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

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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