An Interview with Garrett Halstein | YouTuber & Software Engineer @ IBM
Before making the leap and deciding to attend The Flatiron School, I made my rounds on YouTube. I scoured the net for reviews and testimonial videos for a ridiculous amount of time daily before I knew I wanted to make the time commitment (and remain unemployed for months) while doing the hardest work I have done to date.
I finally have the pleasure of interviewing a Flatiron graduate myself. I met Garrett Halstein on LinkedIn and found his YouTube channel shortly after. Garrett is a back-end systems software engineer for the monitoring & analytics squad at IBM. He is extremely knowledgable and is great at giving advice to those seeking jobs in software engineering. I hope this interview answers some of the questions you may have for those who have made it through boot camp.
Q: What motivated you, after receiving a degree in chemistry, to attend a coding boot camp and why did you decide on The Flatiron School?
A: I was in my last year of college on the pre-med track. Happy with it but was always curious about CS. I decided to take a CS course going into my last semester. I had to learn Java to take it. So I spent winter break studying it and it was tough but I was also enjoying it. I was so curious about what else I could do outside of the terminal. While I was finally taking the course and loving it I decided to attend access labs after graduation. It was a great option offered at Flatiron’s Brooklyn campus that offered no-interest tuition payments that only started until you got a job.
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Q: What do you think was the biggest help in landing your role at IBM?
A: It's hard to say. I would say the most important thing is the resume because its how employers mainly select you for interviews. I am grateful for all of the algorithm practice I put in aside from the projects I built at Flatiron. The coding challenges I took were heavy on data structures and algorithms.
Q: Have you had to learn any new languages or development principles as a back-end software engineer that you did not cover whilst in boot camp? If so, how did you go about learning them?
A: I learned a ton of stuff. As a software developer, learning a new language is a very small barrier. It's easy to jump into a new one after understanding the underlying principles of programming. Its harder to jump into a huge codebase without proper documentation. If I had to learn a language a youtube crash course on the language was sufficient for the syntax. For anything else I don’t know Google is my best friend haha.
Q: Are there any unique experiences you took from attending Flatiron School?
A: I love all the friends I made at Flatiron. It's amazing to be able to stay in contact with them and still plan on working on projects in the future with them. It's pretty invaluable to have that in my opinion.
Q: I saw your video on creating a portfolio site. I learned a lot and thought that was a great idea. What other things can students do to prepare themselves for the interview process and stand out to recruiters?
A: Check out some of my other videos like the resume one but in order to stand out you have to cater to what they are looking for. That means you need to emphasize the skills they are looking for in their applications on your resume. Emphasize your experience by listing any courses you took online to supplement your learning as well. The more skill and experience you can apply, the better.
Q: If you could tell your past self one thing on the very first day of boot camp what would it be?
A: I would tell myself to learn Python for algorithms (because it’s a lot easier than Java) and try to build a side project in it to add to my tech stack. That's what I would have done on the first day of the boot camp because I would have enough time to learn it.
Meet the Author
Deijah is a cyber risk and compliance analyst, member of Data Visualization Society, and is also a developer. She is a closet screenwriter, cinephile and mom of three fur children with her dear husband. She is on a journey of self-teaching french and living one day at a time.
“Life is like a box of chowc-litts…you never know what you gonna get” — Forrest Gump
This article was not sponsored. All illustrations are provided by unDraw.
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