Cooking Up a Career Change: Overcoming Burnout and Finding Your Why with Scrimba Student Jimmy

The Scrimba Podcast

🎙 About the episode

Meet Jimmy Johnston 🇺🇸! Jimmy is a sous-chef turned developer who's just landed his first developer job after working in the culinary industry for twenty years! The career change took Jimmy eleven months. It also involved going through burnout, figuring out his "why," as well as hitting a dead-end with job applications and changing the strategy from the ground up! In this interview, Jimmy will let you in on all of these things so that you can learn from his experience.

You'll find out the similarities between cooking and computing, how Jimmy learned to code, and why you shouldn't try to learn too many technologies at once. Jimmy also talks you through his interview process so that you can figure out at what point you are ready to apply for a similar position.

🔗 Connect with Jimmy

• 👨‍💼 LinkedIn
• 🌐 Website

⏰ Timestamps

• Jimmy was always interested in computing but became a chef instead (02:30)
• The restaurant industry was hit hard by the pandemic, but coding is almost like cooking (02:54)
• How Jimmy learned to code and chose what to focus on (04:59)
• Why you should learn how to learn (07:21)
• Cooking and web development: science or art? (08:37)
• Community break: Your LinkedIn posts, Tweets, and Apple Podcast reviews from the past week (10:41)
• How Jimmy discovered the Scrimba bootcamp (12:58)
• Jimmy needed mentorship and community, and on Scrimba bootcamp, he found all of that and more (14:31)
• If he hadn’t enrolled in a bootcamp, Jimmy would have been back to cooking (19:31)
• Quick-fire questions: brain food, getting old, game development, and learning in silence (21:08)
• How Jimmy dealt with burnout (25:43)
• Jimmy’s job hunting strategy: start with “why” (27:07)
• Jimmy tried the “spray and pray” method before, and it didn’t work - but when he changed his strategy, he saw results immediately (28:51)
• Jimmy’s interview process (30:27)
• What do you need to know to start interviewing for jobs? (33:09)
• Jamie’s first technical interview (34:08)
• How Jimmy got his first developer job (37:48)
• What Jimmy wishes he had known when he was starting to learn to code: Stick to one programming language! (40:38)

🧰 Resources Mentioned

• Scrimba Bootcamp
• Front-end Developer Career Path
• Scrimba's Discord Community
• Book: How to Speak Machine: Computational Thinking for the Rest of Us
• Kevin Powell
• Scrimba Podcast: An Introvert's Guide to Networking (and Becoming Amazing at LinkedIn), with Stephanie Chiu from PayPal
• Scrimba Podcast: Homeschooler, College Dropout, Developer and Master Networker: Crush Your Career with Madison Kanna

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