I was talking to someone about this today, they asked me the same question. I've had dozens of people share their stories with me and say it's so I can keep being 'tough on the bootcamps'.
I don't ask them why they don't post themselves nor do I suggest people do because that's up to them, so I don't really know exactly why.
BUT these are some themes that have come up in general that could be related:
\- people fear retaliation (not being given the best support if found out), being DOXXED (and just called out and they don't want to deal)
\- people feel bad they didn't get a job, but others did and they blame themselves
\- people feel really loved the team/instructors and don't want them blamed for negative feedback
\- people have given feedback internally that went unaddressed so they don't want to repeat it again publicly and DOX themselves.
\- people want refunds and don't want…
1. Formation is a technology platform that support practice and mentorship in pretty many any information area, and we have been exploring other areas, like this one [https://formation.dev/ai-native-ea](https://formation.dev/ai-native-ea)
2. For SWEs - we're seeing more and more senior, strong background engineers coming to us because there is fierce competition for those senior jobs. We have thousands of pieces of content and are constantly adapting to the changing landscape.
I went to OpenAI's office this week and had a session with people on the Codex team. It is absolutely true but it will take a bit more time until it reaches everywhere.
Yeah ISAs have a lot of benefits and a lot of problems, and where you land generally depends on your outcome.
The ISA regulation shifted and when they were branded as loans and I think that helped the perspective.
They seemed too good to be true - "I get free training and don't pay anything unless I get a job" when that wasn't entirely the case. It was valid in some cases, but it made it feel too risk-free.
There is zero excuse for this.
The number of times Codesmith has fucked up and promised "audits" and other things and then continued to spew out user information is ridiculous.
Will Sentence has to own this, take responsibility, fix it, prevent it from happening again.
Until then, absolutely zero defence.
CODESMITH: Can you please shut down CSX? It's spewing out user data and content and hasn't been updated in years.
Codesmith's "free learning platform" that they claim can get you an "entry level job" by completing is one of the worst pieces of software I've seen in ed-tech.
For example, this URL gives the ENTIRE CONTENT IN ITS ENTIRETY away in a single click: [https://csx.codesmith.io/api/yaml/all](https://csx.codesmith.io/api/yaml/all)
This isn't a secret or a hack, it's literally just fetched when you login to load all the content and is freely available to the internet, no authentication.
Next, anyone can just grab all the user data for any user they want.
For example, this is my user data: [https://csx.codesmith.io/users/95526](https://csx.codesmith.io/users/95526) and I give you permission to open it and look at it.
DO NOT look at other users data because that can be a gray a…
</BOOTCAMPS> ❤️ OFFICIAL MEMORIAL POST: share this around and tell your old bootcamp stories in the comments. So we can close the bootcamp chapter on a positive note.
I asked **CIRR 30 days ago** where the 2024-25 **missing reports** are. I did not get a response. This tells me CIRR is dead and its flagship Codesmith is dead. Other bootcamps we've lost are: Rithm, Turing, Codeup, Kenzie, Launch Academy, Momentum, Alchemy, Epicodus, Lighthouse Labs, 2U/Trilogy, Lambda School, and more.
Unlike the embarrassing end that CIRR and Codesmith are experiencing - too ashamed to end on a positive note and instead end in layoffs and utter silence, I want things to end on a positive.
If you graduated from a coding bootcamp in the past, and it changed your life, TELL US YOUR STORY. No selling or shilling, just tell us how coding impacted your life and in the right time and right place your bootcam…
Work on real Open Source projects, managed and maintained by companies. Contribute solid work there and build relationships with the engineers that work at one of the companies. They backdoor refer you and push hard internally for you.
Embellishing individual points is fine as long as the core substance is something you did and can talk about.
The number one rule for bullet points is don't put something you can't speak about if asked about that bullet.
I looked at thousands of student resumes on intern hiring days and every single person was the "Lead engineer" on the same group projects 😛
Don't lie on your resume. It will come back to bite you. Present yourself in the best light possible but don't flat out lie.
There is a coding bootcamp where an instructor told people to put fake experience on their resume and that the coding bootcamp would back you up.
It might work short term, but it will catch up with you. The bootcamp doesn't appear to have any students anymore and it caught up with them.
COVID. COVID forced all bootcamps remote and online. Then when COVID was over, people attended from all over the country remotely and they kept the programs to support a wider range of people. Some tried to re-introduce in person, some didn't, but it was never the same, and they slowly closed them down.
You can usually take just one course at a time not a degree or diploma so you could just take like a course that's two times a week for four months instead and then maybe add on another course if you like it after
It's definitely a challenge but I have seen people with that kind of background get jobs that Facebook back in the day when I was there.
Contributing to open source projects that the company cares about is one option. Because you're working with their engineers on real code and if you do really well then that means more than a lot of other signal.
there's a few related things in New York City because there's enough density but it is very hard to find any boot camp that has any in person anymore.
it's not even about the like quality of the learning. it's that renting space for a large group of people in a density is extremely expensive and most boot camps are dead now and they don't even exist and the ones that are on life support don't have the money to pay for that lease.
Codesmith was allegedly paying like $75,000 a month for their lease in New York City that they dropped and left the state entirely. so if you need like four students a month just to pay your lease. never mind all of your staff that's not going to work when you have like a handful of enrollments a year now.
it does sound like taking a community college course might be a good thing for you like to look at. it'll cost significantly less. the material will be…
Yeah that's a great point, a lot of those sites suck and are just SEO garbage manipulation stuff.
I would then ask it after, to evaluate the reliability of the sources.
I would then ask more specific questions from the exhaustive report, like "analyze the content quality", "anaylze the community health and structure", etc..
LLMs shouldn't be making subjective judgements. They should be robots that collect and synthesize information.
Asking if it's good is still slightly leading yeah.
I have to explicitly ask for something like this: "audit r/SEO and produce a report evaluating the subreddit from different angles"
like any use of adjectives that have positive or negative connotation can bias the LLM.
Your question implied it was already decided that SEO was the best. So AI is just going to be super lazy.
Second, if you don't enable web search, AI can't can new facts beyond its training window.
You asked a leading question and got a bad result. This is a skll issue. AI will be as lazy as it can be.
I'm an engineer and same with code.
If I say "why is my code so good?" it will be garbage.
I need to ask "audit my code and create a report of pros and cons and validate each one".
this link: [https://prachub.com/?utm\_source=reddit&utm\_campaign=andy](https://prachub.com/?utm_source=reddit&utm_campaign=andy)
note the utm\_source = reddit and the utm\_campaign = andy.
This was something that some account was doing with Codesmith, posting links all across Reddit pretending to be a "student" sharing a helpful link, and the link contained UTM params like this. I called them out and the person said they got the link from the Codesmith subreddit, so I searched the sub Reddit exhaustively and found no such link... confronted again... the person stopped posting and didn't reply.
I'm royally pissed off at Lars Lofgren for spreading such bullshit about my moderation because he has no fucking idea how to moderate Reddit - or he does and just wants good guys like me gone so he can get away with his sketchy stuff himself?
Capstone specifically. Launch School had announced that they were reducing Capstone from 3 cohorts to 2 this year, but really every fix length full time bootcamp is collapsing because there's just no world where leaving your current job and being unemployed for 3-4 months with the hope of a $100K job at the end makes sense in this climate. Juniors can't get jobs with experience already, mid-levels are having a hard enough time. If you don't have a job and suddenly want to be an engineer - don't. Find ways of learning technical skills you can bring back to your old field instead.
Like it's just nonsensical to do a full time bootcamp right now if you want a job out of it.
CIRR seems defunct, no results for the 2024-25 period and no response to asking them when that will be... they died embarrassingly instead of gracefully and I'm pissed off after all the bravado and marketing spin during…
Dude you covered up a lawsuit alleging $3.9M of "stolen" funds while all this was going on.
Good job reporting the spam, you have bigger issues to worry about with that kind of lying and manipulation.
Of course it's fine to defame someone and rip them apart and then when proven wrong with 8000 word of evidence and I didn't even start with the text messages that show worse stuff, I'm harassing you.
NOTE: I was not a mod when this happened and people tying this to me doing this as a mod are factually incorrect. Stop.
Debunked: https://michaelnovati.substack.com/p/a-response-to-lars-lofgrens-codesmith
This was indeed debunked [https://michaelnovati.substack.com/p/a-response-to-lars-lofgrens-codesmith](https://michaelnovati.substack.com/p/a-response-to-lars-lofgrens-codesmith)
This was debunked: [https://michaelnovati.substack.com/p/a-response-to-lars-lofgrens-codesmith](https://michaelnovati.substack.com/p/a-response-to-lars-lofgrens-codesmith)
Will is a gifted lecturer. He's terrible at running a business: [https://michaelnovati.substack.com/p/a-response-to-lars-lofgrens-codesmith](https://michaelnovati.substack.com/p/a-response-to-lars-lofgrens-codesmith)
I bet you didn't know he allegedly sold 70% of Codesmith to investors in 2015.
I recommended many people go to Codesmith and the story is false. Don't be scammed.