He turned down the family business to master code in four months

The tailor's son who said no

When Mang Jie — MJ to everyone — was 18, his father asked him to skip university and take over the family tailoring business. His father's view was that graduates couldn't earn what a business owner could. MJ actually dropped out in year one of his degree, despite straight As in SPM and a perfect four-flat in foundation.

He lived alone for a few months to think it over, and decided tailoring wasn't what he wanted. He wanted to earn his own way and build his own ability. "If you make me bankrupt today, I'll have the ability to rebuild my empire," he says. So he went back to university.

A degree that never taught him to code

His degree was management information systems — half business, half IT. But the IT half was mostly theory and design. Out of 30-plus courses, only four touched programming — an introduction to C, visual programming, basic web development and database design. Not even a framework.

What pulled him towards tech in year two was simple: he saw on YouTube how much software developers could earn. "What inspired me to join the tech industry is, of course, money."

His software engineering internship exposed the gap. "I felt like a potato. I really didn't know what I was doing." A mentor there showed him what he should be learning if he was serious — and he realised how many skills he was missing.

“If you make me bankrupt today, I'll have the ability to rebuild my empire.”

Ten courses, all abandoned halfway

MJ had tried teaching himself for about two years — Treehouse, Udemy, YouTube, ten-plus courses. Every single one he stopped halfway. Learning alone, there was no pressure and no accountability.

Then Sigmaschool showed up in his social feed. The fees were about RM7,000, and he had around RM5,000 of PTPTN money he could put towards it. He enrolled in his final semester of university, when all he had left was his final-year project.

What sold him was the structure. "The path is laid down. If I put in eight hours a day for four months, I know I can reach there. It's just a matter of whether I'm disciplined."

Eight hours a day, no matter the mood

He started part-time, with one live class a week, and took two whole months to finish the first module even with a mostly free schedule — the motivation faded fast between classes. If he could go back, he says, he would enrol full-time from day one and finish in four months.

The bootcamp gave him things his degree never did: his first framework in React, then databases and APIs — the full cycle of how a front end connects to a back end and back again. He even coded his university final-year project himself with what he learnt.

Having since taught students, he is clear on what separates the top ones: they do all the optional tasks, not just the compulsory work. "You cannot learn three hours and expect an eight-hour full-time software developer job. You have to put in eight hours of learning every single day to reach that level."

Singapore could wait

His plan after graduating was to apply for jobs in Singapore and earn three times the local salary. Then, in his final month of the bootcamp, his instructor Haris messaged him — and asked what his goals in life were. MJ named three: become a good programmer, learn communication, and get physically fit. The reply: sounds like Sigmaschool.

After case studies and a couple of days of thinking, he chose the company that matched his goals over the bigger paycheque — his first full-time job, secured before he had even graduated from university.

He taught his first class on day one with zero teaching experience. The first days went badly, so on his day off he rewatched his own recordings and wrote checklists for every lesson. Within a week, a student told him he couldn't tell it was his first time teaching. On the developer side, the project used Vue when he had only ever learnt React; a crash course and one to two weeks later, he was contributing. "The syntax is different, but the fundamental logic is the same."

He has since moved on again — today he works as an IT business analyst at Hilti Asia IT Services, the multinational's IT hub in Malaysia.

Decide, find a mentor, commit

His advice for anyone considering the switch starts with a filter: can you sit in front of a computer for eight hours a day? Try it for even one day before you decide, because that is the job — for years.

Second, find a mentor — the fastest way to learn anything is from someone who already knows how. Third, put in the work. Discipline beats motivation, and skills beat certificates.

"Even if you have a degree, if you don't have any skills to back it up, people will not hire you," he says. With a 3.99 CGPA he wasn't confident of getting a job. It was only after the bootcamp, with real projects in his portfolio, that he was.