Meet Ryan Talbert 🇺🇸! Ryan studied entrepreneurship and had an idea for an app. To build it, he hired a developer who scammed him and used his server for phishing! But that was also the best thing that could've happened: Today, Ryan is a developer, passionate about JavaScript, and helping other career switchers break into tech. Oh, and he wrote a book!

In this episode, Ryan shares his story and many things he's learned along the way. Ryan will teach you how to break the process of applying and interviewing for a job into smaller steps and improve them one by one - and some of his strategies are pretty novel, even after more than 160 episodes of our podcast! Ryan's approach divides the interview process into four stages. This way, you can pinpoint the exact part of it where you fail, and work on it without distractions.

You will also learn how to make learning to code more manageable and rewarding for yourself - because the more you win, the more you will win. Ryan also describes how he got his first coding job: he told the hiring manager the company wasn't right for him, but they wanted to hire him anyway, and he eventually agreed - because he had a good reason to do so.

🔗 Connect with Ryan

👨‍💼 Linkedin

⏰ Timestamps

You can come into tech from any career (01:36)
Ryan studied entrepreneurship and wanted to build an app (03:56)
How Ryan lost all his savings and got a cease and desist letter from the country of Germany (05:46)
Getting scammed was a good thing, in the end (08:57)
Community Break with Jan the Producer (10:13)
How Ryan learned to code (11:40)
Becoming a coder instead of entrepreneur (14:41)
Job hunt in 2017 vs job hunt in 2024 (20:33)
Linear progression of a job interview (22:22)
Write a good resume (or pay somebody to do that), and get it in front of humans (23:37)
What to do when they ask you to tell them abour yourself? (25:39)
Practice coding problems (26:49)
Climbing the interview hill (27:32)
We're bad at multitasking (28:56)
Anything is a skill! (30:42)
You need to keep winning and build momentum (35:15)
Set achievable goals (40:01)

🧰 Resources Mentioned

Ryan's book: 101 Tips: TypeScript, React, and JavaScript
The Companies Expert on YouTube
Edabit

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You can also Tweet Alex from Scrimba at @bookercodes and tell them what lessons you learned from the episode so that he can thank you personally for tuning in 🙏 Or tell Jan he's butchered your name here.

Fast Money 01/14/19