School doesn't matter unless you went to a top 4, or top 10 CS school haha, but that's hundreds to maybe 1000 people a year and these people have recruiters lined up, rather than seeking advice on how to apply to jobs.
The person who wrote it has come forward and hasn't said which company but posted here explaining: [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/constructive-discussions-my-startup-software-engineer-ali-taghikhani-x2d7c/](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/constructive-discussions-my-startup-software-engineer-ali-taghikhani-x2d7c/)
Your bootcamp credential is basically not being valued as anything :(
Bootcamp grads getting jobs are faking/exaggerating their work experience.
Imagine having your resume except since November 2023 - present you have a Software Engineer role listed on your resume with 5 extensive bullet points that sound like a job and at the very bottom says "Product accelerated by X Labs" to indicate that this isn't a job but something under some organization called X Labs that you google search and find out is a charity that supports open source projects.
Another option is if you work at your bootcamp after and you call it "Senior Software Engineer" work at some made up entity disconnected from the bootcamp so people don't connect the dots.
Even these strategies aren't faired well in 2024 and people need to have this fake experience on there for a year to even get traction for jobs :(
But the bo…
If you are on the UI side talk to u/sherrifderek !
I'm less knowledgable about the freelancer and web design agency side of things that might be more relevant for your goals
Oh yeah Odin Project, FreeCodeCamp, even cheap things under $100 (one time or per year) are good ways to dabble in coding.
I'm not sure OP's coding level but they could be good if it's very minimal and the management experience involved almost no code.
Or if they want to get their feet wet again in code I would also recommend those.
I might also recommend GreatFrontend as it's a little more interview focused and not for as beginners.
If you already said you just aren't interested anymore as the main reason and want your money back, then it does make sense that you have to pay some amount of money - they paid their teachers and staff and for their software and tools, etc... and unless they were contractually obligated to refund you if you stopped being interested in tech anymore, then you do owe them :(
If they contractually promised you that you could leave at any time and get your money back then you might have a case and I can't comment on that either way, but I'm speaking practically - they spent some amount of money on you and it's also not fair to make them eat that cost because you lost interest either.
yeah, we've had conversations in the past about people going to boot camps to learn rather than to get a job. unfortunately with the market right now, the people who are going to boot camps are people who have done a lot of research and are going to get a job.
like the people who are complaining to me so much about Codesmith right now is a mix of that. their teachers are recent graduates that don't know as much as they do because they were like super prepared and went there just to get a job. and then people who got a job or didn't get a job but are complaining that of way more people than expected in their cohorts did not get jobs yet and that they're very upset with the support they're getting, like cutting off mock interviews this month for alumni according to one person, something they promised for life.
like I hear so much about just one program because it's spiraled over the yea…
Every person got SWE jobs in a bunch of cohorts was the thing that stood out yeah. It's quite inconsistent with three of my sources.
I have a ton of typos because I use voice to text and on my phone so I edit a lot of messages to reword but I agree with you to watch out on editing.
So the scope of what people say matters and how they say it.
If you say something is an option or observation then it's different from saying something is fact.
If you say something is a fact I will diligently review far more than if you say it's an opinion.
Many opinions that align can be useful even if it's not a fact based conclusion.
And sometimes one very specific fact.... like evidence Codesmith paid someone to go after me on Reddit can mean a heck of a lot even if its limited to a specific situation.
Yeah I get that and I totally take your personal experience I just have to super diligently normalize the information I get because people seem to have different interpretations of different words and different concepts and different dates and all kinds of things. so I have to be absurdly diligent to be able to make the claims that I'm making.
the cohorts are quite isolated and you only really see the information before and after. and one of the reasons I'm able to make interesting observations is that people from all different cohorts contact me and I piece things together.
A lot of people tell me a lot of things on an ongoing basis. So lots of people have sent me lots of information about placements about things going on there etc for the past 2 to 3 years. so I'm asking you questions to correlate your answers against other answers without revealing any actual information that would bias things.
so like if your answers don't add up then I flag you as someone who might be playing games on Reddit and if they do align then I might ask more questions or rely on your information more
You said like you know for sure that people are not responding to the surveys which to me implies you've discussed this with people and they explicitly said I'm not responding to the survey.
I might have misinterpreted and maybe you just meant that you think that placement numbers are higher than their official numbers. therefore, people must not be replying to the survey. is that what you meant?
Do you know why people aren't reporting though in your opinion? I've heard the opinions and perspectives of a lot of people so I'm curious to hear your view.
Oh ok so you are a 2022 grad for CIRR purposes even though you job hunted in 2023.
Yeah your placement rates in CIRR were 70% in 6 months and 80% in 12 months so those are pretty consistent yeah.
I was talking about people who STARTED in the years above. The placement rates for people STARTING in 2023 and job hunting 2023 -> 2024 was 42% in their CA data with 65% of people ghosting.
Thanks for sharing, that would help explain why they had 65% of placements 'non response but verified via LinkedIn' for 2023 grads in CA.
Questions:
1. Are these people getting SWE roles or taking adjacent jobs?
2. If people are not responsive to Codesmith, how do you know the cohorts have 60% placement rates? Are you using LinkedIn yourself or are you using the unofficial channels.
(I ask because the alumni that have messaged me in the past few weeks have universally called their alumni channels "ghost towns" (they are 2024 though!)
3. Why do you think so many people are no longer responding to the emails compared to in 2022?
The three eras to me are defined not necessarily by dates but by bootcamp trends.
The dates in my original post don't align super well and I have to spend more time thinking of the dates if they matter at all.
1. Era 1: super intense in person bootcamps for super smart people that had to prove themselves to get it, worked crazy hard, and got very good outcomes.
This was very non-diverse, a lot of young single professionals with a lot of savings and no families or who could pack up their lives to move to SF.
This is where bootcamps came from when they started out.
The canonical one here would be the earliest days of Hack Reactor.
Big tech was hiring these people if they passed interviews. There weren't a lot of grads for a broad trend but some made it through!
2. Era 2: DEI. Big companies realized that non-traditional sources of talent could help increase diversity because CS grad…
There are a lot of gray areas and a lot of state and local conflicting laws around discrimination.
Some of these areas, like explicitly hiring decisions mentioned, have been battle tested in court more than others so if some negative behaviors have been firmly affirmed as illegal in the courts, companies will try harder to avoid those behaviors.
There are a lot of areas untested and if you feel discriminated against and want to push a company in an untested area. You have to be ready to go to the supreme court, to get what out of it.
Recruiting funnels tend to separate the hiring process (from application being received onwards) from the marketing process (sourcing and advertising for jobs).
If the marketing process has diversity goals, they might focus their advertising and outreach in certain communities in the hope that more people apply from those communities. But every applicati…
Yeah you're right, it was more like 2015 to 2018 for the in person ones in SF, like App Academy and Hack Reactor that kept the bar high. They started to slip a bit in 2018 to 2020 and COVID the wheels fell off the bus.
I would probably break these down more granular in retrospect
ELABORATED ANSWERS:
1. No one is falling for it:
a - Applications and enrollments to bootcamps have absolutely tanked. I can't give too much away in my sourcing here but I have hot off the press anecdotes and it seems to be falling off a cliff from already painful numbers.
b - I don't know any company that his historically hired bootcamp grads that is knowingly hiring them (i.e. they aren't faking it and getting fake letters of reference) other than apprenticeships and the anti-DEI shift has diminished or ended a lot of those.
2. Market cooled:
a - it cooled for entry level SWE roles from 2020-2022 and particularly bootcamp grads
b - agencies don't hire for level and they hire for specific skills so I expect agency hiring hasn't changed much and wouldn't push back on that.
3. No one is hiring bootcamp grads:
Ok sure "no one" is too harsh. It's extremely rare to see job postings w…
I mean with the info that floats my way about bootcamps getting worse and worse by the day and loan providers, the SWE bootcamps industry as an industry is done.
I'm not changing my views that 20 person bootcamps will survive and can work for specific cases.
But if you are seeing bootcamps marketing to masses and making you feel like "you could be next", you have to run.
Bootcamps had 3 eras:
2015 to 2020: a lot of success stories, bootcamps had high bars and only let in people who had a high chance of success. They worked on at a small scale
2020 to 2023: COVID - bootcamps and remote work exploded and the successful bootcamps scaled over night and completely failed. Lambda School was the canary here - it showed us bootcamps can't scale by just multiplying their staff but schools did anyways. Instead of reflecting and strengthening during these boom times they just scaled and failed.
2023-Present: market cooled bootcamps reputations destroyed, no one is hiring bootcamp grads, no one is falling for it.
I follow Codesmith closely and look at the California official placement rates for six months post graduation: 2021 - 90%, 2022 - 70%, 2023 - 42%.... and they raised prices this year anyways despite knowing these numbers before doing so.
+1 this, fake or not, these are legit and blunt guidelines tech use (which variations per company) and I was surprised by the reaction to this post. It's telling me that bootcamps are brainwashing people to believe in some alternate reality and makes me sad that bootcamps grades thought the industry might be different.
I think some people see this as very devastating to accept and they just want to believe in an alternate reality to have hope. I'm more realistic and I think you have to understand reality to navigate it, but there's always a way that there's a will, but you have to direct your energy in the right direction, directing it on false hope is a waste of time.
It's not laughable because the selection bias in those schools, it's a proxy signal.
It's not a sole decider and I'm sure they would take people from any school in reality, but it's easy to target people from those schools.
Stanford is a bit unique because a ton of people do startups IN SCHOOL themselves and they are physically IN silicon valley bumping into tech people left right and center. They have all kins of talks from tech CEOs in person, on campus programs, VCs fund students to scout talent, it's like INSANE.
I've been to Waterloo a ton of times recruiting for Meta.
But Waterloo grads tend to get 2-3 FAANG internships in there. It's 5 year degree an they alternate 4 months school, 4 month internship, so the first ones tend to be lower companies and then they work their way up to FAANG. The top people have 4-5 FAANG internships.
So you hire someone as a "new grad" who has worked at Meta, Amazon, Google, Palantir etc...
I would personally lean Stanford grad, it's a special ecosystem. But Waterloo is up there.
Waterloo is kind of a quiet secret and companies get a lot of solid talent from there, b…
Feel free to DM me if you want me to look at your resume (anonymized if you want) because if you have 2.5 years at FAANG as a SWE you should be able to get interviews.
If you are getting interviews and not passing, then it's a different challenge to work on.
I don't mean to dismiss anyone's personal story or journey or invalidate it - everyone has their own path.
When you zoom out and look at the data, the companies see trends, and they go with those trends, it's rational.
If bootcamp grads were crushing it at companies, they have the internal data processes and metrics to know, and they would go all in hiring bootcamp grads.
That simply isn't happening and they are sticking to their story.
Funny enough, your anecdote isn't that uncommon, and a lot of people get to these top jobs and then see all the problems with the companies and then want to move on to new jobs.
The SWE career can be a wild ride for many!
I agree there's no path in the sense that no one can give you a path/road to follow to get there.
So maybe a different framing is that you have to make your own path.
You have dig a tunnel under the wall, or build a flying machine to airdrop yourself in.
And that can feel unfair when they lower the drawbridge for every MIT grad that walks in.
There are ways, and I can give you tons of examples, but these examples would be to stimulate ideas and not to give a path to follow.
This is my philosophical view:
Stanford and MIT generally have incredible smart people and some people are smarter than others. They are selecting for a certain type of "smart" person that our society deems will be an impactful person.
Whereas community colleges let in just anyone who pays for credits.
So the societal structure is setup to try to rely on top schools as vetting our the people who are "supposed…
It depends on the person but in the current market if you have 2+ years of real SWE experience we can generally help you. We do a lot of job hunt and resume work but I completely agree that we can't beat the market - we used to take more people right out of bootcamps with minimal experience (like working at the bootcamp itself, or contracts, some people faked their work experience and go through) and we increased that threshold in the bad market.
But if you have 2+ years of experience in any legit SWE job you can get into big tech, I see it multiple times a month. It takes longer if your background is less strong, like in the past few weeks we had placements at Meta, Google, and Stripe of people who had been with us for like 2 WHOLE YEARS and wouldn't meet the criteria on this post. If you work with mentors from FAANG-adjacent companies for weeks and weeks you eventually absorb some of…
I had to find my own path into tech too. I did an engineering degree so it was much easier than others, but I empathize with this problem.
My life's mission is for people to end up in roles they love where they have impact on world instead of doing jobs they don't like to get by. I want to see people in jobs that leverage their passions and strengths.
Don't judge a book by it's cover or a website from it's homepage!
wow! this thread blew up so I'm going to add some more thoughts here because there's a lot more to this than I commented.
so these things don't mean that people who don't meet these requirements are bad Engineers or worse engineers.
some of the best Engineers I worked with came from not top tier schools and somewhere self-taught and had very interesting backgrounds and life experiences.
the problem big tech companies is that those people are not systematically recruitable. like the data shows that maybe 95% of the Stanford grads that join a big tech company perform exceptionally well and if they were to hire a hundred people from a local community college in a non-tech heavy area, then maybe three out of 100 people would be performing well.
so it's in the company's interest to recruit from these sources that produce people that historically perform well because they can then effi…
Waterloo grads have six internships so you're basically getting someone who's a mid-level engineer as an entry level engineer and they are indeed in that bucket for new grads. Over time I would say things level out. I don't think that Waterloo grids are particularly successful in the longer term compared to those other schools, but early career they can be a good find.
They have shut down while they are in progress yeah but it's rare because programs that were doing really well and collapsed in the market want to have a positive legacy and leave on a good note.
Internal hire is a fantastic path. Having a company support your transition is a great pathway.
Oops yeah I guess the email says all bootcamp grads EVER should be excluded - which is more extreme. I've seen bootcamp grads with no experience flat out excluded because of lack of experience, but once you have 4+ YOE it doesn't matter as much.
It does matter for proxy signal though. It's so hard to get into Stanford and MIT that if you do, you are probably an extremely strong candidate for the rest of your life - more likely to be than at other schools for example. But that's more of a reason to +1 those schools, not to ban all others.
The email and the recruiter who sent it both appear legit and story adds up, but people can fake emails and send fake emails so I can't rule everything out.
Regard allegations of fake screenshots. OP sent more evidence confidentially. It's impossible to 100% prove an email is authentic over Reddit, but the evidence adds more credibility to the original post. I can't rule out an elaborate Reddit-fraud scheme, but as far as a coin toss I would guess more likely than not real.
I try to be on guard here with activity that is provable disingenuous but there is a lot of fake accounts on here that carefully manipulate conversations with the intention of advertising.
You'll see accounts popup that talk very middle-road and casually drop in bootcamp names or program names, etc...
There's one top bootcamps you hear about a lot here that has had comments that go from 0 to +20 or from +20 to 0 (if it's negative) in minutes.
I can't do anything about voting manipulation as a mod, but Reddit's AI has improved a lot and it seems to wipe out these fake accounts after a few weeks of suspicious activity or when an account makes a mistake and they don't get their VPN and virtual machines right to evade the algorithm.
It's why you have to be vigilant on here.
Whether you like the criteria or not and whether it's gatekeeping or not, this is what everyone who has significant experience is telling you and I'm yelling loudly over and over **top tier CS schools are the primary path to entry level jobs right now!!** End of sentence.
If you want to career change then that's probably not an option so when you look at the next best thing, it's a massive range of:
1. 4+ years of experience = impossible
2. No job hoppers = you can show that in a previous career if you have tangential professional/technical experience
3. Significant experience at notable startups = maybe you can volunteer at one to get it on your resume?
4. **NO BOOTCAMP GRADS =** don't go to a bootcamp!
5. Fake profiles = if you went to a bootcamp **don't lie about your experience**
And that leaves pretty much no options if you are a career changer with zero experience and this i…
Reddit doesn't add UTM params to anything so wherever you got it from was someone including tracking for marketing purposes.
Codesmith claims that they have no control over the Codesmith subreddit (which is the one referenced in the UTM params) so something doesn't add up:
The params are explicitly referencing the Codesmith subreddit and not only that but you shared the exact same UTM params in a dozen or more places across Reddit.
If you were sharing it genuinely you would probably have clean links or different links each time. You might just got o CSX and copy paste the clean URL for example, or you might link to specific exercises have different params.
So if you accidentally did this, then you kept copy pasting your same comment dozens of times and changing it a bit, which violates Reddits ToS against mass commenting.
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
I have a list of LinkedIns for Future Code people and a bunch are doing the same old experience exaggeration that students do.
I thought you couldn't have any experience or a CS degree going into Future Code and now I'm seeing these people retroactively having adjacent experience and computer science degrees in progress or computer science minors.
Future Code students - if you are reading this - don't lie on your resumes and don't believe Codesmith if they tell you aren't lying but just representing your "real capacities" and making your "perceived capacities" align with the real ones.
It might help you get a job but the industry looks down on this and if you get a job this why and OSLabs signs off on your background check, you'll have to live with the fact that you cheated your way into the industry and the consequences will catch up with you someday.
I've worked with a couple of Fu…