Yeah CIRR does two things:
1. Sets a standard and set of rules and definitions everyone agrees to follow
2. Requires reports to get audited
CIRR is a business league, founded by SkillsFund (now Ascend) and supported by a Course Report.
The results themselves are meant to have high integrity and I trust the numbers. BUT it doesn't mean the whole process and the rules don't have biases in them.
CIRR represents the bootcamp industry, it's a business league with the charter of supporting the industry the members are in. So it's in CIRR's interest for bootcamps to succeed, it's in Ascend's interest for bootcamps to succeed and for students to get loans from them. It's in Course Reports interest for bootcamps to succeed and get page views on their review website and higher valued sponsorships, it's bootcamps interest because more enrollments = more business.
People reading my comments: C…
No bootcamp teaches the level of fundamentals above and I can go into extensive detail how no bootcamp I know of (including Codesmith) teaches these concepts from a fundamentals approach despite what they might say. There is one kind of bootcamp-like program for senior engineers that actually does have like 4 week units on these topics taught but industry legends in those areas but I don't know if they are still operating.
Most bootcamps teach the "what" and some bootcamps go deeper to the "how" (e.g. HOW does the event loop work in Javascript). The CS fundamentals above are on the "why" - why is the abstract theoretical patterns/reasoning that get applied to real situations.
For example. A bootcamp might teach you what SQL is and the basic syntax of some queries. Going one level deeper, one might teach you how relational databases work in general. Fundamentals approach teach you set…
You can look at [Formation.dev](https://Formation.dev) (disclosure, I'm a co-founder). We aren't a bootcamp and we don't explicitly teach classes... we're more like a personal trainer to work with you on your fundamentals and get you in good shape. We have a pretty strict/high bar to make sure people are ready to work on the fundamentals as a pathway to a top tier job and aren't there for the wrong reasons.
And yes, we pay our engineers FAANG-level/top tier compensation and try to attract the top talent mentors in the industry, so that's a good point about having good mentorship and it does cost a lot.
I have zero affiliation with Codesmith. This subreddit is really Codesmith heavy so the topic comes up on a daily basis disproportionately more than any program for it's size. As one of the top program, this makes sense I think. I'll explain the context for why I know so much about Codesmith in particular after given broader context for others reading... how I know so much about Codesmith is an interesting story though!
My story: I worked at Facebook in California from 2009 to 2017, straight out of school from Canada all the way to E7 principal engineer in 5 years. Company grew from about 200 engineers to 10,000 engineers and I did a ton of interviews, helped grow people's careers and really saw pretty much people of every background imaginable at/interview at Facebook... so after leaving, took a break and then helped start Formation ([formation.dev](https://formation.dev)) to help peop…
I think the OP is referring to the fact that if you lookup students by those projects to "find them on LinkedIn" (because otherwise it would be hard to find them) that a significant amount of people have no new job after the open source projects. I've also found this the time a few months ago when I audited 200 graduates and the percentage with jobs was low (it's REALLY hard to get start dates for people because people tend to ambiguously list the start as "2021" or "2022" rather than the exact months so I assume most of the people I looked at that appeared to have 6+ months of experience were current students). I've also seen some people entirely scrub their LinkedIn after getting a job and removing all those projects so that makes it further harder.
I think the answer to this is to look at CIRR and trust the graduations rates and placement rates! Look carefully at what the numbers mea…
Yeah time will tell and hopefully it serves a need not served with remote! A lot will depend on the execution of the actual program too and it hasn't even started yet!
Sorry to hear about your experiences. I wanted to add some thoughts at the industry level, not to support or attack the post or to defend app academy but just some thoughts comparing them to the industry because I feel like several complaints are industry wide complaints as well.
- The gender ratio in tech sucks. At FAANG it's about 25% female and non-binary.
- Top bootcamps with super long hours make this so much worse and are really non inclusive. HR and Codesmith have 11 hour days. How can a parent not find that intimidating? How can someone living paycheck to paycheck afford to not have any other time to work? They appeal to unattached, ambitious people who have the savings to do them, or people who otherwise have the supportive life circumstances to do it. And this unfortunately is not a represetative bunch of our society.
- A lot of bootcamps that are operated as schools seem to h…
I have worked with several fellows post Codesmith. Corrections are more than welcome!
Some notes:
- The pay is $1K per week as of a few months ago.
- It's a W2 job direct with the company and not a 1099 contractor role. They have fellows in many states, so not sure if all are W2.
- It's 3 months long but some people extend and stay on full time as an instructor and get paid a median engineer salary.
- You can leave if you get a job, but most people expect to stay for the full 3 months.
- You do a lot day to day. Some people have been surprised by the large workload, others have said it's not that large of a workload. The most extreme was "you barely have time to sleep" and the least extreme was "it's a lot of work but you have a lot of down time to apply for jobs and take care of yourself".
- You do: grading, 1-1 tutoring, mock interviews, interviews with prospectives, live support. M…
Yeah it's a good point that with COVID we've forgotten the intensity of the commute in addition to already long hours. Their in-person cohort had applications opened beyond the deadline so I suspect many people feel this way too.
I'm concerned the staff will want to go in person too. I help run Formation and it's been a blessing we can hire some incredibly talented people across the country to help make Formation awesome. And if we were limited to just San Francisco, it would be very hard to find such amazing people in a smaller pool who also wants to commute every day. Very curious if they end of going hybrid with their staff, while requiring students to be in the office 11 hours a a day. At the end of the day the staff are key... you aren't paying $20K to work with some friends through some online materials.
But they leased a nice office in Manhattan (the most expensive real estate…
Another in-between is to attend various free programs that bootcamps offer (Codesmith has a lot, App Academy has Open, Hack Reactor has a prep course). Sure, they are all a little sales-y, but you'll start figuring out what programs seem like a good fit, and which don't
Ping alumni and ask! You ideally want to learn about the experiences of people who had a similar background to you and how they felt about the program.
It's really hard to trust any kind of "ratings" overall.
Course Report is a supporting member of CIRR and accepts sponsorships from bootcamps.
SwitchUp has a disclosure that they get paid by bootcamps that they send people to.
Career Karma gets paid by bootcamps to send people there and has sponsorships.
CIRR itself is founded by a bootcamp loan company and supported by a bootcamp review company (Course Report).
Reddit is full of anecdotal experiences from anonymous people without much context.
And bootcamps do all kinds of tactics to encourage positive reviews and discourage negative ones. In fact all businesses do.... like I saw at a bank even: "If we weren't a 10, talk to a manager first to work out any issues you had with your…
200 people though on a Discord of 40K with 5K online poeple is not crazy successful by bootcamp standards. But it's extremely impressive for a free program. Which is why in my comment I say how unique a community it is right now.
I've seen you around a lot, do you have any corrections on any of the things I've said? Or in the future, let me know too.
I've had a few people (3) message me about halfway through Codesmith telling me that my analysis is shockingly accurate and that I seem to understand the workings of the program at a deeper level.
Not saying this to brag, but to say that I really do take pride in trying to be accurate in what I say, so appreciate any corrections!
Yeah! There are a TON of interesting ed-tech companies, Guild, MasterClass, Coursera, Duolingo, just immediately come to mind.
I would look for paths there.
Also, roles at bigger companies leveraging that experience. Like Facebook has a team working on employee education software internally. You might be good for that team. At Facebook you interview generically, so this doesn't work there, but at many companies, finding the right team to approach can help.
Agreed, I don't recommend BloomTech at all, I'll edit this to be clearer. My point though is to basically re-examine their recent program instead of judging from their past. The conclusion might be that it's even WORSE lol 🤷♂️
Some companies are freezing, but at Formation we're seeing people get hired and interviewing at dozens of top tier companies, so while some of the bigger names are frozen, most are not.
There is more of a shift to experienced engineers, and less risk taking with no-experience people (I've heard from students that are recent grads from Codesmith for example that they are having a harder time getting interviews than students in the past for those with no experience, but the people with experience are getting interviews and strong offers still). At Formation, we are also seeing a bit of a shift. For example, a company might interview someone for senior and they didn't meet the bar, but in the past they would down level to mid-level and now they are just not making an offer at all. So a slight "tightening" rather than full blown freezes.
On the no-experience side, at Formation we're surp…
BloomTech has undergone some serious changes in the past year or so. It's largely self paced now. You work through curriculum on your own, ask for help when you need it, attend classes when you want - as fast or slow paced as you want. I'm not sure how they handle accountability, but presumably someone is nudging you along. But it might not be ideal if you don't like "learning at your own pace".
I'm sure some people on here will say BloomTech is Lambda School, look at the lawsuits, etc... etc... but they have undergone some major changes and I think their past problems have been the result of their CEO being a natural growth-hacker who grew things way too fast and has since rebuilt a lot of things. That said, they still don't have great outcomes yet.
EDIT: Making it clear, I am not endorsing BloomTech but saying that you should re-evaluate from scratch and not make conclusions based on…
I don't know them personally, I can't remember if Sophie did back when. So Bradfield is basically two qualified, solid engineers who teach people and they are very small (which is likely a good thing). I think it's only once or twice a year so if you are going to plan your life around their timeline, I would talk to one of the two instructors now and see if it's good for you, and then make that plan. You'll want to have a good rapport with them to move forward.
One minor thing I noted in the past and has not changed, is their website is a little sketchy, in that they call themselves a "School of Computer Science" but don't even have a terms of service or privacy policy, address, any kind of little details that most legit services have. This isn't a giant flag though because I feel like it's just two really solid engineers teaching people out of a passion, so don't get distracted by the…
I agree with most of this, but one additional point is that people who are doing 100Devs are likely on the lower experience end of the spectrum so comparing them to the zero experience Codesmith outcomes would be more fair in the thought experiment.
If someone makes $105K and it takes them 6 months to get a job and they had to wait 3 months to start Codesmith (which seems to be the time you have to apply), i.e. 12 months total.
I would say the fair comparison would be 100Devs to CSX if CSX were to have a full bootcamp curriculum, but they are still very different. I've been following 100Devs since fairly early on and haven't talked about them much because it's a quite unique offering.
Disclaimer: personal opinions based on observations. I don't know Will Sentance or Leon personally to know their long term ambitions with their programs and am commenting on what I see today.
SIMILARITIES:
* Like any teaching style, Leon has a unique teaching style and it works for a lot of people. Will Sentance has a unique style that works for a lot of people. You can't argue objectively what is better and I don't want to start an academic argument about pedagogy. Objectively, 100Devs is certainly at least comparable to another complete online web-dev course and could be better depending on you.
* Very loyal community. Both c…
Which sentiments are misleading are why? Sorry for pushing you so much, it's not personal, but just because someone yells loudly "this is misleading", "this is fake", "this is misinformation" it doesn't make it so, and yelling more and more loudly doesn't make that more and more true.
It would be more useful for everyone to go through point by point, provide evidence, provide sources, challenge me and ask me what my sources are and why, etc... I'm very open to debating details of anything you think is misleading and we could have a great discussion about that on the thread.
Sophie makes it a point to have investors and advisors that staunchly disagree with each other on our team at Formation because having productive debates and looking at things from different angles can help the team get to the best conclusions.
I'm not just Googling and declaring my feelings on here... my sources…
Also I think you asked good questions around the OSP projects! I have one criticism of the OSPs that while they are well run group projects and are fantastically done, they are really just group projects where the team breaks up things into tasks themselves, runs scrums themselves, does all the code review themselves. However, Codesmith staff call these projects the 'equivalent industry experience of a mid-level or senior software engineer', and that statement is so mind-boggling wrong I feel the need to constantly correct. They are fantastic projects for what they are, like arguably the best of many bootcamps!
P.S. I'm going to get super downvoted because I always talk about the OSPs this way and a group of Codesmith people follow me and downvote me when I do :(
Yeah +1, I think this is a really great system that is really win-win for Codesmith. It's a structured employment relationship so that the fellows don't just leave the second they get a job, which is a problem with other bootcamps that employ graduates. It's perceived as a program for solid students (like the solid ones that don't get outside jobs right away out of Codesmith) and something aspirational to do to beef up your resume before job hunting.
The downsides are that it's paid very lowly, "around $52K a year" (was the last quote), and it extends your program by 3 months (like a 12 week bootcamp turns into a 7 month program).
One of them is employed by Codesmith itself as one of 50+ graduates who are also employeed by Codesmith after they finish, and the other was also employed by Codesmith in the past.
/u/techrally: how do you feel about a conflict of interest if people reviewing a bootcamp are/were also W2 employees of said bootcamp? I'm kind of on the fence and don't necessarily think it's a problem but curious your thoughts or if you aware fellows are fully signed W2 employees and even just contractors?
This varies so much!
1. Some bootcamps rely mostly on former students and pay them way under their market rate to teach. This ends up helping those students learn while they teach though so it can be seen as kind of an extension of the bootcamp.
2. Others hire industry engineers to be mentors to help teach and answer questions part time.
3. Finally others hire full time instructors as their full time job. These people might have more of a teaching background, and some might be industry engineers.
Sadly most founders are men though :( and 2.3% of funding goes to women led startups: [https://www.forbes.com/sites/kimelsesser/2022/06/06/female-entrepreneurs-funded-by-female-vcs-face-difficulties-obtaining-future-funds/?sh=74a7d5b6a7c7](https://www.forbes.com/sites/kimelsesser/2022/06/06/female-entrepreneurs-funded-by-female-vcs-face-difficulties-obtaining-future-funds/?sh=74a7d5b6a7c7)
Yeah I think Codesmith prepares you for entry level roles very well yeah. My definition of entry level is a full-blown SWE job where, while you have support, you are an independent valuable contributor with no strings attached.
I know some people call "entry level" or "junior roles" more like training like roles, and maybe Codesmith calls "mid level" what I call "entry level"?
All I know is they said 75% of graduates get mid level roles and 20% get senior roles (note: this has been removed from their LinkedIn, not sure if they still claim this), yet only 20% of people make over $140K base. All of the mid-level roles I know about in solid tech companies have starting salaries of at least $140K base right now. So my hunch is that it's a different definition of midlevel and senior, etc...
Regardless, the short answer is yes, they prepare you very well for a legitimate role as a programme…
I wrote this up on another post, but it's not as dire as it sounds right now. As usual, it's somewhere in between.
https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/xs5mof/comment/iqj21mb/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3
No! It's probably dozens of things but that is one of them. Codesmith alumni I've worked with are very well rounded and strong, solid engineers and good at talking too, under all the right circumstances, it can be the difference between a $105K job and a $125K job though.
RE: Outcomes. Combo of all three yeah and with a fourth important factor.
1. NY + SF matters, remote salaries have been good too but this still a factor
2. Roughly "a third" (Codesmith's words) of people have prior experience such as a CS degree or industry experience. Yes this matters a lot. Especially those with prior experience.
3. Alumni network isn't so much "better" but more committed. Hack Reactors is fantastic, Hackbright's is also fantastic, but their network is very engaged. 50+ of their current employees are people who just graduated Codesmith and they have a fervent following and support from alumni that is possibly unmatched. Very helpful and caring alumni!
4. The exaggerated work experience + "just ask for "$150K" negotiation strategy. This is very effective at helping people land higher salaries. Many companies recognize Codesmith projects on resumes and put them in the…
There are definitely way more jobs than developers. The economy is very volatile so there are hiring freezes at some companies, and layoffs at others, but overall there are a lot of jobs and more engineers needed than there are engineers.
The problem is that not all engineers are the same and needs are the same. Senior engineers can have 10X, 100X impact over junior ones, but cost maybe 2-3X a junior engineer, so the demand for them is even higher. Whereas there is kind of a log-jam of bootcamp grads with very little experience, ready to contribute 1X for a reasonable salary, all vying for the same junior spots, and on paper all look the same. So it's more like a traffic jam where things aren't moving just because of too much traffic!
My advice right now for bootcamp grad (I'm bias, Formation works with a lot of Bootcamp grads) is to keep working on fundamental skills so that you can b…
Yeah you could fall into either the last or the first bucket depending on how quickly and naturally you pick up the concepts while studying to prepare. I would aim for a top bootcamp yeah as the goal. Even if you are that last bucket, a top bootcamp will still help you get a job, and you still have a decent shot at success just by getting in! If you don't fall into bucket one, then it might just take you longer to ramp up and you might need to do more semi-structured courses before the bootcamp to get there. On the other hand if you fall into the autodidactic bucket, you arguably don't even need the bootcamp, and it serves more as a benchmark of your ability, rather than a useful tool.
I'm speaking more to the other way of looking at things, like in aggregate, why some bootcamps have stronger outcomes than others. Higher bar = stronger outcomes, so if you get it, you presumably meet the…
It's not a single bootcamp, a single stack, a single pathway. That's why there are like 5 posts a day on here asking for answers and unfortunately, the questions have no simple answers.
One of the biggest factors is pre-existing skill. If you look at the top bootcamps, like Codesmith, they are also the hardest to get into. Someone I was chatting with solved Leetcode-easy problems in their interview and got rejected by Codesmith. So if you are an autodidactic person who was able to self-teach to a Leetcode-easy level and get into Codesmith, you probably are employable before going to Codesmith. Someone who has never coded before and wants to get into the industry might come to this subreddit, look for the top bootcamps, and spend months studying to get in. If they have natural talent, they might get in, they might succeed, and they might credit the success to the bootcamp, but the real d…
I wish I had time to do an AMA or something but last time I did one it went crazy and took up my whole day. I would love to share my advice for bootcamp grads job hunting right now. Maybe people can comment on here with some questions and topics and I'll try to do quick write up of thoughts targeted towards the questions? I think I'm late to the party on this thread so I don't expect anyone to see this haha.
There is hope! There are people hiring! But there are hundreds of millions of people in the country, thousands of miles apart, and wildly different experiences for everyone (which is why \~five anecdotal comments on Reddit mean absolutely nothing to make decisions off of)
My background: 8 years at Facebook, 2009-2017. Intern -> E7 principal engineer in 5 years. Interviewed \~450 people. Mentored dozens. Number 1 volume code committer of all time (and still going strong https://gith…
\+1. Formation isn't a bootcamp but I use my real name. The Rithm folks also always disclose, as does the Launch School founder. Disclosing and being transparent opens you up for attacks, but I would give a little extra credibility to those putting themselves out there :D (bias: I'm patting myself on the back here hahaha). I get attacked by a lot of new accounts out of nowhere and it's really damaging to the community.
The whole discussion about stacks is quite interesting and adds to my overall zoomed-out advice that languages and stacks are less relevant than understanding fundamental concepts and +1 to that! If you deeply understand them then you can switch between languages and frameworks... and really just everything makes more sense! I'm saying that JS alone is sufficient and others are saying that Codesmith teaches you so many different frameworks as a defensive reaction, but one framework is good enough!
Also not a good fit unfortunately :(. It takes anywhere from 1 month to 12 months but typically 4-6 months. Most people are part time at Formation though.
If you need a job ASAP and send me some of the reasons why, I can give you a few ideas of where to look though.
Unfortunately no :(, there's no guarantees in the job hunt because some amount is beyond your control. Our goal is to increase your fundamental skill level so that you can confidently go into top tier interviews with a stronger chance of passing, but it's never 100%.
There are thousands of good companies and hundreds of great companies, and some of them you might not know about! So coming in with the goal of a range of companies, or a range of levels, gives you the most room to find the best company for you. We've worked with people that have turned down offers at their "#1 company" because they received better offers from better companies for them that they didn't know about.
Not at all no! There are two paths for jobs:
1. Smaller company that is looking for existing knowledge of a specific stack. JavaScript w/React (frontend) and Node (backend) is a pretty board coverage for a lot of companies, like agencies.
2. Larger companies that are more language agnostic, because they expect to train you on their stack and frameworks - often because they are so complex and large that knowing a language might not even help much.
So by focusing on JavaScript only you are losing out on non-JS smaller companies, but for this bucket you are better off being stronger in one framework than weaker in two.
Can you elaborate? :D
I've seen a lot of people first hand, second hand, and through research, fall victim to get rich quick schemes, MLMs and cults, and I feel strongly that anecdotal success (as well as failure) stories need to be interpreted in context or you are taking a big risk trusting anonymous sources and not getting much benefit in return compared to other sources of information.
But my point of view is just my point of view so I'm curious to hear more about yours.
I'm here with my real name and my real photo for everyone to see and judge and only comment and post from this account.
I refuse to play games with fake accounts. I worked at Facebook for 8 years and I've see the kind of problems that happen with the world with fake news and all that, and I adamantly believe in being open and transparent and will challenge against any bullies who try to push me around because of it.
I have access to Formation's Reddit account for ad management and I have one new throwaway account I made to follow the accounts that block me to find trends and collect some data for the future... every single one is a Pro-Codesmith new accounts with the same patterns and might even be the same person.... we'll see what the algorithms think after collecting enough data.
I have no idea who the other people here are, even the ones claiming to be currently at Formation 🤷♂️…
Anecdotal salaries do more damage than good. You shouldn't be basing any decisions off of anonymous one-off salaries, especially when most programs publish some amount of aggregated data.
Someone at Formation got a $550K offer a few weeks ago, that doesn't mean Formation is the best for everyone or for you.
I would say we "wouldn't reject", we still have to benchmark your current skills and talk to you about your timeline and goals.
For example, we are currently focused on top tier companies, and in most cases the fundamental programming skills and being a good teammate are the only thing that matters.
One of the main reasons I'm here is because people new to the industry don't really know what they don't know, and people quickly latch on to things. I fight tooth and nail against blindly following CIRR for example because Codesmith has an employee hierarchy of 50+ former students reinforcing the importance of CIRR.
Right no professional coding experience. Some examples: civil engineer who does some data processing; finance/math background that has done some Matlab; electrical engineer that has done verilog. All of these we consider 0 YOE.
Your expectations should be an entry level SWE job, even if you are mid-level already in a different profession. Which is why the average salaries are lower for this bucket.
Really across the board in this thread, Amazon and Capital One have been skewing averages. BloomTech is also skewed by Amazon right now. With fewer people hiring, less diverse outcomes, and these two pay mostly in cash, hence high "base salaries".
I really dislike how people quote CIRR and yell at me so much on here. There's so much more nuance to outcomes than the raw numbers.
"Open Source Project". So Codesmith has 3 or 4 "personal projects" that people list as "Open Source" on their resumes and LinkedIn, and then they have the group OSP project that they typically list as "experience".
Hey! The YOE is years of software engineering work experience. So in this bucket people still typically have a related degree + experience, or a bootcamp, or self taught for \~2 years, it's not zero-zero.
We have a handful of people who truly have zero experience and are only self taught and we decided to accept them in lieu of a bootcamp... this person specifically was looking at Codesmith and went to Formation instead: [https://formation.dev/blog/fellow-spotlight-brian-do/](https://formation.dev/blog/fellow-spotlight-brian-do/) and then this person did Formation AFTER Codesmith: [https://formation.dev/blog/fellow-spotlight-chris-guizzetti/](https://formation.dev/blog/fellow-spotlight-chris-guizzetti/)
I would almost always recommend doing a bootcamp first and you are on the right track... like I said, everyone is unique and we treat you that way.
Running a platform like this is hard based on my experience. CareerKarma might be close to what you are describing, but it's for-profit and makes commissions, hence has a stake in the content.
In general, platforms require extensive maintenance (both operations, content quality, and moderation) and someone has to pay for that, even if it's with their time and not money. And if it's successful, you'll need a lot of people's time to do this. This is why most platforms and large scale systems like CourseReport, SwitchUp, CIRR, Don The Developer, all have a stake in the game so to speak in some fashion to justify the costs of operating them.
If my theory here is correct, then the best you can do is understand the biases on such platforms, or raise funding and build a new platform from scratch that you truly intend to turn into a large scale thing.
Hi, I'm sorry you feel that way and hopefully we can continue talking productively and positively. Sophie's life mission is to increase diversity in big tech because for products to work for everyone that have to be represented by everyone and Formation prides itself in having roughly 2/3 of Fellows from backgrounds underrepresented in tech.
I'm more than happy to talk about the reasons for the concerns you brought up, not to counter them, but to add more detail for those reading. Sophie, myself, and our team work constantly on making Formation the best it can be, endless conversations dissecting every detail from the ground up. So when you say we are "hawking a glorified interview prep company" you are personally insulting the thousands of hours we put into our work without a very thoughtful discussion of the pros and cons of Formation.
I'm sorry if my tone was miscommunicated but no…