Hello! We’re the Living Security engineering team. A (currently) small group of engineers, within a startup company of around 20. We’re all working hard to build a world-class Cybersecurity Awareness training platform for enterprises.
We started this blog to share our daily victories and struggles with the world. Our hope is that as we continue to grow, sharing our experiences can help others learn and grow as well.
Today’s blog post is an interview with our newest hire, Gideon Ibemere, Jr.. Gideon recently graduated from a coding bootcamp, and with this becoming more and more common these days, we thought others may find his story informative.
Dan: Hey man, I’m glad we finally have a chance to sit down and do this, how’s it going?
Gideon: I’m living the dream, no complaints, man. Definitely looking forward to sharing my experience as a bootcamp grad and hope it provides some sort of guidance to others in a similar situation.
D: Yea, so let’s start off by having you tell the world a little about yourself.
G: So yeah, my name is Gideon Ibemere Jr., I moved up to Austin to join the Living Security engineering team just over a month ago. Before that I was at General Assembly’s Software Engineering Immersive bootcamp. So from April 2019 till July 2019 I would park my car on the East side and scooter down to 6th and Congress where I spent about nine hours a day, 5 days week working on code.
D: Damn, that's a legit bootcamp. What led you to pursue a coding bootcamp to begin with?
G: I’d been working on a remote agency with some friends and I’ve always been entrepreneurial, but execution made things slow down or come to a complete stop--execution as in getting a production ready site or product for people to interact with. I just didn’t have the complete skillset to do that. Also, the job I was working at was offering a stipend for furthering my education, so it all fell in line.
D: What sort of tech stack was taught there? Were there different tracks to choose from, or was it a pretty set curriculum?
G: Yeah, so, the curriculum for the GA bootcamps is created based on the demand in the area. So for my cohort, we had a “global” classroom with students from Austin, Dallas, San Francisco, and Los Angeles all learning the MERN stack (MongoDB, Express, React, and Node) and also Django + PostgresQL.
D: You said April to July, so a 3 month bootcamp?
G: Spot on--something like a minimum of 500 hours in class, 12ish weeks.
D: Before that, did you have any software development experience?
G: More like web development--I studied Art at Austin College in Sherman, TX--long story short, one of my senior shows was based on the intersection of [my] real life and the internet. I used basic HTML, SASS, and JavaScript to recreate the old discovery page of Snapchat with videos from 30 or more concerts I’d been to over my college career. It’s somewhere on the internet if you wanna check it out.
D: Once you started interviewing, did you feel prepared entering the job market? Did you feel like you were lacking in any particular areas?
G: Technically, I definitely needed to continue practicing authentication with JWT and definitely SQL/Relational databases. Also, I’d say I realized how I could improve my interviewing skills after my fourth or fifth go at it. General Assembly has a career focused portion of the curriculum called outcomes. This was extremely helpful in preparing for the job search, but I wasn’t very good at following the curriculum--I think if I had taken better advantage of that I would have had even better results. All in all, the bootcamp gave me a really good toolset to build upon while also job searching.
D: Do you keep in touch with anyone from your cohort? How are they doing finding jobs?
G: This is a funny one--they jokingly gave me a superlative related to this: “Most likely to not talk to anyone after the cohort.” I mean, they weren’t exactly wrong, I kept up with some of them for about a month or two after. A few were interviewed during the final week(s) of the bootcamp, others had jobs within the first month post-grad. Thinking about my most recent inquiry, there are probably two or three that are still looking for full-time opportunities.
D: Ok, let’s shift over to after you were hired by Living Security, how’s your first month been? How have things compared to your expectations?
G: Candidly, it has been sick! I’ve gotten to work on some pretty cool stuff that required a few different approaches. As such, I’ve learned a lot more than I could have imagined.
D: How was the interview process here compared to others? Any feedback on our interview process?
G: The interview process was part of the reason I was eager to accept the offer. I really enjoyed the collaborative nature of the interview even though I did feel like I could have performed at a higher level. To that point, the openness you and Matt showed helped to quell most of my nervousness. There were some interviews that felt like they were made for me to fail, some that I had the gall to ask if the problem I was solving had a real product connection to the job. In those cases I was met with gatekeeper attitudes versus the collaborative attitude you’d expect from an engineering team. Hope that makes sense
D: Yea, for sure. Where were some of the other companies you interviewed for? Were you always interested in joining a small team?
G: I interviewed with Lightspeed Systems, Sock Club, AnswersNow and a few others. I actually don’t have a preference in terms of team size. I’ve had experiences with small teams and gigantic teams, so I was and still am open to either or.
D: What are things you're doing now on the job that you feel maybe bootcamp did not fully prepare you for?
G: DEVOPS for sure. Deploying code to services other than Heroku and understanding different build options--webpack vs rollup etc. Also design patterns in writing code. Matt (our head of engineering) recommended I use a factory pattern on a project and I was like a kid in a candy shop when I read up on what it was.
D: Now that you're on the other side, do you think what you learned at bootcamp could have been learned on your own for free (or nearly free), even though it would have taken more time?
G: I think I could have learned it on my own, but the structure and proven curriculum was a better catalyst than my own will.
D: So overall, it sounds like you’ve had a pretty positive experience. Do you think you would recommend a coding bootcamp to a friend?
G: I have done and would continue to do so--it’s a cheaper alternative to a CS degree and you are able to impact the workforce as close to immediately as you can be. While job searching, I was able to help friends and family with their businesses and personal projects as ‘real world’ experiences post bootcamp. I’m not sure if I’d have that skill set directly after graduating from CS school.
D: This has been awesome man, it’s been great having you on the team. Can’t wait to see how you continue to grow.
G: Thanks for taking the time to do this! I’m excited to grow as an engineer at Living Security!
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