Hired by Coca Cola! How Michael Learned Coding on Work Breaks and Changed Careers at 51

🎙 About the episode

Meet Michael Robards 🇺🇸! Michael is a career changer whose path to becoming a developer was a long and winding one: he was a business analyst and a personal trainer; he worked front of house and managed restaurants; he studied biology and worked in customer service. Eventually, he got a developer job at Coca-Cola!

In this episode, Michael shares his story and his approach to learning and getting a job. He did a lot of things right, and he's also a proof that it's never too late for a carreer change. Michael and Alex also talk about imposter syndrome, difficulties of learning to code while having a full-time job, differences between big and small companies, and why having to keep on learning is a great thing about working in tech.

🔗 Connect with Michael

• 👨‍💼LinkedIn

⏰ Timestamps

• Michael's long and winding path to becoming a developer (01:44)
• Why Michael thought becoming a software developer wasn't right for him (08:17)
• How Michael commited to learning to code - and did that on company time, at least at first (09:04)
• On learning to code while having a full-time job (11:56)
• How Coca-Cola helped Michael on his coding journey (12:45)
• Ad break: We had a lot of career changers on the podcast. Here's one of them! Plus how to support us, and who's on next week (it's Caitlyn Greffly)!
• Is there anything Michael would've done differently? (17:43)
• Why did it take four and a half years for Michael to get a software job at Coke? (20:31)
• What does it look like to be hired internally? (22:57)
• How to fight imposter syndrome? (25:12)
• What kind of a coworker does a junior developer need? (27:32)
• Why you should do things at your own pace and choose your employers wisely (28:35)
• Michael's career goals (31:01)
• Keep on learning! (31:47)

🧰 Resources Mentioned

• Some of the career changers we interviewed: Chris, Silvia, Theo, Wemerson
• Scrimba's Discord Community
• Grow with Google
• The Frontend Developer Career Path
• Codecademy
• Freecodecamp

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You can also Tweet Alex from Scrimba at @bookercodes and tell them what lessons you learned from the episode so they can thank you personally for tuning in 🙏