Ask HN: People who completed a bootcamp 3+ years ago: what are you doing now?

I don't really need validation from you and you've clearly got an ax to grind. I have linked to both previously if you care to go digging in my account history. Heck, this site is where I first met the cofounder of the school! I've put virtually nothing on Github since taking my first tech job. If you do go digging and choose to make comments about me personally, I'd appreciate it if you did so via the email address linked in the blog rather than in this thread (which I believe is against the site guidelines anyway).

> "Why did you end up working at a startup? YC startups are great. But they're still not Apple."

> "Well you wanted to come in, namedrop all these companies. Despite how popular you are with Google, Apple, Facebook, you don't even manage to mitigate or point out the survivorship bias."

Apple was actually pretty far down my list of choices due to being way down in Cupertino. I very seriously considered both Google and Facebook and to be 100% honest very nearly went with Google. I picked the YC startup because of two things—they moved very quickly compared to big companies and their mission aligned quite a bit with my own. The founders were great and I don't regret having picked them over a giant company for an instant.

My intent wasn't to "name drop". It was to address your claim about recruiters throwing out candidates who went to coding schools. None of the most desirable companies I know of do that.

I personally saw many, many classmates and people in later classes make huge positive changes in their careers or lives due to the program. Sharing this fact isn't "shilling to innocent people dreams of 100k jobs and working at Google".

> "Your HN account age isn't your coding ability."

Of course not. It's an indication I'm not a sock puppet. You've replied to others in this thread, implying there was something shady about their accounts being new (while using a throwaway yourself).

> "How about you show us your credentials so we can see?"

No. The major rift in all threads like this is a difference in opinion about the primacy of credentials. I don't subscribe to the point of veiw that they correlate extremely strongly with skill. This industry has decades of history of engineers without degrees doing remarkable things.

> "If not, it's hard to give your account credibility. There had to be a reason why you were such a celebrity with all these companies, have a YouTube, but can't show it."

I'm not keen to open myself up to personal attacks from someone with an ax to grind. I do not and have not made the claim that I am any sort of celebrity.

My claim is this: Even with evidence of my having attended a bootcamp on my resume, my personal site and my social media (none of which have huge numbers of followers), my applications to those companies were not discarded. It doesn't mean there was special treatment. It just means I had a chance to be evaluated in pre-screening challenges and then in technical interviews.

There seems to be a 95% do-well rate among replies here, and that's on top of being a tech forum to begin with.

I think my bootcamp prepared me about as well as anyone could reasonably ask, 8 weeks included 1) decent introduction to algos + data structures, 2) overview of django / flask / pyramid, 3) introduction to machine learning + data science with python, 4) 2 portfolio projects, 5) overview of relational databases, 6) intro devops (i.e. deploy python app to aws). Probably missing a few things, but this was most of it.

That said I had done a significant amount of self directed learning prior to the bootcamp, 2-3 CS courses on EDX + a lot of tinkering. I think I eventually would have arrived at the same skill set without a bootcamp, but it was undoubtedly the right decision to go.

I cant account for everyone, but I believe most of my bootcamp cohorts are working as devs (at least, I run into them at conferences / see their updates on FB / etc). It took me about 10 weeks to find a job, the people with no prior coding experience took a bit longer.

Am happy to answer any more questions you may have.

And oh yeah, most of my peeps from Ironhack are still coding too.