The courses are $1500 each (currently a discount offered)
Formation interview prep? You can get a $2500 a month membership, or you can pay $5000 upfront and an additional fee from $0 to $15000 depending on the increase in base salary over your current (or previous) base salary. The variable fee is currently structured so that if you don't get a job at all and leave, you don't pay anything extra, and the typical person is paying around $5000 additional (i.e. $10K total).
The interview prep does not 'teach' anything so you have to come in with already hirable skills and it's purely focused on preparing you for job interviews to increase your pass rate by practicing on our platform and by getting mentorship and feedback from our hundreds of industry mentors.
So just want to make sure everyone reading this doesn't mistake what we do for a bootcamp alternative given the context. We make mo…
My company doesn't offer training or education.
Our main product is an interview prep platform to help you receive practice and mentorship for your upcoming engineering interviews.
We also offer short and cheap AI training courses for existing experienced engineers.
The typical flow would be Person -> Bootcamp -> Job -> at least 2 years -> Formation.
Austen seems smart and nice but he's not an engineer and he's like an expert marketing person. He has a track record of misunderstanding the scope and scale of the technical side of what he does.
Growing Lambda School from 0 to 2000 students in 2 years while thinking that the underlying technology was unique and special was a big mistake and it imploded.
A reasonable mistake to learn from and improve next time.
So we'll see what happens with Gauntlet - will the marketing be 5 steps ahead of the product, let in 2000 engineers who want to upskill to AI and it falls apart if they are just doing AI projects and getting feedback from past alumni who are a month ahead?
Or will they build something truly unique that is permanent IP and value.
They have a B2B program for $30K that has no IQ requirement.
I'm watching closely to see if that works.
I have to give them credit for testing and broadcasting the quality of the program so publicly.
If the $30K B2B doesn't result in great outcomes and ROI because the engineers are not in the top 2% and the program doesn't really do enough to justify the cost but relies on people with top 2% IQs as the main reason the people end up with good outcomes.
Their previous program was $5K and didn't work too well so I'm watching really closely.
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If I zoom out, $30K for six weeks is just too expensive long term. If it works amazingly, competitors will figure out how to undercut them to see if they are offering anything innovative at all, or if they are just doing things anyone can teach.
Technology and IP are value and if you have those you can build brand value too.
Brand value wit…
You found "The Order"? Yes, my wife made a donation to a local film group that teaches filmmaking to people from diverse backgrounds and they showed us the filmmaking process for a few hours in making that short.
It's a fun group activity for a good cause that I would recommend.
Hi, thanks for sharing a well thought out argument.
\- Lying on the resume is a tough topic and some blame goes with with the people hiring. The snowball of "6 YOE for entry level jobs" is kind of the result of both sides. Hire a bootcamp grad with no YOE for a job needing 0 to 2 YOE, get burned, list 2YOE+ next time, bootcamp grad lies more, increase again to 4YOE, etc...
They are getting burned because the hiring process inherently is flawed and requires some amount of honesty, but there cost of mis-hiring is you fire the person and move on and it's a rational market. If it was too costly to fire someone, they would spend more vetting the people.
So the way I see it - both sides are optimizing for their market conditions and Codesmith grads lying just enough to get through and doing just good enough on the jobs to not trigger the snowball is the market trying to balance everything o…
Yeah I've been following it since then and it's definitely not a scam. The "gotcha" is you need to have a top 2% IQ to get in.
And then something like 2/3 of the people finished, so some people quit their jobs and it didn't work out.
But yeah it's not at all a scam and I would consider it if you have a high enough IQ and will put in the 100 hours a week work.
I would argue that if that's you, you're going to make A LOT MORE MONEY in your career, and if Gauntlet is the launching pad then fantastic.
Gauntlet get's paid like $30 to $50K for your placement, so if other companies catch on and try to poach you bypassing them then there's nothing stopping that from happening and someone has to pay that fee.
So it's not entirely free in that sense. If Meta got a list of students during the cohort and offered you $500K can you take it and not owe Gauntlet anything?
P.S. If you read Austen's…
Codesmith asks people when they started job hunting and I wouldn't be surprised if they change thier metric to "12 months from starting your job hunt" instead of "12 months from graduating"
If your numbers suck change the goal posts!
Until it's such a joke your alumni turn on you.
Word of mouth is number 1 source of people and no one will recommend a program that changes goal posts to trick the public.
It's important to note that Hack Reactor and Tech Elevator and Galvanize are brands that consolidate all under Stride Learning. And this has happened over the past two years so it's really hard to judge anything about the past.
My understanding is that enrollment is not good at all of them and that all of them are fairly low priority for Stride.
Codesmith is not a viable option right now. It's down to like 4 core staff members and then can't even consistently spell their founders name right in blogs and marketing anymore. It's turned into a joke.
Launch School has maintained its team and quality but even they are cutting back a bit in 2026 cohorts and their most recent placements have been lower than historical highs.
But of all the options Launch School is the only one I consider viable right now.
My opinion is you are making a financially irresponsible decision paying $22,500 for…
That was a marketing trick :(
Codesmith doesn't spend money on marketing because they instead put money into paying staff to run free courses and run the pre courses at a loss.
The goal of these programs is to get you bought into the Codesmith ecosystem for free or minimal cost and once you do it, if the Codesmith way of thinking works for you then you'll pay $22K for the bootcamp.
Codesmith wasn't "hard to get into", rather it was extremely selective for the "type of person" they were looking for: a smart, ambitious, good communicator with low self confidence in their coding ability.
If you were that they thye want you to fail a few times to confirm you have low self confidence and high grit so that when you are let in you are ALL IN on Codesmith.
If you didn't get accepted it was becaue you weren't a good fit.
Some brilliant people who saw through this wouldn't get let in no matt…
Codesmith staff tell people to "snuggle the struggle" when they express stress and anxiety from the pacing. If you fall too far behind you get isolated into 1-1 tutoring to isolate your 'struggle' from others and get a pep talk so that you stay positive.
Yes look at my account history please. Are you delusional? I had three different independent AI engines analyze my entire account history for the substance I talk about and it's all aligned with my representation of myself.
Some Codesmith people are so brainwashed they only see Codesmith stuff and these 100 comment back and forth threads that I refuse to back down on, and completely miss the substance of what I talk about that actually gets VIEW COUNTS.
Codesmith people, go "under the hood" instead of being so superficial.
Like i said in the other comment, entrenching on the Codesmith side without talking to me just makes me shake my head. You'll see in the future when you wake up.
Many alumni have and it's one of the reasons their community has completely and utterly fallen apart. The only Codesmith people I hear from now are on payroll in some capacity. Your alumni are gone because…
I feel like I'm transparent about it, but I will summarize here my arguments that have been consistent for a period of time. I'm extremely transparent about these reasons, so either people think I'm lying or they think that there's some like secret motivation. I don't know.
Codesmith thinks I have all kinds of motivations that they are just incorrect about, and believing them is only harming them even more and making their situation worse. So I don't really know why they're doing that, but it might make them feel better than accepting the truth.
I have been consistently clear that Codesmith was one of the top bootcamps, that their number one strength was in helping ambitious and driven people build self-confidence in their programming abilities, and that they had three things that I didn't like.
1. They were consistently marketing placements as mid-level and Senior roles, and in my op…
Maybe Codemsith brainwashed you to think otherwise but it's the truth. If Codemsith was a good fit for people I recommended they go there and a number of people went. Some check in with me later.
With all the layoffs and cutbacks I couldn't in good conscience recommend them anymore because people were upset and I lose my credibility recommending a program that was falling apart. Hence the pause to wist and see.
You can clearly see my Reddit posts from both early 2024 when I paused and later 2024 when I stopped.
Core?
There are hundreds of thousands of hours of free instruction materials out there. You are paying for structure and accountability. If it's worth what they are is fair debate and up to you, but that's why people pay for stuff in this industry.
Well async and self paced instruction has the problem of completion rates. Springboard's numbers are in their government reports for CA and are like single digits on time completion in some cases.
Do you agree that I recommended people go there or are you calling me a liar?
Critical yes, but I recommended a lot of people go there.
II typically analyze the heck out of things I buy and know their strengths and weaknesses precisely and still buy the things??
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
I can't disclose exact things nor do I proactively reach out to people about it. From what people told me the numbers aren't good.
They removed all their highest paid employees and pay very low now. They fired the most expensive people and hired people in their place and paid them a lot less for the same job.
Codesmith is $22,500 so if you have 10 people every 8 weeks, thats $225,000 or about $100,000 a month.
Their staff right now:
1 instructor: $10,000 (they are paid a lot less now)
3 mentors/combined fellow: $30,000 (fellow is multiple people part time)
1 coordinator: $6,000
1 admissions: $6,000
1 outcomes: $6,000
Marketing/Career Support: $6,000
Overhead = 20% $13,000
Total: is like $80,000 or so?
I think this is why they are clinging to life, they convince loyal alumni to work for a fraction of what they should be paid... like those MLMs that run off of the labor…
Checking in on Codesmith a year later. After recommending Codesmith for 2 years I stopped recommending them a year ago because of massive staff loss, program cutbacks, and tanking outcomes. A year later, things are even worse 😭.
I'll try to summarize some history briefly and then get into the updates. I've been following Codesmith (and a handful of other programs) very closely for years now. I've spoken to dozens of students, staff, alumni, their CEO and have a very good idea what's going on. Codesmith doesn't like me. I've offered to help them, I've reviewed their students projects, I've pointed out security flaws, etc... but they see me as a "jealous competitor". I'm the founder of an interview-prep platform that has nothing to do with Codesmith and works with a bunch of Codesmith ALUMNI in the FUTURE job searches - all of whom thing we are very complementary. But nonetheless, I have…
Always assume you won't get money back with a money back guarantee. You are thinking about you, but these aren't big businesses and the business has to make money so someone has to pay or they will go bankrupt and won't pay you back anyways.
If people aren't getting jobs either the company will go bankrupt and you won't get your money back, or they won't pay you back and find a loophole so they can survive.
Someone reported that Springboard agreed to pay them back after disputing, but the refund will happen over 12 months.... which is a sign that they are trying to spread the cashflow out over time, but at least a good sign they are trying.
Not Chipotle though: [https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/10/technology/coding-ai-jobs-students.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/10/technology/coding-ai-jobs-students.html)
Not all forms of autism are the same, but there are a heck of a lot of insane engineers on the spectrum.
I would recommend this book: [https://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Autistic-Millionaire-Everything-Aspergers/dp/B09KDYMF2R](https://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Autistic-Millionaire-Everything-Aspergers/dp/B09KDYMF2R)
I don't know any company that proactively prefers bootcamp grads over top tier CS grads.
Apprenticeship programs are the opportunities and they are few and far between: Pinterest, Microsoft Leap, LinkedIn Reach
You can trust any online reviews or Reddit for bootcamp reviews
Lots of control and manipulation.
This is why I try to be real and talk about things as they are.
Yeah currently yes, things change quickly though. Launch School takes a long time and isn't a quick-bootcamp, but it could be a viable alternative for career switchers with lots of time to transition. Other bootcamps could still make sense in specific situations, but even the former best ones are falling apart, like I can't recommend Codesmith under ANY circumstances at this point in time.
I think it's fair to push back on that because I have no evidence that you wouldn't be responding to dozens of comments within minutes, and it's very much possible that you would, so I shouldn't assume that.
It's not a personal attack, but it is a counter argument because what I meant was that there are people, especially in late 2023, who got jobs and posted here a week after getting the job. So how excited they were, and some of those people have the job, and some of them do not, and they're really struggling.
One of my consistent and core commentaries on bootcamp is that the bootcamp celebrates your victory at the end date because for them it's the end, but for you it's the beginning. The bootcamp was step-1, and you're now at step 0 starting your career.
and I think it's very important that bootcamp grads who get jobs realize that it's at the beginning and not the end and they sho…
No problem offering hope, hope is important.
People should see both sides.
People who have blind hope because of one case and then drop $20K on a program because they promise to work as hard as you did, is bad.
That's why so many people get caught up with MLM schemes, end up spending more money than they make, and quietly disappear into the ether.
It's cool to talk about your experience. Your goals seems to be to motivate others and that's where I think it's fine but I think others should balance it.
Both sides can be true.
50% of Codesmith and Launch School grads get jobs within 6 months to 1 year old graduation so people get jobs.
I think the more unique thing about you Is that you were a truck driver and didn't have professional desk job experience before.
I would guess that the percentage of truck drivers that go to bootcamps that then get a job after within 6 months is probably quite low. but I do think that if they have the same persistence you have, they probably would get a job and the percentage of anyone who has that persistence is also quite low.
Make sure to keep the job before boasting :D. The market is brutal and you won't be this loud if you get laid off.
You don't seem like the type of person who will be laid off because of your hustle... but bootcamp grads are often the top of the list for layoffs because they are often behind co-workers.
Keep the same intensity on the job so you make it a year!
Yeah this all sounds reasonable. TripleTen was Practicuum back then and had very very few people so it's entirely a different program now so it's good to know the timing.... whatever your experience was good or bad it's largely irrelevant now for anyone looking at TripleTen.
I have a bunch of questions but congrats on getting the job!
1. How long after graduating did you get the job?
2. When was it (like 2023, 2024, 2025?)?
3. How many you started with made it to the end?
4. And how many got jobs?
5. How much do you attribute to the bootcamp vs all of the traits and characteristics you mentioned that are more you than the bootcamp?
Depends on where. FAANG recruiters probably picked up both a strong network and some of the insider info of how engineering works to have a leg up. If you have a strong natural affinity to coding then you could make the switch. But it might take a very long time.and I would expect a number of steps to get there.
The other path would be like recruiting at a hot AI company like OpenAI because there is a lot of room to step up and apply coding and AI tooling to the problem and it might be interesting work nonetheless.
Depends on how much experience. But Meta is strict on YOE requirements because of regulations and such (even though internally they don't care much about YOE). New grad jobs go to interns and aren't accessible anymore. Mid level jobs require 2+ years of YOE.
They use to have this rotational engineer program ("pathways") for mid level adjacent jobs for people with nontraditional experience that wasn't quite FAANG-level. It still required 2+ years of experience but it could be any kind of SWE experience.
I've seen some people from Codesmith straight lie about their experience to qualify for that program, someone saying he worked at Codesmith as a job, before he even started going to Codesmith as a student.
You can potentially get a contractor job there, but those never result in full time employment after and put a hole on your resume.
My advice (that I advise a number of people) get a…
It's wrong to look at it that way because your odds can be narrowed based on your background.
Again Codesmith because I know so much about it... like a seasoned professional data analyst that has written scripts on the job but never done software engineering, will be able to get a Data Engineer role or SWE role at a data-related company. A line cook with no degree and no professional desk job experience will have a much harder time to impossible time, even if they have a natural aptitude - it will take years and a degree is better.
The problem is that a lot of people reading this subreddit saw a TripleTen ad on YouTube or something and are more likely in the later bucket, not the former.
The former bucket is like 75% chance right now and the latter like 10% chance.
Codesmith's Future Code program for people with zero technical background who make under $55K a year in New York City gr…
It's the only place I recommend but it's largely because the process to get into Capstone involves such an extensive vetting period that they have a track record of only admitting people it's likely to work for. If other bootcamps did that, then I would be more open to recommending.
People used to talk about how hard Codesmith was to get into and now they have reduced the number of steps and people get in much more quickly... and I have seen hardly any placements in my analysis in the past few months.... amazing how quickly quality degrades when you lower the bar.
So if Launch School lowered the bar significantly and outcomes dropped more then I would be equally concerned. Right now they are on the border of 50% so they are getting close.
I mentioned Codesmith because I know them like the back of my hand. I don't know Launch School's demographic because their \~1 year "core" process is used to vet who is a good fit, and I don't know the demographics of people.
Bootcamps aren't an alternative to college because most bootcamp grads have college degrees (just in different areas). Codesmith's data they shared in a public talk maybe 1.5 years ago or showed that the vast majority of people had college degrees and most went to pretty good colleges to, like the UC system in California, etc...
Second, when I go to Codesmith's homepage I see a giant $110,000 as the first thing I see and a a banner of where people got hired 6+ months ago.
When I go to Stanford's homepage I see a photo of Stanford, followed by it's mission and news.
Different goals and vibes.
One is luring you in with big numbers and then having terrible placement rates. The other is luring you in with brand and prestige and being a part of an elite community and delivering on that to every single student.
Everything has turned against bootcamps:
1. DEI efforts abruptly ended. Fewer apprenticeships, fewer slots.
2. AI replacing junior tasks (and the fear of) = less junior hiring
3. Bootcamps not doing well financially leave them with less resources to help people when they need more help then ever
4. Bootcamps grads lying and embellishing their resumes result in companies putthing them at the bottom of the pile of resumes to look at.
5. End of zero interest rates
6. COVID made remote work so viable that people offshored jobs around the world
7. Inequality continues to grow - big tech has most jobs, smaller companies not doing well and not hiring. Bootcamp grads have historically not done well at big tech as their first job.
We have some Codesmith and Launch School data.
Codesmith: 2021 grads -> 80% in 6 months, 2022 -> 70% in 6 months, 2023 -> 40% in 6 months, 2024 -> unknown but I estimate (not fact) 25% in 6 months
Launch School: 2021 grads -> 95% in 6 months, 2022 -> 88% in 6 months, 2023 -> 75% in 6 months, 2024 -> \~50-60% in 6 months.
Clearly some people are getting jobs, and you can argue Launch School is still 'more likely than not' getting a job.
It's like going to the hottest restaurant in town from two years ago that was always fully booked. Now you go and the staff all turned over, quality degrading, no one is there, and you are showing up as if it's the best restaurant in town.
Maybe it's still your favorite restaurant, but you have to acknowledge the party has moved on.
Because it worked for you 2 years ago doesn't mean the doom and gloom is incorrect today. I was much more positive about bootcamps in 2023 as well.
I also don't agree with some of the opinionated doom and gloom, but the data is not on your side.
If you already did a bootcamp than sure, try your best to get a job! But if anyone is confused as to why they can't get a job right now, that's concerning to me.
TripleTen's CPO did a CourseReport video in the past couple weeks and she was talking about how they are going to expand to working with current employees (non-engineers) to help them do better at their job with AI.
I feel like changing focus to AI-for-everyone and using the tuition dollars from current dying programs to fund it is not cool.
Don't trust any job guarantee. There are a lot of bootcamps with job guarantees and while I've bumped into a dozen or two people who wanted refunds and got denied, I have yet to bump into someone who actually got the "job guarantee' refund.
Illustrative examples like:
\- despite a flawless record, you missed a phone call four months ago that was scheduled the day before so no refund
\- you took too long to graduate, no refund
\- 9 months ago, you failed the mid term twice before passing the third time, so no refund
I truly believe if you meet the criteria that you'll get a refund, but it seems extremely hard to actually meet the criteria.
AI: "Vertical integration is when a company makes and controls many steps of creating and selling a product, like a farmer who grows apples, makes apple juice, and sells it in their own store."
They are exploiting a short term market inefficiency and I don't think it's a scam.
But I'm concerned that it will be Lambda School all over again. It works super well at a small scale so grow as fast as possible and degrade everything.
For example, if their product works for top 2% IQ people, that's one thing. But they are charging $30,000 for a six week course paid by your employer that is NOT for top 2% IQ people.
If the secret sauce is choosing top 2% IQ people and the program itself is normal, it's not worth $30,000 and that might downward spiral everything.
So we'll see. I'm in the "Gauntlet isn't a scam" bucket, but I have my concerns like any reasonable person should.