As my hands plunged into the scalding water, commercial-grade chemicals tore away at the grease that had accumulated on my skin, licking at the fresh burns from hours prior. I was finishing up my shift at the restaurant I worked at, finding myself in the dish pit for the remaining hour or so to wash, rinse, and sanitize the dishes that had piled up during the day.
This was a meditative routine for me. It wasn’t the most glamorous job in the restaurant, but it was a necessary one. It allowed me the opportunity to completely zone out. It was the one singular moment of peace during my shifts, the one piece of time that I had to reflect back on the day’s events, plan my evening, and daydream about my future. No flood of new tickets to deal with, no entitled customers believing they’re above me and screaming over non-trivial issues, no splashback of hot grease or risk of cuts except for the rare occasion some asshole would leave their knives in the sink.
I’d go home afterward, thoroughly exhausted and smelling of onions. It was always onions, no matter what else was cooked. That smell had a way of soaking into your clothes, your skin, your soul, until it became a part of your very aura. It took everything to get rid of the smell.
I’d spend my evenings tinkering with various game engines, most notably Unity and Unreal, enjoying these moments of creativity. I was never very good at them, but I wanted to learn. I had a heavy reliance on tutorials, which as we all know don’t actually help you learn anything. Tutorial Hell is a real thing, and I didn’t learn how to escape it until a long while later.
My interest in game development stemmed from when I was a child. Video games, much like the dish pit, were an escape from the hurricane that was my daily life. It offered my young mind a way out from the chaos of what was going on around me, a way I could transport myself into some fantasy world where everything was good, where everything was in my control, and most importantly: where everything was safe.
I was probably 5 or 6 when I had my first experience with computers. I remember learning how to type, how to use a mouse, and how to play Microsoft 3D Pinball: Space Cadet. From that moment, my trajectory in life was set and I didn’t have the slightest idea yet.
When I turned 11, I received my first computer: a used Compaq Presario with some flavor of linux running on it. Linux was a completely different beast from what I was used to. It was weird, almost alien. When I received the laptop, there was no password provided with the user that was already on there. Knowing my home environment, it was most likely stolen.
I had to painstakingly learn over the next few months how to force access into root and boot into the terminal. It didn’t occur to me to use the family computer to just google how to do that. Once I gained access to root, a whole new world opened up. I eventually figured out how to remove the old user and replace it with one of my own, finally granting me access to the desktop that was installed: GNOME.
I spent hours tinkering with that laptop, balanced with even more hours playing around with an early version of GameMaker on the family computer. I remember making some terrible RPG with hand drawn sprites and not a single line of code written. I had uploaded it to MediaFire as a way to distribute to my internet friends for their feedback.
A few years ago, MediaFire wiped all uploads before a certain date. Apparently they sent out an email giving users a chance to back up these files or prevent them from being wiped, but I never received that email. My first RPG is lost forever.
I made the jump over to restaurant manager. I refused to be like some of the other managers I’ve seen during my tenure, “lovingly” referred to by the team as office managers. They earned this title by the staggering amount of non-work they managed to do during their shifts, somehow finding ways to spend four to six hours alone “working on the schedule” every single day.
Having done that exact job myself, I know it doesn’t take that long to write a good schedule and to accomodate your team properly. And when you run a tight ship and your crew is reliable, you can very effectively copy-and-paste the schedule from week to week, making very little modification except for covering the occasional time off. Get back on the fucking floor and help your team.
Point being, I preferred to get my hands dirty. I preferred to work as part of the team. This was the same team that I was born and raised in, we worked alongside each other. The only thing that changed was the color of my shirt and the numbers on my paycheck.
Oh, and the hours. I quickly found myself regularly logging 12 hour days on average, even though corporate tried to limit managers to 50 hours per week. Despite this, 70+ hour weeks were more often the norm than they were not. COVID definitely had a major hand to play in this, especially paired with corporate mandates. A lot of folks quit, and understandably so. I would have to, if I had been in a safe position to do so.
Being located in Texas, many of our customers refused to wear masks, sometimes getting belligerently angry about it, throwing drinks and food and whatever they could get their hands on at our staff. All of them, incredibly anti-vaxx and insisting that COVID isn’t real.
A few folks that I’ve worked closely with over the years died from COVID — it was real for them.
Corporate sent down an order that we’re NOT allowed to request for our customers to wear masks, or even to suggest doing so — the paper sign scotch-taped to the door was sufficient enough.
For obvious reasons, none of our customer-facing team appreciated that.
Time went on, most of our staff left for better jobs. The pay here wasn’t worth the risk or the treatment, so very few people stuck around. I unfortunately didn’t have the power or the ability to increase the team’s pay to offset this, and there was very little desire from upper management or corporate to step in and address this. After all, they were making fucking bank.
There was a long stretch where there was just myself and one team member on our shift. We went from 60 team members to 20, and from 8 managers to just 3. It was time for me to leave. If you take away nothing else from anything that I say, at least listen to this: you do not owe your loyalty to your job. They absolutely will throw you to the wolves if it means they can increase their profits. Do what’s best for you and your health. Please.
By this point, I knew I wanted to break into the tech industry. Specifically, I wanted to learn how to code. My experience with computers has helped to shape me into the person I am today, and they’re something I’ve been passionate about for many years. I didn’t know exactly which path I wanted to take, I just knew I wanted to code.
One morning after my shift (I was working overnights at this point), I poured myself a glass of Kamchatka and settled in front of my computer, googling how exactly I can get proper coding education without having to spend tens of thousands of dollars for a CS degree.
It was at this point that I discovered App Academy — a software engineering bootcamp. Everything appeared to be very well-written, and the best thing was their self-paced Open course was entirely free. Bingo. I wasted almost no time in registering for App Academy Open and began to dive into the first lessons.
Every day after I came home from work, I’d immediately rush over to my computer, log in to AAO, and go through a few more lessons, spending hours absorbing and practicing as much of the material as my brain could handle before I had to call it quits for the day and get some sleep. This carried on for about a month.
I was hooked, and I needed more. App Academy claims to assist with your job search and get you placed into a career. At the time, I believe they had some metric saying 98% of AA graduates get placed in their first coding career within a year of graduation. That might not be 100% accurate as it’s been a few years, but you get the point.
Anyway, I applied to their full-time course, and in the meantime I continued going through AAO. After a few days, I was slated for an interview. I was incredibly nervous, and understandably so — this was going to be my ticket out of the restaurant industry and into my dream career. I needed to be accepted. The interview went fairly well, and I was told that I’d be contact in a few days with a final decision.
You ever get that feeling in your core where you just know things will work out? I’m not saying you hope, but you KNOW. It’s like when you cash a check, and even though the money’s not in your account yet you KNOW it will be there. Yeah, that’s how I felt immediately after that interview. I couldn’t explain why or how, but I knew I was accepted.
I woke up the next day to the acceptance email.
My life was thoroughly packed at this point. I had explained to my boss that I got accepted into a school, and so I needed to adjust my schedule to accomodate this. Of course, they were accepting and supportive, and for this I thank them. However, this meant I was working 50 hours per week at my job, AND 45 hours per week on App Academy, for a total of 95 hours per week of work. Literally more than half of my time alive (56.5%) was spent working in some capacity.
I quickly realized that this was entirely unsustainable, so roughly two weeks into AA I took one of the biggest gambles I’ve ever taken in my life: I quit my job and went all-in on AA. I loved the team I had — after all those years they became something of a family to me, so I did the professional thing and fulfilled my two-week’s notice, finishing out the month, giving them enough time to find a replacement.
I had no savings to lean on and no wealth to leverage, and my girlfriend at the time wasn’t paying any of the bills, so I was entirely on my own in this for a while. I withdrew my 401k, knowingly accepting the tax penalties for doing so, and used that as runway to keep me afloat and carry me through the course to completion.
A few months went by, and finances were beginning to dwindle. My girlfriend cheated on me, and so we split. I desperately needed to get out of there. My sister and my brother-in-law very graciously offered their spare bedroom in order to help me get through this, providing me a way to massively cut down on my monthly expenses. They are quite possibly my two favorite people on this planet, and nothing I could ever do will be enough to repay them for their kindness and their support.
Here’s the thing. So many folks say “if you don’t like working in the restaurant industry, just get a better job” but they don’t realize just how difficult or downright impossible that can be for a lot of people. If I didn’t have my 401k as financial backup and I didn’t have my sister and her family to rely on, I genuinely would not have been able to pull this off.
“Just get a better job.” I say this with every iota of disrespect possible: go fuck yourself.
More months pass, and I’m approaching the end of the course. Despite having my expenses drastically cut, I still have expenses nonetheless, and so money continues to drain. By then, I felt competent enough in my abilities as a developer to begin to apply for entry level positions. I sent in over 500 applications before I stopped bothering to count, eventually writing a chrome extension to assist in that process because it was so repetitive. I was at the beginning of the flood of new bootcamp developers in the market, so there was an insane amount of job-ready Juniors to go around and not enough jobs to accept them all.
That 98% metric sure did work for AA’s marketing, and there were even more bootcamps touting roughly the same statistics. It’s an easy ticket into a high-paying career field, so of course everybody and their grandmother was going through these courses. A massive supply of developers and a too-small demand of said developers meant that the market was flooded. Even to this day, I think only maybe five people from the original 100 in my cohort were able to get a coding job. Of course, the market’s far worse now than it was before; companies seeing record profits, but then laying off developers by the thousands — now there’s a ton of Senior talent AND Junior talent all fighting for the same scrap.
A quick note about this: if you’re considering enrolling into App Academy — don’t. Just use their Open course. They’ve somewhat recently laid off all their cohort leaders in exchange for AI, effecting 10% of their workforce. If it weren’t for the leads, especially Drew, I wouldn’t have been able to get through the course. They’ve been incredibly instrumental in helping to get a solid understanding of the core concepts necessary to be able to code. My heart goes out to you guys.
With that in mind: just on principle alone, what AA did is incredibly fucked up. Of course, they offered severance and whatnot, but still. It’s wack. Anyway, I digress.
By the end of it all, I had maybe $100 left to my name, so I needed to figure something out fast. My decision? Work as a delivery driver for Amazon. They had a position open for $16/hr back up in Dallas. I called up my buddy Juan to see if he’d be interested in being roommates. “Hell yeah bro.” The race was on.
The drive up to Dallas from Killeen was uneventful, aside from the rain. I had an interview scheduled with Amazon in a few hours, and I was determined to get there. Roaring along in my old ‘96 Jeep Grand Cherokee at a smooth 90mph, I all but barely made it in time. And make, I did.
The interview was really nothing more than a formality. The lady shook my hand and told me to come back in three weeks to start training. I finally had income again, I was finished with my classes with AA, and now I could get back to life as usual.
The days spent waiting for my start date as an Amazon DSP were filled with building various websites and code projects, and sending out more applications for junior programming jobs. The nights were filled with time spent with with Juan — gaming, cooking, laughing. He’s a genuinely good dude, and anybody would be lucky to have such a kind soul involved in their life.
”Hey, love the website and thanks for the laugh! I’ve got a few positions open I think you’d be a good fit for.”
I couldn’t believe it. Some random recruiter found my website, and liked what they saw enough to reach out to me. I’ve worked with a couple of recruiters before, most of which never followed up with anything so it left a sour taste in my mouth, but something told me this was different. I reply back, and we set up time to talk.
He sets me up with a couple different interviews for a couple of different companies, each of which went very well despite the company “going in a different direction”. But despite each interview not leading to a job, this man continues to keep me up to date regularly and set me up with more. Dean, you’re a fuckin beautiful human being and I wish more recruiters were like you. You and your entire team are honestly like no other recruiter I’ve worked with before. Hats off to y’all.
Anyway, I get slated with another interview. It was for a “Shopify Specialist” position. Not a big deal, I’ve done plenty of work with Shopify before. It’s not exactly the job I want, but it gets my foot in the door and that’s all that matters. The interview went surprisingly well. Took a risk and cracked a few programming-related jokes with the panel, laughter all around. Took a bigger risk and dropped some coding hot takes. I was so exhausted with the performative circus-clown interview charade that I figured I’d just be myself during this one. Decided to share my interest in coding specifically.
Apparently, the team liked me because they set me up with a second interview. Turns out they had a junior developer position open. This second interview was the real meat and potatoes, as it was a coding task. “Here are some assets and guidelines, recreate this webpage.”
Easy.
Except I completely blundered it. At the time, I was quite proud of my handiwork, but looking back on it now.. I barely scratched the surface of the page, it was genuinely awful to look at. We talked about my thought process through the build, why I chose the tech stack that I used, why I did ABCXYZ ad naeseum, and then just as quickly as the interview started, it was over.
You ever get that feeling in your core where you just know things will work out?
I stared at the offer letter in my inbox.
Sixty-five thousand smackaroos.
Personally, I was gunning for $80k, but I was happy to accept 65. My start date was scheduled for the same day as my start date with Amazon. Go figure.
The day that I was slated to start my first training shift with Amazon, I was instead heading in the opposite direction, racing from Dallas to Austin at the ass crack of dawn as fast as my proverbial chariot could carry me. Just imagine Chariots of Fire playing to the visual of a turd-brown Grand Cherokee hurtling along the highway in slow motion. That’s exactly what happened.
Eventually, 9AM approached. I’m walking toward the entrance, elated to meet the team I’d learn to live, laugh, love, and cry with over the coming years. Some guy in a baseball cap and more puns than a person could ever need keyed me into the building. This was it. This was my foot in the door, both figuratively and literally.
I had successfully fought my way out of the dishpit.