He did the bootcamp, tried a dev internship, then found the role that fit

An IT degree without the coding

On paper, Dickson should never have needed a coding bootcamp. He graduated from Sunway with an IT degree, and when people heard he was signing up to learn programming anyway, the obvious question came back: should that not have been covered at university? The answer sits in the fine print of the degree. His course focused on cybersecurity and computer networking, the world of servers and infrastructure rather than software. "I only learned very basic coding back then," he says.

His university internship settled one half of that degree for him. He spent it as a network engineer, and what stayed with him was the constant overtime and the requirement to be on standby around the clock. He could not see any work-life balance in that career, and by the time the internship ended he had quietly crossed network engineering off his list.

The other half of the degree did not survive much longer. Cybersecurity, he found, has a very high barrier to entry. The people who break into the field are the ones grinding through certificates and hackathons, constantly upgrading themselves just for a chance to impress an employer. He is honest that this was not him, and that like most people his age he was trying to get by and see where things went. He actually received some offers in the field, but it was not a world he wanted to go deeper into.

When reality hit

After graduation he took a break, the way fresh graduates do when nothing is pulling them forward. Then, in his words, reality hit. The job market was very competitive, it was the end of the year, and not many companies were hiring at all. He was applying into a season when even good candidates were being told to wait.

Underneath the practical problem sat a heavier one. He had never really decided which direction he wanted inside the IT industry, and there was a stretch where he doubted whether he was meant for the industry at all. He describes that period as being pretty lost, second-guessing whether the choices he had already made were the right ones.

The way out he chose was blunt: if nobody was hiring, use the dead time to fix a gap. The clearest gap in his skill set was coding. He was not chasing a dream of becoming a developer. His first impression of web development was the same as everyone's, that you get to build cool websites, and that felt like enough of a reason. If it turned into a job, good for him. If it did not, it was still a skill he could keep, maybe even pick up as a hobby one day.

“Sometimes taking that first step is really important, because the effect will snowball. Back then, just one day, I decided to try something new. And now I'm here.”

A breakfast conversation

The actual decision took one meal. "It's actually quite spontaneous, to be honest. One day I was having breakfast with my parents, and I was talking to my mom. I was like, right now I'm not really doing anything, and since the job market is not really hiring, why not I just do a bootcamp or something? And my mom was like, oh yeah, go ahead." That was the whole deliberation.

He understood the fee was a real commitment, but the money-back guarantee took the financial worry off the table. If it did not lead to a job, the money came back. His own mindset covered the rest of the downside. Even in the worst case, where he never used any of it professionally, he would still have learned something. He tries, he says, to look at what he gets out of a thing rather than what it costs him.

Revision first, then foreign territory

His background gave him a head start, and he is upfront about that. The first module covered JavaScript basics, which he had already met during his degree, so the opening weeks felt more like revision than new material. Having any technical background, he reckons, makes the start of a bootcamp noticeably easier.

The edge did not last. As the course moved into more specific frameworks and tools, the material turned foreign, and the comfortable start gave way to actually having to lock in. His summary of the effect is careful: the background helped, but it never made the course easy.

Most of his batch studied online, with only a few attending physically, and he joined remotely himself because he could not come in. What kept it working was structure. There was a fixed schedule, and the instructor made sure everyone stayed on time. "It's pretty laidback. I feel like if you follow the instructions and do what you're supposed to do, anyone can do this. Just don't fall behind. You have to commit to it. You have to be a bit disciplined."

For the final project his batch had to build a complete website, and it stretched him more than anything before it, but he found it genuinely interesting. At that point he still thought coding was fine, even enjoyable. He also already suspected what he would later confirm: an instructor can simulate the real world as closely as possible, and actual work will still turn out different.

February off, then the grind

His batch ended right before Chinese New Year, so he gave himself the whole of February to do nothing. In March he locked back in and started hunting properly. His method was practical: read the job descriptions for developer roles, note the frameworks he did not recognise, and go teach himself enough of them to talk about. He built some small coding projects along the way, nothing hardcore by his own admission, just enough to keep learning something new.

He applied everywhere. LinkedIn, JobStreet, every job website he could find, and career fairs in person. "A lot of applying, a lot of interviews, a lot of rejections. That's just the reality. It's not like you do this bootcamp and you're guaranteed a job. You have to have a certain level of willingness to commit to doing something. You have to spend some time."

The hardest part was not the rejections themselves but what the waiting did to his head. His circle of friends had started landing jobs and looking like they were on track with their lives, and he felt himself falling behind, a feeling he suspects most young people know well. Even though he was actively searching every day, it still felt like wasted time, like he was not spending his hours where they were supposed to go.

A three-month test

After two to three months of searching, an offer finally came: a front-end developer internship, starting around May. He said yes partly because of what an internship is not. It was not a full-term commitment. Three months was short enough to test the water and find out whether development on the job matched development in the classroom.

The relief was immediate and had little to do with the role itself. Having somewhere to be took the weight off his mind. For those three months, at least, he would not feel like he was wasting his time, and that alone was worth something after months of feeling exactly that.

Components, deadlines and Next.js

The first surprise was the stack. Sigmaschool had taught him React with Vite, but the company built everything in Next.js, a framework he had never touched. The React foundation carried him across the gap. He would not call the switch painless, but it was manageable, and he picked it up on the job.

The work itself was closer to the bootcamp than he expected. He was assigned to a project with a senior guiding him, and spent his days building reusable components, the same core skill he had practised in class. What changed was the pressure around it: real deadlines, and a standard he was expected to meet. Nobody asked him to build an entire website alone, which matched what he had been told to expect of a real team.

His colleagues were friendly and willing to teach, and he is careful not to paint the internship as a bad experience, because it was not one. It simply did not fit him. One lesson did stick permanently. His seniors kept pushing him to explain what he did and why he did it, and he came away convinced that communication matters even in the most technical team.

The part he couldn't ignore

The realisation arrived near the end of the internship, when he started asking himself what came next. The first thing he could not ignore was physical. Facing a computer for the entire day drained him. Not physically tiring exactly, but his eyes were exhausted by evening, and the fatigue was real.

The second thing cut deeper. He barely talked to anyone all day, and the isolation made the work joyless. His view is that working is not fun by default, so you might as well make the most of it, and for him that meant people. He calls himself an introvert, but he had discovered he genuinely enjoys working around others. "The main thing I didn't enjoy about coding was the lack of human interaction."

Would he ever go back to development? Currently, no. In the future, he honestly does not know. He leaves the door open the same way he leaves most doors open, but nothing about the answer sounds like a plan.

Watching the project manager

The next direction was sitting inside the internship the whole time. The company ran project-based work, and his project manager operated much like a business analyst: she talked to the clients, heard what they wanted, and translated it into tasks for the developers. Watching her work, he thought, that is actually quite interesting.

He had never considered a client-facing role, precisely because he is introverted. But when he studied the job properly, the picture changed. Yes, it faces clients, but it is not sales, and you are not talking to customers around the clock. The role is a facilitator between the client and the technical team, which is a different kind of people work.

His textbook description of the job explains why his background mattered. Clients usually do not understand the technical side, and sometimes they do not even know what they want. The analyst's job is to work out what they actually need, judge whether it is doable, and translate the requirement into something the technical team can build. It demands technical ability and people skills at the same time, and he suddenly had a claim to both.

The resume he fixed too late

After the internship he ran the search on two tracks, applying for developer jobs and business analyst jobs at once. For the analyst roles he studied what the postings actually asked for, mostly soft skills, documentation, and client-facing ability, then worked on those gaps and watched day-in-the-life videos on YouTube to understand what the job really looked like. The rejections piled up again anyway.

He built habits around the failures. After every interview he asked for feedback; sometimes he got it, sometimes he got ghosted. He even attended interviews at companies he already knew he did not want to join, purely to bank the experience for the ones that mattered.

The turning point came when he stopped assuming the problem was him. He pulled up his resume and looked at it honestly: it was generic, tailored to nothing and nobody. "This is one of the skills I realised too late. The resume is very important." He rebuilt it around his transferable skills, the analytical thinking, the logical thinking, and the technical knowledge that let him judge what is buildable, and packaged himself for the specific role instead of for everything at once.

The effect was almost embarrassing in its speed. With the new resume he got a response, went in for the interview the day after they got back to him, cleared two interview stages, and had the offer from Stampede Solution in about two weeks. He had also learned along the way that the two interview styles barely overlap. Technical interviews meant coding tests, sometimes live on the spot, with pressure he found hard. Analyst interviews asked about documentation experience and whether he had a coding background, which some employers valued. Of the two, the technical ones were clearly harder.

Debt collection and finance jargon

Almost two months in, the job is stretching him in exactly the direction he wanted. Stampede Solution is a software company whose product focuses on debt collection, which drops him into client meetings full of finance jargon he has never heard. The clients throw the fancy words around, he takes notes through the confusion, and afterwards he goes to his seniors for clarification. Writing the minutes of those meetings still makes him nervous.

The bootcamp shows up in his work sideways, in ways he did not predict. Clients regularly ask to customise the product's UI, and while he is not the UI/UX designer, his front-end training lets him judge whether a request is realistic or a waste of the client's money. "Sometimes you just have to tell them it's not worth doing." He calls these the hidden soft skills, the ones you carry into a job indirectly.

The mindset he is deliberately building is caution. He is afraid of screwing things up, so he refuses to make assumptions in front of clients, and he will not promise something is doable until he is sure it is. He has not made a mistake with a client yet, and when asked about it he laughs and says hopefully he never will.

As for whether the role fits: his colleagues are friendly, he actually enjoys the work, and he can see himself staying in it. Nothing so far has changed his mind. The remaining adjustment is his own nature. Talking to clients still takes effort, and he knows he needs to become a bit more proactive.

A better choice, not a final answer

If the winding route taught him one lesson, it is to stop measuring himself against other people. Comparison, he has learned, is the thief of joy, and there is no point looking at friends and deciding you are behind. "Sometimes making the right choice is the most important thing, no matter how much time it takes." Asked whether the analyst role is the right choice, his honesty is disarming: he is still not sure, but at least it is a better choice, and if he changes his mind again down the road, he will still have learned something.

His five-year picture is refreshingly unheroic. He would like a senior position, but he deliberately avoids making himself too important at work because he does not want work to consume his life. What he insists on is purpose, knowing that what he does provides value. "You don't have to love your job. You just have to love what it allows you to do." What he wants it to allow is travel: Japan, Korea, Europe, a long list of places, and a life good enough to fund the seeing of them.

His advice to anyone weighing the same jump is conditional but firm. If your finances allow it and you have the room to try, stop deliberating. "Taking that first step is really important, because the effect will snowball. Back then, just one day, I decided to try something new. And now I'm here. Even if you're not sure, just do it first." Sitting around doing nothing, he adds, does nothing. Open some doors and see.