\+1 to this... great minds think alike and this is our view at Formation as well. I was at FB for 8 years and Anshuman (Scalar co-founder) was there for 4 years ;)
\+1 to everyone else, (I'm the co-founder) but [Formation.dev](https://Formation.dev) hits the spot :D, also look seriously at Interview Kickstart, Outco, Scalar, and to some extent Pathrise (which is more job-hunt focused). I'm sure one of these options is what you are looking for and feel free to ping me with more info if you want my thoughts on which is good for your situation.
\+1, I don't think HCOL areas matter than much right now.
I do think their H2 2022 outcomes will tank in terms of placement rates (but their H1 2022 coming out this month will be ok still.
This is pretty spot on, I don't have anything to add!
Edit: actually I have one thing to add...
The fellow program does impact the numbers a bit. You'll noticed that Codesmith's time to placement isn't particularly fast, and about 10% of people become "fellows" (kind of like a TA role) on 3 month contracts, and Codesmith delays the graduation clock for these people. So they are actually job hunting for up to 9 months to be included in the "6 month" window on CIRR.
This combined with number 6 (and to some extent 5 and 3), that Codesmith tends to attract people that had moderate to high success in another career, with substantial savings, and lifestyle support to make the 11 hour days + 6+ month job hunt work, while taking your time only aiming for "mid level and senior" roles.
Edit 2: one more thing.... related to 4.
The medians reported on CIRR are 1. of people placed only, and 2. o…
🦇 I actually get notified for every single new post in here ;) not JUST Codesmith ones
I have a really good understanding of Codesmith and it's a well rounded one. I have had several former employees, fellows, and students tell me how spot on my analysis is. It's a bit unfair because I don't have this depth of knowledge of other programs. I know a significant amount about Lambda School/Bloomtech, and I know Rithm pretty well, then Hack Reactor okay, Launch School okay. I have Youtube videos running the background of talks from all kind of programs, bootcamps, schools, mock interviews, etc... and naturally pattern match! I also have like 8 years of quite in depth FAANG experience + 4 years running a program, and I have pretty good insight to read between the lines and connect those dots! I also have good computer skills and you'd be surprised what programs have publicly that they might…
Hi, yeah that's a slightly above average starting score means you have some room to get to the consistent top tier bar but Formation could potentially be useful yeah! We work with people based on their experience and background and their goals as well, so I would suggest applying so that you can talk to a member of the team about the later and see if it's a good fit for your current goals.
I'm extremely biased, but you should look into the career accelerator bucket of programs in addition to bootcamps since you have some experience already. These programs are focused on getting you a better next job in the industry, instead of getting your first job in the industry.
Formation.dev is the one I help run, which focuses on filling in skill gaps for people with non traditional backgrounds, targets too tier companies, and works with you for however long it takes to get a job, as long as you do your part. But you should look into Outco, Pathrise, Interview Kickstart, Scalar... each one is very different.
Is it possible that you are awesome and demonstrated both natural talent and a strong connection to the company?
I obviously can't speak to this experience, but I've worked with top bootcamp grads and top CS grads from MIT and Stanford and that statement doesn't apply at all when comparing the two.
A Stanford CS grad has about 300 hours across 6 core CS courses and then another 1000 hours in a dozen or two CS electives, then then have 3 FAANG internships on their resumes and leave with 5+ offers at FAANG companies.
This obviously isn't the typical CS degree and many of them are not like this. But saying the best bootcamp produces grads that are more experienced than a mediocre CS degree is more accurate. I would give Codesmith less of a hard time in this regard if they didn't market themselves as equivalent to an elite grad school and instead marketed themselves as the outcomes of a…
Sorry, I don't have time to write a lot and will try to come back to it, but two big ones:
1. It tells you the number of graduates included as an absolute number, and that's it. All other numbers are percentages, which can hide the underlying truth. The salaries are only for graduated and for people who report them, and exclude people who did not. So saying that X program has a $120K median salary is great except it's the median salary of the 95% of people who graduated on time and 85% of those people who got a job and 95% of those who reported salaries... the people who are excluded from the salary data are slowly shaved off the numbers.
2. There's no indication of number of people who started the program in absolute numbers.
3. Not everyone follows CIRR properly, Codesmith doesn't follow CIRR guidelines and "fellows" extend their their "clock" on CIRR by 3+ months. Which makes it even…
Can you provide more detail about the proof? I try to be really on top of CIRR and have read the spec many times (and identified several loopholes) but would love concrete evidence of those loopholes happening in reality!
I think your view is too cynical about getting into Amazon and you're trying too hard to game the system with that mentality. I know about the Codesmith Slack channels and Discords where people try to game the system. I know it works for some people and that only makes others double down on the same approach. But please hear me out.
I've worked with a few people, and one in particular super closely, to get into Amazon with zero work experience. We also have a senior manager bar raiser mentor who did a panel discussion a few months ago for us around this topic.
You shouldn't memorize some "stories for their Amazon principles and answer medium leetcode" to get in, you are missing the point and you might not keep your job very long if you get it.
No interview system is perfect, but you'll have an easier time and more successful career trying to:
1. Become a genuinely strong generic prob…
I've worked with a number of Codesmith alumni and everyone is an adult capable of deciding what approach they are most comfortable with, and we can make that work, but my general advice is:
1. Leverage what's unique about your pre-SWE experience. If you were an accountant, or a doctor, or a lawyer, or something else that you put a lot of time into preparing to be, then you should present openly and try to pull out relevant things from it, rather than hiding it. For example, a doctor who did research in protein folding and was fascinated by the large scale computer systems used for simulations and some day wants to work on such systems to help save lives.
2. Target entry level roles and apprenticeships at top companies. I time box the time I spend writing replies on Reddit and this one needs it's own essay.
1. A summary for entry level: starting off with right support and expectation…
\+1 to the warning about mid-level and senior roles with no experience. It's one of the 3 things I push Codesmith on constantly because it's dangerously mischaracterized.
I do know edge case people with zero experience who get mid-level or senior roles (either direct from Codesmith or that we worked with post Codesmith) and it's not the rosy colored picture of success you might imagine... it's a stressful imposter syndrome filled ride and the gaps are extremely evident to these people when they start their jobs. I still think they can get by in these roles when they happen, but it's not fun and it should absolutely not be the Codesmith's goal to get people into these roles.
I know Eric K constantly says junior roles are the worst thing you can do for your career and to target mid level and senior roles but he's flat out wrong and I'd be happy to debate him live in public about this.
I can comment on this from the perspective of someone who looked at hundreds (low thousands) of new grad resumes at Facebook, helped select which people got interviews, and had a good amount of insight into new grad hiring pipelines.
TLDR: IT'S NOT ELITIST AND IT'S NOT PERSONAL, IT'S PATTERN MATCHING.
1. I went to a top Canadian school in the hardest program to get into in all of Canada and it was not on Facebook's short list they recruited at - they only recruited at University of Waterloo at the time in Canada. Once employed and doing well there, I complained they should add my program to their recruiting list and they didn't want to because Waterloo consistently produced high performers in large numbers, and my program was very tiny.
2. So they are focusing on consistent, reliable, and efficient pipelines of talent. The top CS schools consistently produce extremely high performing p…
I feel bad about the situation overall. Can you clarify the public GitHub comment? It's really weird to look at code out of context and make comments on it... so I'm wondering where the person is coming from. Are they trying to make you feel like you aren't qualified for the job?
I would suggest talking to your former managers and speak candidly. And maybe try to get a perspective of what is going on behind the scenes.
I would have to really dive into the details. But a good path could be to stick to your current company and try to find a way internally to switch to a SWE or developer role, or be reclassified as an engineer and transition in your current department. Then in a few years you can focus on a top tier company.
It depends on your goals. At top tier companies, they are more interested in your fundamentals skills, as long as you have some experiences that relate to SWEs to count as some experience. Not all of the programs I mentioned are the same but you can try to see which align with your goals. Some do more hands on activity and some focused almost purely on job hunt.
If you want to completely change gears and just get any job as a foot in the door as a SWE, I would consider a bootcamp.
So every bootcamp I know the curriculum of is a firehose of information that doesn't go into depth on any specific topic... some more than others, but it's a common trait.
So if you want to learn frontend you don't properly learn frontend in a bootcamp. Instead you get a few lectures in React and a few projects reviewed by recent graduates. It's not the place to go for ongoing career growth, it's a place to help transition careers when you have no idea how the industry works.
Career accelerators are based on the idea of making your next job better than your current job. There are a wide range of them out there and they are all different. But if you can already code and have experience to talk about in interviews, it sounds to me like you need a program to get a better next job, and not to get any kind of first job.
In the end, I don't know enough about you to say either way but you sh…
Look at career accelerator style programs. Disclosure: I'm the co-founder at [Formation.dev](https://Formation.dev) but you should also check out Pathrise, Outco, Interview Kickstart, Scalar, and others. I know I'm super bias, but you should genuinely consider this kind of option in addition to considering a bootcamp.
The model is to have each cohort overlap for half the time with the previous cohort. The "senior students" mentor the "junior" students as part of the process. So the cohorts typically overlap 50% with the previous cohort and the next cohort, and I think they have +/- 1 weeks extensions here and there for closing and holidays.
I did some digging and OSLabs and Open Source Labs are not registered entities that I could find anywhere and don't appear to be anything legitimate. An early Codesmith and executive is listed as a "sponsor", and there are two other sponsors, one seems shut down and 404s and the other has their executives working at multiple companies.
I don't think there is any funding or legitimacy associated with this institution and it's a label that's used to try to legitimize the projects and separate them from Codesmith.
I have two interpretations of this from people who have talked to me about it:
1. This was a good intentioned idea from Philip Troutman to create an open source ecosystem supported by Codesmith and other companies as a way to get students visibility in the community. And as Codesmith grew that vision didn't work out so it's day to day usage is just a legacy label put on the op…
I don't judge whether this is good or bad because I understand why individuals do it as well that I've worked with, but I do strongly want to present the industry sentiment about this which is more aligned with what you just said and people should know that when thinking about their resumes.
We have a small list of rules that are not super complicated:
1. Look for OSLabs, Open Source Labs, and often "product incubated by" with that. It's usually the last line of that item on the resume
2. Look for "Tech Talks" "sponsored by" Single Sprout, Bractlet, or Jeeny
3. Look for jobs with no months specified and just year, e.g. 2021 to 2022
After a while you get to know the more common projects:
1. [https://github.com/orgs/open-source-labs/repositories](https://github.com/orgs/open-source-labs/repositories)
2. And also, if you are unsure, go to the LinkedIn, click on the company name, and see…
I don't buy any "lifetime career services". Note, I have significant bias because I work on a platform that provides coaching and training and does not provide lifetime career services intentionally and instead gives you full powered training every day until you get a job - and makes you pay to come back in the future for your next job.
Two lectures/office hours a week and access to former students for resume reviews to me isn't the support most people need.
Good training is expensive and good mentors who give good feedback are expensive. The longer you are at in the program I help run, the more it costs us, so we are financially incentivized to get you a job quickly and efficiently.
If you are getting any kind of valuable training "for life" it's not free, it's being included in your tuition price and you are getting worse training while in the bootcamp, to allocate a portion of tuit…
You should build it using the rest API and then rebuild with graphql api and write a blog post about what you learned. You seem excited about this project so that would be a good way to double down.
So we actually always wonder like what if you meet a cowoker on Formation or someone you knew from a bootcamp, and at least with colleges and bootcamps that's not uncommon. We genuinely have some people out of bootcamps, but we also have people many years out of bootcamps that TEACH at bootcamps WHILE also at Formation. Because of the way you progress independently week to week, we are trying to put you in sessions with people at your level on a given topic, so you kind of find your pocket of people naturally.
Similarly with mentors, we have Fellows who work at FAANG companies right now, or were laid off and someone from their company might be a mentor at Formation. We also might have a super senior mentor who gets laid off and wants to join Formation as a Fellow because while they are fantastic at coaching the thing they are mentoring, they might need a lot of practice with System Des…
There are a few things going on here and I know how ISAs work from the other side.
1. This can be "undone" if you fix the situation quickly and the bootcamp is ok restoring your account
2. They highly likely won't go to collections immediately, and since collections have fees and are just mean in a lot of cases, it's in everyone's interest to resolve this amicably.
3. In the worst case it would go to collections, and you can negotiate with them on how to pay it back, which also won't be "all at once".
4. Contact the bootcamp as well directly. The bootcamp has full control over Leif, Leif's contracts are between you and the bootcamp and Leif administer's them on the bootcamp's behalf (this is not the case with all companies and contracts though), so Leif themselves shouldn't be taking any actions on their own.
5. Leif allows partial payments, so making any kind of payment will be a gestu…
Thanks for writing this out, I have a follow up question which is what was your ability going into the program and your background?
The network being so valuable can also be a result of the bar being high to enter and networking with an exclusive club of people who are at the bar instead of networking at a bootcamp that lets in "anyone with a pulse and a SSN".
This is true for some of the bootcamps yeah. The bar to get in requires either previous experience, or autodidactic ability to learn to get to an advanced level on your own before joining.
If you are part of such a group, this kind of bootcamp might connect the dots though for what you need.
[https://apprenticeships.me/](https://apprenticeships.me/) is an open source list that you can look at to get started.
Airbnb is the next hot one expected to start applications in the next few weeks.
I would assess them based on the newest facts and really look into it carefully because of numerous recent changes.
BloomTech just had a round of layoffs and half the company left and they have hard pivot towards a self serve model. The free trial zone was a ghost town a few months ago and the sessions had 0 to 2 people registered and it doesn't seem like many people are joining. Their last report had only about 50% of people who started graduate and I suspect it will become less and less with these changes.
Their backend program that had a "100% placement rate and average six figure outcome" saw all of the people (inside report, not confirmed) go to Amazon and Amazon has basically stopped hiring entirely since and laid off 18,000 people.
One of those people had 8 years of experience already and got a full midlevel SWE job. So I would also assume that class was cherry picked for the b…
Feel free to DM me if you want more.personal advice but there are several key questions to answer:
1. Do you fill out a W4 and expect a W2?
2. What was the interview and application process and who did you interview with?
3. Are you technically employed by a middleman company and lent to this other company? What is the company name on your paystubs and does it match what you expect.
4. It's possible the company has different types of engineers under the hood and all of your type are called "Internal Contractor" for HR purposes because there are so many random people in these roles they don't want to have an official role for each one.
5. Regardless of all of this, unless it is 3, your job title should match your offer letter and I would ask HR to explain.
Most people I know with zero experience don't rely on their projects at all to get jobs. My sample size is biased as the people are looking for top tier jobs that tend to rely on generic skills and fundamentals (DS&A).
The number of people that THINK they need projects is much higher and most of that feeling stems from having a blank resume otherwise and lack of confidence that comes with that.
I think some bootcamps work around this problem by spending fairly minimal time on a project and then writing it up on a resume to make it take up like half the page. And people feel more confident when they have that.
But in reality, top companies see right through this and it's why bootcamp grads have such a hard time getting interviews.
If you can find a way to get an interview there and show off strong fundamentals and live coding ability more than the projects to get the job.
The caveat…
I wouldn't say red flag, but they are owned by Yandex, which is a multinational giant tech company, originally the "Russian Google", so there are pros and cons to being owned by a giant company but it's something to think about and not at all obvious from their website.
Try LinkedIn for random people who completed the program, Reddit is a bit of a hard place. I've met many awesome and honest people on here, but there is also a tendency to have polarizing views rather than the middle of the road views. i.e. people who love something, or are employed by a bootcamp as a TA, and want to spread a good word to everyone, or people that follow silently and then badmouth a program as much as they possibly can because of their personal experience.
I try to present a pros and cons approach that aims to be middle of the road and get a lot of flack from both of the above camps haha.
Yeah thanks for commenting, I do agree the tone can be discouraging for people who are in bootcamps that pride themselves in the more "bottoms up" projects and it was shared with some Codesmith people who rallied against it, but it's all a learning experience. Happy to give my opinions to any and all!
It's a bootcamp in India called Odin School doing an event to recruit people for the 6 to 7 month long bootcamp. So I don't think they expect to master JS in four hours.
Yeah sorry for the tone, I agree it was a bit harsh and unsupportive. The other reason I push on this is because Codesmith calls these project "mid and senior level engineering" work, so this was meant as a strong rebut to that. But I apologize for it being personal and I don't think that was cool.
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1. This isn't gatekeeping, and blaming people all the people with 15+ years of experience for not recognizing your 4 week long projects and handful of commits as "months of experience" isn't going to help you get a job. I think Launch School's Capstone projects are fairly well done and they encapsulate more of the elements of real open source projects.
2. Your project has 50 total issues active and closed and 120 PRs active and closed. Again, you aren't going to get too far blaming "gatekeepers" calling that exponential growth in the industry and being taken seriously. For comparison, I personally have 219 contributions according to GitHub in the first 3 weeks of 2023 alone, and over 5000 in the past year, which is about 100 a week, just me.
3. If your project became truly large enough it would be unmanageable and you would naturally require the community management I described…
I would start with your skills and try to find more consumer products built on that language rather than the core frameworks themselves. For example, Material UI (MUI) is a great and approachable project if you are good in React, rather than trying to contribute to React itself.
Another tip is to start with bug fixes or "issues" that they need help with!
Always read the contribution guide first and follow the rules for submitting a proper PR.
I haven't used it myself but I see their ads and they are well done, and their website is very polished. I tried to look into who owns them and found that their privacy policy lists Yandex as the owner (via a company in Switzerland) - which is the mega Russian search engine, which is now a multinational company with a lot of businesses.
Other than that, I don't really know much about it!
What true Open Source Software means from my perspective in the industry and how I recommend contributing to it to get your foot in the door (spoiler: it's not what most bootcamps do)
Hi all, I've been having numerous intense debates publicly and privately about open source projects. They have become the cornerstone of the resumes of many bootcamp grads, from Codesmith to Launch School Capstone, to Hack Reactor. But some people are trivializing the meaning of "open source" and I wanted to summarize my thoughts in a post I've been working on on the side for a while. When I did my first SWE job back in 2006 as an intern at IBM, I had a similar gross misunderstanding of open source... so much so I bombed an internal fun competition to create a business plan around a new open source product. I thought I would just share it here or on Quora, but I have a decent following here so here it goe…
I have experience sponsoring tech influencers on the other side.
It's kind of the wild west and there are no rules about being an influencer. The vast majority of engineers are NOT influencers and do NOT share their stories online in videos so I wouldn't generalize from their experiences.
In terms of sponsorships, we partner with influencers that have a lot of integrity and try to support videos the creator wants to make on topics we also care about. All the people we work with have a really high bar and do diligence to make sure they genuinely want to support us and don't just sponsor anything and say anything. Some influencers do though and it's impossible to tell unfortunately.
You are also correct that they can't share much about their companies unless the company is on board. Even sharing video from inside the office can violated confidentiality rules!
If you want to know what…
Would you describe it as a bootcamp for people with little no to no experience? Like Derek I thought it was a program for experienced engineers to level up and not a Bootcamp. I've been calling it a competitor to Formation and I might be wrong so I want to know! haha