Warm Intros for Bootcamp and Self-Taught Devs
You do not have a target-school alumni network, but you have something recruiters trust more: coworkers who saw you ship. Here is how to turn a past job or a bootcamp cohort into a referral that skips the resume pile.
Find my warm intros →Free · No sign-up · See results in ~10 seconds
A plain LinkedIn search buries the people who would actually help you.
It ranks by prominence, so the most-followed, most-messaged names sit on top. FindWarmIntros surfaces the coworkers who share your school or a past employer - the people most likely to reply - and hands you a ready-to-send intro.
✍️ Ready-to-send intro“Hi - we both studied at [your school]. I’d love to hear about your path to a company you are targeting before I apply…”
… plus everyone else in your network who can put in a good word.
See who can refer you in - pick your target company:
Why a shared employer beats a shared school for you
A referral works because someone vouches that you can do the job. A former coworker who watched you fix a production bug at 2am is a far stronger voucher than a stranger who happened to attend the same university. You lack the second kind, so stop competing on it.
Every place you have worked, even a non-tech job or a short contract, is a pool of people who now work somewhere else. When one of them landed at your target company, that is a real warm path. It does not matter that you learned to code at a bootcamp; it matters that they know you show up and deliver.
Where your real warm paths actually come from
Most self-taught engineers assume they have no network. You have three, and they are all more useful than an alumni directory.
- Past employers. Anyone from any previous job, tech or not, who now works at your target. Shared context is instant: you can reference a specific project, manager, or office.
- Bootcamp cohort. Classmates who got hired first are your highest-conversion path. They remember your final project and are usually happy to refer, because many bootcamps track and reward placement.
- Open-source and community. A maintainer whose repo you contributed to, or someone from a Discord or meetup, counts as shared context. Point to the exact PR or thread so they can place you in five seconds.
How FindWarmIntros does the finding for you
The hard part is not writing the message, it is finding which specific person at a target company you actually share a past employer or cohort with. Doing that by hand means scrolling hundreds of LinkedIn profiles.
FindWarmIntros takes a company you want in at, cross-references your past employers and cohort against who works there now, ranks the people you have the strongest shared history with, and drafts the intro that leads with what you share. It is free, and it exists so self-taught engineers can find warm paths without an alumni network to lean on.