A Server’s Career Change: Sean Blinn’s TripleTen Story

What does your ideal career look like? It’s a question that should be easy to answer with pure speculation, but in reality, most people need firsthand experience to know what’s right for them. Here’s the thing: when you finally do get that exposure and realize what you want in your professional life, you can find yourself too far down the wrong path.

But you don’t have to get stuck. Sean Blinn didn’t. After a little over five years of figuring things out, this former Uber Eats driver, cold-call salesman, and server took stock and made the pivot that is giving him the stability (and paycheck) he realized he needed.

Here’s how he managed it all with TripleTen’s help.

Discovering his professional values

Most people begin their careers fairly soon after finishing college. But Sean had a pandemic against him; he graduated with a degree in communications in 2020 at the height of covid. So in the chaos of the time, he instead moved down to Florida, where he drove for Uber Eats for a year.

Going for a career was still lurking at the back of his mind, but he couldn’t match his major to what he was realizing he was looking for in a job. “I studied communications with a concentration in TV and film, but I realized towards the end of my college that I didn't really want to work in that industry. I'm the type of person that likes stability,” he said.

See, a friend of his had a career in film, and the volatility they experienced turned Sean off. “I didn't want to have months at a time where I had no job and nothing to do,” he said.

So maybe sales would be a bit better. He went back north and got a job cold calling for an insurance company, but it was far from what he was looking for.

There was really no stability in that job either. It was all commission-based, and it was all cold calling and getting hung up on all day long. Sean Blinn, TripleTen grad

He couldn’t stand “sitting in the office alone making 200 phone calls trying to reach out to people and then just getting hung up on all the time” as he put it, so he knew he needed to find something else. Again.

His cousin worked at a restaurant, and he managed to secure a job there as a server. That job was where he stayed for over four years, but Sean had no illusions about that role being his calling. “I took a waiting job just to make some money while I figured out what was next,” he said. “I really did enjoy working there. I just didn't want to do it my whole life … I wanted to find something else that was more like a nine to five where I could make more money and have a better schedule that I enjoyed more.”

So when he was scrolling through Instagram and saw an ad for TripleTen, he was intrigued. A career in tech seemed to fit everything he was looking for. And with the money-back guarantee, he could tell that TripleTen was serious about getting him the job he was looking for. He had a conversation with one of our career advisors and enrolled.

From serving to testing

Sean started out in the Software Engineering program, but after several sprints, he knew it wasn’t the field for him, so he reached out to TripleTen and asked to move to the Quality Assurance (QA) program. The transfer wasn’t a problem, and as soon as he started QA, he knew he’d made the right decision: “QA felt much better for me right from the start, so I was glad I made the switch.”

Getting hands-on with his QA work was something he especially appreciated. Not only was he gaining new knowledge and skills, he was locking them in with real projects that asked him to apply everything he was learning.

Learning the information and putting it to the test on actual projects was definitely very helpful. Sean Blinn, TripleTen grad

His studies and the projects asked a lot of him, but the high expectations were met with commensurately vast support resources in the form of tutors, former students, and more. “The network of tutors and alumni were all super helpful and very nice and really helped make the learning much simpler than it would have been if they weren't there,” he said. “I never had any problems getting help from anyone. That was awesome.”

And during all of this, he was simultaneously still working his job at the restaurant, so to make sure he kept up, he carved out time for his studies every day. “I always tried to stay true to the schedule and keep moving forward and get my work done,” he said.

But when things happened — like they always manage to — and he needed to spend time focusing on something other than studying QA, he didn’t have to give up on his learning. He could simply request an extension so that he’d have a little extra time to master the material.

With all that dedication, guidance, and flexibility, he got the know-how down. Now it was just about the bootcamp’s culmination: landing that job he’d been aspiring to.

Launching a stable career

While Sean was wrapping up his studies, his job search began, during which he had a career coach who guided him through the ins and outs of landing a job, including a review and redo of his job search assets. He’s still appreciative of this assistance: “It was great to have help with my resume and interview prep and things like that. That was awesome.”

Less awesome were the regular rejections or complete silence from prospective employers. But Sean kept applying, not letting any of the disappointments affect him too much. “I was just trying to not take it personally and just tell myself that it's not me. I’ve just got to keep going and keep moving forward and then eventually I'll find the right company that will hire me,” he said.

It paid off: “I went from months of getting absolutely nothing to getting a response and getting hired within a week.”

He had a call with a company’s head of HR. Within hours, she emailed him asking him to come in the following Monday for an in-person interview with the head of their quality assurance program. During that interview, Sean saw how valuable the projects he’d worked on at TripleTen were.

[The interviewer] read my resume, and he saw all the projects I did and was working on, and having that experience definitely helped because I would not have gotten that job without having those projects on my resume. Sean Blinn, TripleTen grad

With his bona-fides proven, Sean was asked to do a quick test task. The company was developing a camera for large office rooms, and it had a unique feature. It could automatically zoom in and focus on who’s talking during virtual meetings. He was asked to test that system.

“I was kind of just on the fly trying to think of things that could be good tests for what it was supposed to do,” he said. “Then [the interviewer] came back about 15 minutes later, and he asked what I did. I told him, and he was like, ‘Those seem like some things that I would have done too.’”

He left the interview feeling good, and two days later, he got the offer. Now, he’s a Quality Engineer Technician at Creston Electronics, and it’s the career he’d been hoping for: “I'm definitely getting paid more than I was at the restaurant. And the job feels pretty stable.”

And there’s more to it, though, something deeper. “I just feel more accomplished,” he said.

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