Episode 38 – How much money can you make after going to a code school?

Our guest for episode 38 is Gregorio Rojas and he is an instructor and founder of the Sabio Learn to Code boot camp. Gregorio began his career in the sports management industry but soon decided that a change was needed. Now, he is here to give us all the juicy details of his story and how you can quickly become a software developer and achieve success in the tech industry.  Are you ready to turn your dreams of coding into reality—no computer science degree needed? Listen in to episode 38 for more details.
Gregorio Rojas’ Bio:
Gregorio Rojas has been in the software development field across a variety of industries since 1999. Previously, he was the CTO and co-founder of an online real estate listings site, MySocalListings. He was also a Director of Development at SFW, a SAAS enterprise software startup and most recently, lead developer for the Monetization team at MySpace.
Episode Highlights and Show Notes:
Arsalan: Hi everyone. Today we have a very special guest, Gregorio Rojas. He is an instructor and a founder at a code camp. So, he is someone that we haven’t had before. We haven’t had a code camp instructor or founder before. So I’m really excited to have him here. How are you, Gregorio?
Gregorio: I am doing great. How are you?
Arsalan: I am doing fantastic and so excited to have you on. I want you to tell us your story and walk us down your path of becoming a software developer from being a computer illiterate, as you described yourself, and going from your first job within a year and a half to becoming a senior developer with a healthy salary. There were some bumps and hurdles that you encountered. So I want you to tell us how it was when you got your first job. How are you feeling? I don’t want you to go into any details, but describe your emotional state throughout this process.
Gregorio: Before I get into it, thank you for having me on. I really look forward to it. So thank you for that. Through Boston University for sports medicine and I was an athletic trainer so that was a very personal job. I wasn’t just working with people, I was also touching people. For me to transition into a world where I was mostly typing was a little weird. But, I knew there was a lot of opportunity in tech. I happen to find myself surrounded by a bunch of people who were getting into tech and it sounded like that was something that I should be doing. Through a series of different events and talking to people, I got the confidence to try it.
Gregorio: What I thought was going to be a software developer job turned out to be a junior job. To give you some context, I think I was making around $27,000 for my first job. But, it ended up being more of a QA job, but not the exciting QA job, software engineer, tester job, or automation QA. It was not that exciting. I knew that’s not what I wanted to do. I knew that’s not why I had really don’t my career and five years of education to come and do QA at that level. That was frustrating, but I was able to continue doing my own home study to ensure that I equipped myself with employable skills.
Gregorio: I built something that actually had the domain bostonapartments.com. I built a little apartment listing application because apartments in Boston were huge. I will not mention the fact that I let that domain name expire. It’s heartbreaking that I let that happen, but I did. It allowed me to get into a company that was a dev shop, where all they did was build product for other folks. I got into another company where I was managing the IKEA North American and Canadian sites in which the code and the content that powered those sites was essentially through a content management system.
Gregorio: At that time, content management systems were the thing. We didn’t have WordPress we didn’t have websites like that. So, it was very strange for me because I had no idea what a content management system was.

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