Key Takeaways
- A stable job wasn’t the goal: Dušan left a comfortable Digital Strategist role because it lacked challenge, not because he was unemployed or struggling.
- He took the bootcamp to understand developers, not to become one: His goal wasn’t to code professionally, but to communicate better with technical teams as a leader.
- The payoff came before graduation: He landed his Product Owner role three weeks before finishing the course, in interview questions that matched exactly what he’d been learning.
For most of us, a ten-minute bus ride through the tranquil summer daylight of Stuttgart would be a perfect opportunity to relax. For 27-year-old Dušan Varcaković, sitting at the back of the bus as he returned home from work was his time to think of an escape plan.
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Plotting an escape on the bus home
He had spent his early 20s cultivating a promising career which eventually landed him a well-paid, stable job as Digital Strategist for a big healthcare firm, working on fields he was interested in with people he liked. In June of 2020 he was desperately looking for a way out of that.
‘I had what in many ways was a great job. But there was no challenge there, no room to really grow,’ he says.
A “weird force” that always wants more
As Product Owner for the German startup Otto Wilde Grillers, Dušan comes across as one of a relatively uncommon type of worker, the sort who is happier when he has problems in his hands than when he doesn’t. ‘I actually have trouble enjoying regular fun,’ he admits, ‘because whenever I get into an activity, I always find myself looking for a bigger picture, for some kind of overarching vision. It’s like I have this weird force inside me that is always pushing me forward.’
Teaching himself HTML at 13, running an e-sports club at 19
It was by following that “weird force” from the very beginning that Dušan had picked up skills that would be valuable in tech. At 13 years of age, he had taught himself some rudimentary web development on the (now archaeological) HTML editor Microsoft FrontPage. By the time he was 19, he had organised his online Counter Strike gaming community into an e-sports club capable of competing internationally, inclusive of a website he had personally designed.
But after his professional apprenticeship, he discovered the local employment culture seemed naturally geared towards passive, stable, salaried positions like the one he’d found in Stuttgart.
Realizing developers respected him because he understood them
‘If I wanted to change my career, I had to step out of the program which I was being unconsciously funnelled into. I took the leap and signed up for the WBS CODING SCHOOL bootcamp in web development.’
While most people take coding bootcamps in order to learn programming, though, he was more interested in learning about programmers. ‘I’d long since realised something. The reason developers liked to work with me was that I wasn’t just some businessman ordering them around with no clue what coding was really about. I was one of them. And I wanted to push this relationship further, which you can’t really do with online tutorials by yourself. In brief, I direly needed a community.’
Why he chose a bootcamp, not to code, but to understand coders
‘In the end, I took this bootcamp because I wanted to learn by listening to other people. It’s so easy for entrepreneurs to fall in love with their own ideas, but this course helped me see the great ideas that others come up with, their unique problem-solving perspectives, their ways of thinking. A team-leader needs to know about these qualities if he or she is to harness them.
‘Also, having a top-notch instructor really allowed me to take my work to the next level. If you are by yourself, there is always a limit to how deep you can go. You can ask Google a question, but there will be nobody to teach you how to ask Google the right questions.’
Product Owner three weeks before graduation
Dušan was able to put his new skills to use even earlier than he expected, as it happens, he was offered his current job as Product Owner three weeks before his AI Software Development Course with WBS CODING SCHOOL was over. ‘The pandemic had forced me to start looking for work early. Fortunately, a lot of the questions they asked me in the interview were exactly about the sort of skills I had been developing in the course.’
Speaking with such a distinctly business-minded developer, there is one final question worth asking: what advice would he give to someone who dreams of a tech career as open, free and entrepreneurial as his own?
He thinks about it for a moment, then replies with a smile: ‘Every entrepreneur, of today and of tomorrow, should be a tech-savvy person. You should understand why and how your code works, even if you didn’t code it yourself. So, if you’ve never done this before, don’t be intimidated by programming. Go out and try things you haven’t tried before, and the rest will follow.’
Dušan Varcaković graduated from the WBS CODING SCHOOL AI Software Development Course, and works as Product Owner for the German startup Otto Wilde Grillers.
Why should entrepreneurs build technical skills, even without coding professionally?
Entrepreneurs benefit from technical skills even without coding professionally because it changes how they lead technical teams, from directing developers with no real understanding of the work, to collaborating as someone who genuinely gets it. Understanding the logic behind code helps a non-technical founder ask better questions, set realistic timelines, and recognize good ideas from developers rather than only their own. That shift in credibility and communication, more than the ability to write code themselves, is often the real value.
Ready to build the technical fluency that changes how you lead?
- Explore our AI Software Development Course, the modern equivalent of the bootcamp that helped Dušan land his Product Owner role before graduating.
- Read more WBS CODING SCHOOL success stories.
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