Finding Freedom in Tech at 50: Bill Samboy’s TripleTen Story

It’s a realization that accretes in your mind drop by drop, like a stalactite forming. At the beginning, you can ignore it. But it grows, and soon enough, the conclusion is undeniable: something about your career needs to change. Sure, the money’s fine, and others might even envy your job.

But you know what it’s asking from you is no longer worth it. You see that you’re giving up on something far more valuable — freedom, family, home — for a salary that, in comparison, doesn’t cut it.

So what do you do? Well, you can follow Bill Samboy’s example. You can master a new field with TripleTen and land a job that lets you reclaim the immeasurable but deeply precious things that make a life vibrant.

Here’s how he did it.

The life of a lineman

All throughout his career, Bill has been irrepressible. Although he didn’t graduate from high school — instead opting for a GED — he completed a four-year apprenticeship with the power company, which prepared him to become a lineman. In that job, he has the one getting the lights back on when something went wrong. “I [was] pretty much the guy that's in your backyard at two in the morning restoring power on the pole,” he said.

It was a well-paid job, something he appreciated as a family man, but it also asked him to put the job first — even above his loved ones. “When you work for the power company, they'll tell you right away: ‘You're married to us first, and then comes your family,’” he said. “I would be coming home at two in the morning, and immediately get a call and have to go back out because that's just what you signed up for.”

As he approached his 50th birthday, that exchange started feeling less and less worth it.

When you get to be my age, and you've been doing that for a long time, and you drive by your house in your company truck, and you know you're not going home for the next 10 hours or two hours, at that point, you're like, ‘Okay, I got money, I got this, I got that. But what am I really doing?’ Bill Samboy, TripleTen grad

Then he was called away from his native Florida for a job in Ohio. To save on his per diem, he was living out of his truck. And this made it clear: he wanted out. “While I was there, I was like, ‘Man, do I really want to do this?’ I was just tired of living that kind of lifestyle,” he said. “So I just said, ‘I feel like this is the best time to do the switch.’”

He’d been doing research, and although all the engineers he worked with at the power company had bachelor’s and master’s degrees, he discovered that, for a career in quality assurance_{How to Become a QA Engineer} (QA), a degree wasn’t the prerequisite he thought it was. In addition, he saw that his experience fixing power issues set him up well.

I said, ‘I do that at work now! I'm a troubleshooter!’ So that's when I put the two and two together and went with QA. Bill Samboy, TripleTen grad

He dove in and enrolled in TripleTen: “I stopped waiting on maybe next year, maybe this, maybe that. I just went with it.”

Learning tech in the back of a truck

When Bill said he stopped waiting — he didn’t even delay learning QA with TripleTen until he got back home. “I signed up for TripleTen while I was in the car. I got a laptop and two monitors, I got Wi-Fi, and I started taking the classes in my truck,” he said.

And even though tech is seen as a field for young people, he never felt like his age was a barrier while he was studying. ”Yes, the majority of people there are young, but I felt like everyone there was willing to help me,” he said. And while he was learning the ins-and-outs of the new field, he knew he could reach out any time he encountered something difficult — databases, for example.

They treat you like a community, so everybody's like family. If I had a question, I could always ask someone and they would answer. Bill Samboy, TripleTen grad

‍With the help of his new community and the clear, accumulative lessons on the TripleTen platform that helped master even databases, he was ready to prove his bona fides in his first big tech challenge. He took the opportunity to join an externship.

This hands-on learning experience with a real-life tech company proved invaluable for him because it showed him where he needed to polish up his know-how. “I really appreciate the externship because I went back and refined my skills,” he said. “I was not the best in the externship, to be real. But once I learned what I was behind on, I would go home after work, and I would study, study, until I put myself up to par.”

For this externship, he and a group of his fellow students tested the website of Runestone Academy, a digital repository of free math and computer science textbooks, making sure it worked as intended. Specifically, he and a partner made sure the log in functioned properly. It was an ideal capstone. “I really enjoyed it,” he said. “I learned a lot — the coaches and the people that were over there were excellent.”

Landing a job in robotics

With this externship, Bill had proof that he had the skills a QA job would ask of him. Now, he just needed to land an interview. TripleTen once again provided guidance in the form of career coaches, industry-seasoned experts assisting students with the job search.

TripleTen — the way it's designed with the career coach — they're there for you. They help you with the resume. They help you with the cover letter. Bill Samboy, TripleTen grad

Bill’s strategy was to broaden the scope of roles he was applying for. Not only would he go for the QA-specific openings, but also positions for which his new QA knowledge would be valuable: “I applied for almost anything similar in the role that would just land me an opportunity to get into the tech field.”

That, combined with his background as a lineman, made him stand out for a robotics company. And during his conversations with the company, his new skills proved vital: “When I landed the interview, the fact that I had the QA experience, it really helped me out a lot.”

He progressed through a few interviews until he met with a software engineer who wanted to really ensure he fit the role. “He grilled me with some questions. Again, I went right back to the QA fundamentals, because he started asking me questions about that,” he said. “Once I got through that, I could tell I was pretty good, because they started asking me if I had any questions for them, and then they started asking me about the schedule.”

His hunch was right. A week later, they flew him out to California for training for his new job. Now, he’s an Automation Robotics Technician for ViaBot, a company that builds autonomous cleaning vehicles that tidy up parking lots for big-box stores, for example. He’s looking after a fleet of 10 robots in Florida, making sure they follow their GPS routes and tackling any code issues that arise. 

He looks back on his time with TripleTen and sees how it set him up to thrive in the role. “It gave me the basic foundation skills to continue on this career path,” he said. “And now it's allowed me to understand other things like Playwright.”

In fact, this ability to keep growing is one of the things that he appreciates most about his new position: “I’m also learning — I’m getting paid to learn.” 

But most importantly, he found the time for his family he’d been looking for. “I love [my new job] because I'm my own man. I have my own assignments. I oversee my robots. I make my own time,” he said. “I have the freedom that I didn't have before.”

Read more grad stories

Bill’s not the only one who found what he was looking for with TripleTen’s help. Check out more stories here.