This dude grew his salary from $37,500 a year to $125,000+, all by teaching himself how to code.
TJ Oyeniyi is his name. Born in Nigeria. Grew up in Dallas. Did his undergrad at UT Austin, where he got a degree in nutritional science.
From there, he bounced over to ASU, picked up a graduate business degree.
Outside of getting him into a lot of student loan debt, both degrees were pretty much worthless.
The stress and pressure of being broke led TJ to pursue coding as a way out.
“Before I started teaching myself how to code,” TJ says, “I was working as a business analyst for a small tech company in Austin, where I was making $37,500 a year.”
“So each paycheck was about $1,200 every two weeks,” he continues.
“But my student loan payments were about $1,000 a month. So after paying that, I was pretty much just living off of one paycheck,” he remembers.
“The main turning point for me happened when I got a promotion. I got promoted to senior business analyst, but my salary only went up to $39,998 a year,” he laughs.
Insignificant and insulting. Like, why not just add the two bucks to make it an even $40 Gs a year?
TJ went home that day and decided, The hell with this. I’m teaching myself how to code.
He called up his friend who was a software engineer and asked her: If I wanted to build apps, what’s the least amount that I need to know?
She schooled him on the differences between mobile apps, web apps, front end versus back end, etc.
She also pointed him to Ruby and Ruby on Rails as an easy way to start.
Another tip she gave TJ was to check out the course curriculum for different online coding bootcamps, to see what they were teaching their students.
Slowly but surely, TJ was able to piece together a plan of attack.
At the time, his dream job was to be a software developer at IBM. He gave himself till the end of the year to apply for that position.
Meanwhile, he would work his current 9-5, come home, watch an hour or two of TV, then study coding till like 1 o’clock in the morning.
Wake up, repeat.
Eventually TJ realizes his day job’s getting in the way.
So he saves up as much money as he can, quits, and goes all in on coding.
At this point, he could build basic apps, but he didn’t know where to go from there.
On the advice of another friend, he took out a loan to enroll in Dev Bootcamp, which is no longer in operation.
TJ spent most of his time there working on personal projects to bolster his portfolio.
Once he finished the bootcamp, he began studying for interviews and searching for jobs.
Throughout his journey, TJ tweeted about what he was learning, how it was going, his wins and struggles.
The one random engineering manager was paying attention, and was impressed by TJ’s progress.
“And this is how I got my first job offer,” TJ recalls.
“From a stranger on Twitter that just so happened to be following me,” he says.
“Now this offer was a verbal offer for a software developer apprenticeship that would pay $75,000 a year. Problem was, the job wasn’t gonna start for a few months.”
TJ couldn’t wait that long. He was broke.
Luckily, he got several other offers, settling on one at a cybersecurity startup in Austin.
It also paid $75k a year.
Then, every 11 months, he would switch jobs, stair-stepping his way to a six figure income.
On the side, he was mentoring aspiring coders, which led to his ROOTs Technology Coding & Career Prep Program.
Cost of tuition ranges from $2,500 to $3,500, depending on the level of hand holding you desire.
That’s about 75% less than what the average coding bootcamp charges.
My only question: I wonder how AI will affect the need for human coders moving forward.