A Firefighter’s Career Change: Ryley Johnson’s TripleTen Story

Suddenly, it’s undeniable: things are different. Some situations transform gradually, like a winding river turning into an oxbow lake. But for you, the change came all at once: there was where you were, and there’s where you are, and there are no perceptible gradations in between.

You are living a new life, and you know your old career no longer fits. And that’s a bind because your skills are all from that old career. How do you get out of that quagmire? You follow Ryley Johnson’s example. 

Here’s how he joined TripleTen and revamped his career into something he can hold onto for good.

Burned out on a firefighting job

The majority of Ryley’s professional life was spent in firefighting across the United States. But even when his fireman job was over with the season, he was still traveling to help out in emergencies. So, even though he had a home base in Oregon, he was rarely there. “We’d be gone all summer long, and then it would go into the fall when we'd do hurricane relief,” he said.

Then he met a girl. The thing was, she lived in Russia. Already adapted to a peripatetic lifestyle, he packed up and went to her over in Novosibirsk, the most populous city in Siberia. There, he adapted to working with a remote team as he took on social media management tasks, and he liked the new method of collaboration. “It was cool to me how I never met any of these people before in real life but I felt so connected to them,” he said.

But when he and his soon-to-be-wife decided to return to the US, he had to find other work, as the job didn’t pay well enough to support a Stateside lifestyle. He had returned to the same place physically, but his circumstances had fundamentally changed, so going back to his old life wasn’t an option.

“I was like, ‘Man, I don't want to go back to wildland firefighting, being gone all the time, it's not good, especially if I have a wife and she's new to the country,” he said. “I don't want to leave her here to figure everything out while I go firefighting for months.”

Not only that, but he started reflecting on the long-term viability of that career. In many ways, he was a retired firefighter at that point, but he could always go back. Did he want to, though? Jobs for firefighters were intense.

Firefighting, it's a really physical job, and I was like, ’Man, how much longer can I be doing this?’ Ryley Johnson, TripleTen grad

While he was wondering about alternative careers for firefighters like him, he started driving for Uber to make ends meet. But for Ryley, it “felt like the biggest dead-end job.” As he powered through taking people wherever they needed to go and taking his car in for weekly oil changes, one thing became clear: “I wanted some skills that I could take wherever I go and, no matter how much I age, I’d be able to use.”

A friend of his had gone through a bootcamp and had landed the career change. There was a snag, though. That program had been full-time. Ryley still needed to drive for Uber, so that wasn’t an option. But TripleTen’s flexible learning philosophy would allow him to learn and work without choosing one over the other.

Still, he wasn’t quite ready to commit. That changed with a bad week and a conversation.

“I had spent all week slaving away on Uber and it was just really slow. I was barely making it that week. I went to a party at my friend's house and this guy was there, the guy who had taken a bootcamp before, and I just started voicing my sorrows,” Ryley said. “And he was just like, ‘I don't mean to sound corny, but a bootcamp’s going to be one of the best decisions you ever make. It was that moment right there that I was like, ‘All right. I'm going in.’”

Building a community as well as a career

Specifically, Ryley enrolled in TripleTen’s Quality Assurance (QA) program because he already had a history of wanting to see software function properly. “There're so many apps out there, and I remember just naturally finding issues and defects and bugs and just being so frustrated by them and not feeling like I had a voice to really effectively get those things changed or fixed,” he said.

But he didn’t think that his knack for flagging problems could lead to a career. “I didn't even know QA existed until I read about it on the TripleTen website as one of the courses,” he said. 

I was like, ‘Wow. There's actually a job for this? This is perfect for me.’ Ryley Johnson, TripleTen grad

Not only did the subject work for him, though; he also discovered a group of people he could interface with to spur his learning. Any time he needed help, he could learn from the questions his fellow students were asking and dive into more material. “I really like the community. I found that to be super helpful. And there're so many resources. As I would work through the modules, I could go and look in all the different channels and see where other students were at,” he said.

And if he didn’t find the solution he was looking for, he would link up with other learners: “I could connect with people and just form these common grounds with other students to figure things out together.”

Not only that, but if he encountered something he found challenging (he mentioned SQL in particular), he could talk to one of the tutors. “I asked him a very specific question on one of the projects, which he helped me solve,” he said. He expected that to be it, but the conversation picked back up. “We just started talking, and he was just giving me so much free advice. It was amazing.”

All together, that meant he was ready to take on an externship, a hands-on tech project with a real-life company. Assisted by a TripleTen mentor, he and a team of fellow students did exploratory API testing for an AI-assisted insurance broker. At first, he found it intimidating. “I was like, ‘I'm going to be working for a real company. What if I screw up or what if I don't know what to do?,” he said. But in his first Zoom meeting with his mentor, his worries were allayed. See, TripleTen had already given him the API testing know-how. 

And through this project, he ended up gaining one more skill that turned out to be invaluable.

Something that I learned in the externship is a direct reason why I have the job that I have now. Ryley Johnson, TripleTen grad

A profession for life

Ryley learned session-based testing, an approach pioneered by brothers James and Jon Bach. It intrigued him, so he started digging, “going down the rabbit hole and looking for these different QA thought leaders and influencers.” The two brothers were major figures in the scene, so he ended up diving into all they had to say.

It turned out that one of them was going to be attending an event in Ryley’s area, and because Ryley had built connections in the TripleTen community, he got the encouragement he needed from a fellow learner. She got him to push through his imposter syndrome and go out and mingle: “There was this conference in Portland, and she pressed me to attend. She just said, 'You have to go.’”

He went. There, he met one of the brothers, Jon Bach, after which he joined an online QA community, where he once again got active: “I was just constantly posting my thoughts, showing that I didn't just do a bootcamp and I'm just going to show you the certificate. I'm going to show you the projects I did. I'm going to find other projects on the weekends. I actually like doing this.”

So when Jon showed up in the digital community and posted that he was looking for testers, Ryley’s clear investment in the field made him stand out as a strong candidate. Not only that, but Ryley was already familiar to him thanks to having attended the event in Portland. Ryley landed the interview.

And thanks to his work with his career coach, he had built up the soft skills he needed. “If I had an interview the next morning, my coach would have an emergency mock interview with me and just help me iron out the details, so I feel like she got me a lot more comfortable with interviews, which was probably my biggest weakness,” he said.

But it’s likely the coach couldn’t predict the interview Ryley ended up having.

Jon showed me a mock app, and he said, ‘How would you test this? Walk me through how you would test this.’ I was about five minutes in, and he was just like, ‘I've heard enough.’ I'm thinking, ‘God, I'm doing something terribly wrong.’ And then he said, ‘You've nailed it. You've gone way past my expectations.’ Ryley Johnson, TripleTen grad

The payoff of all Ryley’s work was emotional for him: “When I got off that call I was in tears. I was so happy just hearing that from someone like that. I mean I was also just waiting so long to find a job but then just having it happen that way — it just felt like it was meant to be.”

He’s now a Quality Assurance Engineer and working with a leader in the testing community: “The group that I'm working with, I mean, I’m being taught by someone who I see as the best in the industry.” 

His job is remote, so he can be there for his wife as she adapts to a new culture, and he sees that this is a career he can rely on for years and years, regardless of his physical capabilities.

It’s a first-day-of-the-rest-of-your-life sort of thing. There are people on my team who are in their 60s, and they’re still going strong. Ryley Johnson, TripleTen grad

And each one is an expert: “The potential just to absorb and learn so much from these people is huge.”

So he feels like he’s landed the career that’s right for him. “For me, I'm like, ‘I want to just always be in QA.’ The more I've gotten into it, the more I love it,” he said.

See if Ryley’s path is right for you

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