This is one of the dark secrets of bootcamps. Some basically let anyone in and that means people who they shouldn’t of let in might have a bad experience and don't get a job, which lowers their outcomes on paper. So the bootcamps that are more selective have more success cases and have stronger outcomes on paper. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that the education is better or worse it’s just one factor. At Formation.dev we haven’t published these kind of outcomes because of this (like a staff engineer making $400K TC isn't really relevant for a bootcamp grad who has contracted and aiming to make $150K TC at a solid company, and aggregating these numbers into medians and averages isn't that useful imo). HackReactor is a great example of this where they are owned by a big company and have pressure to hit numbers and their outcomes for qualified people are actually really good and they ha…
People definitely fail. Codesmith prides itself in its outcomes and part of that is having a very high bar for entrance to ensure the outcomes remain high.
I think Codesmith’s responseness is good remotely fwiw, they have former student Fellows working pretty hard to help. Do you know otherwise? I only know second hand
One thing to watch out for is their CIRR remote outcomes are for their first test cohort and only contain 25 graduates (a typical cohort in person is 36). In their announcement about remote way back when, I felt it was implied they were going to be more selective for the first cohort to ensure the experience met their high bar and outcomes were high. Presumably the quality will continue or they would have stopped, but just something to note as their outcomes in the generally are partially due to having a very high bar to begin with (20% over 140K but also 20% under 110K)
The title is a overgeneralizing. Open Source projects vs Short Internship is different than Codesmith's projects vs Rithm's internships.
The one liners are that Codesmith's projects are curated learning experiences branded as work-like experience. Rithm's internships are real work, but tends to be understated on resumes, and people get hit or miss experience.
I'll do a quick Pros and Cons:
Codesmith's Open Source Projects:
PROS:
* They have optimized the heck out of talking about these projects. They look like real work on a resume, they have a lot of buzzwords, it's very effective for getting interviews.
* The projects are almost all tools, which is a great thing to work on in general because it's solving a developer problem.
CONS:
* The actual projects, people spend 6 weeks on and most people commit only a few commits over 2-3 weeks.
* Not many people use the projects outsid…
This will be super interesting to see, I'll be watching! COVID changed things drastically and people stopped working 9-5. 9am to 8pm M-F + 9am to 3pm S is quite a lot of time to spend in person at a place. We haven't had that kind of in person interaction for 2+ years now.
If you know the question number off the top of your head of a question that you think is the hardest, you are preparing for interviews wrong and cramming Leetcode way too hard. Unless you want to be in programming competitions and aren't trying to get hired.
If you learn the right techniques for how to approach problems, and have practiced the fundamental techniques, no problem should be hard. The only exception is problems that solely rely on an obscure computer science algorithm that isn't used anywhere else except for this problem, but you shouldn't be studying those on Leetcode, except for fun.
Not all mentors are created equal.
I strongly believe in the idea that people don't need a single dedicated mentor, but rather need the right mentor at the right time for the right reason.
If you can get this just right yourself while doing a Udacity course, you are essentially outsmarting these expensive programs that you are paying 15K to do this.
Now the reason it's hard to navigate because some programs charge 15K to be almost entirely taught by alumni of the program. Alumni can actually be better a teaching some topics! But there are also very rare times you need a $500 an hour mentor as well.... and most things fall somewhere on between.
When you are starting out, you don't know what you don't know and you just have to trust a program to make good use of your $15K.
At Formation, we actually think about our fees as a fee that you could easily pay to mentors directly on your o…
I basically work 24/7. Believe it or not but I spend most of my time working on Formation's technology and platform and helping Fellows in their job hunt phase and I respond to things on Reddit via push notifications and often times quickly on my phone - doesn't take that much time. Today I've committed 5 fixes/improvements to our codebase and have a larger feature i'm working on right now that I need to ship before Tuesday. I've also talked to a few Fellows, gave a person advice on two offers they are looking at, and am working on accepting a new Fellow because it's a Sunday on a long weekend and most people are off.
I'm sorry you feel that way.
Hi there! What kind of job are you aiming for?
In general, having a CS degree without internships/experience can be tough: hundreds of applications and few responses. At FB we would go through piles of resumes and people who didn't have several top tier internships were instantly skipped over (this was when I was involved in 2010). Unfortunately bootcamp grads have it pretty similar, so I don't know how much a generic bootcamp will help at this point.
Georgia Tech Master's is good. The downsides are it will take longer and it won't necessarily help with getting a job. It might reset the clock and you can reconsider new grad jobs and hopefully have more direct access to recruiters is GT is a good CS school.
I would only go to a bootcamp if you feel like your skill level is not at an entry level bar yet. If you have the CS fundamentals to get hired and need job hunt help look at these o…
Good question. We didn't really know what to call it to be honest and **F**ormation **F**ellowship (F F) has a ring to it, and the word "fellowship" is used in a wide variety of ways without a fixed meaning.
Pathrise is somewhat of a competitor (they do job hunting support, not so much technical training) and they use the word "fellows" so we figured it was reasonable.
I strongly recommend just pinging people on LinkedIn, no specific people, just ask anyone!
I have two responses to this:
1. The main reason the outcomes are so great is because the timeframe is variable and the outcome is fixed. I don't know any program/bootcamp/school that is like this, which is why we are our own type of thing. You get the result you want and you get there on your own timeline rather than working on someone else's fixed timeline and getting whatever result you can get. All of the logistics I've already described are 100% accurate and talking to people should confirm that (if it didn't let me know and I will reword something)
2. Our team is legitimately experienced and senior compared to anything else out there. We have 3 ex-principal FB engineers (E7+), we have 3 more ex-senior FB/FAANG engineers (\~8 yrs each) who have done many hundreds of interviews each (Amazon B…
I've had over a dozen conversations in the past two weeks recommending various bootcamps to people so can you clarify what are the "dishonest marketing tactics" you are talking about?
I don't know where these anonymous empty profiles come out of nowhere to criticize me. It's really hard to use my real name here and I don't love randos coming out of nowhere criticizing me for no reason. I only use this account with my name and picture for everyone to see (and have access to Formation's team account for helping to manage Ads). I've only recently started being active on Reddit and the amount of people who have criticized me FROM throwaway accounts and accusing other people of BEING my throwaway accounts (that aren't) is really weird... this sub at least has really great discussion for the most part and y'all are spending too much time trying to play games that no one else is playing.
Lambda changed it's name because of a trademark lawsuit. They were fighting it for 2 years or so (another company has a Lambda trademark and was being negatively impacted by bad press and reviews around Lambda School - which didn't have a trademark). They even bought this company in Florida called Red Lambda (which has a trademark) to try to fight back. They settled the suit after depositions and changed their name.
I'm surprised no one talks about this story! A chunk of thir $120M of finding probably went to this.
Regarding fundraising. So two things in general.
1. Even though Lambda had so much funding, they were losing a ton of money. We call this the "VC funded discount". Uber was similar, where they were losing money on every ride so that they could grow by giving people cheap rides. The investors were basically paying for thoss cheap rides. Lambda's case was different. They had…
Hi, I'm the co-founder and I just posted a large comment and 100%++ this. Reach out to any Formation person you can find. Ideally those that have similar backgrounds to yourself and recently went through Formation. Our [https://formation.dev/network](https://formation.dev/network) has people who opted in to being public... some of the best outcomes the people don't want to be, so while that might seem cherry picked, it's a fairly typical representation of the outcomes.
More junior Fellows are more likely to list Formation on their LinkedIns. Most people are working and don't want their employers to know, but they might have posted about Formation after getting their jobs and you can try finding those posts through post search to contact people as well.
We have one Fellow who talked to DOZENS of Fellows and messaged ALL OF OUR STAFF before joining, and I think talking to people is the b…
Hi, yeah I'm the co-founder (Sophie is the CEO and founder) and hang around this sub as Derek said :D. As Derek kind of said as well, Formation isn't a "bootcamp" and roughly 80 to 90% of Fellows (approx) have some kind of professional engineering work experience (typically 1 to 3 years) and are working full time while they do Formation. A lot of people did bootcamps in the past so I took an interest to this sub, and a ton of people have been asking me questions about bootcamps (we have Formation Fellows representing many different bootcamps in the past) and the industry since I became active, so I stuck around to help.
I also highly doubt past Formation Fellows are in this sub, I know a few people in this sub who are doing Formation now and are on the more junior side and they might be able to comment on their experiences to help you get a better picture. Try contacting people on Linke…
I wouldn't recommend choosing a bootcamp based on the languages or the stack. Choose the one that you feel is aligned with your goals. You might not realize it yet because learning programming is hard, but your engineering powers grow 10X every year in your career and years down the road no matter which bootcamp you go to, be it App Academy or Codesmith you'll see how the stack and language don't matter.
Codesmith has very solid instruction, has scaled really well, and is a great choice to get into the field. They have a very strong culture, and if you have friends there and feel like you fit, go for it!
Both Codesmith and Rithm care a lot about their curriculum and their instruction in general. So even though Codesmith has like a hierarchy of former students teaching, they do a good job and have a high bar for sure. Both teams have employees with lots of instruction years of experience and comparatively little industry years of experience. They both prioritize the learning experience.
Codesmith wins handsdown on the job profile preparation. Codesmith grads usually don't list Codesmith on their resume, they post about their projects, their talks, and come across as accomplished industry engineers, etc... Rithm grads post graduation messages proudly stating they graduated from Rithm and are on the job hunt. Very different approaches that show the difference in approaches.
At the end of the day, no school will get you a job, you are the one that gets the job and if you are driven, smart, things will work out. Maybe your FIRST job will be better or worse depending on the school, but you'll be on a good long term trajectory and you sound like you are on the right track.
I know the founder of Rithm and they are very focused on quality of education because of negative experiences at other bootcamps. They run very small cohorts with lots of face time. They care a ton about the quality of curriculum and education. I haven't talked to them since they went remote though.
We have a few Rithm alumni who we worked with a Formation.dev and they were a pleasure to work with.
I can't reply to RobSteinsVoice, a current Codesmith student, because they blocked me. But I'll add some notes here.
If you go to Codesmith's website about page, and look at the LinkedIn for all the instructors (junior, mid, senior, lead), they all went to Codesmith. They either graduated and stayed on for sometimes many years, or they worked somewhere and teach part time. I'm not sure if this is what was meant above about hiring back students. From what I understand "Fellows" are hired on…
Yeah you are borderline and I agree you could use either higher starting DS&A skills or more extensive project work to have a higher chance of success with our training. Note: for anyone else who might read this, if you are not at our current overall bar, our training is less effective so we want to make sure you are there before joining, or that we have adapted our training enough to support you (we have people who really want to do Formation, but it's too early in their journey and I don't want them to read your specific case and generalize). When we work with someone it's until the very end, so we have to accept the right people.
So two approaches for you specifically:
1. Keep practicing DS&A. Great growth so far so keep going down that path to get through a good number of LC easy problems.
2. I think a standalone project that's not a personal website is great. Ideally something whe…
That’s not bad. It’s not linear, so even though 1400+ means you are pretty close to ready for the stop tier interview raw skill bar (obviously you need to practice) 700ish is borderline ready for Formation to get there, obviously the low end but depending on your goals it could be sufficient. So you should look into it and see if it could be a good fit for you. The goal would be an entry level job top tier job or apprenticeship and you’re probably looking at 6 to 8 months. It’s very different from a bootcamp but you can weight your options between self teaching more, bootcamp, and Formation.
I can give my thoughts on this. I'm the co-founder of Formation.dev and I want to be very upfront that I do not think Formation is a good fit for you yet (we work with experienced engineers to get top-tier roles), but I do have extensive experience with mentoring as a result of Formation and can highlight the pros and cons in my opinion.
**Personal Mentoring**
PROS:
* Goes at your pace
* Focused on your strengths and weaknesses
* Content can change and adapt as you go
* Always have a helping hand
CONS:
* Only get one person's point of view. If you hire an army of mentors it will cost you a fortune.
* Relying on one person's teaching style working all the time
* Different people are good at teaching different things, you are overpaying for some things for worse quality
* It's hard to find a good mentor and hard to judge if they are good, when you don't know what you don't know
**Str…
So they get FLOODED with applications. Which is why that Google recruiter was brave to post the other day haha.
Most of them send out some essay style questions in the application and more importantly a hackerrank or codesignal test. The tests I've seen (second hand through Fellows) are classic DS&A/leetcode and medium-hardish. The problem is because there are so many applications, you basically have to be perfect or very close to perfect to not get filtered out. I've heard of some people cheating (and they detect that too) and trying to really "pass the test" mentality... which is actually the opposite of what these apprenticeships want.... there are just so many applications it's the best they can do to filter.
You can try a sample test we offer at Formation: [https://formation.dev/join/assessment](https://formation.dev/join/assessment)
You'll get your score after completing. Since…
You can also try for internships, but various apprenticeships open up throughout the year at a lot of companies. Twilio, Shopify (6 month internship), LinkedIn Reach, Microsoft Leap (I think this is open).
You probably to finish a bootcamp or have impressive projects self-taught to get these. People who get them are often close to the full entry level bar, they just lack experience.
1. Thanks. Yeah just want to help give my perspective on things. It's just one perspective, but so many people in the sub are in bootcamps or choosing bootcamps and it's missing the experienced perspective so I try to comment often.
2. It depends on your goals. You can get an entry level job directly from a bootcamp that is decent. Doing any kind of internship or volunteer work will help. If I were doing a bootcamp I would try to get an apprenticeship at a top tier company. Even the apprenticeships are super competitive right now, but I would try to be a top student and get one of those (e.g. Asana, Dropbox, Twitter).
1. Formation is called a Fellowship, but it's really like having a personal trainer for your technical and career skills and it's not an internship or apprenticeship. Doing something like Formation takes time. Like I said, MOST people at Formation have work experience al…
So I think the actual quality of the work is probably similar. But Codesmith resumes APPEAR much farther along. I've been told 1000 times that Codesmith doesn't tell you to do this, but the vast majority of people I've surveyed (out of 200 graduates) list that open source contribution as "Software Engineer" experience at a real "Company". This gives them a huge leg up with smaller companies that don't check these things well and care more about what you do than what your resume says.
I've audited their flagship projects and almost no one uses them. No one reports bugs. No one reports feature requests. No one outside Codesmith contributes to them. They are group projects that are marketed as big open source tools.
Sorry if this sounds negative, not meant to be. It's a brilliant strategy and it's working to help their alumni get the most out of their experience.
I think both are strong. Neither will prepare you for a strong chance at passing Google though. Both have a handful of alumni ever that go to Google right out of the program in their first job.
At Formation for example, we work with bootcamp grads, and the vast majority of our Fellows get top tier jobs. With many at Google alone, and many TURNING DOWN Google.
So I've seen the transformation needed for most people post bootcamp to be at that level. I would like to clarify that most people we work with have work experience already post bootcamp, so the number that come directly from a bootcamp is smaller, but I'm including all of these people in one bucket, because presumably people who graduated and worked are farther ahead anyways than new grads.
I might get some comments on here saying that all Codesmith alumni are Google-ready because people get jobs at Google, so I want to emphasiz…
Oh are they back in person already!? Yeah I would consider App Academy too. Once you have the short list of top bootcamps, it comes down to personal fit. Not unlike finding the right SWE job haha.
Sorry I should have clarified "soon". I think it was a Codesmith employee in a talk that said something like 'they had plans to go back in person', but I didn't feel like it was in the next 6 months or so, maybe early next year.
I have a lot of Youtube and podcasts and stuff running in the background and I don't remember exactly where. Maybe ask them directly!. I'll edit that comment for clarity to not mislead anyone.
Codesmith is a solid choice in NYC, but isn't cheap, but probably worth it. I heard they are going back in person in NYC ~~soon~~ (edit: by "soon" I meant I heard they were forming plans, but with no specific date)
EDIT #2: App Academy is back in person in NYC now, would also consider
EDIT: sorry, first time for some reason I thought you wanted in person and there aren't many choices right now. Some more questions u/helpmegetrichpls, how much time do do you have? will you be full-time or part-time? What is your starting point? Are you coding already and trying to improve, or are you learning how to code?
u/holographicGargoyle I can't comment directly because that person blocked me, but if you are a recent grad your TRANSCRIPTS ARE TYPICALLY REQUIRED as part of a background check.
Maybe there are non-top tier companies that don't care at all but the top tier ones absolutely do, like Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc...
Google also confirms this directly on their website, don't trust me: [https://careers.google.com/stories/applying-to-google/](https://careers.google.com/stories/applying-to-google/)
"A transcript from your university (unofficial is fine)"
This is for an application, but the third party companies that do real backgrounds checks will collect as well.
Now as long as your transcript is mostly consistent with your statements you should be fine. For example, if the name of your degree is "Computer Systems" and your called it "Computer Science" on your resume, probably ok. If you…
Hi all, I've gotten a lot of DMs about my comments asking for more advice. I work with a lot of bootcamp grads a bit down the road in their journeys to achieve roles at the top companies including Google. I probably don't have as many messages as Mike has thought ;) but I'll share some thoughts on here.
1. Google is one of the top companies in the world and has one of the hardest hiring processes and highest bars for data structures and algorithms. This post isn't about a special program for bootcamp grads. This is an opportunity to connect with a recruiter who is supporting the "Early Career" (a.k.a. "New Grad") L3 pipeline. The bar hasn't changed and remains very high.
2. The interview process is the normal L3/Early Career process. You'll do 1 technical screen covering 1-2 medium to hard data structures and algorithms problems, not much talking. Sometimes you'll do a second one if th…
Google is a giant company. They have third party recruiters source candidates for different funnels and those recruiters get a set of criteria and requirements to look for. Google has accepted people without CS degrees in the past, but this is more of a larger shift (possibly an experiment... don't know and time will tell) to more openly market to bootcamp grads.
It was very hard to get a full blown legit L3 offer without a CS degree and some experience. And it still will be.
I don't want to give specifics for privacy but several Formation Fellows have Google L3 offers with first year TC over $200K (most people have 1-3 years work experience already). You can see a good breakdown here of many other offers: [https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google&track=Software%20Engineer](https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google&track=Software%20Engineer)
Straight from a bootcamp with no experience, you'll be on the lowest end of the spectrum, unless you have competing offers to negotiate with.
Ask them if you can make it in two payments within a couple days. They will probably let you.
In terms of fees, at Formation.dev (not bootcamp, different type of program) we accept CC and don't charge any different fees but I'm not sure what others do.
The Google Apprenticeship program is a very different thing from "Early Career".
The apprenticeship program involves a lot of training, is paid much lower (roughly half), and is for people very early on in their journey.
The "Early Career" program is more for people who are formerly at the CS grad level and now at that level but including bootcamp grads at that level. You're interviewing for the L3 bar ([https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google&track=Software%20Engineer](https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google&track=Software%20Engineer)). It's a rebranding of "New Grad" or "University Recruiting" that has happened industry-wide over the past few years because of a law that passed in California.
Again (someone correct me if I'm wrong PLEASE!)
Also to clarify for Codemsith grads (Codesmith advertises that it prepares you for mid-level and senior jobs) you will not be considered for mid-level (L4) and senior (L5) jobs at Google out of Codesmith with no prior work experience regardless of your interview performance. You can take a shot at early career (L3).
(Again, do not work at Google, making these statements from extensive industry experience and extensive experience supporting people whose dream company is Google)
I'm not a Google representative, but behind the scenes there are some great things happening:
1. Unlike many big companies, Google is shifting Early Career hiring (or at least some of it) to a more year round cycle. In the past these companies recruited entry level on the "college cycle", which is October (prime time) and February (backup).
2. The reason Mike and Anja have posted recently is that Google dropped a degree requirement for entry level, meaning anyone with a CS degree or bootcamp (from that list) can apply for entry level jobs. In the past a lot of big companies filtered out bootcamp grads in their traditional "early career" pipelines and most people there were CS grads with many top tier internships already (or at Google: people with 1-2 years industry experience as well)
So if nothing changes with 1 and 2, you should have a shot any time!
The only exception would be if t…
Yeah the interview bar is not lower and Google is one of the harder interview processes. That first round is medium level DS&A and algorithms problems (or harder), and passing isn't just about practicing LeetCode problems. It does take time prepare outside of bootcamps for people to hit the DS&A bar.
That said, it's a great opportunity to interview at Google! Jump in the fire and give it a shot, if it doesn't work out you have some great experience for what a top tier interview is like!
One of my first interviews was Google maybe 15 years ago now. I chose Facebook before I heard back, but it was exciting to get the chance to interview at Google!
Thanks for the explanation u/InTheDarkDancing makes a lot of sense! I also think this is a fairly off topic discussion and apologize for diverging. This is a great overview though.
Disclosure: I'm co-founder of [Formation.dev](https://Formation.dev), and we've worked with a few people in similar buckets - it's not our most common case of Fellow, but you can look into it and see if it's a good fit on your own. We have a high bar for entry skills, particular with data structures and algorithms, and people's goals are to get top tier jobs (like truly top/FAANG-tier companies), rather than any job. We are like a personal trainer, so there's no fixed length, but I would ball park 6 months to get a job.
Another bootcamp could be an option is if you are really rusty and a lot hasn't stuck from 3 years ago.
Finally, you can try doing some serious project work, like Hack4LA (volunteering) and see if that helps go somewhere.
My hunch is you would benefit from some help or some structure, and also with resume and job hunting etc...
Yeah sorry, my answer rambled... short answer is yes but if not guaranteed how long it will take and don't make any life plans based on a certain timeframe.
No! I genuinely recommend Codesmith to a lot of people, this was not meant as a criticism, but these videos stood out as something super weird that I noticed recently, I'll ask around.
I removed my first sentence, it was weirdly worded.
100%! Not that you have a 100% chance, but you can absolutely get a decent job with just a coding bootcamp. The top bootcamps typically need you to qualify by having some minimal coding skills first.
The differences I've observed are more in attitude and perspective comparing the top CS students (MIT, Stanford, CMU, Berkeley, etc...) and the top bootcamps (Codesmith, Hack Reactor, etc...):
CS DEGREE: Has dedicated 4+ years to programming and have a longer term point of view. They are thinking 10 years down the road - pre-FAANG, post-FAANG, a lot want to start companies, a lot are looking beyond FAANG to the next best things. They are typically super passionate about the underlying technologies and have the time to have gone on tangents pursuing random things. Likely has done 3-4 internships already before graduating.
BOOTCAMP: People want a job and prioritize making themselves look as…
The Codesmith tech talks they arrange for each student with "Single Sprout" are copy / paste. I watched 5 videos, all of the people plagiarized from sources and read them word for word or with minimal changes without properly sourcing them. I just googled 10 or so sentences and found the original posts where sentences and paragraphs were pulled word for word. If a college student was caught doing that they could be suspended or expelled.
Don't get me wrong, as people will attest, I often recommend looking into Codesmith as a strong option in DMs. This is just a tiny portion of the process to check off a box on your resume.
I don't want to call anyone out specifically but you can reproduce by watching some Codesmith Single Sprout tech talks, and google sentences here and there.
u/SlowestTriathlete do you know anything more about this? I might be completely wrong, just something I noti…
RE: how many interviews you will do (i can’t reply to that comment because the author blocked me)
FAANG level interviews are typically 1-2 data structures and algorithms interview as the first round. The “on-site” will then be 3 data structure and algorithm interviews in most cases and 1 behavioral - mostly looking for flags and deep diving in your work experience for determining your level compared to other engineers at the company. For frontend leaning roles you might swap out some of those technicals for more frontend focused practical coding/component design. For anyone with experience you will do a system design interview as well, where you will super deep dive into something like “design twitters infrastructure”. This interview is used to test real experience at scale and also help determine peoples levels. You can’t really study to get through a system design interview unless you…