S2E7: Real Estate Agent to Software Engineer with Bryan Knight

Laurence:
Hey, it's Laurence Bradford. Welcome to Season 2 of the Learn to Code With Me podcast, where I'm chatting with people who taught themselves how to code and are now doing amazing things with their newly found skills.

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Hey listeners, welcome to the Learn to Code With Me podcast. I am your host, Laurence Bradford. In today's episode, I talk with Bryan Knight. Bryan has a story I think so many people will relate to. He shares how he began learning how to code in junior college but ended up leaving to join the Air Force. He later had a stint in real estate but then ended up going back to school to pursue audio engineering after the economy crashed in 2008. Bryan finally got back into coding later in life after realizing his career options were limited. Plus, at this time, he had a family to support. If you have multiple responsibilities and are learning to code a little bit later in life, this episode is definitely for you.

Remember, you can get the Show Notes for this conversation, plus a full transcript, at learntocodewith.me/podcast. Alright, let's jump into this conversation with Bryan. I hope you enjoy it!

Hey Bryan, thanks so much for talking with me today.

Bryan:
Of course, I love it.

Laurence:
Could you just real quick introduce yourself so the listeners get a sense of who you are?

Bryan:
Certainly. My name is Bryan Knight. I live in Las Vegas, NV where I work for a company called ClickFox out of Denver, Colorado. It does big data analytics and customer journey stories for large companies.

Laurence:
Oh nice. I didn't realize that's what you did, big data and customer journeys. That's really cool.

Bryan:
Yes. It is pretty cool.

Laurence:
So of course, since this the Learn to Code With Me podcast, you were not always a coder. When did you start learning how to code?

Bryan:
That is correct. I would probably say around 2012. Well, I guess my story kind of starts out way back in 1999. Right out of high school I actually went to a junior college. I'm from a small backwoods place in southern Mississippi called Soso, Mississippi. I went to a small junior college that had a management information systems program that was brand new. I think we were in the first class or something like that. We had an emphasis in either networking or programming. I went there, took the emphasis in programming, so that was kind of my first introduction to coding or programming period. The first class was visual basic, I remember building forms with visual basic or something like that. Then we went on and learned old AS/400 programming languages like COBOL and RPG, report program generator, and then some C++.

Then life happened and I wasn't really ready for college at the time. My grades started falling and I was on an academic scholarship. I ended up getting on probation for that and just things were not going right. I really was not ready for college at the time. I ended up dropping out and, long way around, ended up joining the military and the Air Force and did that for awhile before I got out in '06. Then did real estate for awhile after that. I've had a long, long story. Around 2012 I would say, I got back into programming at that point and it's been awesome ever since.

Laurence:
That's great. I mean it's great that you ended up getting back into it and everything's been going well for you since. I'm just curious, what was it in 2012 that kind of re-sparked that interest?

Bryan:
Yeah, wow. So when I was in real estate and it was during the 2008 crisis where everything was going crazy and haywire and housing prices were dropping and things were pretty bad economically but I ended up connecting with a bank that was selling foreclosure properties. So it's kind of the other side of real estate where my client was the actual bank. After they had foreclosed on a house, unfortunately, I was one of the people that they would come to to resell the house. While a lot of real estate agents were struggling I was actually doing really well.

But I learned a very valuable business lesson there in that I had put all of my eggs in one basket, I would say. Something happened with that connection and kind of overnight my business dried up. I was at a turning point in what I wanted to do in my real estate career and I decided to go back to school. I was in the Air Force so I had the GI Bill and I wanted to make use of that. You have two years from the date you get out to use that money towards schooling. So I said okay, let's take this opportunity to go back to school.

I went back to school for audio production, had these grandiose dreams of graduating and moving out to L.A. and kind of bumming it, sleeping on couches or whatever it would take to get into the recording industry. I wanted to be a recording engineer and recording for singers and whatever it may be. During the course of that, I ended up meeting my girlfriend, she had my son, and by the time I was ready to graduate she was pregnant with my daughter, and so that really changes things for you. You can't move out to L.A. and bum it and sleep on people's couches when you have kids and responsibilities now.

Second to that, my career advisor pulled me into his office right before I was ready to graduate and I was then working on the Strip, at a hotel, making about $16 an hour and he said, "You know I'm going to be honest with you, I know you have a family and responsibilities, I know you're working at the hotel and thinking about $16 an hour. Most of the jobs I can get you here in Vegas are entry level conventional audio jobs and they pay about $12 an hour." So I had a big realization that if I get out and I take an entry level job staying here in Vegas, I'm going to have to take a pay cut just to say that I'm using my degree. So that put me at a crossroads again. So it's like, what do I want to do if I'm not going to do audio?

I really wanted to do something that I was passionate about and I had three big passions always being cars, music, and computers. So if I couldn't do music, I knew I didn't want to work on cars because I liked to do that more on the side as a hobby, you know modifying cars, but I never wanted to be a mechanic. I said, 'Okay, computers, let's kind of get back into that.' During that big gap between 2000 what I went to college for and 2011-2012 around that time frame, the whole landscape of programming had changed. I knew I had just gone through all this time in college, I didn't want to go back to college and get a computer science degree.

So I started looking at my resources that were available to me online. Started off using YouTube, I would say. In the beginning when you're first learning, you don't know what you don't know, or what you need to know.

So it was kind of like very loosey-goosey and I didn't feel like I was making any traction so I looked at other places like Lynda. I remember going there and I kind of found the same thing at the time, where they had really great one off courses, but there was really no guidance in, 'You should really be starting here and here's your tracking progression to go along.' Since that time back then, I have to give them a big kudos because they have come out with tracks or something that they call, that will show you the progression that you should be on when you're learning. Back then they didn't have anything like that. It was just courses and you shooting from the hip and trying to figure it out on your own.

So I set out to teamtreehouse.com, that was an area that they had really mastered at that time. And taking someone that was brand new, that didn't know and saying, 'Start here and take this course and this course and it will build you up, your knowledge of programming up from ground zero.'

Laurence:
Yes, oh my goodness. That was an awesome story and it was definitely very unique, but I think there's so many parts of your whole story about how you got back into programming that a ton of people can relate to. I know I talk to people all the time who maybe took courses in college or courses in high school and maybe fell out of it and then they get back into it later in life for whatever reason. In any case, thank you so much for sharing.

There's definitely a few things that you mentioned that I would love to circle back to if time permits in our conversation. Kind of going off what you were saying with Lynda and Treehouse, after you discovered those online resources, I guess namely Treehouse it sounds like, that was the primary one you used to learn then, correct?

Bryan:
Yes, I would definitely say that. I would say Treehouse really helped me out the most just because it gave me that structure of 'start here' and it pretty much held my hand the whole way and I really needed that at the time. I needed somebody or something to hold my hand and walk me through what I should be doing because I didn't even know where to start at. So that's really what made me latch on to that particular site. I dabbled in other ones as well, I'd go and do some stuff on Codecademy and codeschool.com and it sprinkled around a little bit but Treehouse is what really got me focused.

Laurence:
Got it. So you began relearning back in 2012. About how much time, if you can recall, was it between when you started learning again and got your first job in tech?

Bryan:
Starting in 2012 I didn't get into Treehouse right away. Treehouse was probably in 2013 or ‘14 or somewhere in there, end of ‘13, beginning of ‘14. I kind of started off 'freelancing' where I would do stuff for friends that I would know that had a website out that needed something changed. They didn't know how to do and I was willing to jump in there and do it for them, a lot times for no pay, even just for the experience. Just with the agreement that if need be, this is something that maybe I could use on a resume or a portfolio somewhere down the road. So I started doing stuff like that but my first professional job, from the time I got on to Treehouse, let's mark that as a beginning spot, it was really only about 10 months, I think.

Laurence:
Yeah. What was, I was looking at your LinkedIn before we hopped on this call and it seems like you've had a few different jobs and correct me if I'm wrong, but a lot of it is in web development but also a lot of user experience stuff, is that right?

Bryan:
Yeah, that's correct. The first person who gave me a shot was a manager for an airlines that's based out of Las Vegas called Allegiant Airlines. I had heard of them because I'm from Vegas but talking to other people, a lot of people had never heard of Allegiant Airlines. They were kind of a leisure airlines that their motto was, 'We fly people from places they don't want to be to places they want to be,' so they went to small airports in North Dakota, South Dakota and they fly to vacation destinations, so direct flights from there to Las Vegas. So to Orlando and to LA and places like that.

They have a surprisingly large tech department. There was a manager there, I have to shout him out, his name was Nesbert Idilgo, I think is how you pronounce his last name. They sent me a, the process kind of started with me applying sending out applications, before I thought I was really ready. I got a reply back from them. He sent me a coding challenge and it was in Angular. That was like, my heart just kind of dropped and I'm like, "Oh my goodness, I got this thing in Angular." I think it had four days to turn it around and get it done and my knowledge of Angular at that time was maybe two out ten, and that's a stretch. I probably spent the first two days just scrambling, trying to learn Angular and construct this thing together, and two or three days just learning what I needed to know to do this coding challenge and I struggled through it. I didn't even complete it all the way. I turned it back in but I was honest and I said, "I didn't get it completed but I want to send you back what I have." When I did that it was one of those things where you dust your hands off and go, "Well, I didn't get that job." Two or three days later I get a call that says, "We want to do a phone interview with you," and I'm like, "Wow, okay."

Actually it was the other way around, I'm sorry. I started off with a phone interview, I did a phone interview with him and I totally felt like I had bombed it because there were questions he would ask me and I'd just lock up, didn't know the answer to, but I was honest and told him I didn't know the answer but I would love to find out more about that and get back to him about that. That was the first time where I was like, "Well I didn't get that job," and then they sent me the coding challenge and then after that I was like, "I know I didn't get that job now," and then they called me back again and said, "We want to meet with you face to face." So I go to this interview, I get the schedule for the interview and it's like a four hour block and my heart dropped again. I had never been to an interview that took four hours. I was like, "What is going on?"

So I go to this interview and it's like a panel thing. These three devs walk in with their MacBooks and they plop them on the table in front of me and it seemed very adversarial almost. I was very intimidated, I would say, but they were very nice. Made me feel really comfortable through the interview process. I had to do a little bit of writing stuff out on the whiteboard to explain just general basic web flows and stuff like that. HTTP stuff. At the end of that process he came back to me and said, "Look, I had a feeling about you that you had the ability to learn. I know you don't know everything that we want, a JavaScript person, but you have the ability to learn and I want everyone on my team to see if they have that same feeling and they came back and said that same thing so we're going to give you a shot." And he did.

He gave me a shot way before I was ready. He gave me a MacBook and took me to my desk and he told me to go on to codeschoo.com and take these Angular courses. They had Angular courses and JavaScript courses at the time, and he gave me like three weeks of my first, they were paying me to come to work every day to sit at my desk and watch these videos for three weeks, just to get up to speed on JavaScript and Angular so I could contribute with the team. I have to, I will forever be indebted to him for taking that shot on me and giving me that chance and to allow me to learn at work, literally on the job.

Laurence:
Wow, that is such an awesome story. That's so great. There's a few things that you said that loved during that. First I really liked that you started by freelancing, even though it was unpaid, for friends and family to build up your credentials a bit, you know maybe some work to show in your portfolio. I also loved that you began applying to jobs before you were ready. I feel like that's something, I talk to people all the time who keep waiting and waiting until they feel like they're ready and the reality is no one is ever going to feel like they're ready to apply to jobs, especially when you're transitioning careers and you kind of just have to take a risk and put yourself out there and know that it may not be easy at first. I'm curious, before you ended up interviewing at this position that you got eventually, had you done any interviews before that or was this the first tech job interview that you had?

Bryan:
I think, if I recall, I had done some phone screening interviews before, I know I had talked to a couple recruiters before in the tech industry and I had done some phone interviews but I would just totally bomb. But this was the first one that actually went for the coding challenge part of it and bringing me into actually interview. I've done, well before getting into tech, usually if I could get a face to face interview, I felt pretty confident that I could get the job.

But once I got into tech I learned that not to be so, it definitely knocked my confidence down. Since then my first job, going into other interviews at places that I've done face to face where it didn't turn out me getting the job or the position and I had to learn to kind of roll with that, that it's competitive out there. At the same time, if you keep at it, someone will give you a shot.

Laurence:
Yeah, wow. I think that's, I feel like I can relate in some ways to what you just said. I feel like in the past with jobs, I always felt very sure of myself, especially if I was meeting face to face or going for an office interview and I totally agree that with technical stuff, it's maybe just not the same. Especially at some companies more than others. And then I do think that, like you experienced, there are companies that are willing to take, I don't' want to say a risk but they're willing to give someone the chance if they think that they can learn and they have that potential.

Bryan:
Yes, that is absolutely correct. I got flown up to Foster City, the Bay Area to interview with Visa before I got the job I’m currently with and I walked in all confident and when they had me do some whiteboard stuff and it totally exposed some areas that I was weak in and I left there just feeling like the smallest person ever, pretty much knowing that when I left the building, I called my wife and I said, “I totally just bombed that.” And sure enough I didn’t get the job, but I didn’t let it discourage me, you just keep moving forward until you get that opportunity.

Laurence:
Yeah, and I feel like you probably learned a lot just from that interview experience.

Bryan:
I did, because it almost made me mad, like I would never get in that situation again and not know those things that I didn’t know that day. So I really got focused on jumping in and getting strong in those areas of JavaScript that I was pretty weak in at that time during that interview, because I did not like that feeling and I was determined to never have that feeling again.

Laurence:
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Out of curiosity, was there anything, any resources that you used to prepare for technical interviews?

Bryan:
I would go online and I would always say Google is my friend, and I would google technical interview questions for everything from JavaScript, for Angular, for HTML, CSS interview questions. When I came across one I didn’t know I would really dive in and find out everything I could about that area about the particular piece of technology. I would read books.

The funny thing about the job at, when I did the interview at Allegiant, I got there early of course, so I’m sitting there probably 30 minutes before it, in my car, and I had all these programming books in there with me that I hadn’t read yet. I had one called Design Patterns and I picked that book up and in the Table of Contents it had the names of the design patterns like repository patterns and refractory patterns and I briefly skimmed over the first few sentences of each chapter of those patterns. Would you know that when I got into that interview one of the last things that he asked was, “Have you ever heard of design patterns?” And I said, a light bulb went off and I said, “Yes I have.” And he said, “Could you even name a couple for me?” And I literally in my mind could see the book I was just reading in the car and I said, “Oh yeah, repository pattern, refractory pattern, you know, rattled off three or four of these patterns,” and he was so impressed. He was like, “So many people we bring in that are junior can’t even name a design pattern.” And little did he know, I literally just read this five minutes before and was able to rattle these off. I couldn’t give detail on any of them but I knew the name.

Laurence:
Yeah. That’s so funny. That’s awesome though.

Bryan:
Weird things happens.

Laurence:
Yeah and that sort of reminds me, kind of a pro tip for the listeners, so Glassdoor is a great resource and if you’re interviewing at a small company there’s not going to be as much information, but say you’re interviewing at any larger company, whether it was something like Visa or Microsoft or Google or what have you, if you type in the job you’re interviewing for, there will be a bunch of questions that other people have reported that they’ve been asked during the interview for that role.

Bryan:
Yes, and that’s huge and key and to give you a head start on the whole process is to really dive in and make sure you have those things down rock solid when you go in.

Laurence:
This reminds me of another thing I just have to mention, I was interviewing for a job not too long ago and I remember as one of their other job listings that was related, not the job I was actually applying for or interviewing for, they had an exercise, it was just a few questions to answer and they were like kind of technical, things like how does the internet work or certain things like that. I remember glancing over those and thinking about them. As it turns out, for my interview, I was asked those same three questions. I remember I was so glad I read through some of their other job openings and the assignments they were having people do as part of the application, because as it turned out during the interview, the same exact questions were asked.

Bryan:
That’s awesome.

Laurence:
Yeah, so that was a nice lucky moment as well.

Bryan:
Exactly.

Laurence:
So let’s kind of fast forward a bit to today. What are you doing now, where, just get into that a bit?

Bryan:
Yeah, totally. I ended up, after I left Allegiant, I went to a small startup, there’s was literally only two devs there when I went, out of Vegas, it was doing a fantasy sports product. They were looking for another dev to come in, their JavaScript frontend dev was going to transition into doing an ionic app, a high app for the site and they needed someone to come in and fill his role as the frontend dev. So that’s what they were interviewing for, they were using Angular and from the skills that I had learned at Allegiant, I was able to plug myself right in there at this new company and we were rocking and rolling for about six months before I got the worst email ever that you always dread when you’re working at a startup that basically says, “Hey, we’ve been going through rocky times and basically don’t come into work tomorrow because we can’t pay you.”

And you’re kind of instantly out of a job, no fault of your own. The company went under overnight and I was out of a job.
Luckily I had a little bit of money in the bank, and I’m not talking about a lot, I’m talking maybe $2000 or something to get through the next month. Well they gave me my last paycheck which is where that little bit of money came from, but it ended up taking me about three, almost three months between that time and the time I got the job that I’m at now. I had interviewed at Visa and all other kind of places and talked to literally like a hundred recruiters and all kinds of stuff before I landed the job at ClickFox where I’m at now, which I really love. They were taking a 10 year old application that was written in Flex, which is an old Adobe Flash technology, and they were going to do a whole rewrite of that into a new product. They wanted to use the latest and greatest in web technologies. They hadn’t even settled on what technology it was going to be at a time and they were going back and forth between React and Angular 2 which was brand new at the time, still in alpha. And they ended up landing on Angular 2.

So now we’ve been working in Angular 2 since alpha 12 or 13 or something like that. It’s gone through all these alphas and all these betas and it just came out with the actual stable version, first stable version of Angular 2 for general release. So we’re using all this cool cutting edge technology for Angular 2 and TypeScript and RxJS and Observables and Redux pattern and it’s really cool stuff so I’m having a blast everyday. It’s literally learning something new every day. We’re running into problems and hiccups with it but it keeps it fresh and exciting. As much of a headache it can be when you’re really trying to build something quickly, it also keeps it very interesting and it forces you to learn in order to progress. I would say I’ve progressed more in this job and position than in any of the rest I would say, just from being forced to.

Laurence:
Yeah, that’s so interesting. I just want to circle back very quick. You mentioned that it took you about three months from the time that the startup you were working at went under, that’s definitely a crappy situation to be in, but did it take three months from that day until you started your new job?

Bryan:
From end date to start date I would say was three months.

Laurence:
And you said you talked to about a 100 recruiters, so you were doing a bunch of interviews?

Bryan:
Yeah, there was a bunch of stuff going on at the time. First step, I redid my resume and I threw it on a site called Dice. I did not read the fine print on Dice that it is really a recruiter’s tool. I thought it was like monster.com or whatever, just a regular job website. But it’s really a tool that recruiters use to find candidates for jobs. So my phone started blowing up, phone and email and I would get five recruiters a day at least contacting me, trying to set up an interviews. I would get 10 recruiters calling me about the same position. It was really rough, like come on Bryan, really rough.

Laurence:
All these people want me to work for them, it’s so hard! No, I’m kidding.

Bryan:
It would get to a point where it was really frustrating and you would feel like a piece of meat that people were pulling on. Some of the recruiters wouldn’t listen to you and there was a lot of recruiting firms that are overseas for some reason. I would have, a large percentage of the time I’m sorry to say, I would have bad experiences with them where they would ask me something about a job on the east coast and I’m anchored in Las Vegas for a couple reasons and I would say, “I’m not interested in a relocation” and they’d kind of bust in, “Yeah yeah, so if they make an offer with relocating,” and I’m like, “I just told you I can’t move.”

Laurence:
Yes, oh my goodness.

Bryan:
I went through that over and over. I was really disheartened with the process by the end of it.

Laurence:
My boyfriend also works in tech and he’s a software engineer. He does Angular as well, user interface development. He gets bombarded with recruiters quite a lot. We sort of came down to this consensus that recruiters that are in-house, say they’re emailing you from ‘companyemail.com’, that they tend to be a lot better to work with.

Bryan:
They are, I will add to that they definitely are a 1000 times better than the outside recruiters/headhunters I guess you could say.

Laurence:
Yeah, like a third party or the ones that a company will hire so it’s not in house. I’ve spoke with recruiters that are in house and had probably some of my best interview experiences ever, just as far as professionalism and getting along with the person have actually been with in-house recruiters. The job I have today I did not get through a recruiter, but my boyfriend, his job today he didn’t either, but his last job he got totally through a recruiter, cold email through LinkedIn and it worked out really well. I can definitely see how that’s frustrating. I see how he gets frustrated. People are calling him on his work phone or his cell phone and it’s like, “How did you even get my number,” he has no idea.

Bryan:
You try to pull it off. I tried to pull down my stuff off all these sites and I still get emails, random emails coming in for jobs. And I’m like, “I don’t even have that technology on my resume, why are you sending me this job for something crazy?”

Laurence:
Exactly, and like you said with the relocation thing, you clearly said you didn’t want to relocate. Keep getting you for jobs that are on the other side of the country.

Bryan:
Exactly.

Laurence:
So we have to wrap things up here but real quick, did the job that you have today then, did you get that through a recruiter?

Bryan:
I did. There was a recruiter that was working with me for a job out of Phoenix that was going to be remote, fully remote. At the last minute that company decided to pull back and not do a hire at that time, so we were kind of getting into the process with that company and then he called me and said, “I have some bad news, they decided not to do a hire at the time. They want to re-approach you at a later date, but I do have another recruiter buddy that has a company out of Denver that’s looking for a developer that I think you would be a good fit for. So I’m going to connect you with him.”

And he did, he connected me with the other recruiter. In the beginning of the process, he was under the impression I think that it was going to be a fully remote position. Into the process it came to light that they kind of wanted somebody there for the first six months while they built this MVP with the team. So that was kind of negotiated for starting in March of this year for the first six months or so, I was kind of living out of hotels in Denver. Traveling back and forth, back to Vegas to see the wife and the kids and the family and then going to work. In the last month to two months, I’ve been in Vegas more than I’ve been in Denver, which is awesome. I’m loving the work from home, remote gig.

Laurence:
Yes, I know so many listeners can feel the same way and want to work remote, work from home. I just love that about tech, I feel like there are a lot more work from home, or work remotely, or maybe go to the office once a quarter, once a month, opportunities.

Bryan:
Yes, exactly. And I love it. I wish more companies would get on board with it, because it widens your talent pool. If you’re in any particular city, you’re kind of geo-locked into the talent for that area. When you go remote, it opens you up to nationwide talent. Or worldwide talent if you want to look at it in that way as well. I’m a big fan of the working remote.

Laurence:
Yeah, that’s awesome, that’s such a great point. So thank you so much Bryan for chatting today. Lastly, where can people find you online?

Bryan:
Oh of course. The two big places you can find me are going to be on LinkedIn and on Twitter. My Twitter is @bknightcode on Twitter and at LinkedIn/bknightdev. Or if you just google Bryan Knight you can see my smiling face.

Laurence:
And we’ll definitely put the links to your social media in the Show Notes, which can be accessed at learntocodewith.me/podcast. So thanks again Bryan, for coming on today.

Bryan:
Of course, Laurence. Thanks for the opportunity.

Laurence:
I hope you enjoyed our conversation. Again, the Show Notes for this episode, plus a full transcript, can be found at learntocodewith.me/podcast. If you’re enjoying the Learn to Code With Me podcast, make sure to leave a rating and review on whichever podcast platform you’re tuning in on. So whether it’s iTunes, Stitcher, PodBean, SoundCloud, or anything else, please leave one. It means so much to me. Thanks again for tuning in, and I’ll see you next week!

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