I think they can be used as tools for learning, debugging, and teaching yeah. They way I look at them though is as replacing "anything code related I would Google search and read in stack overflow/blog" and make that faster and automatic. These systems are not made to learn how to teach you personally something.
Bootcamps are already pretty bad at teaching and have bad curriculums... you can't learn React in a day like some try to do.
What people need is experienced support and guidance. For example, how to talk about things with industry engineers, job hunting strategy, face-to-face interview practice, and the human emotional support side. Those can't be replaced.
Like most technological advances, the people who are really innovative, unique, and the best products in the industry tend to both survive, adapt, and often flourish. The people who are trying to squeeze very penny out of…
I'm a bit sour from someone who was claiming I was trying to steal Codesmith students and that Codesmith offers the same thing Formation does and then blocked me and the person has quite a good reputation on Reddit (not a fake account). But that kind of job hunt support is nowhere near what we offer. We continue technical training indefinitely until you get a job, 2 to 6 sessions a week with mentors, continuous practice tasks and benchmarks, ongoing mock interviews with senior engineers and recruiters. A team of 3 non-technical people and a private channel to talk with them about your strategy and progress, and they keep on top of your work if you are slipping.... all until you get a job, as long as you don't proactively stop doing your part.
Anyways... unrelated haha, thanks for the context as always!
Sharing a post from CSCareerQuestions that shows why your first job matters!
DISCLAIMER: I do not endorse any bootcamps and can't tell you which are "good" or "bad" and think every program should be looked at from all angles. I'm sharing this post as an example of why the day to day of your first job matters so much more than the title or numbers that come along with it. Additionally, I'm the co-founder of Formation (.dev) in case that could have any biases.
Link:
https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/zwocj0/my_revature_horror_story/
What is Codesmith doing about the 50% of people disappearing?
I have a few notes about this from my CIRR analysis:
1. In 2021 some cohorts had a fairly high percentage of people placed who did not report salaries. This was explained as people that auditors can confirm are employed by LinkedIn but who ghosted and won't report salaries to Codesmith. The reason this is important is that if the hardest working and most ambitious people hang around and get super high salaries to make the medians higher and then the overall placement rate appears high because of this LinkedIn loophole, if can look like more people are placed and making high salaries, when it's not the case.
2. I know Codesmith doesn't offer a job guarantee and is transparent about that, but it feels kind of crappy to shoot you with a firehose and then just leave you be with minimal check in. Leaves people dazed and confus…
I heard from someone that they talked about hooks very briefly after finishing the class component approach. When questioned why, the response was, paraphrased, 'the Codesmith leadership have developed this curriculum minute by minute to perfect it and you have to trust it. most code in the industry is class components so you need to be prepared for real code you will work with and hooks are not used widely yet'.
This is a decent argument for why class components, other than the arrogant first part haha, should be taught. But my opinion is that a really strong engineer could switch between them with minimal effort because they understand how things work under the hood. They would naturally absorb the relationship between component mounting callbacks and useEffect by understanding the underlying role both play in the component lifecycle.
If someone could teach the abstract part and nat…
They have changed things drastically. They also laid off half the company a few weeks ago.
You can try out the free trial without making any kind of commitment and I would recommend doing that.
They have transitioned to a fairly self-paced program, where you choose what you want to do when, and there isn't as much accountability as there used to be.
The result is that if you make it to graduation, you have a higher chance of placement, but the majority of people don't graduate anymore because of these changes.
I've worked with a number of BloomTech grads and helped them get jobs post BloomTech and I've seen their CEO post these "another person from cohort X was hired".... where those people are people we helped place because they struggled to get a job post-BloomTech and those people sadly have a lot of money to pay now. On the bright side, they are on their dream paths now, just a l…
Thanks for helping the community by sharing your experiences.
One word of caution is that everyone changing careers has a different path and there isn't just one way to get there.
For example, I work with a few people that feel scammed by Revature. They were overqualified and interviewed there thinking it was a dream job, only to find out it's a bootcamp that is free but that you pay back indirectly by being placed in a job where you are being underpaid by about $40K per year for a 2 year contract (and leaving early means you have to pay a $30k penalty), while Revature makes a ton of profit on your contract.
However, for someone with no training, and a lot of hustle, putting in 2 years, aiming to get bought out earlier, at a legit job isn't so bad! Heck Codesmith has like a 3 month wait time, you have to study for 3 months before then, program takes 3 months, being a fellow adds 3 mo…
Freecodecamp, codecademy, cs50, and Odin Project are good places but anywhere free to get the ball rolling. Then you can get a sense of what your next steps should be. Be it self teaching, a bootcamp, a more formal degree, etc...
Colt Steele's Udemy, YouTube, too!
Lots of people here with no industry experience and bootcamp grads with very little industry experience.... after working with hundreds of people from bootcamp backgrounds and from top tier CS backgrounds, and from conducting hundreds of interviews myself I feel like I have a valuable perspective to share in this sub. I spend anywhere from 5 mins to 30 mins a day on Reddit, mostly commenting on push notifications I get while on the go, so I don't "live here" 🤣
Also, while 11% of people at Formation graduated a bootcamp and hadn't found a job that way, more than half of the people have a non-CS degree background, so I also want to connect with people who might come to Formation years in the future.
Finally, we are a for-profit technology company, and some day we're going to expand and offer more options for more people and it's useful to keep a pulse on the bootcamp community in genera…
We have this guide that collects resources for different topics and was curated by three engineers on our team (myself included) with over 40 years of top tier industry experience running interviews at Facebook, Microsoft, Nextdoor, etc...
https://formation.dev/guide/
Disclosure: Formation is not a bootcamp but we work people to level up their careers later on. Only 11% of people we worked with who got a job in the past year we're bootcamp grads without a job so I want to make it clear that I'm sharing this to help and not to solicit you to look into the training, as you sound a bit too early in your career.
And yes they are fairly common at larger companies. As companies become larger they want to standardize their interview processes which means having really consistent topics and types of interviews. Data structures and algorithms interviews are about as general problems as you can…
+1 official title doesn't mean anything. at large companies your level might mean something as people know how to pattern match to levels at their company.
+1 use software engineer over "developer" on a resume even if it's not your on paper job title as long as it's reasonable to do so and the job duties are analogous to other software engineer jobs. A resume is a tool to communicate your background in seconds to a recruiter or hiring manager. If you misrepresent yourself though it will catch up with you and optimizing your resume is understandably a challenge. It's important though and often needs help from experienced advisors. Codesmith has a head of careers with a "silver tongue" who really works those resumes to tell whatever story you want without explicitly lying.
On a background check or a formal curriculum vitae you need to list everything as it is on paper because these tools…
When I did this I had never even drank alcohol before and was clean. I had a very rigorous workout schedule so I could do work while working out but do the exact same routine every day. I had no friends whatsoever at the time.
But the way it happens is a result of what I mentioned below in another comment about diversity. The programs aren't just selecting for people who have the raw skills, but who have the life circumstances to do this. Perhaps enough savings in the bank from past work. Perhaps a full time nanny for the kids. Perhaps a nurse for the elderly parents. And a family and friends that are expecting to not interact much for a few months. You'll find a lot of the people who do this were relatively successful at their previous career for example, and either don't have a family or have tremendous support from a spouse who is sacrificing their own career and lifestyle to make it…
I work about 80 to 90 hours a week out of choice and have been since 2009, other than a semi-retirement in 2017/2018. I didn't do a bootcamp but I did a very competitive and selective college degree where 1/3 of students are mandatorilly cut after 1st year and worked non stop except for 1 hour a week on Saturday to go out for dinner. The work ethic that I developed then carried forward to the real world and I was very successful. That said, I have a lot of other weaknesses as a result and would not recommend this lightly. But my point is that the super intense intense work ethic carrying forward even a tiny bit might help you hit the ground running on the job!
Keep in mind that most ISAs need to be paid back regardless of if you get a tech job at the end of it. So while this sounds good if you get a $100K job, it's not good if you keep your current job and have to pay $20K over the next 4 years.
So ISAs really come down to the program itself and how confident you are it's a good fit for you that will help you get a good tech job.
I work with hundreds of people to improve their underlying data structures and algorithms skills. Myself and my team have run thousands of interviews at Facebook, Microsoft, etc... and many of us have trained interviewers as well at those companies.
Some people get these concepts faster than others but everyone is capable of learning the fundamentals. The bars at these top companies isn't set to gatekeep on Leetcode problems... the problems are supposed to be testing your underlying problem solving abilities and how deeply you understand fundamental concepts.
I believe that given enough time, anyone is capable of reaching at least that bar. Some faster than others, and some might get farther than others, but most people are capable of meeting the bar.
We work with people who insist on doing hundreds of LC problems and you just don't need to do that many to get to the bar, so you might…
The enforced time commitment for both HR 12 week and Codesmith is one of the reasons both are not super diverse. You have to have both the life circumstances to work on this without any source of income for 3 or more months AND you have to have the life circumstances to commit 11 hours a day to a program. Not everyone has the savings or the ability to do this and it tends to bias to non parents with enough savings to live off of for months. These programs though are optimizing for the outcomes of such people though and they don't pretending to be trying to help make the industry more diverse and inclusive.
Nothing wrong with this, but it's counter intuitive that the most intense bootcamps with the best outcomes are the least diverse at the same time.
Lack of diversity in the industry is the biggest problem with big tech right now in my opinion and I'm committed to working on this prob…
I'm the co-founder of Formation.dev and I would strongly suggest looking into it as an option, alongside other career accelerator type programs, rather than bootcamps. For example, Interview Kickstart, Pathrise and Outco, maybe Scalar and Coachable.dev. All of these don't start at the beginning and rather are focused on getting you interview ready and finding a good job. Most are part time as well.
At Formation, we don't teach anything lecture style, it's purely practice, benchmarking, small group problem solving sessions with mentors, feedback from a wide range of senior industry engineering mentors, mock interviews. Every Friday, all your practice tasks and sessions for the next week are selected based on how you've been doing so far and based on your schedule and availability for the next week.
A lot of these programs will support you until you get a new job in some fashion as well.…
Zooming out here, most people's goal is to become a strong software engineer and make an impact on the world. For others, it's to build a better life and do more interesting work day to day to get there. All I'm warning against here is tunnel vision that only Codesmith can provide this outcome and you must do months and months of Codesmith prep to prove you are worthy. There are many paths for many people and for a lot of people Codemsith might be the best path, but don't lock yourself in until you know that for yourself.
I don't love this answer with my outsider hat on.
On the one hand, you shouldn't have to study Codesmith-proprietary techniques and learn things the Codesmith way to get into Codesmith.... it's a little brainwashy
BUT, on the other hand, it's also good confirmation that IF the Codesmith way of learning works for you then Codesmith is also a good fit for you and adds additional confidence in choosing it.
I just think if you do things all the Codesmith way and don't get it, it's probably a good sign Codesmith isn't for you, and not a reflection on your abilities as an engineer.
Two sides to every story :D
I've chatted briefly somewhere around 8 people in the past two to three months and there are a group of people who didn't get OOP at all and got accepted and most chose Codesmith, and another group of people that got OOP, some of whom were accepted and some rejected with somewhat blunt feedback like that. I don't know if the bar is variable depending on your background? I didn't get any kind of complete and useful data here, but just anecdotally people did not all get the same difficulty of questions. And surprisingly the people who didn't get OOP had more "imposter syndrome" about thinking they weren't good enough. And the people that were more like "I studied every last detail and did well on OOP and they rejected me" were more like confident.
I've also seen the unofficial places people share all the hard questions and try to study them all before applying. I guess it's not unlike any…
Both of them have been called a "firehose" by many I know who went there. For example, spend 1 day on React, do a project overnight, learn hooks the next day, and then next topic.
So I wouldn't join particularly for the curriculum alone and focus more on the day to day that you think is a best fit for you. If you haven't talked to people who went to each one, I would suggest that as a starting point and asking specific questions about the day to day, more than trying to look for which is "objectively better".
At Formation we've seen like 10 offers in December so far and it's spiked. But that said other people at Formation are finding it hard to get interviews in December. But if I was job hunting I would keep up the pace without stopping and no excuses.
Depends on the misdemeanor but if it shows up on background checks it could be a problem yeah. You can try a few paths. One is freelancing and contracting. The other is try to find programs for people with records that are kind of like apprenticeship-type programs and have partners who are willing to hire.
It really depends on the conviction though and what you did since then. For example, was it a drug related crime that you had rehab for and have long since forgotten. Was it something related to your life circumstances that you have since received counseling for? Was it as DUI and you have been volunteering for years to rectify your wrongs? All of those things matter and can make a difference.
But it's definitely an uphill battle as some companies might just pull back offers without asking questions. You don't HAVE to legally but if the above apply, you can try disclosing EARLY in th…
What ethical boundaries did I overstep? Please tell everyone publicly. I signed up for your website with a temporary email address and looked at how many people were enrolled and paid for that course which was directly in the UI for checking out.
I told you several times how you let everyone sign up and your website forum is full of scam ads for drugs and casinos. You didn't remove them. Your Data Mastery website and Build-A-Dev website reference each other and its not what I would expect from leading developers and I hope you can teach people how to be better engineers than this.
When I signed up, it clearly said 31 people had signed up for the $1,000 365 day program. If the number was lower you really should double check your systems aren't compromised.
It's offensive to me that you are questioning my behavior here for signing up for your website like anyone else can.
I'm sure you've seen me around in here but [Formation.dev](https://Formation.dev) might be a good number 3. We were running the numbers for an upcoming outcomes thing, and about 2/3 of people have work experience already but about 1 in 10 people have come from bootcamps with no full time SWE experience yet. So it could be an option and is almost exactly like what you said in #3 above. It's very expensive though so I wouldn't consider it lightly unless it's the right thing for you.
EDIT: I'm getting downvoted a lot in one of those weird situations where the count keep changing wildly and the comment is ranked high for something with downvotes (which is usually from people who spam downvote and their votes stop counting), so let me know why in the comments. I feel like this is a very reasonable answer to the question and wouldn't be offended if a leader at a competitor said the same thing…
I think Codesmith's results will continue to be better on paper than most bootcamps even though they will be lower than the 2021 outcomes. We won't know until at least June 2023. I expect H1 2022 to be fairly strong, especially in terms of compensation with so many people going to Capital One and Amazon... two companies that compensate mostly in cash compared to other high comp companies.
Several people have noticed that they seem to have 6 fellows per cohort now (BootcampBen disputed, but I'm going off the 56 fellows on their website) and that might help slow the drop in placement percentages as well.
I also think if their results tanked it wouldn't change much about how people feel about them. It's not like they can control the market and are failing at it. The only thing that would change that is if they had a loophole that only works in good markets and not bad and people turn on t…
FAANG pays about 200K first year TC in SF/NYC
Typical Google offer: 135K base, 20K per year or stock, 10K signing bonus, 15% target bonus = 185K
Typical Amazon offer: 160K base, 40K bonus, 5K stock
Palantir is about 155K base, 45K stock
Microsoft is lower at like 120K base, 15K stock, 10K signing, performance stock and cash
These are recent common offers. Levels.fyi has more info. But people often don't include the proper things in their TC. Even the numbers above don't include benefits and these places offer some incredible health care that would cost like 2K a month for a normal person.
The head of outcomes at Codesmith says almost quote unquote in Codesmith job hunting lectures that Codesmith has proven to be better than Harvard and Stanford. I'm assuming he's referring to a biased survey (from Switchup - which is sponsored by bootcamps) from several years ago regarding placement rates. Stuff like that doesn't help anyone in the industry on how bootcamps are perceived.
Yeah ISAs are tricky. Some people see them as a loan where whatever additional cost on top of the "upfront" cost you end up paying is "interest".
Other people view it as an incentive aligned payment option where the better the outcome, the more you pay, and you don't pay anything until you get a job.
We found that a lot of people choosing ISAs don't want to take out loans to pay the upfront cost because they don't want us to get paid the full cost until they get paid and feel better about that.
How you feel might depend on your personal experience with ISAs. The latter only really works if most people actually get jobs.
All the complaints against ISAs I've seen are not the cost, but as a result of people thinking they would only pay if the program worked and then finding out they had to pay no matter what... hence it coming across like a loan with super high interest.
I also observe a lot of projecting of ones experiences onto the industry. Another thing to watch out for is confirmation bias, and assuming something you think is good because one or two people say it it.
I'm going to comment more on CS degrees, which is a common topic as Dancing said.
All of that said, you can't learn as much in a bootcamp as you can in a really good CS degree. That doesn't mean you can't get as good as a job, just in terms of the breadth of things you get exposed to and the time you get to explore lots of different things.
I didn't even do a CS degree... I did a general engineering degree where I did civil engineering, chemical engineering, materials engineers, in addition to over a dozen CS courses like DS&A, Databases, Distributed Systems, Operating Systems, Computer Architecture, Signal Processing, Electrical Engineering, Computer Graphics, Human Computer Interac…
I think if you sign up via Course Report you can save more than $750.
https://www.coursereport.com/schools/springboard "Scholarships" tab
They are one of the sponsors of Course Report, like Code Fellows, Codesmith, and others and they pay Course Report money to promote their programs with social media and videos.
Yeah it's [Formation.dev](https://Formation.dev). If you think you are a good fit, you can checkout the study guide, apply and do the assessment, read the blog, and try to ping some people with backgrounds like yourself that you can find. Note that most experienced people don't list that they went to Formation on their LinkedIn because they already have jobs and want to be discrete... so you can also ping people from out network tab on our website (which people that opted in to being listed on the site).
There are also some sample schedules on the "How it Works" tab to show what a typical week could end up looking like.
Sorry, lots of info, but we're still fairly small, and the day to day is pretty unique compared to anything else so trying to throw it all out there for you haha.
So Formation isn't a school or bootcamp because we don't have a curriculum, we don't teach anything like lectures/presentation or tutorial style, and it's kind of a more unique type of training. It's all practice based from day 1. The sessions with senior engineer mentors are 3-6 people and highly collaborative around going through a problem together. You are given problems to work on and then various resources to help unblock.
There are infinite problems to solve and really you could train for anything on Formation in theory, but it's currently focused people with work experience (and in some cases, people with prior education but no formal work experience yet).
So if you don't have any work experience, you have to be able to have some decent understanding of fundamentals, like arrays, strings and be able to solve "LeetCode Easy" level problems as a benchmark and maybe dabble in hard…
I'm not sure about bootcamps specifically, but at Formation we have seen more people than expected interested all across the spectrum in the past month. I think it makes sense that people who are more experienced and nervous about their job, or were laid off, or are trying to get a leg up in the super competitive market would come... that one's easy. But we're also seeing more people who are already at a LeetCode "Easy" level of DS&A problems, asking about Formation INSTEAD of going to a bootcamp (i.e. forgoing our 'we work with you until you get a job' promise and paying much less than a top tier bootcamp in return).... it's something we are pondering.
We are WAY TOO SMALL to generalize from, but I do think a lot of people just really like programming and didn't realize it until later in their careers, and if they have the passion, stick with it, they will get jobs eventually. Life's a…
I've been active in this subreddit for almost a year and I comment a few times a week at least, and I USE MY REAL NAME, and people still think I have an army of fake accounts to control the group 🤷♂️. You can just do you and hope for the best lol
>It’s crazy to think that a couple of months ago I was asking whether or not I should join a bootcamp
My hunch is because you said this \^\^ and then your account was created today so people are skeptical.
Actions speak louder than words on Reddit, and people read through comment histories over many months/years, otherwise you could just be a random GA employee.
This is an example of how they are biased. Either this is a sponsored post for Codesmith that is paid and not disclosing the conflict of interest, or CourseReport is voluntarily promoting a bootcamp and choosing sides - since they aren't promoting all bootcamps!
https://twitter.com/CourseReport/status/1600868291039428609?s=20&t=OILWA0bMTg-KsiWJePyDOQ
Thanks for adding more examples, I said it was not that reliable so would love to hear more examples yeah or more cases that they haven't increased that number. I also heard there are flex fellows who are not assigned to a specific cohort, but it might be a confusion of terms.
EDIT: they currently have 4 locations running at once with 2 simultaneous cohorts = 8 cohorts and on their website they have 56 current fellows (excluding instructors etc... JUST fellows). Which is about 7 per cohort. Lets be conservative and add in 2 part time remote with the same number of fellows and bring cohort count to 10. That's 5 to 6 fellows per cohort. So maybe you only see 3-4 but there are some fellows on the books doing other things, like interviews and career support, etc... (/u/bootcampben)
Yeah fellows don't show up on CIRR at all, they are basically students in a 12 week + 3 months program who "…
We're not a bootcamp and yeah I should have disclosed that in that comment because of the bias. But we survey people regularly and most people want them for various reasons, and they work well if your program works with people until they get a new job.... because you train them, they get a job, then they pay you. I agree it's a little different if you don't get a job like at many bootcamps.
Or what else specifically is predatory about them?
I'm working on Formation and there are endless things that are interesting about what I'm working on.
I was thinking about this for a few minutes after I got the notification about this post and I could comment on so many interesting engineering challenges that I'm trying to work on and solve with my team, but I actually think the most interesting part is a lot more ambitious.
So I believe that everyone learns at a different pace and in different ways. And a lot of us don't know how we learn best or with who? but a lot of us want to learn and improve our lives and have a positive impact on everyone else's life.
I'm working on building out a platform where people get the right mentorship at the right time on the right topic that they need to work on. And I don't think there's anything else in the world that exists like this right now.
It's really hard. every week we're scheduling hund…
I've been working in the industry for 15 years or so if you round up a bit.
In no particular order:
1. engineers are not these magically efficient beings. we have lots of inefficiencies and AI and automation are only going to remove those so that we can spend more time doing the creative and interesting work that we both like doing and is most impactful
2. The press this week about ChatGPT have been really great PR for Open AI's team but the truth is that there are almost 8 billion people in the world and Amazon mechanical Turk has existed for a long time. While to a comfortable engineer or college student in a good university, it's intriguing to think about machines replacing human thought... for pennies we've been able to farm out intelligent activities and get extremely fast responses through other means for years. So for someone to exploit the AI we have today to replace their job…
I would still ask just in case. The economy is kind of all over the place right now and it's the end of the year and you never know even though it's unlikely
Try emailing ADA and asking them if they still have room. sometimes people drop out and they make room. sometimes there's an extra spot or two. don't give up just from the advertised deadline if you really want to go there!
I want to be super clear that I fully trust their CIRR reports (acknowledging that hiring fellows can boost that a bit short term) but that their reported numbers in the past are fully reliable. The 50% is recent 2022 cohorts from earlier this year.
My non-data-backed hunch based on anecdotal reporting is it's around 50% within six months for recent cohorts. Every 3 fellows hired per cohort could boost that by \~10% and the way they describe fellows as being hired is completely invisible to CIRR (based on their explanation in their blog post about CIRR)
Their salary stats could be much higher if only experienced people are getting placed at high salaries. Salary stats are only based on people hired and don't account for all the $0s from people not hired. You could have a 1% graduatio rate if 1 out of 100 people graduates and a 100% placement rate if the person is placed and a $500,000 median salary if that was the person's base salary.
EDIT: I have no problem with CIRR or Codesmith using CIRR. But I'm very concerned when people tout it as a "gold standard", "only trustworthy source", "independent audit" or other statements on Redd…
I commented above. In re-reading it the tone might come across intense, but I have a lot of respect for you on Reddit and don't mean it to read that way.