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

The tailor's son who said no

When Chung Mang Jie, MJ to everyone, was 18, his father asked him to skip university and take over the family tailoring business. In his father's mind the maths was simple: a business owner will always out-earn a graduate. MJ had straight As in SPM and a perfect four flat in his foundation year, and yet in year one of his degree he actually dropped out.

He knew how that looked. A student with results like his walking away from university was not the status quo, and he did not pretend otherwise. So he lived alone for a few months and did little except think it over: was tailoring really the life he wanted? The answer, when it settled, was no.

The conversation with his father afterwards did not go the way these stories usually go. His father did not encourage him to return to university either; he still believed a degree could not compete with owning a business. MJ went back anyway, because the degree was never the point. The point was to earn his own money and build his own capability. "If you make me bankrupt today, I'll have the ability to rebuild my empire," he says.

It is a strange position to defend, and he heard as much. A successful family business is a base most people would love to inherit; you could take over something profitable and simply grow it. MJ chose to start from zero instead, in an industry where he had no experience at all.

Four programming courses out of thirty

His degree was management information systems, half business and half IT, and the IT half leaned heavily towards theory and design. Out of the 30-plus courses in the whole programme, only four touched programming: an introduction to C, visual programming, a web module covering HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and database design. Not even a framework. Very fundamental, and in his own assessment, really not enough to get a job in programming.

What pulled him towards code in year two was not a calling. He watched a YouTube video and discovered how much software developers could earn. "What inspired me to join the tech industry is, of course, money," he says, without apology. He wanted a programming job before graduation, so he googled how to learn programming self-taught.

Then came his internship, in software engineering, and with it reality. "Throughout these three months I felt like a potato. I really didn't know what I was doing." He counts himself lucky that a mentor at the company took him seriously, taught him, and showed him what he should actually be learning if he wanted to become a programmer. The internship's real lesson was the size of the gap he still had to close.

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

Ten courses, all abandoned halfway

By that point MJ had already been teaching himself for about two years, on and off, starting back in year two. Treehouse, Udemy, YouTube: he went through more than ten online courses. Every single one of them he stopped halfway.

The pattern never changed. An assignment would land, or life would, and because nobody was watching, quitting cost nothing. He was learning alone, with no pressure and no accountability, and motivation on its own could not carry him through a full course even once.

After two years of that, he drew the obvious conclusion: it was time to find a mentor. Around then Sigmaschool appeared in his Instagram or Facebook feed, he forgets which. The fees were about RM7,000, and he had roughly RM5,000 of PTPTN money he could put towards it, so a top-up from his own pocket would cover the rest.

The timing was deliberate too. He enrolled in the final semester of university, when every course was finished and only his final-year project remained, which left him largely free. His original plan for those months had been four months of intensive self-study. Instead, he decided to spend them with someone holding him to the work.

The road is there

What sold him, more than anything, was the course structure. Instead of figuring out which skills to pick up a bit here and a bit there, someone had already laid the whole route down in order, from fundamentals to job-ready.

"The path is laid down. As long as you follow through this path, you can be a software developer. It's just how much effort you need to take to complete all these things. But at least I know the road is there. 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."

That framing moved the risk to the only place he could control it. The question was no longer whether he had picked the right resources out of thousands. It was purely whether he would do the work, and for someone who had abandoned ten courses for lack of accountability, that was exactly the problem worth paying to solve.

Two months stuck on module one

It did not start smoothly. MJ began on the part-time track, with one live class a week, and even though his schedule was almost completely free, the first module took him two whole months.

He is honest about why. Part-time came with a study buddy but not much accountability, and the instructor appeared only once a week. After each lesson he would be hyped up for a while, then his motivation would slowly drain away and he would get lazy here and there. With all the time in the world, he still could not finish module one in a month.

Ask him what he would do differently with a second chance and the answer comes instantly: enrol full-time from day one and finish the whole thing inside four months. Full-time meant four days a week, eight hours a day, a three-hour live class followed by tasks to complete. The structure he had paid for only really worked once he committed at that intensity.

Eight hours a day, no matter the mood

Course content, he says, was never the hard part of the bootcamp. The hard part was managing his life around it. His university final-year project was running at the same time, and family and friends still expected his time. He had set himself a goal of becoming a software developer in four months, and every distraction threatened it.

His answer was to be, in his own words, laser focused. "Can you stay focused, can you stay committed, can you be self-disciplined to wake up and then learn and then sleep? Can you put in eight hours a day no matter your emotions? Whether you're happy or sad, work must be done."

In the interview, he and his instructor Haris do the arithmetic on what the full-time track actually demands: sixteen weeks, four days a week, eight hours a day, which comes to 512 hours. That number is why both of them push back when someone asks whether a lighter commitment gets the same result. "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."

Could someone technically complete the programme on three hours a day? He concedes the word complete. You can hit the compulsory requirements. But becoming a developer that companies want to hire, someone who can shine in a technical interview, is a different bar, and three hours is definitely not enough for that.

What the degree never covered

The bootcamp filled specific, nameable holes. Module one covered JavaScript fundamentals. Module two gave him his first framework, React, and before that he had not known frameworks existed at all; his internship had been in pure JavaScript. Module three covered databases and APIs, which he had no idea about whatsoever.

What he came out with was a mental model, not just syntax. For the first time he understood the full cycle of a web application: how the front end connects to the back end, and how the back end passes data back to the front end. With that high-level understanding, he says, transitioning into any new framework or language a company requires becomes far easier, because fundamentally the logic stays the same.

The proof arrived through his own final-year project. His university expected a full-stack system, front end and back end, from students it had never taught to code. Some of his coursemates self-taught over those months and produced projects he bluntly calls really not good, and he knows many others simply paid someone to build theirs. MJ coded his entirely himself, from what he had learnt at Sigmaschool.

Singapore could wait

His post-graduation plan was already set: apply for jobs in Singapore and earn roughly three times what he could locally. In the final month of the bootcamp he was preparing his resume for exactly that when his instructor Haris texted him, just curious, asking what he wanted to do after the programme. When MJ said Singapore, Haris asked a different question: why not make Sigmaschool your first full-time job?

The text turned into an hour-long conversation, and Haris asked him what his goals in life were. "Currently I have three goals in my life. The first one is I want to be a good programmer, I want to develop my skills. The second thing is I want to learn communication. And the third thing is I want to be physically fit, because a strong body is a strong mind." Haris's reply: sounds like Sigmaschool.

MJ took a day or two to think it through. Go overseas for the sake of money, or join a company that lined up with all three things he wanted to build in himself? He worked through the case studies he was given, Haris confirmed he was a good fit, and he took the job: his first full-time role, secured before he had even graduated from university.

Haris is open about why he wanted him. Plenty of people can code, but in live coding challenges MJ could explain his code clearly while writing it, which is precisely what a software instructor does every day. And he wanted to hustle, which Haris, drawing on his own years working in Singapore, calls rarer than talent.

Learning to teach in a week

The role was software instructor plus software developer, and on his first day he had to teach a class. He had zero teaching experience and had never spoken in front of a computer for two to three hours straight. The first two days, by his own account, were not very good.

Wednesday was his day off, so he spent it working on the problem. He went home, rewatched the recordings of his own classes, and studied how he taught and how each lesson should flow. Then he wrote it all down in a book: start the Google Meet recording, take attendance, follow the plan, give students a break at the right time. A checklist for every single lesson, because he had no experience to fall back on.

After a week of what he calls deliberate practice, feedback came in that he had improved a lot. Then one student told him something he still holds on to: "I couldn't see that you are first time teaching. I thought you had teaching experience." His effort, he says, had paid off.

A React developer on a Vue project

The developer half of the job had its own trap waiting. MJ had learnt React for four months; it was his first framework and the only one he knew. The project he was assigned to was built in Vue.

He handled it the way the bootcamp had taught him to think. He signed up for a 13-hour crash course on Udemy and worked through it in one to two weeks, and then he was contributing to the codebase alongside teaching. "Of course I need to learn new syntax, a new framework. How they write code is very different. But the fundamental logic is the same."

That, to him, is the real case for a bootcamp over piecemeal self-study. It is not that you memorise one tool; it is that you learn the high-level thinking that lets you adapt to whatever framework or language a company happens to use.

Skills over digits

Teaching gave him a vantage point self-study never could: a submission page showing exactly who did what. The compulsory tasks tell him little. The optional tasks are where good students separate from average ones, because those are the challenges you have to figure out yourself, and figuring things out is the actual job.

One of his top students had SPM, secondary school, as his highest qualification. Every monthly assessment, that student delivered far more than the compulsory requirements on the same timeframe as everyone else, and he posted his live projects on LinkedIn, which brought him multiple job interviews. If you want to stand out in a crowd, MJ says, you put in effort that people can see; when a hiring partner asks an instructor for a recommendation, that is who gets named.

It sharpened his view of credentials from the other side too. Friends of his in computer science degrees told him that even there, the students who genuinely know how to code are the minority; many copy the top student's project, and plenty of graduates end up as tech consultants who talk rather than code.

MJ himself graduated with a CGPA of 3.99, and he is blunt about what it was worth. "Even if you have a degree, if you don't have any skills to back it up, people will not hire you." With his near-perfect transcript he was not confident of getting a job; during his internship he counts himself lucky a manager simply told him it was okay not to know, he could come and learn. Only after the bootcamp, with real projects in his portfolio, did the confidence arrive.

Decide, find a mentor, commit

His advice for anyone considering the switch comes in three steps, and the first is a filter, not a pep talk. Do you foresee yourself sitting in front of a computer for eight hours a day? Try it before you decide, even for a single day, because once you are in tech you will most probably be doing it for years. There are many industries that can make you money; the question is whether this is the one you actually want.

Second, find a mentor, and pay them. If you want to learn sales, you find someone who already knows sales; coding is no different, and the fastest way to learn is from someone who already knows how. "If you don't pay a good mentor, they won't put in heart to teach you. It's very realistic."

Third, put in the work. Not motivation, which he watched fail him through ten abandoned courses, but discipline. "Motivation is not a thing that can sustain you for a long time. Self-discipline is what will make you grow."

He has followed his own advice further since the interview. Today MJ works as an IT business analyst at Hilti Asia IT Services, the multinational's IT hub in Malaysia. The empire he told his father about is still being built, and the ability to build it is now his own.