Promoted Ep. 13: How Luiz Transformed a Passion for Tech Into a Career

Podcast Transcript:

Luis: Hi, I’m Luis. I transitioned from working in a credit union call center to being a software engineer for Southwest Airlines, earning 70% more in my new job.

Masha: You just heard the voice of Luis, an alum of Merit America’s Java Development Program. Welcome to another episode of Promoted, a podcast about leaving low-wage work for good. I’m Masha Finn, today’s host and a Merit America coach. In this episode, we’ll discuss how you can use your personal interests and passion projects to develop skills that are valuable in your professional life. I’ll be talking to our learner, Luis, to help us understand better how that worked for him. Luis, welcome to the show.

Luis: Thank you. I’m glad to be here.

Masha: Can you tell us about your professional path prior to Merit America?

Luis: Well, I worked in a call center in Houston for about eight years. Before that, I worked in retail, a restaurant, even drove a school bus. I had an associate’s degree, but I had to be pretty open to what I could take. I even handed out samples at grocery stores, stocked shelves, did remodels, all sorts of things.

Masha: What led you to choose Java development as a career path?

Luis: I always loved technology as a hobby kind of thing, but I’d never actually done coding. And I was ready to change my career. I knew software development was something I probably could do, and that’s when I came across Merit America and thought Java would be a good fit.

Masha: When you were at the credit union, were you dabbling in technology? Or is that something that came about much earlier?

Luis: That came about much earlier, to be honest. I was always playing video games growing up. And then I got hands-on later, with things like building a PC for gaming and building personal media servers. I joked that I’d done everything in technology that a person could do except learning to write code. If it’s something I like and something I felt I could do well, I figured I might as well try to make a career out of it.

Masha: It’s fun to hear about how people turn their hobbies and their interests into their career paths. I think that’s what a lot of people dream about doing. And your journey from tech enthusiast to your professional role in mobile app development is a perfect example. How did you take on all those personal projects?

Luis: Each time a project presented itself, it was like a means to an end. The very first thing I did was Android, because I had a Motorola Droid X that was a good phone, but not great. So I did some digging in online forums, and if you follow very specific instructions, you can unlock your phone, root it, gain administrative control, and replace the manufacturer OS with a different one modified to be closer to what I wanted. So I learned to figure out how to do it.

I ran into some problems along the way. Every now and then you get a bad update, and it messes up your phone. And it’s like, oh no, I can’t not have a phone all day. So it’s a lot of problem solving and learning to follow instructions. It was really self-directed, just carefully reading technical documentation that’s a little bit above my head, and trying to slowly piece through the instructions. It’s the same thing with building a PC, media servers, all that stuff. It’s all the same underlying skills.

Masha: How did you transition into learning how to code? Did you feel like that prepared you well for the program?

Luis: Yeah, I do because it’s a lot of learning to kind of take a big goal or project, and break it down into smaller problems or steps, and then figuring out how to achieve each one.

Masha: Yeah. And now what do you do?

Luis: So currently, I work for Southwest Airlines on their native Android development team. They actually hired me for web development. But I had a great manager who I’d talked to pretty regularly, and he knew that Android was the thing that I was passionate about. So, when he heard there were opportunities, he thought of me and put my name in there. And here I am. So everything’s come full circle.

Masha: I think it’s so typical for people to refer to their professional experiences or transferable skills when they’re gearing up for a new position. And sometimes they don’t reflect on their personal interests or projects on the side or the fact that they’re tech hobbyists. So I’m curious, were there times where you discussed your personal tech projects or emphasized the skills you were developing?

Luis: Oh, yeah, definitely. When I first interviewed for the position, there was a panel of hiring managers from different teams. I think what made me stand out to the manager who ended up hiring me was my enthusiasm for a lot of things. I talked about Android, but my interests are all over the place. I like to think of myself as a tech omnivore, because I’ve done Android things in the past, but at Merit America, I learned Java and a little bit of web development. I finished Merit America and then learned ReactNative, Unity game development, and a little bit of Lua for another hobby project. And I talked about all that in my interview. And I think that made me stand out to the manager who eventually said, “I want him” because I was passionate and had a lot of interests. So in many ways, starting in this position, I’m at an even less experienced level than I was when I got hired to do web development. But they were okay with taking me on at entry level and confident that I could learn it and grow into the role.

Masha: That’s so satisfying. And it sounds like you stood out because of those additional interests. I’d love to learn more about how your life has changed as a result of your new career. How has it impacted your life and your family?

Luis: Well, I work from home and so does my wife, which is great. I also have great coworkers, but cutting out the commute is so much time saved. I also feel much more fulfilled and happy in what I do. Every day I get to work on something that interests and excites me, and that is just great for my mental health. And I know that I work somewhere where they care about developing me and my future, and that I can grow long term with them. And it also supports my family much better than it was before – it’s opened up opportunities and stability in how we’re living.

Masha: That’s wonderful to hear. Looking ahead, what do you think is next?

Luis: I want to continue to learn Android development. It’s a new, fun, interesting field. But I’m just a person who likes to learn and go in every direction, a little bit of a dog chasing a squirrel. Part of me being a tech omnivore is there’s what I do at my day job, at work, but then I get to scratch a lot of other itches in my free time. On the weekend, I’ll mess around learning to write a little bot for Discord or whatever. It’s fun to see something that can be improved through technology and be, like, I can do that.

Masha: What’s your side project these days?

Luis: Lately, I’ve written a Discord bot because I have a media server that I run and share with some of my friends. So I wanted them to talk to one another so that if I add a new thing to the media server, the bot announces it on Discord. It took some figuring out. Some of it was Python, which I hadn’t done before, but I learned to connect those things. Right now I’m in between projects because there’s so much to learn for Android to get up to speed.

Masha: Thank you, Luis, for sharing your insights and how you can turn your passion and what you love to do into a meaningful job opportunity. Your experiences and advice will undoubtedly help others on their career journeys. To our listeners, if you found value in Luis’s insights and want to learn more about how you can turn your interests into a new career, visit our website at www.meritamerica.org. With that, we conclude this episode of Promoted.

Until next time!