S23:E3 - Saying Yes to Opportunities (Frankie Nicoletti)

In this episode we talk to Frankie Nicoletti, VP of Engineering at SoLo Funds. We learn how throughout their career Frankie has always said yes to opportunities that came their way and it has made all the difference. Tune in to find out about what saying yes looks like and how to best look for and apply to jobs when you're a new bootcamp grad. Show Links Partner with Dev & CodeNewbie! (sponsor) Hackathon Go Diversify Tech Veri Kunche Hack Reactor

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[00:00:05] SY: Welcome to the CodeNewbie Podcast where we talk to people on their coding journey in hopes of helping you on yours. I’m your host, Saron, and today we’re talking about saying yes to opportunities with Frankie Nicoletti, VP of Engineering, at SoLo Funds.

[00:00:19] FN: When you’re driving on an icy road and you start to skid, you turn into the skid. So you just sort of ride it out for a little bit until your car corrects course. And I think that if you could do that in technology, you will be more successful, especially in the early years. You just got to take those opportunities as they come up and really lean into that because you never know what you’re going to find.

[00:00:36] SY: Frankie talks about their unique journey into coding, how to best look for jobs when you’re a bootcamp grad, and how saying yes might just get you where you need to go after this.

[MUSIC BREAK]

[00:00:53] SY: Thank you so much for being here.

[00:00:54] FN: Thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited to be here.

[00:00:57] SY: Wonderful! So you actually started your career as an accountant. Why did you initially choose accounting as your career?

[00:01:05] FN: This is a sort of embarrassing story. I met a guy at a bar. I had gone to school for a major that wasn’t working out, and I was sort of between semesters trying to figure out what I wanted to do next because my careers had been dashed. Right? This is like the story a lot of successful people have where they’re like, “I was down in the dumps.” Things weren’t working out. I didn’t know what to do. I met a guy at a bar. He got me a receptionist job that ended up being an accounting role and I just picked it up right away. I had had a background in doing a lot of computer work when I was in high school, which for some reason I never considered to be a possible career path. Weird, right? But in the early 2000s, high school girls weren’t learning how to program. So it was like not a given that that was a career possibility for me. So here I am after the first year of college. He gives me a job where I thought I was going to answer phones, but before you know it, I’m running accounts receivable for multi-tenant office buildings for the entire Northern Virginia area.

[00:02:01] SY: Whoa! That’s a lot of responsibility.

[00:02:03] FN: Yeah. I got in there and was able to really clean up a lot of processes that they had because, well, I’m an engineer now, so it’s obvious now, but I sort of see through how their systems could get optimized and updated, and I could make Excel do back flips. They thought I could work magic. And so it’s just sort of like happened and then I worked my way up the ranks in accounting before getting to a place where someone pointed out that maybe I should consider tech as a career. Who would’ve thought?

[00:02:30] SY: Interesting. So at what age, if you don’t mind me asking, did you start thinking about tech as a career?

[00:02:35] FN: I turned 30 halfway through my coding bootcamp.

[00:02:38] SY: Okay. So when you mentioned that you had technically dabbled with computers, but never actually considered it a career option, can you tell me a little bit more about that? What got you interested in the first place, and then what brought you back to that place years later?

[00:02:55] FN: Yeah. So I graduated high school in 2003, and so in high school I had a couple opportunities to work office jobs with my father, and there were some like new cool tools that were just available on computers, like Microsoft Access, that I just figured out how to use. I might have built my dad one of the first relational databases that he ever knowingly used for work.

[00:03:20] SY: Oh, wow!

[00:03:20] FN: Just like in the office being like, “Hey, here’s a way that you could search through all of your newspaper clipping.” So my dad worked in public relations. And in the olden days, and by the olden days, I mean 23 years ago, when you were in public relations, you would subscribe to services that would cut out newspaper and magazine clippings and mail them to you. Like you would subscribe to a topic and they would literally send them in the mail. And we know that concept now as Apple News.

[00:03:46] SY: Interesting. Right.

[00:03:51] FN: You can set Google alerts for the topics of news that you want to know about and it gets delivered to your phone in real time. But it used to be if you wanted to know what people across the country were saying about your business or your cause or your nonprofit, you would subscribe to these services that would literally send you newspaper clippings. They would have a little bit of metadata basically stapled to the literal newspaper clipping then you would have like a whole stack rubber banded together that were for one particular topic for a specific time period, and he would save these in a gigantic filing cabinet with like a meticulous filing system. And so what I gave him was a Microsoft Access database where these things could be scanned so they could be looked at on the computer and then it kept track of like tags and all of these other things that are very obvious to us now, but we’re not so obvious in 2001 when I was doing this. So it was really like this early view into how databases and other types of technology systems were going to ultimately like thoroughly change the way we live our lives and do business. And I’m almost 38 years old and I got to be alive for the time before everybody had cellphones. Before, everybody kind of knew what databases were and adults kind of thought it was cool that I knew how to do this weird technology stuff, but nobody really knew how to translate that into maybe you should go to school for this. And so I went to school to be a mechanical engineer.

[00:05:12] SY: Oh, interesting.

[00:05:13] FN: And I was like, “I got to do something else.” Like, “This is not the thing.” So career changes, major changes, all of these things are okay and you can still be successful. It’s nothing but a but a little roadblock. You just got to figure it out.

[00:05:24] SY: Absolutely. So the story goes that you helped a friend with some manual labor to rebuild a house, and in return your friend taught you how to code. Is that really how your career in tech started?

[00:05:36] FN: Pretty much, like my career has been a series of, “I met somebody somewhere random.”

[00:05:41] SY: You just meeting people. These are like really amazing people that you’re meeting.

[00:05:44] FN: Yeah. And then they offer opportunities. And I think what makes my story unique, I think people meet other folks all the time. What makes my story unique is that I continue to say yes. And I had been trying to figure out how to get out of my career or at least out of my current job for about a year prior to me meeting this person on Facebook. I had done all the math. I sort of knew how much money I could live on if I just quit my job, but I wanted to have a plan for what I was going to do next, like what was I pivoting to. In this time, like the VP of Information Systems at the company where I was managing their billing department was like, “Hey, why don’t you come work for me?” So I went over and worked with him as a billing analyst. I migrated the finance department from Great Plains to NetSuite. I ran a bunch of database queries. I did a bunch of basically tech support for the finance department. And that was pretty fun, but it wasn’t quite as creative. I wasn’t really building tools for people. I was more like a help desk for them.

[00:06:41] SY: Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

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