From mechanical engineering dropout to senior software engineer

The kid who kept formatting the computer

Sebastian Belulok grew up in Miri, Sarawak, and got hooked on computers in form one, when a friend taught him to format a PC. Soon he was reinstalling Windows on every new machine his dad bought, playing with the BIOS and setting up dual and triple boots of Windows 2000, XP and Vista.

He wanted to study computer engineering, but his parents wanted him close to home, and the nearest university offered only engineering or business. Money ruled out West Malaysia or overseas. So he chose mechanical engineering.

Dropping out, and a reason to fight

In his third year, he dropped out. He describes 2019 as devastating: his parents had high hopes for their youngest, and other universities questioned whether he could finish an engineering programme if he tried again. While he figured out what came next, he worked as a part-time tennis coach.

Two things pulled him towards software. One was redemption, with friends telling him he could still make it. The other, frankly, was money: browsing JobStreet and LinkedIn, he saw software developer salaries around RM8,000, with Java roles at 12 to 15. "I was like, wow. Why don't I just learn this through YouTube and give it a shot?"

“Don't give up, keep on grinding, and you will receive the fruits of your labour. Most of the time we don't see success stories because people stop halfway and do something else.”

Six months of faking it

When Covid struck in 2020, he applied for any internship he could find and landed one at the Malaysian branch of a Singaporean company doing WordPress. Because he hadn't finished his degree, the internship ran six months instead of three. In the first month the pressure hit him every morning before work: he was being handed tasks he didn't yet understand.

"Anyone who comes through this field, you have to fake it till you make it," he says, but his version of faking it was studying furiously to close the gap. He taught himself JavaScript and PHP on YouTube, bought online courses, and, with no mentor and nobody in his community working in tech, paid tutors around RM200 a month for two hours of their time. Not to teach him syntax, but the grey areas you normally only learn from experience. "Knowledge is power. The more you know, the less scared you are doing the task."

It worked. Over three years he climbed from intern to senior WordPress developer, then spent a year teaching kids to code through block coding and game development.

Three painful months

In 2022 he moved to Kuala Lumpur and joined a financial firm as a full-stack developer, enrolling at Sigmaschool shortly after and juggling the course with a full workload.

A few months in, the firm's senior developer left and his manager offered him the seat. He passed the assessment, and on day one as a senior was handed a project to lead, with two interns under him: build the firm's back office, covering withdrawals, transactions, campaigns and financial reports, in Laravel and React, neither of which he knew well.

He worked 9 to 6, then studied and practised from 6 until midnight. He asked the operations and digital marketing teams to spare him 30 minutes a day to teach him the business logic, because technical skill alone wasn't enough to build what the company actually needed. "That was a very painful three months, but it was a very satisfying three months, because out of that suffering and learning I was able to create a back office for the company."

Headhunted

In February the following year, a large multinational consultancy headhunted him. There were five interview rounds, two of them technical, because the client he would serve was one of the most famous search engines in the world. He got through, spent almost a year there, and today is a senior software engineer at Pixlr, the online photo editor.

His hardest interview lessons came from the failures. One interviewer told him flatly he wasn't fit for the role. Another, for a remote Australian position, responded to his honest admission that he didn't know the stack with "that's the kind of person we want", then explained afterwards why he still didn't get it: instead of saying he couldn't do it, he should have said he was willing to learn. "I learned more in my failed interviews than the ones that I passed."

Be honest, be confident

His advice to career switchers is the inverse of where he started: be confident, be honest, and don't try to fake it too much. Research first, give yourself a few hours, then ask, because showing what you tried counts for more than pretending you know. Back in 2020, he'd tell himself to apply to far more companies and worry less.

He now teaches a three-month full-stack bootcamp as an external trainer, giving career switchers the mentorship he never had, and has already helped friends land their first tech jobs. "What I didn't have back then, I'm able to give right now." His parting line for anyone still deciding: go big or go home.