From Hobby to Career: One Developer Is Now Making a Living Doing What He Loves

Background

Amos bounced between various jobs while pursuing coding as a hobby.

He worked as a tutor and substitute teacher, often only for temporary assignments or positions that only lasted a few months.

In his free time, Maddux would continue to code, but it wasn’t earning him any money.

Challenges

Amos faced several challenges when deciding to pursue a tech career:

• Getting adequate training
• Financial Support

“I really need to figure out not how to get into not just hobby coding anymore but into a job and start training for that and looking,” said Maddux, a former Smoothstack trainee. “I was looking around, had been looking for a while. I heard of Smoothstack and I decided to try and make it a career.”

The Turning Point

Amos gravitated towards Smoothstack primarily because the opportunity offered paid training and education. Smoothstack gave him the ability to do both.

“With Smoothstack, I knew that it would kind of be training, and I would get paid to keep learning, which was great,” said Maddux. “If I hadn’t been able to do that, I would’ve just had to get another job.”

Training Experience and Smoothstack’s Approach

Maddux joined Smoothstack in July of 2022, where he completed multi-month training, including a fully covered education with certification.

It was a process that, using Smoothstack’s hire-train-deploy approach, allowed Maddux to earn an income while growing as a developer.