Ep. 59: Shawn Wang left a $350K/year finance job to learn to code

On this week's episode of the freeCodeCamp podcast, Quincy interviews Shawn Wang (@swyx). We talk about "learning in public" and his transition into tech from finance, where he left behind a job that paid him US $350,000 per year.

Shawn grew up in Singapore and came to the US as a college student.

He worked in finance, but at age 30, he burned out. So he decided to learn to code. He used freeCodeCamp and a ton of other resources, and since then he's worked as a freelance developer, and at several companies including Netlify.

Follow Shawn on Twitter: https://twitter.com/swyx

Follow Quincy on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ossia

Here are some links we discuss in the interview.

Shawn's Projects:

The official React subreddit that Shawn moderates: https://reddit.com/r/reactjs

Shawn's article on No Zero Days: https://www.freecodecamp.org/forum/t/no-zero-days-my-roadmap-from-javascript-noob-to-full-stack-developer-in-12-months/164514

Job Search / Salary Negotation articles:

Cracking the Coding Interview: https://fcc.im/2UihbNm

Hasseeb Qureshi's story of getting a $250K/y developer job at Airbnb: https://haseebq.com/farewell-app-academy-hello-airbnb-part-i

Steve Yegge's "Get that job at Google" essay: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-google.html

Patrick McKenzie on Salary Negotiation https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/

Quincy's recommended article: I spent 3 months applying to jobs after a coding bootcamp. Here's what I learned: https://medium.freecodecamp.org/9a07468d2331

Algorithm Expert: https://www.algoexpert.io

Full Stack Academy https://www.fullstackacademy.com

Shawn's Learn In Public movement:

Shawn's Learn In Public essay https://gist.github.com/sw-yx/9720bd4a30606ca3ffb8d407113c0fe5‌‌

Kent C Dodds' Zero to 60 in Software Development: How to Jumpstart Your Career https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qPh6I2hfjw&app=desktop‌‌

Cory House on Becoming an Outlier: https://vimeo.com/97415346‌‌

Brad Frost on Creative Exhaust: http://bradfrost.com/blog/post/creative-exhaust/‌‌

Patrick McKenzie on the origin of the word "friendcatcher": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=511089‌‌

Chris Coyier on "Working In Public": https://chriscoyier.net/2012/09/23/working-in-public/

Links to other things we discuss:

Shawn's Software Engineering Daily Interview with Sacha Greif: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2017/08/09/state-of-javascript-with-sacha-greif/‌‌

The origin of No Zero Days: https://www.reddit.com/r/getdisciplined/comments/1q96b5/i_just_dont_care_about_myself/cdah4af/‌‌

John Resig, creator of jQuery, telling his team to rip out jQuery: http://bikeshed.fm/180

‌‌Jeff Bezos' Two Pizza Team rule: https://buffer.com/resources/small-teams-why-startups-often-win-against-google-and-facebook-the-science-behind-why-smaller-teams-get-more-done‌‌

Shawn's "You can learn so much on the internet for the low, low price of your ego" quote draws from Paul Graham's Keep Your Identity Small: http://paulgraham.com/identity.html‌‌

Shawn's Impostor Syndrome Bootcamp Podcast: https://player.fm/series/impostor-syndrome‌‌

TypeScript's growth via npm surveys: https://mobile.twitter.com/seldo/status/1088240877107965953

Episode source