How Getting Insulted Every Day Was Actually A Good Thing

Because it will either drive you mad or put a fire under you to make a change. Andrew Anderson did the latter.

You look at your monitor and read:

57 calls waiting.

It’s only an hour into your shift at the call center you swore you wouldn’t stay employed at for long and you are already drained from being yelled at for the third time this morning.

Is that a new record?

You take a deep breath of preparation and accept the next incoming call…

Queue an angry hello from the other end of the line.

Sigh

Now, meet Andrew Anderson, a man who always had a passion for technology but never had the opportunity to pursue it.

Andrew was stuck in a draining job as a Senior Agent Analyst, working in a call center, getting yelled at, and feeling unfulfilled.

He knew he needed a change and a career that would give him purpose and value.

It had been a decade since Andrew had touched anything related to code, so I asked him how he decided to pursue a coding career in the first place.

Andrew’s sister and brother-in-law encouraged him to get back into coding.

He had a background in HTML, so after the little nudge from his family he tried it out again to see if it would be a good fit after all these years—and it was!

“I needed someone to believe in me and before that experience, I felt like I didn’t have anyone that did.”

Andrew knew himself well enough to know he didn’t have the self-discipline to sit and watch YouTube videos all day on his own.

He needed organized structure and feedback.

So, Andrew and his brother-in-law got to work researching coding bootcamps and colleges.

I was curious how they landed on Nucamp and asked what the final decision came down to.

After listening to many YouTube videos of people who either went to college, attended a bootcamp, or were self-taught he made comparisons and weighed his options.

In the end, it came down to Nucamp’s curriculum and price.

It was like comparing oranges to apples; other bootcamps were $20,000-$50,000!

Nucamp's Full Stack coding bootcamp could teach him everything he needed to know to land his first coding job.

Andrew appreciated he would have a small class size and opportunities to have 1:1 time with the instructor.

There were even great Nucamp instructor reviews he found explaining how much the instructors cared about their students.

Without hesitation, he decided to take the leap and enrolled in the program.

The journey was not easy for Andrew, he had to balance his studies with his full-time job and his family responsibilities.

But he was determined to make it work, which meant saying NO—to things he was used to.

Because his spare moments needed to be filled with learning and practicing.

“The fact that I had such great instructors and classmates helping and encouraging me, AND me helping them, was a godsend.”

Hearing Andrew explain what he gave up in the short term to reach his career goals puts the reward at the end in perspective.

It is a common theme for people to underestimate the amount you need to give when taking on the challenge of learning to code, but it creates purpose and value.

To pry into the highs and lows of his journey I asked Andrew to tell me about a moment of doubt or difficulty and how he overcame it.

Andrew’s biggest moment of doubt was when he started learning JavaScript.

He isn’t the strongest with math, as in the second you start explaining things with algorithms and equations, his eyes gloss over.

(Same Andrew, Same.)

The “aha” moment where it all clicked for him was after watching a video on programming by Bill Gates explaining if-then statements.

Andrew leaned on his brother-in-law and sister for encouragement and would call them when he was feeling the doubt creep in.

Despite the challenges, Andrew persevered and graduated from Nucamp's bootcamp as a skilled developer.

Even though he was in an unrelated department, Andrew leveraged his current job at a top tech company to apply for internal roles on the development team, all the while applying to other companies on LinkedIn.

Besides connecting with and starting conversations with those in the industry on LinkedIn, the most valuable thing Andrew did was post the certificates he earned along the way, showing the progress he was making, and the code he was working on.

This instrumental step caught the eye of the SVP of his current company and showed he was putting in the effort and was passionate about what he was learning.

After attending an internal job fair he made a great impression and was offered a Software Engineering internship.

Andrew's determination and hard work paid off, he was able to overcome the adversity and dissatisfaction he felt in his previous job and jump a step closer to achieving his dream of becoming a software engineer.

Wrapping up our conversation I asked Andrew for advice for those interested in following his footsteps—people who are thinking about attending a bootcamp but haven't yet registered.

Andrew said two people have already asked him for his advice on this:

“I recommend Nucamp because of the flexibility, the friendliness of the instructors, and the material taught. It’s also partly self-paced, but you still have deadlines. The biggest thing I learned was how to go out and find the answer. I may not know the answer, but I know how to go and find it or ask for help when needed.”

Nucamp played a crucial role in his journey, providing him with the structure, education, and support he needed to succeed.

Andrew said, "Change isn’t going to happen unless you take it into your own hands"

And he did just that, he took the reins of his life, and with the help of Nucamp, he was able to achieve his goal and live his dream.

Andrew's story is a reminder that with hard work, determination, and the right resources, anyone can change their career and achieve their goals.