Hey, fewer than Codesmith, can't generalize any patterns other than they have all been similarly hard working, professional, collaborative people and their outcomes at Formation were no different (not statistically significant, but qualitatively).
I actually spend like 5 to 10 mins a day connecting with \~20 bootcamp grads on LinkedIn from all different programs, as my network is super Facebook-heavy and I want to connect more with junior devs and see what they talk/care about (also why I'm here haha). Despite Codesmith's reputation, HackReactor has quite a plethora of alumni who down the road end up a top tier companies. Granted they are larger than others, but many more than Codesmith. I have a strong stance that if you have the life circumstances to do so, you want the RIGHT job out of a bootcamp to kickstart your career in the right direction, not the HIGHEST PAYING job, so you shou…
Absolutely possible! Codesmith is an interesting one because they are very proud of results and their bar to entry, but it's not as high as it sounds (don't get me wrong, it's high!) but if you start from 0, study really hard and have a little bit of natural inclination towards the concepts, you can get in and do well.
I would try to reach out to some of the Codesmith alumni on LinkedIn too that maybe have similar background to yourself. Reddit is a bit of a crazy place and real people via LinkedIn are fairly approachable!
So I think education-wise Hackbright's teaching and curriculum as it stands today in 2022, isn't that great, it's fine, but not one of the best of the best. However, the tech industry remains fairly man-dominated (75% - 25%) and some people who have done Hackbright have found it easier to learn in a more gender-supportive environment. The industry is changing and I absolutely don't want to stereotype, but from my experienced I can totally understand this perspective for many people as a big reason to join a program despite the quality of education.
Another option to consider if I was considering Hackbright, would be Ada Academy, which has been building more momentum lately. They have a guaranteed internship at the end which can help you get a job more effectively. Hackbright alumni have done well as they've progressed in their careers and the network is also strong and supportive, but A…
I have the same questions and the distributions based on experience, but I can give objective answers to some of those other questions.
1. 120K is the median, not the average, so it doesn't mean you are likely to get this salary. It means of all the people who join there is a 50/50 shot making over 120K and a 50/50 shot making under 120K. But it's more important to narrow it down by people of a certain background. Like I know at Formation, the average first year TC for people with 0 experience is $134K and for 1 - 2 years is $181K, so I have to hypothesize that people with less experience are on the lower end, but need data to test that.
2. The Codesmith numbers in CIRR do not include any kind of options, bonuses, etc... they are just base salary. This is a criticism of CIRR, but it's also very hard to compute TC fairly. At Formation, we EXCLUDE all TC that is not objectively measurabl…
I genuinely try to be middle road and explain my sources, and be a good custodian. I worked at Facebook for 8 years and I know how easy it is for misinformation to spiral like crazy and I'm very sensitive to trying to be middle road.
I like Derek's sense of humor and I also think people are people are also incorrect that you came out of nowhere with this post as PE's and Derek comment frequently on topics in here all the time. And I don't think those attacks are fair.
I wish all the people that said incorrect things about me were this responsive in editing and trying to share fair information when there was a disagreement :D
I personally talk about Formation all the time on here and also agree with your points that people can just choose to ignore the top level post if they want and don't think the post itself is a problem IMO. As long as the rules are the same for everyone I don't have any problems.
I think there's a maybe a slight problem if ~~a member of the~~ EDIT: an employee of school is a moderator of the forum as is the case. I also find it crazy that everyone talks about Codesmith and Rithm here and like 10% of current Codesmith students are on Reddit talking about it haha and it comes across like there are no other options out there. But if you are close to your next cohort deadline and the moderator ~~starts shutting down Codesmith threads~~ (EDIT: mod explained they were trying to help and not shut down conversation) ( [https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/x7sx97/lets\_hear\_it\_fro…
I know someone who made the switch from FAANG recruiter to engineer. I can ping them to see if they want to chat with you.
I disagree with others here that your comp will drop that much. You are probably already in a big city and you it's likely you can get a smaller company or startup job making \~$120K base and get back to FAANG in a few years.
One of the problems with imposter syndrome is that some people actually aren’t skilled enough because they are genuinely in over their heads and use it as an excuse for their performance. Don’t get me wrong, many people have real imposter syndrome but a program shouldn’t be telling all of its students they have it and that’s why they feel stressed. People learn at different paces and in different ways and you shouldn’t use it as an excuse for a program that isn’t teaching you the most effectively for you.
I was confused when I learned Redux a couple of years ago, and that was 8 years after being the highest output engineer at Facebook :P so I would agree to spend zero time on it haha
It depends on the terms of the ISA. You should try to compute the range of outcomes you will pay and see if it's worth deferring payments over getting a loan, which might be less upfront but require payments right away.
Don't look at an ISA with a job guarantee like you have nothing to lose and look at it as an amount of money that you expect to pay, but that you get to defer it to the future. There are almost always fine print that make you have to pay something if you end up without a job at the end.
Hey, you mentioned "most people entering had little to minimal experience ever making a website or using an ide"
I was under the impression that "a third" of Codesmith students have past experience, a CS degree, or relevant tangential experience, as Philip Troutman said in a video on Course Report's YouTube channel.
Would you agree with the rough "a third"? If I had work experience and was working alongside people who had never used an IDE, that doesn't seem like the right fit.
Based on their info sessions, they want you to take the prep courses to see what Codesmith is like and if it's a good fit for you. Knowing you aren't a good fit at the CSPrep level, helps keep their bar for immersive high and their outcomes high.
I agree with your reflection that you might have been better off starting another program sooner. It's great that Codesmith is hard to get into and waitlisted, but it means that you spend months preparing, 2 months waiting for your start date once you get in, and then months job hunting at the end. A lot of people would be better off starting sooner at another program, getting a foot in the door job doing anything programming related, and then working towards leveling up to a better job. (Disclosure: co-founder of Formation.dev and we help a lot of bootcamp grads make that second jump, so I'm bias in this opinion).
The biggest problem with th…
Who is going to write the software to make no-code work? :D
I learned how hard it is to build product from my Facebook days, and It's going to take a lot of engineering work to build, maintain, improve no-code tools.
I think this will take a self-driving-car path. There will be a few examples of full automated no-code solutions that are successful under specific circumstance (ex. Cruise, WayMo) but a lot of the benefit of no-code will be taking pieces of no-code tools and thinking and enhancing the current coding experience.
I used to code in Vim with no tools and was the highest output engineer at Facebook. Now I use Visual Studio which is like using the "lane assist" feature on my car. I'm driving, but it helps keep me between the lanes. Maybe in the future I'll be inputting my ideas in thoughts, or words for really small pieces of code, and the tools will produce the actual code ba…
Exciting! Apply early and be creative. Look for internships and apprenticeships, and contract jobs to get your foot in the door.
The job market is more competitive right now, but there are a still a ton of jobs and graduates from top bootcamps should be able to find something.
Codesmiths curriculum spends about a week or two on CS fundamentals and then has practice for the rest of the time while doing intense project work.
I also agree it’s not a single bar for what is “cs fundamentals” and that is not meant to gatekeep. Everyone learns and progresses differently.
My point restated is that interviews don’t ask these questions to gatekeep but they are testing understanding of the broad abstractions that all coding is based on. The best way to do well in these interviews is to understand those fundamental abstractions and patterns incredibly well instead of understanding minimally and practicing intensely. Don’t get me wrong, part of understanding intensely IS practice. But it’s practice for the sake of understanding, not practice for the sake of trying to pass an interview if that makes sense.
An example is someone might solve a LC medium problem and techn…
Absolutely. There are many SWEs of all shapes and sizes, strengths and weaknesses. We need way more diversity in backgrounds and personalities in tech. I worked at Facebook for 8 years and saw firsthand how we need more points of view at the table when building products for all.
Hi, disclosure, I’m the co-founder of Formation.dev, which isn’t a bootcamp but a career accelerator focused on practice and feedback and not on lecturing/teaching.
I believe data structures and algos are extremely important but not just to practice them because they are interview questions. A lot of Codesmith alumni I work with are able to solve problems but lacking a bit in the underlying fundamental concepts.
If you believe DSA are important to you for interviews, learning CS fundamentals for months (not a week) and applying them to DSA is the way to go, rather than whack a mole trying to just solve problems for the sake of solving interview problems.
I saw you added the median thing or maybe I missed but this is my views on that. If I’m Codesmith I would very justifiably be marketing like you are saying, but to have students personally insult me about trying to steal Codesmith students
and tell me the “average” Codesmith student makes 120K and it is the best with nothing close is not looking at the data critically. Averages, medians are different things. Data excludes stock and bonuses, etc… It is not a factual statement to say that. Dancing, you are super reasonable on here so this message is meant for the others haha.
https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/x44mov/how_legit_are_codesmiths_stat/imtfku9
Yeah to be clear, this isn’t really talking about Codesmith so much as people who are fighting tooth and nail with me that Codesmith is the the “best bootcamp” because of CIRR and any data that’s not from CIRR is not to be trusted.
I think i just fall victim to engaging with trolls because most people are a lot more reasonable…
cc u/InTheDarkDancing, I commented on this today elsewhere and adding here for consistency.
I also appreciate the blog post explaining how Codesmith supports CIRR. I don't have a problem with Codesmith's position on CIRR, but what I have a problem with is people blindly supporting Codesmith as the "best bootcamp" because of their CIRR outcomes and regurgitating their marketing as unwavering fact. These are smart people, who want six figures jobs levering their problem solving and critical thinking abilities and regurgitating marketing without thinking critically about it is not demonstrating that ability.
Codesmith directly comments about how important equity and bonuses are in compensation. Yet they continue to market their CIRR results (which explicitly only include base salary and exclude stock and bonuses) solely as a marketing strategy to make a claim they are better than other b…
Yeah if someone starts, as long as they have the intention of job hunting after, they are included in the report and impact the graduation rate. The placements rates and medians are all based on the number GRADUATED and not the original number who started. Finally, if someone is unresponsive to CIRR requests but they can confirm they got a job, they person is included in the "placed" count but not in the salary counts. So the way CIRR is designed is it tries really hard to make sure the salary stats are only counting successful people and have the highest medians possible.
This doesn't change the fact that Codesmith has very strong outcomes, but their outcomes don't include equity and bonuses and hence are somewhat meaningless, other than as a marketing tool. They are well aware how important equity is in outcomes and would make their outcomes even better but they support and promote CI…
Sorry maybe I misunderstood. If you have a current computer and you are considering renting a Mac to get through the bootcamp, then I would just use your current computer. If you don't have a computer at all I would get the cheapest computer you can get. Maybe a fairly old used Macbook Air for example for $250 or so.
Read my comment here from this morning: [https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/x44mov/comment/imtfku9/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/x44mov/comment/imtfku9/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
If you don't have experience, then it's more important to break apart where their outcomes come from more than the flashy median numbers.
I expect their H2 2021 results to be slightly higher than H1 2021. Salaries have continued to go up across the industry, as has inflation, and if they are not higher that would be concerning haha.
CIRR H2 2021 is out! [Discussion Thread] Same schools as H1
[https://cirr.org/data](https://cirr.org/data)
No new schools added, so same ones: Hacktiv8 (Indonesia), Juno (Canada), Launch Academy, Tech Elevator.
Codesmith and Turing are missing, but I'm sure will show up soon.
Feel free to comment in this thread to discuss! I'm busy but will add edits later!
1 minute glance looks like Tech Elevator and Launch Academy's results all improved for placements and salaries. End of 2021 was certainly a faster hiring period from my observations as well.
Stats are real but there's more to the stats. For example, CIRR doesn't include equity and bonuses which means the numbers are actually only equal to or HIGHER than in the reports.
The key thing here is "median", i.e. the 50th percentile.
20% of people make under $110K and 20% of people make over $140K.
An “average" is most useful when you have a normal distribution and this data certainly is not. A “median”, which is used often for data sets to remove the influence of outliers, is, but it loses a lot of information in the calculating. Let’s say one bootcamp has 3 alumni with salaries 0, 100, 200, and the other 100, 100, 100. Same median, same average, completely different stories.
Which is why you have have to look at the outcomes for people who are starting with a background like yourself.
It's very likely that people with zero experience and a few months of CSX before joining a…
I can add some info about Formation.dev (disclosure co-founder, not bootcamp, not an option for people with no experience). Each Fellow has a continuous conversation in their private job hunting channel containing 5+ team members. Each Fellow has a dedicated human (their Fellow Manager) to talk to and who checks in with you constantly. You have career team members who are constantly trying to find you opportunities for referrals at good companies. You also have ongoing continuous scheduled training and practice that never ends to you keep getting stronger and stronger as you job hunt.
This isn't the right forum as we compete with Interview Kickstart, Pathrise, and Outco, so apples to oranges. I'm commenting this because just because the bar for bootcamps is so low that even if the above commenter's story sounds like strong support, there is a bar 100X beyond that that exists if you look…
The summer isn't slow no... there are a lot of hiring freezes right now that are reducing the number of options but it certainly isn't slow anymore than the fall, especially since COVID turned everything upside down, and you should be interviewing regularly, even if some of them aren't your top choices.
If a programs costs $20K for 12 weeks, which is a college quarter, it’s like paying $60K a year in base tuition at a college alone… which is more than Harvard.
I can give my 2 cents on this. Most bootcamps are better off getting paid 'upfront' than deferring payments and they don't really care what fees or interest you pay (as long as they don't recommend someone that is really bad operationally that would worsen your experience). So there isn't much difference in personal loan versus a partner loan. The reason the partner loans exist is 1. the company knows the bootcamp and can factor in past performance of students in the terms they give you. 2. you usually can't defer a personal loan, other than real student loans, and some partners will let you defer payments until after the bootcamp, again because they can evaluate the outcomes transparently.
So TLDR: use whatever payment method works for you. Partners aren't necessarily better and not necessarily a scam.
I think the founders have good intentions and do pretty good research in their posts, but I wish they were more transparent about how they make money (which I couldn't find anywhere on their website). The best digging from LinkedIn profiles of their team makes it appear that they make money from sponsorships and "lead gen" (i.e. sending students to bootcamps via "matching"). But given the high quality of their reports, I wish they made it more clear what was sponsored and what wasn't. For all I know, that great video with a bootcamp leader the bootcamp look awesome was paid for.
Regardless of how they make money, they have an interest in bootcamps succeeding (and or painting them more positively) to justify the existing of their website so there is some bias there to account for.
Hi, I'm the co-founder of a competitor to Interview Kickstart, called Formation.dev, so obviously I'm extremely biased but if you are looking at them, you should also look at us, Outco, Scaler Academy and Pathrise.
I can talk about this bucket of program more generally and where these companies fit in the bucket because I don't like talking directly about competitors on here. You should talk to people 1-1 who did a program to get their sense of the day to day and if would be a good fit for you.
So this bucket is generally called "career accelerators" rather than schools or bootcamps. The programs don't really focus on being the world's more brilliant lecturers on underlying concepts but they focus on training and practice to prepare for real interviews and jobs. They tend to leverage their staff and mentors practical experience to get feedback from the people you aspire to work with.…
So if you aren't aiming for top tier companies with heavy DS&A interviews, and you don't have any internship experience, then I would consider a bootcamp or career accelerator. If you did a lot of DS&A in school, have an internship or two and want a leg up in the competitive environment, then definitely career accelerator and not a bootcamp.
It depends on which school you went to and what experience you had (i.e. internships) and what your goals are. If you have very strong fundamentals and are having a hard time getting interviews because of a lack of interviews and you want to work at a non-tech centered company (e.g. an agency or maybe a bank), Codesmith could be useful but purely as a job hunting strategy because you'll add this OSP project to your resume that's branded as professional experience in order to help you get past resume screens (this is fairly controversial with people on both sides of the ethics of it, but it works). If you did a CS degree, the project is the size and scope of a semester long 4 person group project, however many alumni market it like they worked at a company for a year, and that helps you get initial interviews and sometimes even mid-level roles at 3rd tier companies.
The alumni connection…
Yes but when people search for Formation on Reddit they find your top level comment and ask me what your problem is with Formation. The comment is so utterly false and damaging to the company, and hence defamatory. You might not see the damage from calling a company "predatory" but it's why I have to continuously comment on this thread when it comes up.
It's not personal, I would love to help give you personally advice in your job hunt and you seem like a nice person, but I also have to defend the company from trolling and anonymous baseless attacks and those two things are separate.
To add to this. At Switchup.org, the ["Write a Review"](https://www.switchup.org/write-review) page says I can win one of six Amazon Gift Cards for submitting a review, but it's said the exact thing since JANUARY 2020: [https://web.archive.org/web/20200109162505/https://www.switchup.org/write-review](https://web.archive.org/web/20200109162505/https://www.switchup.org/write-review) and every snapshot since then still has 6 gift cards available.
Apparently no one has won them, or they perpetually refresh the gift card pool and you have a random chance of winning, and then they just refresh the pool again.
Second, the ["Complete our additional 10 minute outcomes survey to be entered to win a $500 Amazon Gift Card!"](https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/YMTFNWK)
It's from 2020. So are they still collecting data the rigorous survey data for 2020? And who won this gift card?
Finally, the copyrig…
I haven't heard of them before but I can walk through how I would look into a program you are unfamiliar with. This is information gathering, not about making judgements each step of the way.
1. Who runs the program/owns it/and why did they make this program? It doesn't matter if it's for-profit/non-profit more so than the reasons it exists. A good start here is to try to find the corporation/company's legal name. If you can't find it, that's not a good sign. You can usually find out quickly if the legal owner is a startup, a giant company, an individual person, etc... and helps paint a picture of where it's coming from. Giant company !== bad, just painting the picture. Often times you can find this on the Terms and Conditions page or Privacy Policy on their website.
2. Google '<program name> scam'. Now any kind of big program probably has some disgruntled former people who claim it's a…
No, I think it takes time to see if you like programming or not and what aspects you like. Some people like theory and some poeple like building. Very different things.
Hi,
1. I actually started programming very young. In elementary school I did a LEGO Mindstorms robotics club without even realizing years later that I was doing programming. I also found computers in the garbage on junk day and found very old random programming books and used them to to learn C++, which make no sense but gosh I tried. Oddly enough I went to college for general engineering, and thought I might do physics or nano engineering, and was just naturally drawn to web programming and building things in software.
2. Yeah never too late! It sounds like you want to take baby steps first and get a stable decent foot in the door job first, but everyone has their own journey!