career services to graduates as they move through their career, not just help securing their first gig. I am glad to report that this is not false advertising. I am still in contact with Jen, and she has been a vital resource on this journey. This is not a paid advertisement, this is my real life experience. Moving on…

My terrible technical interview with the FoodTech company hit me hard. I was monitoring job postings for junior developers, but I was very hesitant to apply. The continued career outcomes portion of the course provided guidelines for how many jobs to apply to per week and tips for structuring the job search. Graduates are also required to submit a bimonthly survey which monitors the number of jobs applied for. I often lied on these forms, inflating this number from zero to anything above zero (sorry Jen).. But I had shifted my approach. I was going to focus on building things, and improving my skills.

About a month after the program ended, I heard back from one of the companies I had applied to before graduating. I had totally forgotten I had applied. It was an EdTech startup and I liked the concept. After a lengthy but casual initial interview with the co-founder / CTO. They asked me to build an app using the tech stack they were building with, AWS Serverless Stack. The whole vibe was super chill, I had definitely gained a bit of confidence and felt ready to take on this task. I was entirely unfamiliar with AWS SST, so I was given a pretty loose timeline. I completed the core functionality with some styling and animations for flare and submitted the app. The response was positive, but the test continued, and they requested I build an additional feature. There were two rounds of this, and I successfully built each additional feature. I had made it to the final round, the last interview was to be a live coding challenge. I was stressed, but I had built a good rapport with my interviewer by this point, so that took some of the edge off. This time around, I was not embarrassed by my whiteboard performance. Quite the contrary, I did well. Ultimately however, I received an extremely thoughtful and complementary rejection letter as opposed to an offer. I didn’t land the job, but I knew I had come leaps and bounds and my confidence was bolstered.

While it was a positive experience, I had invested a fair amount of time into the application process with the EdTech company and inadvertently ended up in a crunch. There was a General Assembly graduate talent showcase coming up in a couple weeks, and I had previously committed to presenting an app I had only just begun working on… I was going to have to hustle, but I liked my concept, and I thought I could pull it off, so I began working feverishly.

The hustle paid off, and by the day of the showcase I was very happy with the state of my app. I had built something I was proud of and I had a well rehearsed presentation to match. I felt I fully capitalized on the opportunity and hoped I had impressed. That week ended with an offer from Third Act Digital.

Let’s wind this post up with the moral of the story… After interviewing, negotiating and ultimately receiving the offer from the founder and CEO of Third Act, all I could think of was Jen telling me my job is out there.

Third Act is the first NFT marketplace for the theatre industry. It's a space where fans connect to collect theatre's most memorable moments and where creators share their work. Crypto + The Arts. This was my job. I accepted the offer.

If you are thinking about or are in the midst of a career transition into tech, YOUR JOB IS OUT THERE!