Shane Brown spent nearly 20 years as an electrician, wiring data centers and managing power systems where one mistake could kill you. He worked his way up from pulling cable to supervising crews, and along the way he got very good at understanding how complex systems fit together.
The travel kept pulling him away from his kids, though, and the stress at home and on the job kept building until he burned out completely. For about seven months, Shane was homeless.
What brought him back was a phone call from his daughter. She told him, in Shane's retelling, "You need to shape up. Be a man. Be a dad." She was working long hours at Starbucks at the time, mostly to pay for his gas so he could come home, and his family rallied to get him back to Arizona. That's where Shane decided to rebuild from the ground up.
Back to the hacker movies
As a kid, Shane had been obsessed with hacker movies and with whatever people were typing on those screens. Once he'd started to heal, he went back to that curiosity. Video game design turned out to be too art-heavy for him, and networking was interesting but didn't grab him, so he used his remaining education benefits to study cybersecurity - in his 40s, and terrified he couldn't compete with sharp 20-somethings. He graduated from Arizona State University with a degree in Cybersecurity.
And then, like a lot of new grads, he couldn't land a job. Every listing wanted hands-on experience that he just didn't have on paper.
Building proof while job hunting
So while he kept applying, Shane started building projects on NextWork, from security labs to web apps, and documented everything he learned as he went. To earn some money in the meantime, he took a job cleaning at a local community college. This is how Shane described it himself:
"A Software Engineer, Web developer and Cybersecurity graduate cleaning toilets and offices. Getting my hands dirty (literally)"
On his second day, Shane was cleaning the marketing department when he overheard that they needed someone to rebuild their website. He spoke up and showed them his portfolio, along with the documentation he'd written for his projects.
On day three, he became the college's new Website Administrator.
What did a marketing team see in someone who had been cleaning their offices the day before? In Shane's words:
"The project documentation is what impressed my new employers."
"NextWork gave me real projects I could show. That's what helped me get hired."
Building for the next person
Shane hasn't stopped building since. He hosted a BuildLab for other learners as part of our 21 projects in 21 days challenge, and he writes and shares resources for people trying to break into cybersecurity and tech from non-traditional backgrounds, which you can follow on his LinkedIn. He talks openly about failure and about rebuilding slowly, and his advice to anyone starting out is this:
"If you want that job, if you want that future, it's waiting for you. But you have to take the steps. One project. One lesson. One day at a time."
Shane, thank you for being so open about the hardest parts of your story, and for hosting a BuildLab so other learners could build right alongside you.