I think Codesmith's founder wants the Chief AI Officer so that he can go to conferences and throw around the title.
Codesmith is all about appearances, superficial, good words... and zero substance to back it up.
I'm sorry that's offensive to the people who are trying hard to save it, but it's true.
It's borderline.
PROS:
\- it's a REAL masters and not just a pay-for-play style one
\- Georgia tech is a top 10/20 CS school and this is a respected program
\- the cost is insanely good deal compared to other options!
CONS:
\- since it's fully remote there is less of the community vibe for networking and recruiting for those internship and "new grad" opportunities.
\- It's not a top 4 program that has recruiters lined up.
ANALYSIS:
\- excellent choice for part time while working
\- excellent choice if your company is paying for it
\- don't go all in 100% expected a job at the end as the solution - it's a great choice instead of a bootcamp if you have a background they accept, but it's not the only answer to all problems.
The goal of a masters is:
1. Try to get back into "new grad" pipelines. If you get a "top tier" masters, it will open these doors if you have 1-2 YOE and aren't eligible anymore.
2. If you are not employed and doing a full time masters over 2 years, you are internship eligible in the summer and that can be the stepping stone you need to get a job right now - even if you have a year of experience.
I definitely see how this feels like a step back if you have a year of experience, but a lot of bootcamp grads - even from the best ones - have gaps to fill and it's really a step forward.
**There are other ways to fill those gaps, but this is one of them.**
I had the same reaction to Chief AI Officer and called it out. They are pushing this narrative of the "modern engineer" - someone who brings their past experience to SWE and AI and is a unique perspective that makes the industry better.
I agree with the idea but the blocker is that this applies to people with EXTENSIVE SWE WORK EXPERIENCE and not to bootcamp grads with no experience.
They keep trying to push this narrative and come up with random alumni examples and twist them to fit the mould.
Codesmith: you can't force product market fit by just telling stories about how your product meets the market. It might make you feel good because the stories are great, but If it's not there it's not there and you guys are done - hang up the towel and if you want to keep doing this, start over from scratch.
It is indeed, I'm telling it loud and clear everywhere and my LinkedIn post about it got a lot of traction.
Codesmith doesn't like me much and every time I call them out they double down more on this narrative because (from my conversations with them) they are incapable of seeing why this is disingenuous.
Based on their tanking enrollment, people aren't buying it anymore so if they want to keep doing this they keep going they are accelerating their demise.
Sorry to hear that and this isn't that uncommon so you aren't alone. I see a lot of bootcamp grads with a "I will do anything to break into the industry" attitude and the hustle carries them for a a year, two, sometimes a bit longer, but the fundamental gaps eventually come out and it impacts people pretty hard.
I wish bootcamps talked about this more openly. I'm super pissed off at Codesmith for advertising a success case last week 'from Codesmith to $150,000 job' and left out the person graduated in 2018, worked somewhere for 2.5 years, and THEN got the $150K job in 2021.
The journey just STARTS with the first job, but for the bootcamp itself it's the END and they advertise it that way and even places like Codesmith that offer "lifetime support" don't actually offer that and it's a marketing label.
Don't want to play the victim here and I have real advice haha:
1. Do a master's de…
Alina is more capable of running the company for sure but it's too little too late honestly.
She needs a capable team around her and almost everyone has left.
The whole industry is changing and the teaching style and pedagogy at Codesmith is dying out and you don't have a team left to invest in building out.AI ways to learn. You have to flip your company on its head. But you don't have the money and you don't have the talent to build that.
Even if Alina has a vision, the team is delivering garbage code (as her and I both know the quality of) and people there isn't even realize it. They celebrate the heroes of the past - who themselves really didn't know what they were doing either.
Will needs to leave the company entirely, which it sounds like might be over time and he floats to academia - where maybe he should be - because he just doesn't have the experience to forge software engine…
The questions I normally ask that specific Codesmith grads have lied about and their story fell apart:
1. What other roles did you work with (e.g. PM, design, operations, support, legal, HR, marketing, PR, release engineering) and give some examples of those
2. What was the engineer - PM ratio
3. How does the company make money and what's the business model
4. What were things that worked well and didn't work well with your manager?
On a resume:
1. if you see the word OSLabs or OpenSource Labs listed anywhere, immediate sign. We had to train our team on this because Codesmith grads were being flagged in the wrong bucket for Formation based on their resumes as team members who were not trained did not know the difference between a job and project and the amount of time specified was 1+ year.
This is normally right beside a section called "Open Source Projects" so it appears more le…
1. I have a reference letter signed by Phil Troutman from a few years ago
2. I have numerous confidential chats of people telling me that Codesmith is aware of this and that everyone is aware.
3. The OSLabs directors was basically laid off a year ago but kept on the website and told to keep her email address for appearances but said that Codesmith runs the show and manages everything. They continue to puppet a fake company to do fake reference checks.
4. I know of two cases where people were asked for W2s or proof of work and both those people exaggerate the OSP experience on their resumes and both ended up getting hired without specifying how it happened. And I believe Codesmith acknowledged and helped one of those.
Conspiring to commit fraud is a jail-able crime by the way.
Puppeting a fake charity (that has no revenue reported at the IRS and is run by Annie's team at Codesmith - a t…
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
I didn't say anything about you. I was responding to that person about the typical grad behavior for why many Codesmith grads defend this behavior.
I had a rant that I deleted because it was not coherent. But time will tell and the truth is catching up with them.
Most people have already figured it out and apparently many remaining staff are one foot out the door.
Maybe the CEO steps down and Alina takes over and maybe brings in some funding to buy out the company for cheap and they try to build something new and sell it off for a profit later on in a consolidation of remaining bootcamp brands?
Kind of like what happened at App Academy. The founder finally left, the new CEO replaced everything with he own AI platform. They stopped doing SWE and kind of floating around as a completely different version of the program before.
Codesmith will probably follow that path and they really sh…
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
A good question is to ask why I'm like this.
Seek first to understand, then be understood is what Codesmith told their staff, and they should action it.
I offered to help Codesmith and some ideas to work with them. Their leaders didn't want to.
Alina confirmed to me that Codesmith paid some guy to post on Reddit and I gave her evidence that the same guy lied and tried to get me banned and that the mysterious missing founder of the Codesmith subreddit was involved with this scheme.
I offered to apologize publicly for any individual person who felt attacked by my commentary if they publicly apologizing for making shit up about me and sending it out to their community.
They declined to apologize.
Then I open up LinkedIn and see all kinds of fake made up stories that seem to rewrite history and promote Codesmith.
I hear about more and more layoffs even as of a month ago.
I hear about…
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
A number of alumni are brainwashed and don't even realize they are lying. And then they get upset or defensive when you call them out because Codesmith "changed their life".
A number of these people come around eventually and it's one of the reasons there is zero Codesmith activity anymore on here.
After people get out of the bubble they see the truth and they don't go back and Codesmith alumni network is also dying.
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
I commented on a similar comment but the person deleted their comment so here is my thoughts:
Yeah they do and I do not agree with it and would debate him on it BUT he is transparent about it, and quite blunt.
He says stuff up to fake it and that you will be exposed like 9 out of 10 times and it just has to work once.
I really don't agree but I respect that he's clear on it.
Codesmith has a giant facade that pretends to teach people and brainwashes them to think that it was Codesmith that did it. Look the other way and blame students for doing it.
If Codesmith told people hey the job market is not fair so you have to exaggerate your experience to get through. You deserve the job and you pass the interviews so this is a means to end.
If your goal is to be employed, my hunch is you can get hired with 8 years of experience as a mobile developer without changing your specialty entirely.
You didn't say it explicitly but is your problem getting interviews or passing them?
If it's getting interviews -> need to improve resume (I can look and give you quick comments)
If it's passing interviews -> you need to prepare better/practice/be more strategic about each interview
\---
I agree with others to consider a Masters or even a taking college courses if you don't have an undergrad degree.
BUT I wouldn't expect to be employable in ML quickly and you will be starting over as it has little overlap with mobile development.
You might be better off switching to full stack engineering and applying for generalist roles because with 8 years, you can get interviews.
Yeah it's a fair point but the time periods are wrong. I surveyed like 50 people's GitHubs and the people committed over 3 to 4 weeks and put 11 months of experience.
Lying about the timeframe is still lying.
My answer is it doesn't matter that much as long as you realize your ROI is much higher than the cost.
I don't know the website data off the top of my head but for 2025 (unofficially quick math on our live tracking database) $125K average increase and median is $123K increase.
This is running match on the increase (or decrease) per person and then average OR median of those numbers.
Our live data is missing people who haven't been processed yet, we have ballpark 5 Amazon placements in the past two weeks and 5 Meta placements in the past month and that's not in there - usually those are higher.
We do better than that. If you apply we'll walk you through a selection of anonymized before and after outcomes for people with similar backgrounds to yourself in a table.
The high level numbers we post are to justify the cost. The ROI is insane so you should look into it more and see if it's a good fit. And then we go super deep.
It's very hard to anonymize the data and it's only a selected illustrative set of examples but it's pretty good IMO.
Since we've rolled that out it's significantly helped people understand possible scenarios based on the YOE, location, and target company type.
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
Yeah they do and I do not agree with it and would debate him on it BUT he is transparent about it, and quite blunt.
He says stuff up to fake it and that you will be exposed like 9 out of 10 times and it just has to work once.
I really don't agree but I respect that he's clear on it.
Codesmith has a giant facade that pretends to teach people and brainwashes them to think that it was Codesmith that did it. Look the other way and blame students for doing it.
If Codesmith told people hey the job market is not fair so you have to exaggerate your experience to get through. You deserve the job and you pass the interviews so this is a means to end.
👍 I edit my posts because I go so fast I often have spelling and grammar issues, this is one of them. Will edit.
Incompetence isn't the right word though, it's lack of diligence and rigor, holding a really low bar for your work. Having mathematical errors and telling everyone how great it is. And then constantly defending with 'it was just a mistake, it was just a mistake'. If it's a couple times sure, but if everything you do has mistakes, maybe YOU are the problem.
The amount of careless mistakes on Codesmith website, in their data, in their materials, in their research, in their curriculum and slides, in their HR practices, in their company structure and registration (don't even get me started there), everything can't be a mistake.
It's not incompetence perhaps, and it's just carelessness or negligence maybe?
Yes good point. I'm enraged right now and very upset at them.
They just posted on LinkedIn about how a grad went to Codesmith and got a $150K job at Twilio right away.... the grad went to Codesmith in 2018, got a job at Virgin and then Twilio in 2021....
They have a Dog Bot responding to me on Reddit now that is an incompentant use of AI or an idiot pretending to be AI.
But I'm losing it and sorry if I'm unprofessional about it now. I am a transparent and authentic person.
Agreed, it's equally the hiring company's fault.
The moral point I have is that Codesmith advertises it's methods and pedagoy and Will is like a GOD TO STAFF MEMBERS.
But all of that is bullshit. He's a phony who can't code.
If Codesmith was honest about how people get jobs I wouldn't criticize them.
If someone who is smart and autodidactic just knew they could self study and put their personal project as 1.5 years of work experience thye wouldn't have to pay $22,500 for Codesmith to tell that to them.
So Codesmith keeps up this facade like the Wizard of Oz with Will Sentance manipulating everyone around him when behind the curtain, things are not as they appear.
A couple of people with evidence, you can't edit titles on Reddit. I see it all the time myself. DO you know how many grads applied to my company with zero experience for a senior role requiring 6 years of FAANG experience.
Codesmith leaders can't explain why, but it's the norm and not an anomaly.
I'm saying that people at Codesmith are aware of people lying and support them in various ways (I'm being vague) to help the person.
There are a LOT of people at Codesmith who are not W2 full time employees. So let's say a friendly prep instructor or a Fellow or Mentor does it. "It wasn't us it was our contractors!" isn't going to hold up.
It's more complicated than it seems yeah but based on the messages I've gotten so far, I'm going to hold my tongue, but Codesmith is on notice and maybe this behavior has finally caught up with them.
I believe I agreed with that in my post.
My the 'things' people told me about involve Codesmith cooperating in some fashion and they are clearly aware of it.
I totally get that if a student is like "help, I put OSP as work experience and they want to verify the background check, what do I do!?!?!" that if Codesmith staff tell the person "too bad, you're toast!" that would be bad. But from my understanding, this has happened enough times that Codesmith is aware of it.
I surfaced this to a leader in a 1-1 call and the leader said they would look into it because this person was shocked and puzzled that it was happening.
Well it's still happening!
Many real tech companies do too and it's why you see so many grads going to these non-tech smaller companies that they squeeze through with this bullshit or level them as mid-level based of the fake resume and don't know any better.
Codesmith Grads - Stop lying on your background checks. Your OSP is not 'employment history'. I've received a number of couple of people having trouble with background checks because they put their project as 'work experience'. STOP.
I've received a couple of reports over the past few months of Codesmith grads having trouble with background checks, failing background checks / having flags raised, etc... because their "Open Source Project" is listed as months to years of "employment history" and they need Codesmith to sign off on it, and it's too late after you started the background check. These reports were shared with me indirectly from concerned students/alumni.
A Codesmith leader told me point blank to my face that Codesmith does not sign off on background checks for OSPs as paid employment, and if you list it as volunteer work, they will verify the 3 week project for the timeframe…
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
Please keep demonstrating more incompetent use of AI and defending it... it looks terrible for the program you are the lead of shows why no one should go to it... the person in that video is the Lead Instructor for the FTRI and it's not taken down.
Seems like you know nothing about the IP situation.
Review the internal Microsoft procedures for conflict and review and submit this for review through the internal tools. Don't ask your manager. You aren't contributing to education, you are are the primary person responsible for a for profit private companies AI product. What the f... you are playing with fire here.
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
No, I've had enough of this condescending bull shit response and I'm not having it. The smug attitude with the tone of arrogance is disgusting and I'm not playing nice.
If you don't know about the layoffs a month ago in a 20 person company then I don't know what to say... go figure it out before gaslighting me.
I'm not going anywhere until you are all healed accountability for this bullshit and publicly apologize for this behavior.
Do you know if they hiring partnerships have been impacted with the market?
ADA Developers Academy was one of my top recommendations but they were really hit hard by companies shutting down their internships and it hasn't fully bounced back yet.
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
To give you an idea of how things have changed - if you went to Codesmith and graduated in 2022.
95% of people who started graduated, 70% of the graduates got jobs within 6 months of graduating (and 90% of them reported their placement to Codesmith) = 63% "self reported placement"
If you graduated in 2023:
95% of people who started graduated, 43.6% got jobs within 6 months of graduating (only 60% reported their placement to Codesmith - **A MAJOR DECLINE =** 26% "self reported placement rate"
\----------
Codesmith hasn't given any 2024 placement data even though **ALMOST ALL 2024 GRADS HAVE HAD 6 MONTHS POST PLACEMENT AND THEY INTERNALLY KNOW THE DATA**
The reason I'm so enraged here is that in 2024 when they internally knew about that major decline, they told the public that even in a tough market, Codesmith was crushing it. They conveniently pulled all these blog posts from thei…
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
I don't care either way, but if a program is publishing how amazing their outcomes are when they are good and goes RADIO SILENT when they are bad it pisses me off.
Codesmith's CIRR results tanked so they started publishing random time windows of absolute number of placements and then then even stopped doing that because in the past six months it's like fifty or something and a number of them have been looking for over a year.
I criticize them LEGITIMATELY and they come back with garbage data.
I bet their response to this is 'Michael is an asshole our placements are amazing, we had an average increase in salary over previous work of $70K so far this year! who cares if there aren't as many placements it's take people longer that's fine, it's all about average increase.'
My point is that changing the goal posts and each time telling everyone how "transparent" you are is garbage behavio…
WHEN you went matters a lot.
If you went during "era 1" (2012 to 2016) then it was a great time! App Academy too!
If you went between 2020 and 2022 - Launch School, Codesmith, Rithm School were all that your heard about.
Now - Rithm closed, Codesmith should have closed, and Launch School is the only program to remotely consider (after doing core for a year) and it's the only one that advertises itself honestly as the "slow path" to becoming an engineer.
Short answer yes. But long answer - Launch School still publishes detailed reports exactly 6 months after the cohort finishes and Codesmith published garbage reports to cover up their collapsing results.
I would put Codesmith worse than the ones that don't publish reports because it's been misleading the public in my opinion and that is worse than if they didn't say anything at all. They keep saying how "transparent" they are and it's a giant performance and bull shit from people with no integrity.
I spoke directly to one of their leaders on a phone call and I really just don't think they understand how messed up their own data is, or they won't admit it publicly because their company is collapsing and this is the nail in the coffin for them.
More details on what that why I feel this way.... I'm a very centrist person and I have been centrist with Codesmith for 3 years. I used to reco…
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
I'm extremely pissed off at your bullshit response Codesmith. It's now 10 months later and things are worse then even and everything I said was correct. Everything you wrote (your post was removed by Reddit) was false bull shit you made up to manipulate people when you knew how bad things were.
Things did not get better. The 2025 "recruitment rush" never happened. Another 50% of your staff was laid off and you have hardly anyone left.
Your unethical behavior and marketing is catching up with you and I hope everyone sees it.
2 years later - placements rates tanked from 70% to 40%, I was right, and this person's account is suspended from Reddit. Please all - stop listening to these Codesmith garbage accounts.... it's enough.
I don't know an answer to that one but I would go off what your recruiter said. The people I'm aware of were int he E4/E5 pipelines in the USA. For new grad roles in general - they tend to have narrow starting windows so I suspect the 60 day thing doesn't apply the same way.... but that said, the starting window is around now so if you didn't match I wouldn't be optimistic :S
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
Here's some feedback for Codesmith you can relay. BE HONEST AND STOP LYING TO THE PUBLIC. Will: you very well know about continuing layoffs that keep happening over and over and over and you straight up lied above that there haven't been any 'restructurings'.
I'm absolutely not backing down and going to keep applying pressure until you are honest and tell the truth and stop manipulating the public.
Students deserve better. Your alumni deserve better. The former staff members who are treated like garbage deserve better. It's so sad that such dedicated team members who are laid off suddenly are so insignificant to you that you don't even acknowledge any 'restructuring' happening.
Absolutely garbage behavior and I'm enraged.
Yes please commenting using garbage AI integrations because it's proving my point how no one at Codesmith is qualified to teach AI or SWE - and everyone gets to see what happens when graduates of Codesmith with very little or no industry experience portray themselves as experts and pat each other on the back doing it.
Like this clip from a LEAD INSTRUCTOR who has ZERO SWE WORK EXPERIENCE talking about AI who clearly has no idea about AI tools in their response: [https://www.youtube.com/shorts/evDsJlN3Mms](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/evDsJlN3Mms)
I'm glad you don't have the capability of managing Reddit and teaching at the same time. I have 8000 commits in the past year, respond within minutes to all my Fellows feedback, bugs, questions, etc... (which anyone reading this will back me up on) and I reply to Reddit quickly too.
Just because you aren't capable of doing this and I am, I…
I specialize in interview prep, check out my background at Meta, and this is the method we propose for solving DS&A problems: https://formation.dev/blog/the-engineering-method/
Note that Formation is a paid service but that blog post is entirely free with no strings attached and I'm not trying to sell you anything, just check out the blog post and try following those steps when solving problems.
I actually agree, the problem is if the typical person seeing the marketing is led to believe 87% of people who sign up get jobs at the end, which isn't the case.
This is the Achilles heal of the program.
They want experienced engineers this time around but if you work that hard you probably already have a job paying more than you'll get paid after Gauntlet.
I watched their entire live 1 hour vibe code competition and lets just say they attract a certain person.
It was the "bro"iest tech thing I've seen in years.
Well it's a great time to learn how to use AI tools because they are completely changing the day to day faster than anything else before!
I have a background with top tier tech (Meta) and top tier interview prep (Formation) so this is my advice through that lens:
1. Everyone has gaps no matter what your background or experience. If you have INTERVIEWING GAPS (e.g. System Design and DS&A and struggle to perform) - those are one set of skills to work on. If you have gaps day to day and just feel behind - part is imposter syndrome and part is lack of work experience. Most people with CS degrees have a lot of internships and 4 years of CS that make you actually behind in work experience.
2. If you are trying to interview - which is sounds like you aren't, do DS&A like NeetCode, and SD like Hello Interview or other free and cheap options.
3. If you are just trying to level up on the job,…
You sound like one of those people who wins the lottery or gets lucky early life and then loses it all later on and has their life destroyed because you didn't have a good system around you to navigate.
I grew up where people buy lottery tickets and success was having money, but no one actually had any money. Being at Facebook, I saw a lot of wealthy people and how they lived and what their advice was and I saw the other side of things.
I ask myself a lot, what if people growing up were just given $1M cash instantly, what would they actually do?
Like pay off debts and then what?
A lot of people don't actually know.
All these people telling me that my value when I grow up is how much money I make, but none of them actually knew what that meant.
You don't have to listen to my advice, but if you find yourself with some money, make sure you have role models around you who manage it wel…