Gene Hallman has come a long way from his hometown of Sydney, Australia. He got started in software engineering in his late teens in the early 2000s and developed a passion for the technology industry early on. After graduating, he quickly latched onto a fledgling startup that helped release a set of web services to produce mobile websites. Within months, Gene found himself working in Silicon Valley and became an expert in languages such as JavaScript, SQL, and Dev architecture. In succeeding years, he’d become a leading Zero-Day security expert at Google.

He then decided to switch things up. He moved into the education space to ensure other people could have access to a high quality level of programming education. But Gene didn’t go back to his undergraduate alma mater. Instead, he joined App Academy, the top coding bootcamp in the U.S., as an instructor. After a few months working with beginners, he helped the bootcamp create a new type of program, one that would cater to veteran, experienced programmers: Engineering Interview Prep.

In an interview conducted at our office, we asked Gene to answer some of the most important questions applicants have about the program and about getting better programming jobs in general.

The following has been edited for clarity and length.

What does Engineering Interview Prep offer that other accelerator courses do not?

I’d say at a guess that we have smaller class sizes, which means more personalized attention with more experienced instructors.

A lot of people believe that an engineer’s first company should be able to provide career support to help them move up. Is that even possible for most companies and why don’t engineers take this opportunity to move up?

It varies greatly. In a medium-to-large organization there are often well structured pay grades and role levels, with a clearly defined path to career progression.

Alternatively, at startups, you likely won’t be given an opportunity to advance your career formally, since engineers will often take on much more responsibility across all facets of technology, for example, an engineer at a startup will need to both build the backend and frontend systems, and will also be involved in the setup of marketing campaign tech (like tracking leads), internal corporate software engineering, and monitoring systems, all under the same title/paygrade.

The Engineering Interview Prep is an App Academy course. How do Engineering Interview Prep students benefit from being part of the App Academy structure?

App Academy is able to provide the existing infrastructure surrounding the course content itself. This includes admissions, student experience, and post graduation guidance. We have many great resources already available on such topics as negotiation, whiteboarding, and resume building for example, which the Engineering Interview Prep students immediately are able to take advantage of.

Sharing the learning space with other students helps too, by having a group of peers who are also going through the job search process.

What are the types of engineers that take Engineering Interview Prep? For example, how many years do they have in the business and what are their specialties in, usually?

The average Engineering Interview Prep student has approximately 1-3 years in the software engineering industry already, and most do not have any sort of university/college level education in the subject (although some do).

The typical student is ready to take the leap into a larger organization, higher pay and needs help to understand exactly what they’re going to need to know to have success during the interview process at these large tech employers.

This includes both soft and hard skills, including how to answer tough interview questions at all levels of seniority.

We aim to get all our students a pay rise, at least in the $20k range, but often much higher.

What’s usually their main reason for joining Engineering Interview Prep? How can Engineering Interview Prep guarantee a salary of $120K?

Most students want to be successful when they go for that high paid job at a large tech employer. If they’re dreaming of working at Google, they want to *make sure* they pass the interview, and most of them don’t have access to a senior engineer to validate” them in a way that the feel is representative.

Why did you join Engineering Interview Prep? What do you get out of it personally?

After being a software engineer for over 10 years