Apple is a tough place to prepare for. They hire per team and the team has a lot of flexibility in the interviews. The rubrics and questions generally are discussed at the team and department level for diligence and fairness. But compared to other companies, there is a lot of variance up to the interviewer in the questions and style.
So I would prepare for the specific team once you get the interview.
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
I really hope Will isn't actually the lead instructor for this program for long because this is one of the worst uses of AI I've seen and thank you for proving my point that he is not qualified to be leading with curriculum development and teaching of this course. I don't want to discourage people from learning AI and I wouldn't be remotely hard on Will if this was a student learning AI, not someone branded as an industry leader in AI leading teaching a $4600 for 4 week course.
This is a completely defensive comment about one of five points and it doesn't even address the point whatsoever... it defends the legitimacy of the music band - which I never disputed - and instead I was attacking Will for posting like a dozen promotional comments for the band that didn't disclose he actually was in the band at the time. Your comment is defending that behavior - defending manipulating Reddit wit…
How many people in your cohort got jobs and in what timeframe? Second, does your resume and LinkedIn reflect that you have no experience? Third, it's important to hear from you in 1-2 years because a lot of bootcamp grads are having a hard time keeping jobs right now.
It's great you got a job but you are making it sound like everyone gets jobs and the entire data backed argument right now is that like half as many people are getting jobs as in the past and it's taking like twice as long to get to the same placement rate.
You would be an idiot not to question going to a bootcamp right now with data like that.
And this is data from Codesmith, one of the top bootcamps.
Staff members have been abandoning ship for 2 years now and almost no one is left. As of last week almost the whole full time company has turned over in the past year so any experience prior to that would be completely di…
Well this one does it by capitalizing on people with low self confidence or self esteem and building them up emotionally.
In all seriousness, self confidence is hard to build so building it for $22K is maybe worth it?
Most of their staff are in eastern Europe and have a lower cost, and there is no office space, so in your calculation they have much more room to work with and survive.
In that case, I would consider these options:
1. creating a demo mode that shows the product without revealing the secret sauce
2. making a demo VIDEO that shows you using in a protected way
3. writing a "white paper" document that explains it (without giving away implementation) and share that around.
Generally speaking if something is ground breaking and no one else has done it, then it will take a lot of effort for people to copy you and there should be SOME WAY to share some amount about it publicly to get some support.
If your product is really really good, share that with engineers. If someone really likes it, they can help bridge the gap with recruiting to backchannel the support you need in the interview process.
They are 100% online already, and they pay their instructors approximately market rate as engineers because if they don't pay them what they claim they would make as engineers in the industry they are admitting the people aren't ready to be engineers. E.g. if they claim an instructor is qualified to be an engineer making $150K they have to pay them $150K or their entire product is a scam.
The CEO puts pressure on the team to improve things but they aren't qualified to so very few changes have been made over the years.
The CEO claims the pedagogy is based on Oxford's teaching methods and has nothing to do with any specific skills or topics - "learn how to learn" so he uses that to justify the fact that nothing has substantially changed in the past number of years.
The CEO training materials for instructors are very performative. Like how to ask people questions to engage them, how to…
Based on their website as of 6/7/2025
Admin Team (8 people): no one on that list has a technical/engineering background.
Instruction & Engineers (15 people): more complex breakdown -
Lead Instructor (2 people): full time staff, both of whom graduate Codesmith roughly a year ago and have no real industry experience. One of them "works" for a Codesmith alumni's shell company/startup that Codesmith people use to beef up their resumes.
Engineering Mentor (2 people): full time staff, a stepping stone to the Instructor title. These are Fellows who stay on full time - kind of like Full Time Fellows.
Faculty Lecturer (1 person): James Laff was the head of curriculum and seems to have left, and this role is kind of like the more junior stepping stone to that role. This person graduate Codesmith end of 2024 and has never worked in industry.
Engineering Fellow (5 people): these are hourly TAs…
I would guess half of bootcamps shut down already or paused their programs and suspect by the end of this year there will be only a handful of founder-led ones left that aren't aiming to scale.
I think the larger companies are going to be completing their pivot to AI related stuff
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
All programs have seen much lower enrollment in 2024/2025. The only solid numbers I have are Launch School - which publishes cohort by cohort data and their cohorts dropped below 20 people at the end of last year.
Codesmith has been downsizing for 2 years now. They mega expanded during the end of COVID to almost 50 cohorts a year because everyone Google 'best bootcamp' and chose the first one.
Now that's not the case and they are down to like 10 or maybe less cohorts a year - which is still shockingly high.
People might be dabbling with code but they aren't paying $22.5K for likely nothing.
And as of late Codesmith is seeing fewer and fewer show up to those free learn to code sessions.
So as others said, SWE bootcamps really ended in 2024 and this is the tail end.
Thanks for sharing this, I would add a note that bootcamps in 2025 are struggling because the number of students is way down. I heard about a panic at one bootcamp when they had like a record low number of applications in a given week, and the same bootcamp had like basically no one show up to their weekly info session.
Some costs can adjust with enrollment but fixed costs cannot (some can with layoffs and consolidating positions).
1. [Guantlet.ai](http://Guantlet.ai) is trying this in the new AI world
2. Main reason for SWE is supply and demand - not enough demand for junior engineers and it's cheaper for companies to go to MIT and Stanford
3. During the better times, tons of companies did this in various forms to try to open top of funnel to more diverse sources they didn't have the resources to explore themselves. But since DEI is dead at big companies no one is doing that either anymore.
So yeah all of those things.
When you see the world "Partnership" on a website it's bullshit marketing fluff. There's are a few bootcamps that call every company it has an alumni at a "partner".
Most of your Reddit history is you promoting this wedding band you like over and over (about how your friend used them and how you heard them once and loved them) and I looked into it and it's **YOUR OWN BAND** and you are front and center on the website. WTF.
Why can't people just have integrity anymore.
I've had enough of bullshit marketing in this space and I'm not backing down on holding you all accountable.
Both. They had a number of program cut backs that resulted in people being laid off formally with severance. But after several rounds of layoffs and when no one shows up to your info sessions that used to have 20 people a week showing up, the remaining staff get the hint and a number of people have also voluntarily departed since then. Even if the remaining staff, my knowledge is that most are open to work.
I don't mean this offensively at all but there isn't any engineering talent left. The instructors seem like fantastic communicators and eventually I expect to be superstars but they are sooooo early in their journeys the reality is they are not remotely there yet. And the pressure of being sold to the public as a super expert is a lot.
I commented on this elsewhere on here but I just don't understand why their founder - who is respected as a great lecturer - doesn't just teach thing…
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
Other instructors feel exploited. So In your case - you do this program for 1 month and say have 30 people = $130,000 of revenue for Codesmith. What are they paying you? $100 an hour? And you are doing like 10-20 hours a week?
So you are responsible for making the curriculum, teaching it all, and you get paid like $10,000 a month and Codesmith made $130,000.
Even if they have a couple of other helpers (both technical and operations) and the total cost is $20,000. There are no other costs here, no career program, no alumni support, etc...
This means that Codesmith is exploiting your generosity to make $110,000 a month off of you, which is absurd.
Now imagine you ran a program entirely by yourself and started your own company, think of how much money you would make... you are effectively paying Codesmith $100,000 a month for the opportunity to 'pay them back for all they did for you'…
In the past month we started moving to async agents that run in GitHub etc... and they literally behavior like a junior engineer who is assigned tasks, ask questions in the comments, and sends PR. So the future is coming fast. You have to assume these tools are going to get 5X better in a year and plan for that because the delta is so much, if you aren't remotely ready, you might get left behind.
You sound like so many Codesmith people before hand, ping me in two years, it's like a cult-like same old same old from you all.
This is what I do all day thank you very much: [https://github.com/mnovati](https://github.com/mnovati)
1. Why isn't he teaching classes and why do students in the immersive complain to me they never see him?
2. Ok so Will, Eric and Annie? I'm talking Phil, Shandra, Kyle, Alanna, Demi, Cassandra, Elizabeth, Kinsley, Jared, Laura, Jamaica, James, and more...
You didn't notice these people leaving??
People who have done the course have chatted with me about their experience, but I haven't done it myself. I've fairly familiar with the content.
But for starters - you work at Microsoft full time and you are doing this as a side gig - which is a conflict of interest because your Microsoft contract probably owns your IP unless you got sign off for it.
Second, no offense, but you don't have much industry experience, a couple of contracts here and there and you are solely responsible for the curriculum for this program?
My frustration is that Codesmith is full of people with very little experience - even 5 years of experience if nothing if someone is going to portray themselves as a world expert on a topic.
The arrogance and attitude and confidend tone I've seen from people with very little experience is a massive disconnect.
I applaud and support the effort and I don't think it's int…
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
Well my understanding is the only people left are Annie and Eric (and Will isn't involved with Codesmith much) and that all the other leaders left and keep leaving. My understanding is all the instructors and engineers left and the two leads become instructors right out of Codesmith about a year ago.
All of the staff who were dedicated to Future Code are no longer on their website and I believe are looking for work.
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
Well I hear partial info about some changes going on and a number of staff departed again.... they are really done to not many people left. They also dropped their approval status in New York which was a contractual requirement to have based on the contract for this program. The contractual requirements for the teachers also isn't met if their current staff ran the program. So I'm not exactly sure what's going on and if it's still happening but they downsized it or if it's not happening, or if it's running but with delays to manage the restructuring.
I don't understand if you think I'm lying and a super sketchy person then you should join the club with Codesmith's leaders who think I'm out to get them to promote my company and steal all their students. I literally talked to one of Codesmith's leaders face to face and explained this and if they don't believe me it's on them, but it doesn't change reality.
I would argue if we froze LLMs as they are today, using Claude 4 Opus/GTP o3/Gemini 2.5Pro I would be 2X more productive based on my person stats over the last few months.
That alone will change the industry and destroy the junior engineer market (other than top 10 CS grads who companies deem worthy of investing in) and destroy bootcamps.
If we go beyond that depends on model and tooling improvements. From what I hear from my close friends at Anthropic and OpenAI, there's more room to grow here.
Read these two things and then let me know your thoughts:
1. [https://ai-2027.com/](https://ai-2027.com/)
2. [https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/](https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/)
Absolutely!
1. We spent literally 5 years building a platform from scratch where people can practice anything and do dynamically scheduled mentorships sessions on anything. So we're adapting in real time to AI. We've added a dozen new AI features in the past few months. We've increased the experience bar for people to work with. We're paying very very close attention to interview changes that are happening with AI out there.
2. We're introducing our first AI-specific tracks shortly and started offering one off sessions to iterate on those within our platform engine. The goal of this is to help people become more efficient engineers on the job and keep up with AI.
3. It's entirely possible that AI will crush a lot of SWE industry. It's not a guarantee but a possibility we have to prepare for. In that world, competition for the top SWEs is even more and we'll play a role helping those p…
It's not about getting the role, it's about the next 5 years and what AI is going to do with that.
Codesmith's results were from people exaggerating resumes and Codesmith looked the other way.
AI will replace you if you were lying and getting by by sheer hustle. AI works 24/7. AI can parallelize 1000 tasks.
The only think AI can't beat yet is the taste that comes through SWE experience.
IMO, there is no alternative right now, just don't change careers and learn programming for free on the side slowly over a couple of years.
I'm very confident in the next 5 to 10 years
1. We'll know what all the new jobs AI created are
2. We'll be able to train people for those jobs quickly with bootcamps - but the demographics might look different than bootcamps today with smaller deltas each time around and people aren't becoming "programmers", they are Accountatns becoming like AI Accountants.…
I'm seeing top 10 university grads getting internships and if they perform very well, getting jobs. I think that's the only path to a canonical entry level SWE job.
I think we're going to have a ton more tech-adjacent jobs coming up with AI but that's not what you pay $22,500 to go to a SWE bootcamp for.
Codesmith marketing campaign: "you’re not late to tech". Unfortunately you likely are, and this kind of thing is tone deaf and misleading. Instead of making changes in their program structure they are marketing a 10 year old program structure as if it still works and please don't fall for it.
Codesmith sent out a mass email campaign today that I found offensive.
>If you’ve been thinking, *“Is it still worth trying to break into tech right now?”,* you’re not alone… but we will let our latest data speak for itself.
Yes, let's the data speak for itself. For 2021 grads about 80% got jobs within 6 months of graduating, and for 2022 about 70% and for 2023 grads about 40%. We don't know what it is for 2024 grads but word on the street is it's about the same as 2023 grads or worse.
The trend is falling off a cliff so let's let the data speak for itself and run for the hills.
>Despite layof…
So the shady part is if misled you to not think this was a loan. If you take out a loan to buy a car or a renovation, or pay down debt, you have to pay it back and these loans are no different except that you pay some of your salary instead of fixed payments so that you gaurantee you have an income when you make payments instead of going to collections becuase you don't have a job.
If this wasn't clear when you signed it then you have grounds to complain.
The people who settled with Lambda for regulatory violations basically let the ISAs be cancelled and pay the upfront amount instead, or to cap the ISAs at the upfront amount because the hidden interest wasn't properly disclosed to people.
If you were misled that you don't have to pay unless you get a tech job directly out of Lambda School AND YOU CAN PROVE IT IN WRITING then you have a case to try tp get the whole thing dismissed bu…
This is correct and how the ISA works, and if you get more raises, you'll have to pay more. If you don't feel like your loan was disclosed properly at the time tell them this and offer to pay the upfront equivalent pricing retroactively instead. If you don't or can't pay the upfront equivalent pricing all at once, then you have an ISA for a reason and it's a loan that will cost more than the upfront and the addition cost is the "interest" on the loan.
Did they email you to tell you you haven't been selected? I noticed the staff who were supposed to teach it possibly left, so I'm curious if they shut down the program entirely.
My commentary is generally at the macro level and on an individual basis there are exceptions. For the 100K plus people who have done SWE bootcamps over 10 years I would guess than a quarter are still SWEs to this day. Half of them probably never got a SWE job to begin with and then many people pivoted out to like TPM or data engineer etc...
If you spray a hose at a hole in the wall, some water gets through but most doesn't.
This is like spraying a hose at a hole then for water getting through travelling another foot and getting through a slightly larger hole.
Someone watching this zoomed out would see someone spraying a wall and the water bouncing off.
In all fairness people getting any job in tech might be a step up form the previous job but it's like a Dentist bootcamp where many people get jobs in the dental field but they paid $22.5K to become a Dentist.
This falls into the Codesmith bucket to me. People with good intentions trying to do a good thing who don't have the experience to do it well.
The two people that pick their best bootcamp awards stated there is "subjectivity" in choosing them but that it's based on the Course Report reviews and other sources of info.
Since these two people ALSO do partnership pieces (blogs and videos) and work directly with partners, that's super bias in the "subjective" piece of the pie.
I asked them why they don't have a 3rd party contractor review Course Report data and determine the list and got no response.
I'm sure they THINK they are choosing it without bias, but they have insane bias. The result is they add programs with 0 reviews that don't meet the qualifications but they hear about.
It's like lobbying in politics. The cash cow programs like Codesmith that charge $22,500 to be educated pri…
Let me know how many people DM you a referral code and tell you how amazing it has been after 4 weeks.... if the number is more than 0, I think that tells a lot.
I heard there will be an increase in need for Dentists in the next few years - AI resistant job.
I'm an engineer but I want to become a dentist - can you give me a 12 week course so I can become a dentist.
HECK NO!
So why do people think they can become an engineer - a PROFESSIONAL JOB requiring a lot of training - in 12 weeks.
It's not possible and all of the 'success cases' have caveats and nuances and edge cases and lying on your resume.
There a lot of tech jobs you CAN do in 13 weeks, just like maybe you can be a Dental Assistant who takes moulds of people's mouths in 13 weeks, but you can't become a "Dentist".
omg no - if they are showing that in their socials run for the hills and it's probably a sign of the end for them. I'm not an anti-vibe coding or a pro-vibe coder but that sounds out of touch with the reality.
ISAs have fine print. Either they have loopholes to get their money, or the success rate is baked into the cost (i.e. you pay $38K if you get a job because you are covering the costs for 3 other people that don't pay anything). In the former case, you need to expect to pay no matter what, and in the latter case, if you are the exceptional case then you should fine a cheaper option for 1/4 the cost.
That's great for you but even back for 2022 the better bootcamp like Codesmith had something like a 80% placement within 6-month rate.
Now it's like 40%.
The price for that program went up I think $3,000 or so to $22,500.
So I think it's very reasonable for people to ask why they're paying for this now not in 2022.
Anything teaching AI is new and there are no AI experts, so it's a gamble for sure.
I'm not advising people spend a lot of money on AI bootcamps from previously SWE bootcamps because most are grasping at straws to adapts and far too early to know if the program is useful or not.
I'm a fan of cheap or free programs offered by these places.
I'm in the interview prep space - different but vaguely related - and it's not so easy to just launch AI courses, so that's why I'm super suspicious of $5K+ AI programs with slick marketing pages. It's not that they are scams or anything, just no way to know if they are worth it.
A lot of people live in their own realities and when things don't line up with their reality, instead of trying to understand things from different perspectives, they just refuse to acknowledge things outside of their view and resort name calling, accusations and blaming and shaming because they can't actually make any valid arguments. Often stems from a lack of self-confidence where admitting you're wrong about something that doesn't really matter is so detrimental that people do these things to avoid doing it. they would rather pat themselves on the back for attacking a villain then dealing with reality.
It's ironic that during the good times, people posting left right and center about the $150K jobs and the other side saying how one sided it was.
It's not the subreddit, it's the job market and I always has been.
Yes. the hard part of building projects is building a startup-like project and not just toy projects for fun. Having real users and iterating and deploying something publicly that is used. Even the best bootcamps don't produce projects people use. Like Codesmith's OSP capstone projects, 90% are untouched or dead after the people graduate. The larger projects that have undergone many teams working on them, I struggle to find anyone actually using the project. All the GitHub stars are fake and farmed from the community. I tried using some of the big ones and found security problems and broken experiences and I really don't think these things are used.
So you can see that just making a project that is a useful product, launching it and getting people to try it and then making iterations based on the feedback is already better than anything a $22,500 bootcamp gives you.