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Super interesting! Very curious about a few things: -- How did the large company recruiters find you, and what do you think made them contact you (e.g. If thro

Super interesting! Very curious about a few things: -- How did the large company recruiters find you, and what do you think made them contact you (e.g. If through LinkedIn, what credentials / keywords did you showcase there)? -- How much of the attention do you attribute to Hack Reactor (which is selective, and hence has some of the signaling benefits of a name brand university) vs. your own online study? -- Did you pursue any of these conversations? If so, how did they go? I realize I'm asking a lot of questions, and am happy to take this offline if you prefer. I just love learning more about alternate education.

xiaoma 12y ago
That is a lot of questions! I'll do my best here, and please just check out the links in my profile if this doesn't cover it. Hack Reactor has a brand now, but I was in it over a year ago. When I graduated it had no brand whatsoever. It was selective, but nobody had even heard of it. Worse still, employers I did tell about it, tended to immediately assume it was essentially the same as another coding school with barely half the instruction hours and a far worse student teacher ratio. For the most part, what I got from Hack Reactor was the hard skills. I presented prototype of a robot fighting game at an Backbone.js meet-up, I did a hackathon at fb and I went to a bunch of other meet-ups that focused on actually coding things as opposed to mixers. I also had profiles on AngelList, White Truffle and Stack Overflow, all of which linked to my Github account. The vast majority of the inbound messages I get on LinkedIn are pretty much just looking for me to work with exactly the same technologies or even just a subset of the technologies I worked with at Groupon. I ignore them. But sometimes, a company has noted the MOOCs and more often than not those opportunities involve learning something new and are much more interesting to me.
- gautambay 12y ago
  Thanks for answering!

xiaoma 12y ago

That is a lot of questions! I'll do my best here, and please just check out the links in my profile if this doesn't cover it. Hack Reactor has a brand now, but I was in it over a year ago. When I graduated it had no brand whatsoever. It was selective, but nobody had even heard of it. Worse still, employers I did tell about it, tended to immediately assume it was essentially the same as another coding school with barely half the instruction hours and a far worse student teacher ratio. For the most part, what I got from Hack Reactor was the hard skills. I presented prototype of a robot fighting game at an Backbone.js meet-up, I did a hackathon at fb and I went to a bunch of other meet-ups that focused on actually coding things as opposed to mixers. I also had profiles on AngelList, White Truffle and Stack Overflow, all of which linked to my Github account. The vast majority of the inbound messages I get on LinkedIn are pretty much just looking for me to work with exactly the same technologies or even just a subset of the technologies I worked with at Groupon. I ignore them. But sometimes, a company has noted the MOOCs and more often than not those opportunities involve learning something new and are much more interesting to me.

gautambay 12y ago
Thanks for answering!