Sabio Fellow’s Stellar Career Path Leads to Amazon Web Services Job to Help Developers Thrive
Life as a Senior Developer Advocate for Amazon Web Services comes with plenty of perks and responsibilities. The job is as important as it sounds, revolving around speaking to developers, teaching them and fighting for them internally when it comes to new features or services. This renowned and coveted job at AWS belongs to none other than Nicki K, who among many other things, is one of Sabio’s first alum’s.
Nicki, just 28 and originally from Orange County has had quite the ride as a software engineer. She’s worked in both web and mobile development, AI and cloud development, along with the budding new tech beast, Blockchain. But there was a time when Nicki was as fresh to the tech industry as ever. As a child she found herself interested in tech, but never saw a career in it. After completing her BA at UCLA in linguistics and psychology, Nicki went from working at the Apple Genius Bar to the stock market, “which completely bored me. I started to tinker with the idea of developing toys that I played with as a child. So I started looking for jobs that involve building and consoling, so naturally when I was googling, coding came up.”
With that, it was off to the races. While at work Nicki spent every second of free time teaching herself how to code. After a few months, it was time to make her dream a reality, “This was in 2014. There weren’t any bootcamps in LA, there were two in San Francisco, so I decided the plan was, I was going to quit my job and use all of my savings to go to Hack Reactor in SF. I had the whole thing lined up. Ready to go, I applied to Hack Reactor, but I couldn’t get this little voice out of my head. I did one more google search of bootcamps in LA, and Sabio came up.”
It was meant to be. Nicki was accepted to the 2nd cohort ever at Sabio, “I started in April of 2014, graduated that September and got a job a week later at 1iota as a Fullstack Software Developer. I worked there for just over a year and a half before starting my own company.”
But before jumping ahead to Nicki’s amazing career strides, she had a few things to add, “Even though there weren’t a lot of choices, if I had to go back now with all my experience and everything available in LA. I would still choose Sabio. First of all, I love the founders, they’re extremely supportive individuals, like a family. They weren’t just my instructors for 20 weekends, they’ve consistently kept up with my career and been career advisors, and we’re now almost five years out from the time I graduated.”
“Having been in the job market, and was ultimately hired, plus then running my own company, I learned from the starting point they’re the best bootcamp out there because the environment sets you up for obtaining an actual job. It is exactly like the real world. The same way you would have to figure things out on your own, learn the answers to your questions, that’s the same kind of environment you are put in at Sabio, but with a deeply knowledgeable cushion of support.”
Nicki continued, “It also makes it really easy to find a job, you are taught to know what employers are looking for and what is expected of you. Having hired in the job market, I have hired developers from other bootcamps, and I’ve also fired developers from other bootcamps because they just couldn’t cut it. I have yet to meet a developer from another bootcamp who can cut it at the same level as a Sabio graduate.”
For Nicki, it was only a year and a half went by after Sabio before things got really exciting. She came first place at the Launch Hackathon, one of the largest hackathons in the country, giving her the seed money to start her lifelong dream of running her own company. And run it she did, at its top BetaGig was valued at 2 million dollars, an achievement she greatly credits her Sabio mentors too. “They’re founders of a start up themselves and they had tons of advice. They went out of their way to connect me with individuals that could help me or drive my company further down the road.”
BetaGig, Nicki’s company thrived for its two years in service based off of Nicki’s experience in the job market. A, ‘try before you by,’ for careers, allowing individuals to connect with companies for a job shadow or a “working day interview,” to see what a day in the life was like before actually getting and/or accepting a job.
After her successful run at BetaGig, Nicki moved to her current lucrative position at AWS, but that doesn’t mean her time with Sabio is done yet. Currently enrolled in Sabio’s Blockchain class, Nicki is finding the experience, “incredibly fascinating,” as she paves the way for returning to a familiar career path in software engineering. “I feel like I can talk to Liliana Monge (Sabio’s Co-Founder and CEO) and Gregorio Rojas (Sabio’s Co-Founder and CTO) about anything. I’m hoping as I get back to engineering that Liliana can help connect me with the right people.”
Nicki added, “Sabio is the best development bootcamp in Southern California. If that doesn’t tell you enough, then you need to go back and do your homework again. They are the best and they have a crazy high success rate of people finding jobs. If I can accomplish this much in five years, who knows what the next five will bring, and I couldn’t have done any of it without Sabio.”
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Written by Sassy Mohen