Choosing a program is a personal choice that I can't tell you what to do, but you should absolutely consider Codesmith as one of the top options. Try attending their free and prep classes to see.id it's a good fit.
I'm talking about the on paper version of what they are trying to do. I suggest researching how that has actually worked for people to get a sense of when it works and doesn't work.
For example, it doesn't work when a CS grad doesn't realize what they are signing up for and loses out on $100K+ of lost income as a result.
It also doesn't work if the contract company fires you, or doesn't give you any work to do... which sounds funny but has happened.
50K is kind of a "drop in the bucket" for big tech, that's barely more than San Francisco's minimum wage, and the companies you get contracted to sometimes don't treat you great, and sometimes you are a contractor for a contractor for a contractor (yes 3 layers, e.g. you are W2 for Revature assigned as contractor to Cognizant assigned a contractor to X, who is building something for the government (under a contract). And X is treating yo…
I saw this. I worked at Facebook for 8 years (where believe it or not, they take privacy very seriously). The first thing I thought of was how they kept this system secure. Google sheets doesn't exactly have per-row permissions, audit logs, etc... One employee creates a share link and you are in major legal trouble.
Yeah +1 to others, it's not super relevant that Will went there, and yes it's true: [source](https://www.coursereport.com/blog/founder-spotlight-will-sentance-of-code-smith)
Hack Reactor was acquired by Galvanize in 2018, and then K-12 acquired Galvanize in 2020. And then K-12 restructured as Stride Learning at then end of 2020.
So whatever experience he had back then it is certainly a little different from the experience now.
The only think that's relevant to some degree is that Codesmith's instruction staff all come from Codesmith alumni who become TA's, get hired full time, get promoted to leads, etc... and they are lacking like real industry experience in the ranks. Their main investor has many startups, is mostly known for film, but did an SAT prep company, and their head of outcomes did a startup as a product-person many years ago and then wrote movies as well. There on and off…
100% agree a motivated person can get an excellent outcome at any of them. You are in HR and sounds like you are doing well, so you probably fall in that bucket.
I know a lot of people who have no idea if they are "motivated" but they think they might be. Some people are and have tremendous imposter syndrome and some people aren't and feel "tricked" thinking that a bootcamp will connect the dots to a six figure job, but really they shouldn't have gone there to begin with. Hitting the bar of acceptance is a good sign, but some people will need a lot more time to get to that job than others.
It's really not cool for a self-taught chef with no college degree to think that Codesmith will get them a $140K salary because that was the median in New York for H2 2021. It might be cool for a electrical engineer who has 2 years of experience writing python scripts to think that they will get thos…
I want to add that I've looked at the curriculum for all of them and you can tell how Codesmith spends 1 week on DSA and 1 week on frontend (with two days on React), not even the smartest and most brilliant engineers I've worked with can learn those concepts that fast. So that's why the curriculum is somewhat relevant and it's more about the culture where you will feel supported and shine.
They aren't officially a bootcamp but are kind of a bootcamp in disguise. They take almost anyone and they put you through a bootcamp-like training that is aimed at getting you ready for specific clients they have projects for.
If you pass some tests and possibly an interview, you get assigned to a company and get paid around $40 to $50K a year which goes up in the second year to something like $60K (these are estimates/examples based on people I know, not the current numbers!) but you are doing like 80K+ level of work.
You never pay Revature directly, but you pay by being underpaid for two years after placement. And if you leave your contract without being bought out, you owe penalties fees of somewhere around $20K (which is the cost of a bootcamp...)
I disagree frequently that Codesmith's outcomes speak for themselves. They are unlike most programs in that there's a peek of people on the high end and a peek of people in the low end and they don't break out results by experience level. So people with more experience or a stronger background who end up making more money might not be realistic for someone who is maybe from a completely unrelated industry with no even vaguely related skills, like basic math, and I don't think that that's clear from the results.
In addition, I've worked with several Codesmith alumni who got fantastic jobs after the 6-month window but pretty close to it that they report on and those people don't even show up in their results. So there's a lot more going on than just what outcome say on paper. both good and bad.
I lost track of the thread because you commented 4 times so I'll reply here. I totally understand all of this and this is competitive to what Formation offers (which is why I know so much about them), but I'm asking if they have branched out of India or not yet, as all of the people I could find who did it did it in India and got jobs in India.
1. Are there hiring partnerships outside of India?
2. How many of your peers that you interact with are located in India vs outside India?
3. What percentage of the mentors you worked with are location outside of India?
I've kept a close eye on them but don't know anyone in the USA who has done it yet. It is a well funded Indian company, InterviewBit that launched Scalar. The testimonials on their website all have LinkedIn's attached and every single one of the people are at great companies but located in India as well. The vast majority of people in the sub (I've been here over a year, every day) are looking for USA, Canada, or EU based bootcamps.
It also looks a lot more like Interview Kickstart than a bootcamp. Can you give more info about your background and if Scalar is appropriate for people at the bootcamp level?
It depends a lot on you personally, how far along you are, and what kind of environment you want to learn in. As with almost any program, you have to do the work and get the job. No program will give you a $100K+ job... you get paid that kind of money because of the impact you have in generating more value than that for the company.
Rithm: 9am to 6pm, direct instruction from senior engineers/instructors, capped at 18 people class sizes, mock internships. Focuses on actually learning.
Codesmith: 9am to 8pm + Saturdays, Cohorts are 36 people and instruction is from former students (either new grads, or previous grads who were hired full time). More of a "firehose" style program where ambitious people who power through do well. Entry bar is designed to get people from free sessions -> prep -> immersive and selects and for people who are already strong from self teaching, and communicate w…
I'm the co-founder and lead engineer and have been in the industry for 15 years, 8 years at Facebook and then a break, and then 4 years at Formation. Formation's predecessor, Buildschool, was a free coding bootcamp, and Formation was explicitly founded to not be a bootcamp.
There are a few differences, for which there are no bootcamps that offer this kind of thing:
1. Formation has no length, no curriculum, and no expected time frame that you will be training for. You start training on day one and you keep training until you get a job. We work on things week to week that you need to work on, and constantly benchmark across many skills until we think you are at the top-tier company bar (not just FAANG, but the broad top tier bar). As the OP posted, you might have good weeks or bad weeks, but you are paying for unconditional support until you get a job.
2. The majority of people at Forma…
To clarify for anyone else reading, Formation isn't a coding bootcamp and is not an alternative to a bootcamp if you are looking for a program like App Academy, Codesmith, Springboard, Hack Reactor, etc.... It's a program for experienced engineers to level up their skills!
I try hard to state this like a broken record and if that isn't clear, let me know so we can clarify our language!
It's really important to understand that what we do is nothing remotely like a 'coding bootcamp' and I want to make sure people know what they are getting into!
My hunch is it's just a human error mistake and they will refund you eventually and I would suggest reaching out... someone has probably already seen this post and will get it done ASAP. Of all the programs and sketchy things with other bootcamps fine print, Codesmith's run really well and I have zero doubts they will refund you fully.
I know personally, when someone leaves or backs out of the program I work on that you want to make sure they are refunded promptly and leave on good terms, partially for this reason \^\^\^ because it looks like you don't have your operations in order, and while it wasn't the right program for you, it might be for your friends, or for you in the future :D
Hi, thanks for sharing a great summary of your experiences and I really appreciate you sharing thoughts to help people figure out if what Formation currently offers is for them or not. Our team cares deeply about each and every engineer succeeding and works with people for as long as it takes to get a job, but we are your partner in the journey and being on the same page is critical.
I won't say much on this thread, other than a few points below, unless people address me directly, because I don't want to interfere with the discussion or step on your toes.
RE: Session consistency: For context, we create a new schedule for each Fellow, and mentor, every week - truly from scratch, and entirely different every single week.... hundreds (crossing thousands) of sessions scheduled every week dynamically from scratch. The real challenge with doing this, is that it's incredibly hard to handle at…
Yeah see the link above, in Canada, a "non-profit" is just a normal company that has a mission of social good and there are ZERO tax benefits for the company or for you. You can't even donate to them.
I actually disagree they are a scam though... I think they are just really poorly run. They had 6 people last year and 6 people this year. For the $12,000 they collected (and then refunded some), I'm not sure if that was even worth anything for them. They hired an (allegedly bad) instructor who was presumably paid, they have a website, they have TWO companies (a data science company that runs under the same name) and they spent hours commenting on Reddit and Instagram to promote the business.
One of the founders works at Amazon (or worked, not sure after layoffs if still does) and presumably wouldn't put this much effort to scam people out of a few thousand dollars.
I think incompetent…
They are a non profit but not a charity and in Canada this is a big difference.
https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/charities-giving/giving-charity-information-donors/about-registered-charities/what-difference-between-a-registered-charity-a-non-profit-organization.html
Oh yeah sorry, I'm not normally in this sub, but I should have given context yeah, co-founder of Formation.dev. We typically work with people with 1 to 3 years of work experience but have a very simple pricing model.
If you paid with Paypal, and it was a "goods and services" transaction and not a "personal, friends, or family" transaction, then you can file a Paypal dispute. If Build A Dev doesn't respond in I think 14 days or maybe 30 days, then you automatically win.
I was digging into them and noticed several problems that I pointed out to them professionally and gave them a chance to address them and thought we had a good correspondence, and then they blocked me and posted publicly about me.
Try complaining to your credit card company. They can also suspend their accounts so other people don't get scammed.
They released a press release about 8 months ago saying the average compensation was $140K but their website now say 91% of people make $165K+ so I would try to get more details and breakdown on their numbers. If 91% of people made exactly $165k and 9% of people made $0, then the average would still be above $140K lol.
It's possible that they just don't have that many people and added a handful of new high earners in the second half of the year that brought up that average.
The program I started has about 80% of people land at top tier companies, and the average total compensation for people with under 3 years of experience is close to $200K so these numbers don't seem crazy, I would just get more details!
Yeah they focus more on satisfaction and people feeling the program is useful and honestly that's probably better than posting job outcomes for a bootcamp because I really believe that bootcamps need to be separated from their outcomes (and people should stop expecting a $100K job in 4 months for $20K). It would be better if people focus on "was my increase in skills from before to after worth the $20K".
EDIT: $20K is an example, NuCamp charges a lot lower per module and even the whole thing is like $5 to $6K
I haven't used their products yet, but interestingly they bought Fullstack Academy at the end of last year and they raised $45M to grow and expand. So I expect we'll see more and more of them in the coming months.
Was it a wrong number? jk jk hopefully you think that's funny
"Hi, this is X from Google calling about a software role, is this Y?"
"No this is Z"
"Sorry, goodbye!"
Yeah one or more of those was a Formation alumni we worked with after they went to Bloomtech and I won't disclose any more than that for privacy reasons.
They do include people on their 2nd, 3rd, 4th jobs in there too so not all of those people are alumni.
I'm not a lawyer so it might still be challenging but having an engineering degree and taking any kind of computer classes in college will help make the case for a TN yeah. Doing a bootcamp in the US won't help much but it can't hurt if you aren't doing anything else.
Their CEO posts about placements all the time on Twitter and how well people are doing. He claims 100% of job seeking people from their backend program got jobs and many before graduating.
Can you shed some light on those 3 to 4 job offers? I know they report graduates who get 2nd, 3rd, etc.. job offers down the road. I've worked with a few alumni from Bloomtech at Formation and Bloomtech has reported their placements in that channel even though they came to Formation afterwards and some even had work experience in between.
H1 2022 CIRR results should be out this month, and I expect them to be down a little in terms of placement rates, and neutral for salaries (since salaries are only of those people placed, the people that DO get placed have similar salaries in H1/H2 2022).
H2 2022 I expect to be down a lot more than H1 and we won't see those results for another 6+ months.
Hi, I'm from Canada originally, and know a lot about his topic.
So the TN status is the most common because it has no quotas and a very flexible process to get it. However, it's a bit archaic and you need to have a related university degree to be admitted as an engineer. If you have some kind of university degree in a field where you took a lot of programming classes, that can help with a skilled lawyer involved. But a bootcamp certificate is not recognized in this process. Or if you have a degree in another field, getting a job title in that field, for example being a Business Analyst with a business degree, that does a more programming-like role that legally still falls under that TN class. The company you work for has to be onboard finding a role that fits your background and to pay a lawyer a few thousand dollars to help explain how your university degree fits the role.
You are lik…
Sharing this post from someone in CSCareerQuestions... surprisingly not angry and sarcastic for a viral thread in that sub, and a good reminder to not get too lost in the job hunt and remember what coding is all about.
I love this discussion btw!
Yeah I agree with everything you are saying about these factors being reasonable, I think that's why they are in the CIRR spec for the most part.
My problem with CIRR comes down to the "legalities" of the writing itself and the spec document looking like it's written by a "head of outcomes" at a bootcamp, rather than a lawyer or auditor who can write proper documentation. This leaves a very clever bootcamp operator, room to "follow the rules" and still portray things in the "best light".
For example:
1. There is no clear list of definitions of terms and concepts, like almost every legal document begins with
2. A list of all possible values for each item we are recording. They have a list of codes specified for outcomes and then refer to those in double quotes inconsistently.
3. Lots of "X states" or "if Y", but then the collection of documentation is a se…
Number 2: It took me a while to wrap my head around this one too and quite frankly, I'm still confused. The main point was that CIRR could just ask straight up the number of people who started in the half and the number of people who graduated. And It could be very clear that not everyone who started in that half was expected to graduate in that half, but it gives some idea of what the starting point is because you'll see below, there are a lot of ways people cannot be included in the graduation count.
1. Withdrawals: CIRR is very clear to anyone who withdraws needs to be marked as such, but their worksheet has not a single withdrawal example or a column to do this. So it looks like only people who actually graduate end up being included in the report. I'm not sure how withdrawals end up being reported to be honest. If someone withdraws for failing a test, they could be included in the…
If you really like Codesmith from the prep work then I would wait because it will probably work well for you... as long as you are sure you have those two months of buffer. If you learn well independently and your budget will be very tight, then I would go with HR sooner and get a two month head start on your job hunt,
It really depends on you, your experience, your time commitment, your natural abilities, etc...
For example:
Codesmith: great for ambitious people with hustle mentality and the means to do 11 hours a day, people with natural/existing talent, recommend full time
Rithm: great for small classrooms, high exposure to senior instructors, 9 to 6 days
Ada Academy: great if you fit their demographic profile and are more comfortable learning in this kind of environment
Launch School: more async at your own pace at first in core
Nice! Yeah they are legit DS&A! I consider them a competitor to us (Formation) and not really a bootcamp. Let me know how it goes! They are based in India and started off with a DS&A platform and recently launched Scalar as a bootcamp so I'm curious how much of the audience is in India vs the USA, Europe, Canada, Australia.
If you have a CS degree I would consider a career accelerator in the mix instead of a bootcamp. I'm the co-founder of Formation.dev , which focuses on DS&A and fundamentals (very little hands on project work), and other ones include Outco, Interview Kickstart, Scalar, Pathrise, Coachable. I would look into all of these and see if any are a good fit for you.
Bootcamp-wise, you probably want to look at the Codesmith, Rithm, and Hack Reactor, as bootcamps that work well for people farther along.
So almost 1/3rd of the people in H2 2022 have already hit the 6 month window (or fellows from H1 with 9 month window) and from what people have said, the placement rates for those cohorts are hovering around 50% and a number of people have ghosted and disappeared. I'm sure the top 20% will get jobs quickly and proudly fill out this spreadsheets with how great they did, but it's the silent people to watch out for.
When CIRR comes out I'll look with a fine tooth comb because there is one giant loophole: the auditors can use LinkedIn to validate if someone has any job listed and mark the person as placed but not have any salary to report.
So if someone ghosts the program and becomes a salesperson at BestBuy, they can be a placement but not bring down the salary metrics.
The number of people in this bucket has to be reported in CIRR and if we see this number go up from previous cohorts,…
Yeah everything in this thread is truth, not sure why I got downvoted. Whoever is downvoting that comment... show me the numbers and prove otherwise... nothing wrong with a 40% placement rate within 6 months, just be transparent and explain what you do and don't do.
A Codesmith alumni came to Formation and got a true senior job at C1 - due to their own hustle and drive - but it's correct they are not hiring people with no experience at entry level roles right now.