The $895 was meant for people that did the new SWE immersive because it's the same as the old + the 4/5 AI lectures now. So the $895 would be for the Saturday discussions I guess? I'm not super sure but I get the vibe they are trying to leave the door open for heavily discounted alumni rate because they originally said loud and clear that Codesmith will give you everything you need to be hired for LIFE and by backtracking on that to extract money from alumni, it's a bad look, so maybe if you watch the 5 free alumni lectures you can ask them to qualify for the $895.
I don't want rub salt in a wound, but an alumni could organize their own thing, like slap a calendar invite on your calendar to all watch a lecture recording every week and then discuss it with each other, and then do a project together.
You'll get 85% of the value for free.
Their standalone AI course is absolutely awful for $4600. It's 4 weeks, 5 lectures, and a couple of projects. Which is like $1000 a week for one class per week and there is no outcome or job or any goal other than to learn.
The topics are already outdated, like a whole lecture on RAG. You are paying about $1000 to learn about RAG when you can spend $0 to learn from AI itself about RAG.
The lectures were curriculum was written by someone who has never worked as a SWE or in AI (but they throw the names of others who worked on their failed Data Science program that has nothing to do with the new gen AI program in reality).
The people teaching out have little (0 to 3 years) professional experience as SWEs so I don't see why they charge so much.
It should be like a $500 course max.
All of your comments are trolling comments that Reddit keeps flagging. Do you have any thing useful to add to the conversation? I'm all ears to talk about things for real.
The data above says that at a specific program that has a very high entry bar where you have to pay a couple thousand dollars in a year to get into had a placement rate where 11 people got jobs.
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
Yeah it's absurd to me. They have a feature piece and video interview with a Codesmith student about their recent experience and then the video came out and I went to the person's LinkedIn and noted that the person was the Lead Instructor now for the course he just took.
Like they aren't doing journalism or vetting. They are making videos for whatever people pay them to do and then try to claim they aren't bias in choosing the awards.... well there are zero reviews for this new AI program so I don't understand how they could have any information to make this claim and their info is heavily based by what Codesmith paid them to say... and that's echoed back in these awards.
It's just a pile of garbage.
That's good to know that the other cohort sizes because in 2024 they seemed a little on the smaller side so maybe they're picking up some people who had previously gone to other programs that shut down.
I'm confident their numbers are entirely real, but the reason they're good is because people have to be in court for about a year and by the time they're done core they know that the launch school communities like really perfect for them it's before choosing to do Capstone and I think that's one of strong reasons for their success. they don't get people who saw like an ad in a discount code who sign up without fully understanding what they're getting into.
Launch School Placement Date - Q4 2024 Cohort, ~70% placed within six months - similar to previous cohort. Lower salaries at $100K mediums - indicating role shifts. Very strong results given the market but very small program so hard to extrapolate.
Results [https://www.reddit.com/r/launchschool/comments/1kzrkyv/cohort\_2405\_salary\_outcomes\_6months/](https://www.reddit.com/r/launchschool/comments/1kzrkyv/cohort_2405_salary_outcomes_6months/)
2024-2025 saw major changes to top bootcamps. Codesmith - arguably the top program alongside Launch Schoo - is down about 80% of it's staff and the founder seems to be moving on to writing a book about AI Ethics and doing a new Front End Masters course while the remaining Codesmith students are taught by recent graduate 'lead instructors' with no SWE experience that their website calls 'engineering industry experts' - most recent 6 month placemen…
If you can't get an internship this year then I would:
1. volunteer for a professor or research lab on campus
2. do unpaid work at a startup
3. do a startup yourself with friends (i.e project you devoted the whole summer to)
oh yeah don't get me started on the patterns. I reported suspicious date patterns and also didn't care about that.
Codesmith gave people giftcards and they got like 20 reviews in a month and then nothing for months and months and months, then out of no where 3 reviews on the same day. Like WTF they are clearly asking people to write reviews.
Which on it's own isn't the worst thing in the world, but Course Report doesn't acknowledge that people are gaming the system and defends themselves.
Feedback for anyone reading this - if you get critical feedback from a competent industry leader and the feedback is delivered in a way that makes you defensive - accepted the feedback and give that person feedback on how you feel. By defending a bad product you are going to kill your product.
CourseReport is a scam in my opinion
I've pointed out a number of issues to Course Report:
1. They made a AI/ML course at a bootcamp a "Best of AI/ML" award when there are zero reviews of that program on their platform - the program is offered by a paid partner of Course Report and in the award announcement they say that this partnership has nothing to do with the list.
2. Interview with a "student" of a program who happens to also be the "Lead Instructor" of the exact same program he was interviewed as a student of.
3. Paid staff members writing reviews without disclosing, being called out, and Course Report not removing the post.
4. Reviewer lying - saying they had zero experience and the bootcamp helped them change industries, when the person's LinkedIn said they had 3 years of SWE experience prior to the bootcamp.
5. People getting giftcards to write reviews without disclosing…
That doesn't explain why those people post their codes on Reddit and then when asked 6 to 12 months later what's up they either don't respond, say they are still doing it, or say they dropped it... Only a handful of people said they got a job and the ones I remember were better jobs than before but not the ideal best job they trained for at Triple Ten.
I'm all for Triple Ten being a multi year async platform that people find useful for the cost but it's not marketed that way.
If anyone out there is thinking of making a documentary about bootcamps, hit me up, will go on the record. The things that happened during the boom times were unbelievable.
Why do you think it's almost impossible to find Triple Ten grads who gets jobs.
Im a mod and sooooo many posts get filtered if students a couple weeks in trying to spam discount codes for Triple Ten and a couple years later not a single one of those people has come back to Reddit and said they got a job eventually.
Very sus.
yeah you're right. I shouldn't really call it a bootcamp because it is longer and you leave with a little bit more solid absorbed materials and in boot camps you normally just flail for 12 weeks and don't really remember much.
if the company is sponsoring it actually hire you either as an engineer or an apprentice, then that's like a great reason to join.
at the end of the day you're looking for something that will help you get a first baby step job and if their partners will do that then I would highly recommend.
the major problem with bootcamps in the United States and why the tone is so negative there on the subreddit is because the best ones promise the world to people and promised mid-level jobs and things like but the boot camps actually weren't really doing much and there was a big disconnect between the marketing that the bootcamps were responsible for everything and the re…
In the USA, I would say that all the people worked hard and had a lot of hustle but only a handful for top tier excellent jobs right away. Most of those people are doing great nowadays like 7 years later because they kept going and levelling up.
My advice on this market is to similarly expect it to take many many years to catch up to others, but that's ok. Your first few jobs will be very hard to find and might not be the best tech jobs.
If you are in Germany maybe there are better apprenticeships, because I think is the best option for bootcamp grads and it can smooth out the first few jobs into just 1 apprenticeship that ramps you up more consistently.
Do you feel the 87% placement rate is real? Like for every 10 students you work with 8 to 9 get placed 6 months after graduating.
Or of every 10 students you work with how many actually graduate?
u/Interesting_Egg4686 \^\^\^ this means that the course is the same at both and there is no difference.
Can you give more insight into how you came across both choices since they are the same? I'm curious what led you down the path that ended up in the same place.
look at which third party providers operate the bootcamps and evaluate those because most University bootcamps are just labels on top of third-party programs with zero to no involvement from the University. the university basically gets to give people loans based on their legitimate status and then people do like a bootcamp that you can do off the shelf.
I don't say no one, but I do say that it's not systematic anymore - every placement feels like a one off case. Launch School Capstone is small enough that historically each person was a one off case and it never relied on patterns.
Larger programs had hiring partners and common places where alumni pass down back channel referrals and cover up the fact that all the people have zero experience and then help the people ramp up. For example Codesmith -> Capital One is this.... people scheming to lie on resumes and get through interviews and then help each other not get fired after starting.
I go with the Bill Gates answer to that - I've never been tested, don't want to be tested, and function totally fine day to day, but if I grew up today with the social challenges I had in elementary school I think there's a chance I would have been put on the spectrum.
I'm not a Peter Thiel supporter (and not a not-supporter either, just centrist) but Gawker is no more after they slighted him.
I can't speak for others but for me it's not personal in any ways whatsoever. I could pick up the phone and have a conversation with Will Sentance anytime.
This might sound crazy grandiose but I don't need to work for the rest of my life so I do what I do out of a deep belief that humanity will better if each person is contributing (work or otherwise) to humanity doing what they are both passionate about and good at. So people doing jobs that they don't like drive me to figure out how that person can move to a place where both THEY are happier AND they are contributing more to humanity.
If you have a scam product and scam marketing that bothers me a lot less.
When you have a pretty good, mediocre product like Codesmith has that refuses to see how it can be BE…
Other programs are bad too but Codesmith confirmed to me that they paid some guy on Upwork. And that person coincidentally (Codesmith claims that no one currently employed there asked them to) posted garbage about me and tried to get me banned from Reddit.
I asked them to apologize and they declined so any company that behaves like this deserves to be called out in my opinion. I'm sure others do it to but I can prove this about Codesmith and I'm not going to drop it, no.
If you are extremely hard working and want to lie on your resume to jump ahead and then company hop around for 5 years then I would not have recommended Launch School in 2020 - 2022, but I would have a 'come to reality' talk with that person now a days and only recommend a slower approach like Launch School.
I wish more schools gave transparent, clear responses like this.
As bootcamps are struggling right now I'm seeing so much grasping at straws that are twisting reality into marketing headlines.
Just because the person has great Frontend Masters courses or YouTube videos it's not cool for him to be missing in action in the $20K program and you are actually taught by people who with no experience who graduated a year ago.
If the founder is all over LinkedIn posting how cool they are and all the cool people they are hanging out, don't sign up.
If the founder is promising you the magic formula for success on TikTok if you DM them. Don't buy it.
The market is tough right now and you need **experienced people** who understand how it is and can help you the best they can.
Don't pay a dime for a service that can't acknowledge the reality right now because they aren't going to help you.
I think half of it is a personality trait. You probably have a tendency to fix things around where you live, tinker, build, organize, etc...
Second is if you have that trait to some degree, then how do you apply it to programming rather than learning specific technologies or skills.
So once you have a foundation you then want to target problems. e.g. How do I make an app to monitor my exercise? And then work backward from the problem and solve it. Rather than "I need to build a React project so let me think of what to build".
I answered something similar so this so copied my starting point - step 1 is to identify a goal:
\- get promoted
\- get new job that pays more
\- get new job at top tier/'real tech' company
\- learn new skills, like using AI stuff
\- fill in theoretical/academic gaps that you feel like come up
If you start with a specific goal it really narrows your options and I can give more advice.
If you just feel like you are missing something and don't know what - that's imposter syndrome - try to reflect on what your specific next goal is and not just about missing something,
So step one is to identify your next goal. For example:
\- get promoted
\- get new job that pays more
\- get new job at top tier/'real tech' company
\- learn new skills, like using AI stuff
\- fill in theoretical/academic gaps that you feel like come up
If you start with a specific goal it really narrows your options and I can give more advice.
If you just feel like you are missing something and don't know what - that's imposter syndrome - try to reflect on what your specific next goal is and not just about missing something,
Tough question because it's not so generalizable.
You absolutely don't need a CS degree to do well in the industry but that also doesn't mean that you will do well without having good strong fundamentals.
It's just that a CS degree isn't required to build those fundamentals. Bootcamps though do not as well.
Someone mentioned IQ and that's part of how fast you can build them. High IQ people with strong abstract thinking and reasoning abilities will grasp CS concepts 10X faster and it might appear that a bootcamp got them a great job. When in reality the bootcamp taught them how to create a facade to trick recruiters into interviewing them, but their abilities got them the job.
Others might learn practical coding skills that are temporarily in demand (right now it's Cyber, last year Crypto, two years Backend, etc...) and take advantage of supply and demand and sneak into a job. This gr…
that might not be a scam but what you describe literally is a pyramid scheme. You're saying that you could potentially even make a profit by just referring people into the program and then those people can make a profit by referring people into the program and it seems to go on forever. so that sounds like a pyramid scheme?
Things that I look for:
1. Look at the Terms or Privacy Policy to find the company name that runs it and Google them.
2. If you can't find a company name or the company doesn't exist, then it might not be a scam but it's not a legit operation and I wouldn't give them my money.
3. If you can find the company, look into their reputation, their team, how they make their money, what other businesses they have etc...
Their terms of service don't list a formal company name
So I would probably not take it seriously or ask them what the official company name is and where it's located so that you can research it.
I mean I'm sure some people get by and are edge cases. But my argument was moral and not fact based.
Even if you are absurdly successful and surrounded by a beautiful family in a giant mansion on your death bed.... you'll leave the world knowing your legacy was built on lies and those people might never know their own lives are built on lies.
No one is perfect and we are all flawed, and I'm saying that as an extreme thought experiment.
Point being - you decide who you want to be and how you want to do but understand and reflect on how you are doing it and what the impact is in the bigger picture. If you choose to lie, knowing the consequences on the world around you can help you adjust and maybe even make up for it down the road.
"Nice guys finish last" is also a saying, so it's not so simple.
Launch School is doing ok because its model protects against the market to some degree and the market impact is less severe.
1. You do Core for months so then only people who are perfect fits for Capstone get in
2. The founder is hands on doing most of the work, so there aren't many people to pay. He could personally take lower income for some time to survive. Codesmiths founder uses your tuition money to go to conferences and write books and make lectures for Frontend Masters and students complain they never see him. Fine but you have to pay more people to run the program and when most of those people leave and you are still MIA - math doesn't work out.
3. Launch School's very small, like 20 capstone at a time, 60 a year. Codesmith had like 1000 people in 2023. The founder knows everyone by name and helps them try to get jobs individually.
So yeah Launch School ends up with like a 70…
I believe that when an engineer is working on something and it "just works" without knowing why - some day you will have to understand why. Maybe not right away but some day in the future.
Similarly I believe that about integrity. Integrity doesn't mean being nice or friendly or a good leader or friend. Integrity means acting honestly, transparently, and with good faith towards others.
If you lack integrity and lie to one or more people to get a job, it's going to catch up with you and you will have to pay the price some day.
In Codesmith's case they never taught anything technical of value. All of the teachers and instructors are former students who follow a script and don't have any / much real engineering experience. They lie about the nature of that work. A lead instructor who claims to be a senior engiee= at Codesmith has hardly any commits on GitHub because they are actually a t…
Surprisingly I was actually quite neutral until mid last year. I gave the pros and cons fairly and genuinely was in the middle. Recommended a number of people go there.
They didn't see things that way and paid that dude who went on Reddit and literally straight up defame me with lies... and no more neutrality until they apologize which they refuse to do and thought it was a joke that I asked for that.
It does get screened and you get a "unverified" for that section - and many companies don't care and ignore it.
Just remember that selling your soul has a price and it will catch up to you some day. Maybe it will take 10 years.
Look at how great Codesmith felt taking in $20M a year and feeling like the kind of the world.... changing the industry.... creating the leaders of the future.
All bullshit built on lies and when people figure it out, reputation is gone, money is gone, and you are worse off than when you started.
I've been trying to talk to them privately but it's too hard. Too many lies and I can't trust anyone there. I talked to them in good faith and they did nothing.
I tried to extend the smallest olive brand and they did nothing.
They told me they care about fixing the problems I talk about but I think the only thing they care about is keeping me quiet. No changes except half of the staff left since I stsrted talking to them.
They have a rotten seed there and until the seed is removed nothing will ever change.
I dont think this tone is great but it's worse than that.
First, the stats were wrong because they only included people who responded to reach out and submitted salary information at first. The "adjusted numbers" included all the people who never responded but appeared to have jobs somewhere on LinkedIn and count as placements who "did not respond" boosting the rate to 42%.
But the reason it is worse is because the newest numbers don't make any sense.
They published unofficial 12 months numbers but the 2022 numbers are copy paste from the 6 months report so the drop of 2023 12 month from 2022 six months doesn't look as bad.
On top of that, they had to check everyone's LinkedIn to count them as a placement so they are fully aware that all those grads are exaggerating and lying about their experience.
Finally, I proved they paid someone to post on Reddit - a person who posted bullshit…
During the boom times of 2021-2022 it had like a 95% graduation rate and 90% placement within 6 months.
Now in 2024 they have like a 90% graduation rate and 40% placement within 6 months.
HOWEVER, people list like "X to Present" for these fake listings. The bootcamp has like a 60-70% placement within 12 months now and as people hit like 1 year post bootcamp these fake listings look like 1+ years of work experience and help people start getting jobs.
So the TLDR - no - Codesmith is falling apart and I would recommend running for the hills - they are down to a skeleton crew of staff, half of who are looking for work.
The best bootcamps have closed down or pivoted.
Rithm closed, App Academy closed SWE, General Assembly pivoted to B2B according to their annual report, Bloom Tech closed SWE, Turing shut down, Launch Academy shut down, Code Up shut down, Episcodus shut down. Tech Elevat…
Codesmith is the SWE place where 80%+ of graduates do this by stretching their resumes.
How people get away with it all?
1. Companies not verifying employment
2. The person putting friend's contact info and the friend verifies
3. They use fake pay stuffs or offer letters to verify
4. The bootcamp lies for them for background checks
5. They list group projects as work and have peers from the group project do the background checks
6. The list a bunch of stuff on LinkedIn to get recruiters attention but they don't talk about it to the engineers and they don't include it on the background check.
Give me the specific program name, cohort name, or graduation month, and how you know it's 3% (e.g. from people who are in our Slack, or from the school's documentation) and I'll add it.
I know that could out you so if you send that to me privately I can massage it a bit so it's less identifiable.