Tim's Career Change to Solutions Engineering: Real Advice from a General Assembly Grad

In 2017, Tim was working in finance and feeling the familiar mix of fear and uncertainty that comes with a major career pivot. But after enrolling in General Assembly’s Web Development Immersive, he made the leap into tech. Today, Tim is the Manager of Solutions Engineering at Quantum Metric. In this Q&A, he shares how the network effect helped him land his job, why community matters, and how bootcamps like General Assembly can lay the groundwork for a fulfilling tech career, even if you’re starting from a non-technical background.

You had a successful career in finance, from analyst work at CRT Capital Group to equity sales trading at MKM Partners. Can you tell us about the moment that sparked your interest in software engineering?

It was a confluence of forces. First, I saw two of my closest friends go through the General Assembly shortly after graduating from college. Both of them had a high degree of career success early on and got to reframe their career purpose. I saw that evolution take shape for them.

Secondly, there were some headways in my industry. I had reached my supposed dream job – trading on a trading desk – but I realized it was a dying breed. I could see that humans wouldn’t be a focal point for long. Being the youngest guy on the trading desk and seeing older folks’ careers sputter out, I thought, “Maybe I need more domain expertise than just a Series 7 and Series 63.”

Take us back to October 2nd, 2017, when you quit your job to attend General Assembly. What's going through your mind, and how did you decide?

I had some unnecessary fear. I remember leading into that day thinking about being judged – I would walk into this office as a 27-year-old with the world in my fingertips, and I'm giving it all up. But I had started to put together a plan in July 2017, when I realized my current career wouldn't take me where I wanted to go. I began putting the building blocks in place before applying to General Assembly. I did coding exercises, worked with my best friend and roommate (who luckily enough had gone through General Assembly), eventually attended information sessions, and then got into the program. 

So when I went in to quit on October 2nd, I had already laid the groundwork for myself. It felt like a leap of faith, but it did feel like there was a safety net.

What was important to you when you were researching bootcamps? You had this GA connection, but did you research other bootcamps?

I had two of my best friends as proof that the program worked. General Assembly’s network effect is powerful. The second thing was practical logistics: could I make it happen? I was living in Stamford, Connecticut, and wanted to attend the on-campus experience. Could I commute every day, and make that work in my life? The most important factor is the outcomes they can generate. I remember attending an info session, learning that 80-90% of grads get jobs within the first three to six months. I remember thinking, “That's a pretty good proof point. That's a statistic I could see myself in, right?” 

All of those factors made it easy for me to say, “General Assembly is a top brand with staying power; this is a safe bet.”

What was your experience like in the General Assembly Web Development Immersive program? How did you approach learning the code from your finance background?

The experience was nothing short of amazing for me. It was so transformative. It broke you down to your most simple and basic parts. The most essential part of the experience was that I was 27 and relearning how to learn immersively. One thing I remember is that both my roommate and best friend ended up working with me at Quantum Metric for a while. 

Before my first day, my roommate said, “I'm jealous you're going to General Assembly.” I was confused because he had already graduated and was on the other side. But he was jealous of the energy and positive momentum swirling around in that environment where everybody is adopting a beginner's mindset. Everybody is there to up-level themselves. Everyone is investing in themselves to generate a better future and tomorrow.” And that's where I think the experience is unmatched by anything other than what I've done. 

I remember being overwhelmed in the beginning. Having worked in finance before and being analytical from the onset, I am somebody who can keep themselves organized, manage projects, and work with people. Those are some soft skills I brought in, but I had next to no programming experience when I started.

What did you focus on immediately after the bootcamp to make yourself hireable and ensure you were among the majority who got through the job search and interview process?

General Assembly did a great job helping us focus on the right things because the handholding stops once you leave the program. You have to hold yourself accountable. My job search was a full-time exercise. That meant, nine to five, every morning I started by doing coding exercises and problem solving for engineering interviews, then spending the other half of my day learning new technologies relevant in the market.

Ensuring you stay current with your skills and follow your passions is essential. Being a consistent contributor to your GitHub helps. Working on your resume, workshopping ideas, and practicing talking about your narrative and storytelling. 

I had a great career services coach in New York. But I knew after I took the course that I wanted to move to the West Coast. So they linked me up with a career coach in San Francisco and LA. I took a trip up and down the West Coast and spent time at the campus, getting interviews, doing workshops, and doing demo days. I did a few demo days at the LA campus, where I live now. I ended up getting interviews from that. I got far. I even got to the final round on a couple of them.

All it took was one. And while it might not have been something that GA sourced for me directly, I did source it through a GA alum who just happened to be part of my extended network. Again, the network effect is coming into play here.

It took about five months, but I would not have had a degree of success had I not had General Assembly as a resource.

Have you stayed in touch with your cohort? Have they become part of your extended network?

It’s been about eight years since I graduated. I’ve kept in touch mostly with one person from GA. He was probably a more gifted developer than I was, so I benefited from his skill. 

But the network at large, I mentioned two of my best friends who also moved out to the West Coast with me. We ended up working together at Quantum Metric. I've met many folks who have been to bootcamps or have been specifically to GA. One example is when I was introduced to somebody thinking about taking a coding bootcamp, and I introduced them to some of the resources at GA. He ended up taking the 32-week program. Then shortly after they graduated from that program, he and I kept in touch throughout.

When a job opened up at Quantum Metric, similar to the one I started, I helped him get in for an interview. Lo and behold, he's been at Quantum for at least six months. It is so gratifying because he did all the work, but I just nudged him in the right direction, and he just received a company-wide shout-out from our company all-hands the other day because he's been thriving, doing excellent work, and building great relationships. So it's fun to see the new crop and the new generation of bootcamp grads finding success in their career. I'll closely track his career because he'll continue to grow and elevate himself in the coming years.

Do you remember the projects that you built at General Assembly?

I most clearly remember the famed group project. The first two projects we did were solo, but then you quickly realize that a group project is a different beast. That’s how the world of software engineering really works – within a team. There’s no other way to experience that until you go through it.

In my cohort, we were all at about the same skill level, and we decided to build a blog about cryptocurrency with real-time crypto quotes – very much a sign of the times. It was over Christmas break during a snowstorm, so everyone took the train to my apartment in Connecticut, and we spent a couple of days coding together. Thankfully, my roommate helped us debug when we got stuck.

I also remember worrying if we’d finish on time, so we ended up at a Starbucks in Manhattan on New Year’s Eve – and the heat was broken. We were all freezing in our hats and coats, coding away. By the end of that day, we finally knew we were ready to deploy. That moment taught me what it really takes to collaborate, cooperate, and get to completion.

When we came back to the cohort on Monday, we were further along than any other group and ready to deploy and present. That project showed me it’s not just about being a lone wolf. I’ll never forget it – and I still think fondly of those times with my fellow Hamiltonians from my cohort.

Walk us through where you were as a General Assembly graduate and your current role at Quantum Metric. How did you land the job, and how have you moved up since then?

It’s a funny story. At the time, I was living with my best friend – another GA alum, and we both wanted to move to California. He landed a job as an instructor at GA’s Santa Monica campus, and we decided to go for it. While he was teaching, I would go to the GA campus with him every day and basically treat it like my office.

Through GA connections, I eventually got introduced to another alum from the East Coast who was then working at Quantum Metric in San Francisco. He was in a Customer Success Engineer role, which was nothing like the junior software engineer or web developer jobs I had been applying for. I remember him saying, “I know what you know, because I learned it too. What if I told you there’s a role like mine where you could combine your background in business and finance with your new tech skills – breaking down concepts for people who don’t fully understand the technology?” Honestly, it sounded too good to be true.

At that point, I had applied to over 200 jobs. I’d made it through several interviews, but nothing had panned out. Quantum Metric ended up being my only offer – and it was far better pay than any other roles I’d been interviewing for.

How has your role changed and grown over the last 7 years? 

I started as a Customer Success Engineer when the company had just 25 or 30 people. I was one of five in that role, and together we supported about $5 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR). A few months later, the company raised a $25 million Series A, and growth took off. Today, Quantum Metric has nearly 500 employees and my own path followed that growth. I started entry-level, gained more responsibility, and eventually transitioned into a pre-sales role – Solutions Engineering – which is a mix of customer-facing engineering and sales. That was a perfect fit for me, since I’d come from a sales background as a trader.

I’ll never forget what my hiring manager said in my first couple of weeks: “There isn’t a day at Quantum Metric where you won’t use the technical foundation you built at GA.” That’s still true. Fast-forward to today, and I manage a team of engineers and lead hiring. It’s not lost on me that there are so many bootcamp grads out there who just need someone to take a chance on them. For me, paying that forward feels like the best way to honor what was given to me.

You’re now a Manager of Solutions Engineering. What does your day-to-day look like?

As a manager, I’m less hands-on with the keyboard than I used to be – though I still jump in now and then to do demos or configurations. Quantum Metric is digital experience analytics software. We help companies understand what’s going wrong on their website or app – whether that’s errors, failing APIs, or even poor design. We quantify how often those issues happen and what they cost if left unresolved. That’s incredibly relevant for some of the largest organizations in the world, especially when it comes to improving checkout flows, product detail pages, or homepage layouts.

My team of solutions engineers partners directly with the sales team to shape our platform to the specific business problems of large organizations. Think of major airlines, telecom companies, your favorite running shoe brand, or retail giants. Any time customers struggle with a digital experience, Quantum is there, capturing that data and helping answer: How often is this happening? How can our solution fix it? How do we improve conversion rates and make digital teams more efficient?

What I love about this role is that it sits at the intersection of technology and business. It’s not just talking to engineers – I collaborate with marketers, UX designers, and product leaders. I recently sat down with the CTO of a Fortune 500 travel company, which is not something I ever pictured myself doing back when I was a GA student. For me, this role is the perfect blend of tech, sales, and working with some of the most important brands in the world. I couldn’t imagine anything more exciting professionally.

How has AI impacted your work as a Solutions Engineer?

You can’t turn on the news or scroll social media without seeing something about AI. Like most companies, we’ve integrated AI into our product – not just because the market demands it, but because it's a fundamental shift in how people analyze data and ask questions.

In many ways, Quantum Metric was already ahead of the curve. 

At the end of the day, it’s about augmenting a company’s workflow and speeding up the time it takes to identify and resolve issues. Speed to insight and speed to triage are critical metrics for engineering teams, and AI is helping us accelerate both. It’s been astonishing to see how quickly the broader market has adopted large language models and generative AI.

Even though AI wasn’t part of the curriculum when I was at General Assembly, that bootcamp experience trained me to relearn how to learn. You develop a fluency in “technology speak,” then once you’re in the industry – going to conferences, talking to leaders, hearing what people care about – you keep building on it. For me, that means subscribing to newsletters, reading tech coverage, and carving out time to take courses on topics like generative AI fundamentals or using Google AI Studio.

As a Solutions Engineer, you’re often expected to be one of the most knowledgeable people in the room. That means being a kind of Renaissance person – someone with deeper-than-surface-level knowledge across a range of topics. AI is just the latest field where that mindset is essential.

You’ve been on both sides of the hiring process now. Have you hired bootcamp grads since 2017, and what do you wish you had known as a recent bootcamp grad?

There are several bootcamp grads on my team today. One of my engineers went to GA – he and I started as peers, and now I manage him. On my small team of six Solutions Engineers, a couple of them are bootcampers, GA or otherwise. And across Quantum Metric, I’d estimate we have close to 10 GA alums.

Looking back, one thing I wish I had known as a job-seeking bootcamp grad is that you don’t have to limit yourself strictly to software engineering roles. There are so many adjacent opportunities – support engineering, customer success engineering, solutions engineering – that still pay well and give you the chance to grow within a company.

You come out of a bootcamp with a strong foundation that makes you valuable across different parts of an organization. If you can get your foot in the door, work hard, and climb the ranks, you’ll find many paths to success. At Quantum, we’ve had a lot of success hiring bootcamp grads, who’ve proven to be excellent additions to the team.

What should a GA grad focus on after graduation?

When you leave the program, you have about 85–90% of the baseline technical mastery you need. That last 10% has to be demonstrated after graduation. What have you done to uplevel yourself? Are you learning a new technology? Integrating AI into a project? Building something new with Python because you didn’t get enough time with it during the cohort? Showing that you’re not just relying on the program, but that you have the drive to keep improving, makes a big difference.

The other piece is soft skills: What’s your story? How are you telling your narrative in a way that makes a recruiter want to talk to you? Rehearsing that story will help you interview better. At the end of the day, you need to interview well to get the job – and part of that is being yourself and being likable.

One of the most important skills I took from GA is being able to talk about code conversationally. It’s that sweet spot of explaining technical concepts to both technical and non-technical people. Recruiters often aren’t engineers, but they work with a lot of engineers. If you can break things down clearly, it connects your technical skills to your soft skills.

I also look for strong project management and organizational skills. In any role, you won’t just be working on one thing – you’ll be juggling multiple projects and micro-tasks. You need systems to keep yourself organized, and you need to show that. For me, one takeaway from GA was learning to use a Kanban board. I use Trello in both my personal and professional life. I always have a backlog, tasks for today and tomorrow, items in progress, and things I’ve decided to drop. Being able to describe how you prioritize your work and stay organized tells a great story about your overall competency.

Those core skills – technical growth, storytelling, communication, and organization – are exactly what set bootcamp grads apart when they’re interviewing.

Was General Assembly worth the time, financial investment, and decision to quit your finance job?

By now, it’s clear that it has paid tremendous dividends for me. The ROI has been huge – not just from a career change perspective, but also in my life overall. GA taught me important lessons about betting on yourself and having confidence. At a real inflection point in my life, it proved that I could go after something I wanted, leave behind what I thought I wanted, and make that leap of faith – even if it meant sacrificing personal time and a comfortable financial situation.

The payoff has been incredible: a fantastic career, an unbelievable professional network, and even personal milestones. I wouldn’t have met my wife if I hadn’t gone to General Assembly – I met her on a plane during my first year at Quantum Metric. There are so many dominoes I can trace back to that one decision, and for me, it’s paid off in more ways than I could have imagined.

For someone sitting in a job, debating their next move, and maybe feeling the same anxiety you felt before October 2017 – what advice would you give them about taking that leap?

It’s a great question because fear is real – and you can’t pretend it’s not. You have to face it head-on. People will tell you, “There’s never a perfect time to quit,” and that’s true. But you can make it easier on yourself by building a plan.

Talk to your closest friends and confidants – workshop the idea with them. Ask, “Is this something I really want to do?” Start experimenting. Watch videos on YouTube. Try something like General Assembly’s free Dash app, where you can build a simple webpage using HTML and CSS. That kind of hands-on exposure gives you a taste of what’s ahead and helps you build a small safety net.

If you decide to make the leap, I hope you come away with as many fond memories as I have of my bootcamp experience. But give yourself the best shot by making a thoughtful plan. 

Find out more and read General Assembly reviews on Course Report. This article was produced by the Course Report team in partnership with General Assembly.