Lambda School Journey #1

If you only care about Bootcamp / Lambda Information and not my history (totally understandable), skip to “The Bootcamp Hunt” to get into those details.

Who I AM

My name is Ruben A. Ramirez. I am a young man from Stockton, California. Being a first-generation college student, I was informed of the “traditional” industries: Lawyer, Doctor, Engineer. I thought I wanted to be a lawyer, so I went to a private Liberal Arts school in the North Bay, Dominican University of California, to double major in Business Administration and Political Science. I ended up doing a few internships in different industries (Banking, Law Firm) before finding 2 Marketing and Sales internships in Tech Startups as a Senior in college.

It was in these internships, I saw the importance of product and engineering but didn’t have any bit of experience. At the time, I thought you had to go through formal education to become anything, so I never got my hopes up. I was certainly wrong.

Life Before Lambda

Continuing Sales

After graduating from university in 2017 and having my brief experience in sales and marketing from a tech startup, I moved to Barcelona, Spain, with a friend. I wanted to continue pursuing a sales role. I ended working for an outsource Software Engineering and Design team, Simform, as a Remote Full-Cycle Business Development Representative. It was here that I learned about the many different tech stacks in the world of software development as well as the Product Discovery and Development methodologies. Our target customers were Startups, Established Software Companies, and Software Agencies. In short, I became learned about many technologies, the development of lifecycle, startups, product ideation, and engineering.

Being a full-cycle sales rep means I handled the entire sales process. I started with Prospecting, which meant going through ALOT of companies on Crunchbase, LinkedIn, and AngelList. Simform didn’t focus on a specific verticle, so I found some pretty awesome companies in different company life stages. I then did my outreach, talking to hundreds of C-level execs and founders. Through my cold-call conversations, LinkedIn searches, and proposal conversations, I realized that many didn’t actually have formal education in technology. This inspired me more.

Short-stint in a startup

In 2018, I met the founder of World Tech Makers through AngelList while looking for Marketing roles. It was an education company looking to teach both high-school students and adults the digital jobs of tomorrow. They had tremendous success in Columbia as an in-person Bootcamp and looked to Digitize their offering through a software platform. I immediately saw the value of online education and jumped on board to support. The business plan was laid out properly, the designs were very modern, attractive & usable and the education curriculum was great. However, there were no engineers on the team, and outsourcing the project through UpWork had been much more of a headache than anticipated. In short, after 5 months of back and forth battling with freelance engineers who weren’t keeping their end of the bargain, the software portion of the company had to shut-down, my role included. Another instance in which I saw the value of being an engineer.

Sales wasn’t giving me satisfaction

I’ve always been a “talker” to the point where my Mother would warn my teachers that I would “talk to a tree if he could”. Naturally, this led to me participating in many things like student government, college clubs, and my classes. This segued into sales, where talking and curiosity are the main actions. I was good at it, bringing in over $2,000,000 in sales at Simform, but I wasn’t satisfied at the end of the day because of those outbound tasks. I didn’t wake up excited to call and make my prospect’s life easier. I didn’t like feeling like I was bugging these entrepreneurs. I didn’t like having to chase someone to respond to me. I didn’t like getting hung up on constantly.

What I did enjoy from my time at Simform was the Discovery Calls, where I learned about the problem the entrepreneur was solving. I flourished when I involved in the wireframes and Requirement Gathering stage. I liked hearing the tech lead discuss the architecture. I liked doing proposal presentations where I discussed why choosing React Native over native Kotlin was better, or why Node.JS was the better back-end or the difference between relational databases and non-relational databases. I enjoyed the product and engineering side. I found that the days in which I had multiple presentation calls or discovery calls were my favorite days of the week.

Why a Software Engineer

The ability to create the future of all industries is extremely enticing. Being born in 1995, I saw the transformation and shift of software while growing up. I quickly saw the transition to smartphones and saw the birth of some phenomenal software companies: Airbnb, Uber, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft, to name a few. All these companies had software at their core and exploded to become great. Even here, in 2020, there are countless technology startups that are solving real problems through software. As Andreessen Horowitz famously said, “software is eating the world.” In fact, software has “eaten” the first course and is now on the main entree. Almost every industry has software involved in one-way shape or form. Medical, health care, transportation, education, fitness, waste management, sales, marketing, recruiting, oil&gas, and so forth. The list goes on. I want to be part of the future. I want to build the future.

The Bootcamp Hunt

Because of my experience working in software and the fact that I knew I needed to make this career change, I thought I could do it on my own. Between FreeCodeCamp, Code Academy & The Odin Project, I thought I could go at my own pace and get a software engineering job. Then I took a deeper look at the huge lay-offs due to the pandemic. I saw engineers from Uber, Lyft, Toast, Airbnb, and Intuit get laid off and struggle to find a job. The market was suddenly flooded with engineers and I knew I had to stand out. I knew that having the hard-skills was only one important aspect of a candidate. There are still soft skills like communication, teamwork, and emotional intelligence, to name a few. These are things that can be improved on in the right setting. I was looking for a Bootcamp that considered the entire package.

Career Karma

I was fortunate to find CareerKarma almost immediately after starting my search. The CEO, Ruben Harris, is on a mission to make tech more accessible and is doing a fantastic job. They match you with boot camps that match what you are looking for.

Career Karma certainly streamlines the process and allows for quick applications. I realized that many required Pre-Work (and even for those that didn’t, it didn’t hurt to get more knowledge), so I did a few. They mostly focused on HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Doing just one of the Pre-Work session certainly prepared me for Lambda.

Most programs required something along the lines of these things:

• an application with a brief explainer about who you are and why you are making the career change
• A typing test
• An Assessment on verbal, math/logic and spatial reasoning
• education history

Choosing Lambda

Choosing a Bootcamp requires one to take a look at multiple things. I treated it just like buying a car or a new phone: by looking at what I valued most and see how that item/product fares.

Job Placement

All people who go through Bootcamps want their program to have one thing: successful job placement. I’ve followed Lambda School’s CEO for about 2 years now, so I’ve seen tweets like this on my timeline for a while:

Notice how these are all from different years. This program places students in engineering roles and has been doing it for a few years now.

Timeline

Next up is the timeline. How long is the program? Originally, Lambda was a 9-month program, and to be honest, that is what kept it low on my list. 9 months is a long time, and competitors were anywhere between 3 and 6 months. Then on September 10th, I received an email that included the following:

They were cutting the program down to 3 months. Their explanation on this Reddit post:

We did about 100 hiring manager interviews, and some analysis on students who’ve been hired over the last two years, and found that there are some really core concepts that we cover, and some nice-to-haves that don’t really make a difference.

We took that research and rewrote the latter half of the program to cover the core concepts and give the right Labs capstone experience in about half the time.

Awesome! So the program was optimized, and now it is shorter — another reason to choose Lambda.

Cost

The cost was somewhere in the middle of the priority list for me. I was fortunate to have worked for a year with the specific purpose of saving money to be able to either:

1. pay for a Bootcamp upfront

2. afford expenses while going through a Bootcamp

Lambda School was one of the first programs to offer an ISA* (Income Share Agreement), where you do not have to pay anything until AFTER you get a job over $50,000 per year. This means that Lambda is incentivized to place you in a job.

*Note: New York and California no longer allow ISAs. Instead, there are RICs. You can read more about them here.

The RIC doesn’t have loan forgiveness like the ISA. Both still incentivize Lambda to place students. This was something I liked.

Extra Goodies

The student to Teacher Ratio

This was something that I was on the fence about. I went to a tiny University (2,000 total students) and saw the benefits of small classrooms but, on the other hand, have also seen success in large universities of 50,000 through friends and family who went to larger institutions. It wasn’t so much the ratio I was worried about but the ease of access to instructors/help. Lambda has large cohorts, but they also have breakout groups and Team Leads / Instructors available within Slack. Good for me!

Projects

Lambda offers two distinct ways of doing projects. The first is Build Week. Build Week is a week where you and students from different cohorts work together to build a product assigned. You will have no instruction that week and instead, work with your team to complete.

The next is Labs. Labs are in-house apprenticeships by building a real-world project in a small team that you can host and share — basically a portfolio piece where you have a defined role and goal.

Choosing Lambda

I heard back from Lambda about 3 days after completing my application. An employee personally called me and informed me about the details of the program. They sent over the recommended, but not required (definitely do it) pre-course work and laid out the steps to getting started with Lambda. I am confident I made the right choice.

Follow my journey

In all honesty, when publishing this article, I’ll have been going through the program for one month, BUT I have been writing this since the Bootcamp hunt started. I will be writing monthly updates as I progress through the course.

Rule #1 is to ship fast and often. Until next time.

This article was also published on my Showwcase profile. Follow me to see projects and portfolio pieces.