He thought about it for a year, then quit his four-year job to learn to code

Four years on the Google account

Nixon's resume looked enviable from the outside. He graduated in actuarial science, joined Accenture, and spent more than four years working on the Google account as a platform experience moderator. For his generation, he says, that counts as stable and comfortable already: a big firm, a household-name client, a clear scope. He was, by his own description, fully inside his comfort zone.

The inside view was different. "My previous company is so big, and the client is Google. Sounds very big, right? But I'm more like a screw in part of this big machine. You keep rotating on the same rotations." The size of the operation was exactly what made the work small.

The nature of the client made it smaller still. Google's expectations were very high, so the job was to do one thing inside a perfect scope, exactly as the manager instructed, every time. Precision was the whole game. There was no room to think beyond the task, and he slowly worked out that this suits some people very well and did not suit him at all.

What the MCO taught him

The pull toward coding had two strands. The first was straightforward interest: he liked technology, and he had come to see coding as something that could genuinely change his life, not just his job title. The career development on the other side of the switch was obvious to him.

The second strand was colder and more practical. He lived through Malaysia's MCO lockdowns during his university years, and he watched which jobs survived a crisis: the ones you can do from home with nothing but a computer. That observation stayed with him. He wanted to be equipped with something that counted as a real skill, portable and crisis-proof, and coding qualified on both counts.

“Today will always be earlier than tomorrow. If I don't move now, it's going to be more difficult to move tomorrow. If I want to do something, I'd better do it before it's too late.”

One year of weighing it

Nothing about the decision was quick. He calls it a very tough decision-making process, and the arithmetic explains why. Leaving a four-year job meant dragging himself out of a comfortable rut, going back to studying years after he thought he had finished with classrooms, and giving up his income entirely. His savings would have to stretch across the course fee and his living expenses at the same time. He turned it over in his head for a full year.

He did not spend that year standing still. He tried to teach himself through online courses, and the attempt failed thoroughly enough to teach him something important about how he learns. "I'm sure someone in the world can make it, but definitely not me." Self-study alone was not going to get him there.

What finally moved him was not a plan but a realisation about time. "Today will always be earlier than tomorrow. If I don't move now, it's going to be more difficult to move tomorrow. If I want to do something, I'd better do it before it's too late." His parents were part of that maths too: they would only be older tomorrow than today. He was 26 when he committed.

Two signals

His research phase was short on options. Bootcamps are common in the US, especially for programming, but in Malaysia he found only a handful. Sigmaschool surfaced through its social media ads, and he started digging into what the course actually looked like.

Two things convinced him. The first was the refund guarantee: if he did not get a job after the course, the money came back. For someone about to have zero income while draining his savings, that was not a marketing line, it was the difference between a calculated risk and a reckless one. At worst, he would secure the money back.

The second signal was what the guarantee implied. A school does not promise refunds unless it believes graduates will actually get hired, which told him the course material and the lecturers had to be confident in what they were doing. Reading it that way, he decided he could give it a try.

The deciding extra was the classroom itself. Sigmaschool ran physical classes with a teacher in the room, and after his failed year of self-study he knew precisely how much that mattered for him. A live teacher and a class to be accountable to was, in his words, a plus plus. That combination is what separated Sigmaschool from the other bootcamps on his list.

A week behind from day one

His start was messier than planned. Something came up and he missed the entire first week, joining only from week two. The school was worried about him and told him to come back as soon as possible, though he did not need to defer to a later batch. Some very basic coding he had done back in high school helped him close the gap quickly enough.

What he walked into was a pace he had never experienced: a new topic almost every day. It produced a contradiction he still finds funny. The three-month length was one of the reasons he chose the course, because it meant he could start job hunting quickly. But from inside the course, three months felt a little bit short, because everything had to be learned so fast.

What made the pace survivable was what the course chose to skip. "They don't really focus on those conceptual things. They focus on the real-life tools, skills and frameworks you need to know." With so little time, he thinks that trade-off is exactly right. He also noticed the syllabus tracks the industry rather than a fixed curriculum: whatever the world is currently using is what gets taught, and he suspects a batch a year later would be learning different material than he did.

The module that fought back

The module that gave him the most trouble was React. He wrestled with it more than anything else in the course, which makes what happened next his favourite irony: React is the skill that got him hired. Listing it in his tech stack earned him several interview opportunities, and the offer from his current company came because he had it. It is also what he now works in every day.

For his capstone he built a simple web page with a booking system, simple by his own insistence. His teacher was Diamond. The project's simplicity turned out not to matter much, because what employers wanted to see was that he could build something real at all, and the capstone did that job.

Proving it without the degree

He graduated in April, and on paper it took three months to land a job. His own accounting is stricter: he had family plans first and was not urgently searching, and he only sat down to hunt seriously in the final month of that stretch. Measured from when he actually started trying, he got the job in about a month.

The interviews themselves were a new species of stress. Programmer roles usually run at least two rounds, and one of them is a technical interview. He had never gone through anything like it in four years of working, and it genuinely scared him at first. It was, he says, simply something new he had to adapt to, because it was never going to be optional.

Coming in without a computer science degree shaped his whole strategy. Companies know you took a short course, so you have to prove the skill some other way, and for the junior roles he chased nobody sets assessments: your projects are the only evidence you get to submit. The capstone and personal projects were his proof, and he found that Sigmaschool's project requirements lined up with the concepts companies actually asked about. His advice on targeting is equally practical: employers who welcome fresh graduates and entry-level hires do not mind the missing degree, while junior roles demanding a year of experience will be a struggle. Do not set your target too high, and it is going to be fine.

Underneath all of it sat a very sober calculation about why coding was even possible. "This is one of the industries you can step in with the lowest qualification. How can you become an accountant in three months? That doesn't make sense at all." He chose the field partly because the door was genuinely open.

One offer changes everything

He did not job hunt alone. Because the technical rounds scared him, he went through Sigmaschool's mock technical interviews and took the feedback from them. The school had also just launched its job board, with partners and referrers attached, and his first-ever interview came through a Sigmaschool client. For someone who had never sat a technical interview, having the first one arranged rather than cold-applied counted for a lot.

Then the offer from Property213 landed, and his first reaction was not triumph but release. "Finally, I don't need to go through those technical interviews again." The second effect surprised him more: with one offer secured, the interviews still in progress transformed. He felt recognised, safe, with nothing left to worry about, and he walked into the remaining rounds more confident than he had been in any of the earlier ones.

He knows how easily it could have gone otherwise, because he watched it go otherwise. An ex-colleague from Accenture jumped out around the same time, self-studied something in cloud engineering through an online course, completed it, passed it, and is now working a job much like the one she left. It is not easy at all, he says, and he does not pretend his outcome was automatic.

The gap between practice and production

The job itself opened with the hardest weeks of the whole journey. "The gap between a real-life project and your personal project is way too different. The requirements from clients are very complicated, and the real-world data is very huge." Nothing in a capstone prepares you for either, and he faced a lot of difficulties in the first month.

What carried him through was the tail end of the syllabus. At the close of the course, Sigmaschool taught him how to use AI coding tools, and in those first few weeks he leaned on them heavily, together with everything else he had learned, until the rhythm arrived and he could write more of the code himself. He is open about the sequence: rely on the tools to survive, then grow past the reliance.

Three months plus into the role, things are getting familiar, though he is careful not to overstate it. The company grows fast and something new lands on him every day. He talks about it less like a problem and more like the reason he came.

From perfect scope to ownership

Asked for the biggest mindset shift, he goes back to the contrast with his old job. At Accenture, the manager told him what to do and he did it perfectly, one task in a perfect scope. Programming inverted that. "You need to think a lot. Will your code affect other people's code? Will the database become fragile because of this?" Even doing one thing, the thinking never narrows to one thing.

That contrast is also his honest filter for who should attempt the same switch. Know yourself first, he says. If you like to think and you want something new on a daily basis, programming is one of the jobs to look for. If you prefer things simple, rotating through the same motions, the job that suits someone else might suit you, and coding will be a very big challenge. He does not dress this up as a universal recommendation, and that is precisely what makes his recommendation credible.

The regret and the licence

His advice to future students starts with a confession. After four years of working, he treated the bootcamp partly as a chance to rest, studying half the day and recovering the other half. "I kind of regret it now. The teacher is there, the course material is there, the assessment is there. I did complete that, but you still need to put more effort in yourself. It will make landing your first job easier." The extra self-study he skipped then is study he has to do now, on the job, so that each next day gets easier.

He is equally clear about what the bootcamp is and is not. It is the fundamentals, and he reaches for a driving metaphor to place it. "You get a licence, you can drive the car. But if you want to be an F1 racer, you need something more." For him that something more is the bigger picture around the code: infrastructure, how whole systems fit together from a higher point of view. He is eyeing a focus on DevOps down the road.

None of the ambition dims what the licence itself meant. Sigmaschool, as he puts it, opened a door for him, and now he is stepping into a new world with enough in his hands to pick what he likes and pursue it. But first, you need to have the door open.