If you have enough raw skills they will help you fill in gaps you have based on your needs. Bootcamps are better at starting at zero and reinforcing with projects. If you are fairly far ahead you will be the star pupil and teach other people along the way. It's a good way to build confidence and get connections. If you are 85% of the way there already and need help then career accelerators are more effective.
Your original comment is offensive and vulgar and I hope Reddit bans you.
"It’s 2022 and we have a fat bald white man gaslighting women that their experience at the actual bootcamp is not true lol.
Michael novati has a bunch of boys upvoting and downvoting these replies.
How is this not a mod issue"
Read my comment history. My entire life is about increasing diversity in tech. Being so anonymous, I have no idea who or what anybody on Reddit identifies as and never have I made a personal comment about anybody.
I have one account for commenting and voting. I have no idea who is upvoting or downvoting these comments and I don't care. I'm happy to talk to anybody here no matter how you feel because I was bullied my entire life and now that I've led an extremely successful career and built more confidence I pity people who bully others and want to help them.
Definitely not. You can always exclude the bootcamp from your resume if it was harming it, so focus on what skills you are missing from your next step and if how a specific bootcamp will address those.
Tech Elevator is great in the non tech large cities they focus on. But cast a wide net and consider options. Look at Codesmith, Rithm, Hack Rector, and look at career accelerators like Pathrise, Outco, Interview Kickstart and Formation (disclosure: I'm the co founder).
Worked at Facebook for 8 years a principal engineer, did hundreds of interviews and looked at thousands of resumes. My team has 3 engineers with similar backgrounds. My team has 4 ex-FAANG 5+ year recruiters who have seen tens of thousands of resumes and done high thousands of interviews.
We have seen a heck of a lot. I think it’s worth hearing all sides as none of us have attended Codesmith. But what we see on a weekly basis on the outside is very clear and i’m presenting that view.
It’s very possible that we see more of the exaggerated resumes because they make it through the other filters, so I will admit that bias.
So I’m just basing this of the hundreds of LinkedIns I documented and the dozens of people I’ve worked with directly or indirectly from Codesmith. Things change, but you need to survey your whole cohort to kind of counter this rather than one case. You can always do whatever you want on your resume. It’s pretty frustrating to have super diligent data and people tell me I’m wrong because of one off cases. I’m not sharing the spreadsheet because it’s a privacy violation in my opinion but I’m happy to share the methodology and you can repeat it on your own.
Similarly. At Formation, the majority of people we work with are experienced industry engineers and we worked with them 10 to 20 hours a week as they have full time jobs elsewhere. Yet just because we have a small number of people with no experience at all - either no bootcamp or straight from bootcamp - and combine with the fact that…
1. People practice how to talk about OSP in depth without lying and without identifying it as a it is. This public video describes what I've heard from alumni and staff members, and what I've seen in alumni that I've interviewed myself, and specifically who talk to Erik Kirsten (a senior board advisor) as well: **"there's this one guy in particular his name is eric kirsten uh and this guy has a silver tongue and he will teach you how to say anything like you know you tell him hey um this is my background how do i present it to an employer to where it doesn't look like i just decided to switch careers because you want to avoid that stigma and he will give you a great way to say it you know"** 33:03 from [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkWYanfkfCY&t=1983s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkWYanfkfCY&t=1983s)
2. I totally agree there should be additional checks and bounds to catch people m…
Well Formation is a Delaware Corporation, but you have to register in any state you are physically located in (and in some cases if you just have customers or employees in!). So just physically living in California means we have to have register here and pay taxes. People do try to avoid these things with "stretching" the laws, but we are trying to run things by the books.
My wife had a CA LLC in the past which is why I know a lot about that.
Yeah CA is crazy! $800 just for running a pass-through LLC and you have to file a tax form that can only be filed on paper. If you live in SF you have register with the city for a permit and that costs money. Once you register all these agencies are sending you letters asking you to register for other things, like unemployment insurance department, etc...
Then you have to file a statement of information every two years for an LLC (or every year for a corporation).
If you genuinely commit to all this for a group project, that's a little leg for real, I'm not being sarcastic HAHA
Yeah so many things are broken about the application process! I have so much more interesting things to say about that!
I work with/have worked with a lot of bootcamp grads (low hundreds) and see a lot of perspectives from a lot of people from a lot of programs. I also have a huge FAANG network that spends 24/7 in this world. I'm just putting out what I see because not that many people have this perspective.
All LLCs in California have to pay a minimum $800 tax every year regardless of revenue. This obviously depends on the state of residence of the managing members and the state of registration of the LLC.
LLC's don't have shares and ownership can't be bought and sold like a share or stock. This is like a fundamental fact about the nature of LLCs.
Sarcasm aside, making an LLC obviously doesn't change the nature of the project. But why don't more people do it? It might show some initiative at least if you go through the trouble of registering a genuine, non-fraudulant company even if it's a terrible group project. The fact that this sounds kind of funny is an indication that these group projects are no where near real companies but their members are getting a lot of the benefit of appearing like a company and kind of proving my point.
That job post asking for 10 years of experience for an entry level job is because of this behavior causing this.... it's the price to pay for bootcamp exaggerations.
I worked at Facebook for 8 years, reviewed thousands of resumes, hundreds of interviews..My team now has 3 other engineers with hundreds of interviews each. All of us have trained interviewers as well. We have 4 ex-FAANG recruiters with 5+ years each, two with 10+ years of FAANG experience
These are just my views but I feel confident in my evidence to back it up and you can choose not to believe me if you want, I might be wrong. If you have a similar backing to counter me, present the arguments, and let people reading decide.
I'm honestly middle of the road! If someone turns a project into an LLC, files secretary of state forms, taxes, and does all of the overhead of a business, and runs a business, and say they worked they, that's work experience.
I said this above, but I support people with this strategy in some cases and not in other cases, and I personally support the individuals I'm dedicated my time to supporting. I'm saying there are a lot of people in the industry who have a 'table-flip' reaction to this kind of behavior though.
On a weekly basis, in my personal experience only, people are mistaking these resumes for experienced engineers. The blame might be entirely on the people making these mistakes, but I'm stating that I'm seeing it happening almost all the time.
I would like to emphasize what I repeatedly said in the past, MOST people working on real, legit Open Source projects ARE PAID for it. So Open Source !== not a real job and instantly make something that looks like a company not a company. Anyone reading, happy to talk more what Open Source really means because there is a lack of understanding in this sub about it.
In auditing 200 GitHub commit histories, over 75% of people had 2-3 weeks of commits on their projects, far less than even 1 month, never-mind multiple months. I have a nicely organized Google sheet from around May when I did the analysis. This is not two sides, it's a continuous spectr…
I agree that some things are a result of limitations of LinkedIn. This is not one of them. People might not be doing this with bad intentions, but someone, somewhere, is aware of this as a strategy to stand out from other bootcamp grads.
I agree that how people portray their personal profiles is up to them But I pulled over 200 Codesmith alumni profiles and over 2/3rds of them have almost the exact same descriptions and representation of that experience as ambiguous work experience.
I really need to emphasize that I'm not saying anything personal about people that do this. Again, I support people doing this case by case, but the fact that the vast majority of students do it is a fact to note as no other bootcamp has this characteristic.
It's often listed as "experience" and portrayed somewhat like a job.
This is a sample Codesmith project that looks like a real company that produces open source software and you can see how the students list their experience if you look at the "employees" profiles. It says nothing about Codemsith and instead redirect to a non existent entity called Open Source Labs (this isnt registered in any state I could find and is just run by Codesmith)
https://www.linkedin.com/company/vaasdev/
EDIT: Some people didn't like me sharing one of the OSP company pages in particular. I randomly chose it from the recent announcements and you can choose any of them! As open source projects they are all public and easy to find and easy to document the commit histories of what people are actually doing.
I don't think I portray Codesmith as a whole as shady. All of the people I know personally who work there or went there are fantastic people. They also say how hardworking and awesome the staff is on the ground running the day to day.
I'm pretty sure since I've been around here for like 8+ months, Codesmith has longer lines than ever, and several people credit me with the reason they chose it, so sorry if this was offensive, but overall I want to have balanced pros-and-cons.
It's fact based, I guess it's not "everyone", it's "vast majority". Out of over 200 profiles and resumes I've seen, the vast vast majority (who were not employed by Codesmith) do not include the word Codesmith on them.
Sorry if it comes across that way, I work with Codesmith alumni daily to sort this out and they will attest how complex and case by case this is, and how middle road I am... I work with people to help them get the best outcome and sometimes they use their Formation resume and sometimes I advise them to use their Codesmith resume for a role.
It's a controversial point but they do officially suggest to exclude it. The reasons they tell you are that: 'you did Codesmith and it's an elite school so you don't want to disadvantage yourself by coming across like a bootcamp grad. you have done projects that are at a mid or senior level and you want to be recognized for your accomplishments so you should emphasize those'
I don't agree with this reasoning but that's what they tell people.
EDIT: Want to clarify a few things because saying "officially" might be misleading
1. The official documentation doesn't tell you to exclude it but tells you to include it as experience and doesn't tell you to include the word Codesmith in describing that.
2. People are told the above not in writing but have reported being told it verbally during a standard resume lecture
Interview for the principal role. If you get it then you can have a discussion about why they think you are at that level, and your manager etc... feel free to DM me if it comes to that and can give you some tips.
If you get a "senior" offer after the interviews instead and get "down-levelled" by them, that's actually ideal and is also normal to happen.
With the economy right now, sometimes you won't get downlevelled if there are no more junior slots, but Capital One is hiring across the board and I think you'll be ok,
Their strategy is to hide the bootcamp, make the projects you do their appear ambiguously like real work experience, and then you can hopefully pass recruiters screens as an experienced engineer if they don't look too much into the details.
Rarely do the difficulty of programming questions get harder with levels. It's more common to look at the scope of responsibility in your past experience.
At Facebook and Google your level is ENTIRELY based on the scope of experience of your previous work experience, how large the projects you managed are, how many users you built products for etc... You get a mid-level role if you've independently owned large features end to end for tens of millions to hundreds of millions of users.
Capital One's "Senior Associate SWE" is equivalent to the Google entry level L3 and Facebook entry level E3.
"Principal Associate" is more like Google mid level L4 and Facebook mid level E4.
The bar is higher but Capital One doesn't evaluate people like top tier companies do, they are a little more recall and study based.
Capital One right now has a super broken process that Codesmith alumni are exploiting so try running with it while you can! We've had Codesmith grads be honest about their experience and not pass the recruiter screen for ANY role there, and others who do what Codesmith told them to say who get these interviews... but each person does their own thing.
I would just be careful about over-leveling if you have no experience and are interviewed for this role. In the current economy low performers at higher levels who are overpaid go first in layoffs.
Having worked with a bunch of people from many bootcamps, everyone puts it on their resume in some capacity except Codesmith alumni being the anomaly where almost no one puts it on their resume.
I'm bias but I would self-teach and then do Formation :) but that's because even though I have a degree, it was a broad engineering degree and I self taught myself web programming and started a web-based company in college that forced me to self-teach with real users.
Bloomtech's results were not great unfortunately :( I don't want to judge but by moving to the flex, much fewer people graduate now.
58% of full stack web people "graduated" and 90% of them got jobs.
They used to have 75% of people graduate with 75% job placement.
So of the people that sign on day one, it remains to be about 50% of them getting jobs at the end within 6 months of graduating.
The median salaries haven't changed much.
Leif administers income share agreements and other deferred payment options on behalf of schools, bootcamps, and other training programs.
They operate on behalf of programs though so they don't have much skin in the game themselves. They are kind of like Visa or MasterCard for deferred payments and they take a processing fee for each payment. Leifs job is to check your salary and income and facilitate your deferred payments after you finish a program.
Behind the scenes they often also offer loans to programs to pay for their teaching costs because you need money to pay for instruction if someone is deferring their payments far into the future. But this doesn't really impact the student side.
There aren't any program bootcamps that cover theory sufficiently with your Computer Science hat on.
Some programs, like Hack Reactor and Codesmith spend a week or two on DS&A, and both have ongoing DS&A practice. But it's firehose-style crammed in DS&A focused on passing interviews, not DS&A to learn fundamental patterns and ways of thinking about how computers work.
If you've already done a course, then you'll find even at these bootcamps, 90% of your time will be doing practical work and then the DS&A you do will be you helping the more junior people that don't know the basics.
What are your goals? If you want to get a top tier CS job, then I would consider Formation (disclosure: co-founder), Outco, Interview Kickstart, Coachable, and other "career accelerators" as they are designed possibly more for your case. If you feel you need a lot of practical skills too, and you just want…
If the program has 25 students for an instructor and the program is 1 year long. That means you are making $25,000 to pay an instructor to teach for a year assuming all the other costs in running the non profit are handled by the founders. Unless you have donations, or this person is not very good, or this person is located somewhere else where that is a good salary than something doesn't add up.
Why are they doing it for so cheap specifically?
I'm from Canada originally and I actually kind of understand the social motivations more and the United States is so much different culture. Sometimes things can cost more because they are better and more effective and they actually help people more. You mentioned your past cohorts were fully refunded because of bad experiences, so it's a little risky that someone will do the course for $1,000 and get a good job and they're going to spend three four five months on this. They might actually be better off spending $50,000 on something that is a guaranteed to get them a hundred thousand dollar fang job (no program exists but hypothetically).
So saying it's so cheap to help the students is not necessarily convincing that this is the right way to do it.
I'm trying to help y'all because a lot of people have been suspicious of this program and…
I think it would help if you explain why though. Why are you so passionate about this? Why don't you become professional soccer players, or build a rocket to Mars? Why are the founders so passionate about disrupting the bootcamp market more than the ones above for example? Leon at 100Devs has the same mission and offers a free program entirely to hundreds of people, so why are you more passionate than him?
For example, a staff engineer at Google is paid over $500K. If I believe that students need more teaching from someone of this level to become good, then I might need to charge MORE to help the students more so that I can pay this person to teach them. So more details on the passion will help explain the mission you have.
I suspect they were overwhelmed with applications and trying to figure out what to do to filter them fairly as almost all bootcamp resumes look the same unfortunately.
Can you explain more about your mission? Why are the founders so passionate about disrupting the bootcamp market? For example, do they have personal stories or experiences or reasons why?
For example, the CEO of Launch School is extremely passionate about self service mastery based learning at a lower cost. The CEO of Nucamp believes most raw content is online already and wants to make an affordable program to guide people through it with some help. Leon at 100Devs believes that content should be free and the system is broken and wants to help people get any kind of real world experience as fast as possible through hustling to try to standout to get job so he does it entirely for free.
What drives the founders to offer such a cheap program for $1K that would normally cost $10 to $20K?
I've worked with several 42 alumni, and their former operations manager worked at Formation after leaving 42.
The long story short is having a free school with free housing doesn't really work here and people take advantage of it for all kinds of reasons, from homeless people, to non-work authorized people, etc... At the same time, they were extremely low-staffed in person, as their platform was all online, even though the physical campus and dorms were in-person. So people would show up and sit at the computer doing online work all day, where they didn't really need to be there.
So you have these really hard operation challenges of running an in person school with in person dorms, with extremely low staff, and add the fact that it's free and people from all over are trying to exploit that.... makes it really hard to maintain.
It think all the people I worked with at Formation (and pr…
1. This is unrelated, but the variable names have inconsistent capitalization, underscores, and inconsistent use of ID, id, Id, etc... is very confusing and a flag if I were looking at this.
2. Performance of SQL when you have millions of rows will depend a lot on the indexing you setup and schema.
I don't know their day to day enough to comment. From a company-level, they are owned by Stride now (which also owns Hack Reactor via K12 via Galvanize - but I don't think the operations are affiliated in any way). They focus on markets that traditionally have fewer engineers historically but more diverse demographics than the traditional big tech hubs. So I think they specialize in helping people from areas where software engineering isn't as common a path, get into it and get a decent job, which is why their salary data is a lot lower than other places that focus on getting people into traditional big tech jobs.
Coraline gave an amazing answer above/below as well.
People learn differently and at different paces. Bootcamps give you a fixed curriculum "firehose"-style on their accelerated schedule. So it's really not reasonable to expect yourself to absorb everything.
I also agree with Coraline that you (and anyone reading this) should expect to take some time after graduating to fill in gaps, continue projects, find your areas of passion to double down on, etc...
Launch School is one program that calls themselves the "slow way" to learn. The completely opposite of bootcamps is "mastery based learning", where you do the same topic over and over until you "master" it, and then move on, and then you finish the curriculum at your own pace. BloomTech is also moving in this direction of mastery based learning at your pace. Formation (disclosure: co-founder) isn't a bootcamp but we have a hybrid of…
There are a lot of paths, but I help people specifically prepare for FAANG level jobs and interviews now as my job and it's a heck of a lot more than grinding Leetcode. You can get your odds up to decent numbers by solving hundreds of Leetcode problems but you can have higher odds if you practice 1. deeply understanding concepts and bolstering your toolbelt. 2. actually practicing interviews and technical communication.
1. is being an expert with simple tools so that you can get a heck of a lot done with them. You want to be the veteran contractor who can get a lot done with an old rusy hammer and drill rather than the DIY person who buys a full suite of power tools to hang a photo.
2. ia about passing interviews even when you don't know the question. You don't want to pass 4 out of 5 interviews and lose an offer because of failing the 5th. Even of you dont do well, you want enough par…
Sure,
Silicon Valley: I'm from Canada originally and working at Facebook or Google was some kind of unbelievable idea at the time. Silicon Valley has a different vibe to it. One where almost everyone is involved in technology. Once you get behind the curtain, you see all of the many paths and options you didn't know existed. It's maybe similar to a small town actor dreaming of Hollywood and finally getting a really good acting gig.Then they realize there is a whole world of blockbusters, independent movies, tv, movies, reality tv, etc... and you are now introduced to all these paths you didn't fully understand before. I could write an essay on this.
Riot: he was there for 10 years and is now at a different gaming company. He really loved LoL and contributed a lot to the game and it was really fun and rewarding for him. I couldn't imagine any other job would have served him better.
I don't have a list no because it highly depends on a person, their goals, and what type of day to day learning works for them.
I wouldn't give a green light to even the best bootcamps for some people.
In fact, a bootcamp like Codesmith with a super high bar, is actually a very BAD CHOICE for someone who is genuinely not at the bar. If you aren't at the bar, you shouldn't be trying to get in at all costs, because it just won't work.