Got a DevOps job partly because of FCC! Thanks for the wonderful content!

Career Advice
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Hello all,

After a year of grinding and ups & downs with learning languages and computer science fundamentals, I have finally landed a job as a senior DevOps engineer. My background might be entirely different from a lot of people on the forum, but it shows that with a little determination, any one can get into an engineering role.

My background:

  1. No College degree - Currently pursuing a bachelors in Information Sciences and Technology
  2. Former Military
  3. I have been working in IT (which definitely helped) in a support analyst/IT Specialist role the past 3 years
  4. 3 projects away from obtaining my front end certification.

What helped:

  1. My current job helped me learn all aspect of IT and IT Infrastructure. This was really important because it taught me how distributed systems worked and provided key learning opportunities with networking, enterprise architecture, etc.
  2. FCC helped me get the programming juices flowing! If I hadn’t gone through any of the pathway, I wouldn’t have passed the programming challenge that my new employer threw at me!
  3. Learning scripting first definitely made it easier learning the content here.

Current Situation:

I start work on December 14th with a fortune 500 company located in NYC. I definitely encouraged automation and scripting in my current employer. Anything that came my way, I always tried to analyze the challenge and attempt to solve it with scripting (mainly in Powershell/Bash, we’re a mixed Windows/Linux environment). I’ve been looking for a engineering role for the past year or so. You’ll get discouraged, but don’t let that consume you as it did me for months! My new role will entail AWS/Azure, working in Puppet, and intergrating RESTful APIs into the infrastructure.

This post might help people who are already in a technical support role looking to transition, so YMMV. One advice is to ALWAYS keep learning (I know I might be beating a dead horse here). I would review old topics that I learned and continue to do so today.

I wanted to thank everyone at FCC for creating a wonderful curriculum that helps people from all walks of life. Thanks all!

8 Likes
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Hi Peter,

Thanks for sharing your story and specific skills that helped you make the transition!

It sounds like quite a jump in responsibility! I’m confident you’ll learn a ton in your first few months on the job.

If you have time to contribute to the freeCodeCamp Guide DevOps section, it’s quite bare bones at this point and could benefit from your newly developed expertise :wink:

Have a fun week gearing up for your new job, and keep us all posted on the insights you have working with these tools!

3 Likes
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Congrats. Get me a job. :wink:

What was the interview like? What type of programming questions did they ask you?

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Thanks Quincy,

Definitely, I’m ready to give back to the community as soon as I get situated. Thanks for creating something special. Keep up the momentum and the good job!

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The interview was very hands on. They asked me to do a scripting puzzle that was based on fizzbuzz but added a twist to the problem (specific to powershell). Afterwards, they had me do pair programming with one of the senior developers which included revisiting the fizzbuzz puzzle and discussing further programming concepts. Pretty much to prove I understood them. The whole process took about 3 weeks. Afterwards they set me up with the executive director of IT and the CTO for further questions on background and current projects.

All in all, I came in prepared and reviewed a lot of algorithms and scripting concepts. Reviewing syntax before an interview will help you immensely. I remembered most of the syntax to the puzzle that I finished almost in just under 20 minutes.