Built to Adapt: How Stephen Thomas Engineered His Next Chapter

Stephen Thomas knows how to do hard things. Born and raised in Chicago, he served in the infantry and stayed on in the reserves, and in the civilian stretches between he built a reputation as someone who showed up and put in the work — warehouse floors, odd jobs, nearly five years with a landscaping company. He spent his days outdoors, hands busy, in every kind of weather. That work taught him discipline, endurance, and how to keep going long after the easy part is over. When he decided he wanted more, he brought all of it with him. "I was used to working outside in the elements, getting all sweaty, working with my hands a lot," he says. "I was like, it's time for a change of pace. Time to learn a new skill."

He found Code Platoon on his own, through a simple Google search — no friend to vouch for it, no mentor to point the way. He did the research himself, and two things stood out: it was built for people with military backgrounds, and it was honest about the challenge ahead. Stephen wasn't looking for easy. He was looking for real. "It was good to be around like-minded people," he says.

He came in without a coding background, and he didn't let that slow him down. By his own account, his experience before applying ran about as far as turning on his iPhone — and he decided that was a starting line, not a stop sign. He applied with his eyes open.

Then he proved how badly he wanted it. The pre-work was challenging at first, so he attacked it again and again, taking the coding challenges a few times until he passed them on his own merit. He missed one cohort due to timing, used the extra weeks to sharpen his skills, and kept his sights set. That kind of persistence is rare, and it's entirely his.

"They were very patient with me, making sure I passed the pre-work coding challenges," he says of the team. "Very willing to help out those who didn't have that technical background."

The first week was tough, and he met it head-on.

"That first week was challenging. I won't lie," he says. The class moved fast through the basics — HTML, plain JavaScript, the bones of the thing — and at first it didn't land.

He didn't flinch. He leaned into the room around him — instructors like Francisco, who has since come back to teach at Code Platoon, and a cohort built so students could ask questions out loud, mid-lecture, before anyone fell behind. Stephen used every bit of it.

"It wasn't, everybody wait till the end," he says. "We could ask, why are we doing this, how'd you get this from that. Code Platoon actually cares about everyone."

He thrived in that culture. "It wasn't designed to weed people out," he says. "It was, everyone's here, everyone's family, everyone wants the same thing. So why not push each other to get there?"

His effort compounded, and around the halfway mark it broke through.

"Things started to pick up," he says. "I started understanding the assignments, how everything flowed as a programmer. I got into a flow."

Stephen graduated in May 2024 and carried that same drive straight into the job hunt. He partnered with Code Platoon's Career Services — Katherine and Rich — nearly every day. The market had cooled from its pandemic-era peak; the cycle had slowed, layoffs were rolling through major companies, and the interview process was a gauntlet of phone screens, behavioral rounds, and final rounds, with recruiters who sometimes went quiet. Stephen kept showing up anyway.

"They kept me level-headed," he says of Katherine and Rich. "Instead of doing this, do this with your resume. Reach out to these recruiters on LinkedIn. Attend this info session. So I was always at the info sessions, always at the one-on-ones, staying on top of the applications, staying focused on the end goal."

That discipline put him in the room when Travelers came to talk about its Engineering Development Program — a one-year track that asked for no bachelor's degree and no prior experience, only a willingness to learn. For someone with Stephen's work ethic, it was the right kind of opportunity. The interview was high-stakes by design: one hour, one conversation, no second attempt.

"It was a one-shot interview," he says — and he prepared like it. He and the Career Services team ran two or three mock rounds before the real one. He earned the offer that fall and started as an EDP engineer. He has now been at Travelers a little over a year.

His training carried him further than he expected.

"As far as the actual work, it was a pretty seamless transition," he says. The React, the backend, the SQL and PostgreSQL he'd built at Code Platoon mapped onto exactly what his team needed. When the role reached past his training — picking up C# — he learned it, with teammates who backed him the way his instructors had. And Travelers runs on agile, which clicked at once: daily standups, retros, the rhythm of a team dividing and owning its work all felt natural to him.

The clearest measure of his readiness came in his first week, when the team trusted him with real work and let him ship it to production.

"They trusted me to deploy it for real users, my first week," he says, with justified pride. "It's like — me? I've been doing this six months, and you already trust me to put live work out for users?" He'd earned that trust, and he knew his training was solid.

"I didn't have to do too much research. It wasn't, I have to spend three hours figuring out how to start this," he says. "I knew the work. I did the training, I did the curriculum. So I just need to trust that the skill set I have is going to translate. And so far, it has."

The technical jump came naturally; the part he's proudest of growing into is finding his voice on the team. The infantry, he says, ran one direction — you did as you were told, and the newest person kept his head down.

"It was be quiet and work, dig in," he says. "When you're the newest person, you think, I'm just here to learn and absorb."

His team wanted more from him, and he's risen to it.

"They're like, no, you're here to implement, to add on, to help the team," he says. "I have the right to speak up if something looks weird. I can take ownership. They want me more vocal, because I'm a fresh mind and they want fresh ideas."

He's leaning into it — speaking up, taking ownership, answering "what do you think about this?" instead of deferring. "Sometimes being the new guy, you want to hide," he says. "And they're like, no, just go for it." So he does. And he's clear-eyed about what he accomplished.

"They get a million stars from me," he says. "It's not normal to do this in less than fifteen weeks. Most people take four-plus years, or they've studied their whole lives. Fifteen weeks, and within about six months you're in a job where they trust you to do the work. You can see your hard work paying off. It's pretty rewarding."

Now, when Code Platoon asks something of him — a conversation like this one, a reach-out to a current student — Stephen says yes without hesitating. He knows what his story can do for the next person standing where he stood.

"If Code Platoon asks something of me, I'm always willing," he says. "They were willing to help me when I was looking for direction."