Capstone has helped me secure, and perform strongly on, a Level 2 Software Engineer role, with no prior experience.

7 months after finishing Capstone, I’m now a strong-performing Level 2 Backend Engineer at Thought Machine, a high-growth, engineering-centric company based in London, UK, founded by a serial entrepreneur and led by ex-Google engineers.

I recently passed my 3-month probation where I received only positive feedback with my manager commenting “I felt like you came in already with the knowledge and skills needed for the job, and spent the last few months mainly trying to deepen your understanding of the company and our codebase, to figure how to apply those existing knowledge and skills. That’s what I’d expect from someone with experience.” All of this despite actually having no Software Engineering experience prior to Core!

More specifically, this is what Capstone has helped me do:

• Pick up enough Golang in 2-3 weeks - on the side while preparing for and participating in various interviews - to complete and pass a code challenge for Thought Machine
• Ramp up quickly on Go, Python, gRPC and Protobuf, Kafka and Kubernetes to be productive on the job
• Understand, participate and contribute to most code design and architectural discussions on the job
• Own and deliver a small feature before the end of my 3rd month on the job, and with another feature about to start

The 1.5 years I invested into Core and Capstone, plus the modest financial costs (compared to the typical bootcamp, or a Computer Science master’s degree), has enabled me to skip the junior level (i.e. save 1-2 years of my career), and landed me a gross salary that’s very close to that of engineers in non-tech hub US cities, in a company that’s known for a technically best-in-class product and a culture of engineering excellence among clients, prospects, and industry observers.

With these results, I would not hesitate to say that participating in Core and Capstone was easily the best decision I’ve made in my career so far.