I commented on this separately, I see four cases, and one of them is indeed living in fear and feeling like you are underperforming lower level colleagues.
App Academy certainly is no saint here, but at least paused their SWE program entirely recently given these issues instead of pretending everything is amazing and telling career changers that "you can be next".
Great example here: [https://www.linkedin.com/posts/codesmith-llc\_programmer-coding-codingbootcamp-activity-7303912379589820416-c\_03](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/codesmith-llc_programmer-coding-codingbootcamp-activity-7303912379589820416-c_03)
"From conducting orchestras to software engineering"
1. The person's LinkedIn says they had 11 months of SWE experience prior to Codesmith and then 1.4 years of open source experience "software engineer" experience during Codesmith.
2. Then you read the blog post there and find out the person was an orchestra conductor with no experience prior to Codesmith
3. Then you ask a recruiter at Capital One that says to clear a background check for a "Senior Associate" role (which is not a Senior Software Engineer role there - which requires 4 years of experience), you need to have 2 years of verifiable SWE experience to get hired...
So something…
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
Don't get me started on this because I've been hounding them for literally years on this and it's been happening since 2019 https://www.reddit.com/r/TechLA/comments/b7xl98/codesmith_coding_bootcamp_scam_beware/
Every time I significantly push back you'll see like a blog post about someone who got a senior job right out of Codesmith, and they just adamantly adamantly believe this to the bitter end.
So I don't think they are lying but instead are delusional.
No leader there has a STEM degree, and no leader has been an engineer ever either in industry.
Enough people for $130K jobs in the past they made them believe they and the secret formula to creating mid level and senior engineers out of s bootcamp that it became their identity.
When your identity is attacked, you often defend completely irrationally.
There are a handful of people that have gotten those jobs. and then when you zo…
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
I've been a massive fan of apprenticeships (some are better than others though so you have to watch out).
You need 10000 hours to develop the taste needed to be a valuable engineer and a bootcamp gives you 1000. Doing apprenticeships for 2 years can get you almost there.
You can rush it and you have to put in the time.
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
It's not that at all.
They are gaslighting critics of Codesmith hahaha by countering facts with cherry picked numbers and then telling the critics they are wrong.
But the students are genuinely rewiring their thinking to believe they are mid level and senior engineers.
It takes 12 weeks and lots of tactics:
- if you are ever negative you do correction meetings to readjust your mindset to be positive
- You have to emoji like every post and an instructor apparently complained they didn't get enough emoji reactions for example.
- you are told you have imposter syndrome and the solution is to follow Codesmith's resume advice to fix it and to trust them because you have imposter syndrome and aren't thinking properly about your work so you have to trust Codesmith's way as the "reality"
This stuff actually works though! Like people systematically come out thinking this way and when Codesmit…
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
The way this has been framed to me:
1. the top couple of students usually get jobs quickly. they aren't on Reddit and they often aren't very engaged because they are in and out. others wonder why these people did Codesmith in the first place. when I've talked them I get a mix of responses: they were misled to believe Codesmith was more senior and they were way to advanced and we're advising the teachers, they needed some kind of structure and peers because doing it alone was emotionally challenging, and some people just wanted to do projects to refresh their skills and were misled that the codesmith projects were like work experience.
I hear people here saying that it wasn't really with it but that they enjoyed the community and didn't think it was a scam or entire waste of money, just probably wouldn't have done it in retrospect.
2. the 2nd tier of students get hired by Codesmith. T…
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
Apparently someone said there are no support engineers available for March for resume and mock interviews?
It's sad if Codesmith worked for you back in the day but it's imploding right now they don't deserve people's money right now.
I can't believe one of their leaders texted an alumni who was considering Formation and told them 'it's a waste of money and Codesmith will give them all they need for life'
Sure.... 'all they need'.... we have hundreds of mock interview slots available for the next week.
Does doing your research include looking at reports and asking critical questions and then interpreting answers?
Question: the ghosting rate for placements went from 15% to 65% from 2022 grads to 2023 in CA reports, what happened there? Why are alumni not responsive and is there a problem continuing in 2024?
The problem, whether you think I have biases or not, is that I **do my research** and I show it to people. When things are good, I publish good.
There has been nothing good in the past 2 years, no silver lining, nothing. There have been anecdotal one off success cases.
Codesmith added 5 lectures of AI to their curriculum that are already dated and worse than the free stuff from Andrej Karpathy on Youtube... and they intentionally chose to go all in on an AI curriculum that they knew was changing daily and they didn't have any unique expertise in teaching.
Like I wish I had more…
Even if this was considered good, it's not good enough to justify the cost and no one is forcing anyone to do a bootcamp, you can choose to not do any of them.
You would think it's that obvious but Codesmith explicitly tells people the opposite. They say that you are a mid/senior because Codesmith nurtures your capacity to be a mid/senior engineer and that gatekeepers in the industry are unfairly preventing you from getting the change you deserve, so their job is to make you realize your ARE a mid/senior and build your confidence believing that so you demonstrate that in interviews
This is what they have directly said almost word for word numerous times.
They have a chart of your "perceived capacity" vs "actual capacity" and they the problem is that people ARE mid/senior and just don't perceive themselves to be.
Comes across like an MLM pitch... you are "triple diamond status" you just don't know it yet. Give us $20,000 and work really hard and you'll see that soon enough!
Oh wow, that's insane. But it also explains the absolute disregard for ethics and zero integrity.
He went to Oxford, I thought they taught integrity there.
Do you know if Hack Reactor ever took legal action?
We have stuff in our contract that if you take any IP from my company you are done for.
Do you know for sure that he intentionally copied Hack Reactor? As in his strategy was "I'm going to copy Hack Reactor's material and teach it better" or was it "I'm going to start a school, all bootcamps are the same, I'm just going to follow the curriculum Hack Reactor did because it doesn't matter"
Both are wrong, but one is criminal and one is a civil lol.
I've seen two groups of people
1. People who want to be "honest" (their words) and none of the career support engineers are helping them do that and they all push the "Codesmith style resume" templates and check lists that indirectly guide you to exaggerating your experience (which Codesmith says is unintentional)
2. People who genuinely think they are mid-level and senior - generally ambitious and intense people - successful in other careers - well connected - ivy league background - and they really think they have the grit and smarts to make it, but can't seem to pass the interviews. These people are definitely heading places but you just can rush things. In 2021 these people were getting jobs and doing okay, but in this market they are competing with their clones who also have CS degrees and actual SWE experience and they just can't cut it.
A lot of people in the second bucket unde…
I don't think I could disagree more.
I work on an interview prep platform, which is unrelated to boot camps, but we've shipped hundreds of changes in the past year. we're going to start announcing a bunch of changes publicly because we want people to see just how insanely hard. we are trying to help people navigate the market, read how we continuously challenge our most basic assumptions and redo things and rethink things to match what's needed. week to week and once a month.
and yes, it's absolutely a rough market and a lot of people are having a hard time but if people are paying a lot of money then it's your job as a company to really give it your all.
so like I said, if the CEO is more interested in spending more so his time writing a book right now about AI ethics, that is nothing to do with software engineering placements. then I don't think that they deserve your money.
But why is it taking longer just because supply is low.
I reiterate, If there's nothing that codesmith can do about this because of the market, then they shouldn't exist right now
So I'm trying to open the door for them to be able to do something within their control to produce the placement numbers that could justify paying $22,000 for.
If they've made all the changes they can and they don't think there's anything else then they're done right?
Their CEO is off writing a book about ai and inequality and doesn't seem interested to be spending 12 hours a day on the ground with every single alumni helping them in whatever way they can.
So maybe that's a sign that they've tried everything they can and these are the best the results are going to be and if that's the case, they're not good enough to justify their existence right now or at least their cost.
A lot of people say that but what do you think that means?
Like does it mean that people need to continuously apply and they finally get lucky at month 12?
Or do they need to do more supplemental work and then job hunt when they have more experience?
Are they waiting for a local maximum in hiring to get into a job?
Are people fishing interviews from competitiveness?
And whatever the factor is, why isn't Codesmitb addressing that factor to strengthen grads in the areas slowing them down?
Codesmith's CEO loud and clear said that Codesmith style applications have a 20% response rate so why the heck would it take so long.... someone could spend an ENTIRE DAY doing a Codesmith style application and get a response a week.
They don't seem to understand the market or how to navigate it and keep telling people that the same old same old works, gaslighting alumni, not making enough changes,…
The thing Codesmith leaders won't accept is that even if they have good intentions and even if they built a great community, they can't beat the market and the market says they shouldn't exist anymore.
Instead they have raised prices to $22,500.
I bet you went it was $18,000 and 80% got jobs making $125K in six months.
Now it's $22,500 and 40% of people in that time frame get jobs making $110K.
Finally, their CIRR numbers have always showed relatively low 90 day placement and very solid 180 day placement, so people weren't getting jobs in a month that often.
What I'm observing is around half of the placements I see... which is not many anymore, take over a year to get packed and their LinkedIn has them 'working at' their 3 week group project (listed as a company) for the entire time... often offer a year.
This looks to the untrained eye like the person has a year of experience and the longer someone is job hunting the more experience this item shows.
So I think it's indeed taking people longer because they need to have a year or more experience to even be taken seriously on the market.
But all that said, their ghosting rate of alumni skyrocketed and that indicates that alumni are not engaged and disappearing after six months so even if they are getting jobs and it's taking longer, they are figuring it out on their own.
I've been calling this out loud and clear and pushing them very hard for being deceptive and manipulative.
Their response: hire people on Upwork to manipulate Reddit and try to dismiss my posts and hire new people to push the brand with a refreshed story.
I'm appalled at their responses to my critical scrutiny.
Their 2023 California numbers showed that 2/3 of "placements" ghosted and were verified by LinkedIn - compare to just 15% the year before - and when I asked them if their contractor could have mistaken misrepresented group projects on LinkedIn at work experience.... no response. Instead they pulled the report and replaced it with an unofficial one using 12 month placement windows instead of 6 months and published these random stats about 102 offers accepted in the past 6 months.
102 offers accepted is a massive decline in offers per day from their previous numbers, $110K is a…
They don't and I think that's why CS grads are also struggling right now more than normal.
1. Top tier CS schools are more likely to have the "gifted" people there that do
2. Top tier CS schools have students that might ave 4 to 6 FAANG internships which gets them closer to the 10K hours, probably there with their Stanford CS schooling added in.
The thing I'm trying to flag is that there isn't a shortcut to get that. In the past there were enough companies where even though juniors were a net loss at first, they broke even on a reasonable time frame as they developed "taste".... but if juniors so so absurdly a loss that even training them to develop "taste" isn't worth it financially versus paying 5X for someone else who already has it, then bootcamps are going to work as a systematic large source of engineers.
Yeah it is, they talk about that too, like that their founders often do NOT have that expertise, and they talk about how their founders have to have the ability to review the work from those engineers, and was a lot of discussion about how reviewing code and having intuitions about code that's good or bad or works or not, or solved the problem well or not is very important.....
.... but they then call that "taste" and it's unresolved how people get that taste if AI does everything to begin with and it's harder and harder to get the raw experience.
YCombinator video about the future of engineering hiring - summary: in an AI world only "taste" matters and you can only build "taste" through time and "10,000 hours of deliberate practice" ... not good news for bootcamps
YCombinator is the worlds largest startup incubator, where Airbnb and dozens more billion dollar companies originated. They seed hundreds of startups every year.
They discussed what they are seeing at their startups in this video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IACHfKmZMr8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IACHfKmZMr8)
The first point below is really a massive negative for any kind of bootcamp. I would expect bootcamps to call this "gatekeeping" - experienced engineers trying to keep their positions by calling their expertise "taste" and hiring people for having that.
Well I've seen a small number of people gifted with taste at a younger age and accelerate really f…
There are a bunch of bootcamps that have pivoted to AI and started to abandon/pause/not improve their SWE support like App Academy, BloomTech, Codesmith, and there are new AI-only bootcamps popping up.
The problem is that no one is an expert in AI tools yet and they change literally week to week. First it's Devin, then Cursor, now it's Windsurfer. It's co-pilots, its about data protection, it was about giant context windows and now it's about reasoning models, like.
I'm going to post top level in a sec about this.
I think a lot of this applies to a lot of bootcamps right now. If they only admitted people with corporate experience and who are well connected, then it might work for those people and maybe the business can go on.
Gone are the days that just anyone can walk into a bootcamp and leave with a SWE job... it never made sense and it still doesn't.
I feel super cringe when I see posts and ads from bootcamps like 'X did it you! You can too!' or '2024 was a great year, are you next?'... it should be illegal but it isn't and I'm in this sub to look at things from a middle of the road angle.
Turing sure is trying and you can pat them on the back for trying while simultaneously stating that they have an impossible mission....
He has never written production code at a top tier company so I don't consider him qualified. But I think he's smart enough to know a little bit about everything and pick up concepts for sure.
He's certainly sharp... in their lawsuit with Lambda Labs, Lambda School bought this company in Florida called Red Lambda that had a Lambda trademark prior to Lambda Labs to defend themselves, and I really think Austen has some kind of grit and hustle that is unmatched (and I mean this in an objective way, not saying if that's good or bad).
The biggest mistake people make is not believing people can change or grow, so I don't hold anything in Austen's past against him at all and I can do that while also feeling bad for and wanting to support anyone who feels like they were mislead by Lambda School... it can be both haha.
Anyways, I'm really curious. Like the shift from promoting diversity to 'le…
That sounds reasonable, I've been following along and the program itself seems real yeah.
The thing I'm skeptical of is
1. Austen isn't qualified to evaluate code and I'm pretty skeptical of his tweets, but that doesn't have anything to do with the program itself day to day.
2. I'm SUPER skeptical a company will hire all grads that survive The Guantlet, no questions asked. Like some companies have contractual obligations to run background checks, and I know if I was working at a company and the company hired 50 people without doing behavioral interviews for working style alignment, I would be REALLY concerned internally.
But I think the program seems very effective to identify for, select, and weed out an interesting group of people.
Do you have a sense of how many people are left as it comes ot an end??
I agree that the world is changing and SWE bootcamps haven't adapted, but at the same time the SWE market isn't tiny and it has trends and well the world is changing, there are tons of SWE jobs still and they are going to top CS students.
I'm using that to judge specific bootcamps marketing and claims that say otherwise.
Stanford CS is like 200K plus 4 years plus effort to even get in the first place.
So there's an argument that a boot camp could accelerate something in a shorter period of time, but it is not getting you to the same destination.
therefore, my view on this is that bootcamps are competing for the wrong SWE jobs.
It's irrelevant that the market changed, all that did was expose the above fundamental facts.
When I see bootcamps like Codesmith just yesterday advertising incredible 2024 outcomes (like they did throughout 2023 and 2024) they are absolutely delusional abo…
Yeah I've actually seen some Codesmith grads start an LLC for their project. Not sure if the IP paperwork is on the up and up there, but running an LLC teaches you something! haha.
Before I did Formation, we ran a company called Buildschool that WAS a free bootcamp, where senior engineers did paid contracting projects and the students learned by shadowing those projects and some became paid contractors on them later on was a really good model and a lot of those people placed and have great jobs.
The problem is the projects don't scale. Each one is different and unique. But like I keep saying, if you stay smaller and hands on focused on placement, it could work.
Yeah for sure, I've also seen probably every permutation of representation under the sun haha.
Ultimately people are responsible for their individual choice. If they over-represent and perform poorly, then it makes companies never want to hire bootcamp grads again (which is one thing that has happened a number of times). If they over-represent and do well, do the ends justify the means? A lot of this is blurry for sure.
The thing I have a major problem with at Codesmith is the majority of people have the exact same looking experience on their resumes, and grads have told me it's the only way the career support engineers advise doing it (as an explanation as to why -as Codesmith denies telling people to do this) - and then their 'sister company' OSLabs signs letters of reference for background checks backing whatever people tell them they did.
Codesmith's CEO has stated explicitly that…
Yeah I'm really curious what's working for entry level jobs. I have a very good handle through Formation on FAANG-mid-level and FAANG-senior.
As you know, I keep a close eye on Codesmith as the largest 'top 3' bootcamp, and placements are still terrible there and half the people placed have over a year of "work experience" on their LinkedIn which is their 3 week long project. I had some AI analyze that and it didn't do a good job to publish, but it was ridiculous to see maybe half the placements relying on framing a 3-4 week project as 12+ months of experiences only because they put "X - Present" on their LinkedIn and have been job hunting for 12+ months.... A bunch of the people also worked at Codesmith as a teaching assistant and they delay their clock by the time they worked there. So someone who graduated 2 years ago, was a part time assistant for 6 months, has 1.5 years at their gr…
Yeah my personal opinion is that bootcamps are a terrible idea right now. You can read my posts and I struggle to see how a SWE bootcamp can be relevant in 2025.
I do think a handful of programs will hang on and stay small and niche and maybe Turing will be one of the.
But the days of the SWE bootcamp disrupting the tech industry are over.
My 2 cents is relative outcomes are important and as long as a bootcamp is consistent in it's measurement and explains the trends then we're good.
It's not good if see something like Codesmith where they change the goal posts (e.g. 12 month placements instead of 6 months - conveniently changing in a terrible market when their placement rate tanked) and trying to post metrics and numbers that look good, while insulting you by calling it rigorous transparency - that's scam behavior.
I expect Turing to continue to publish the numbers they have been and explaining the trends proactively.
I don't think Turing's recent struggles have been hidden or misleading anyone.
I would push on what 'market turning around a little bit in 2025' means.
I'm not seeing anything turn around for entry level roles and there are two possibilities:
1. The partnerships they are making are helping some people…
Wow that's a lot of hustle to try to find paths for grads and I think it's really the only way for bootcamps to survive right now.... by dedicating 150% of your time to trying to find any nook and cranny of advantage for your grads in a market so bad that each partnership puts only a small debt into the problem and you find something deep inside to keep on going.
We've seen a similar level of trying creative angles at Launch School (e.g. open source mentorships on Firefox and such).
Others give up and try to pivot to AI, like App Academy completely stopped its SWE program and only does AI - same with BloomTech. Launch Academy paused entirely.
Some of the larger ones like General Assembly and Galvanize are somehow keeping the lights on and I would like to know more about them.
I'm very nervous about Codesmith, which was arguably the top bootcamp based on outcomes until 2023, and which…
There are a lot of regulations around collections processes and such and different types of collections.
They can give it to someone who can try to hound you to collect without going to your credit all the way to selling the debt to a collections agency that now owns the debt and goes after it very aggressively.
I don't see a collections agency wanting to buy ISA debt since ISAs are so not well defined but you never know.
It's more likely that they would hire a company to pursue you.
It can go to collections yeah. ISA are complicated because various departments of federal and state government have made claims they have oversight of ISAs but no laws have been passed explicitly giving anyone oversight.
So you see a lot of headlines that are much more nuanced than they seem. ISA actions have tended to be departmental interpretations applied to specific companies that companies have negotiated settlements on to avoid trying to litigate ambiguous laws.
My advice is to talk to your bootcamp and have a fair negotiation. Acknowledge what you did partake in and specific ways the program violated their contract and why as a result you don't want to pay the full amount, and offer something fair based on that. Listen to the response and consider it fairly and negotiate.
If the program won't negotiate with you then I'm not sure... maybe let it go to creditors and negotiate wit…
Haha Formation is far from perfect but we have an advantage to scale for sure because of our dynamic scheduling engine that gets better the more people we have. We match people up through hundreds of mentorship sessions every week, all scheduled for scratch based on what topics people need to practice, availability, and seniority level. So the more people we can match from, the better the matches end up being!
BUT! The downside is that with such a dynamic schedule, it's more likely for a mentor to have to reschedule or for people in a group to have to drop out. So to make it work, we have to have layers and layers of product and algorithms to handle these cases and make them as least abd possible.
Another aspect of scaling is our mentors. Because Formation doesn't teach anything or have any curriculum and instead we facilitate mentorship and practice: you might like or dislike a mentor…
Launch School Core + Capstone works but with caveats - no bootcamp works for everyone
1. Try it first and see if the style is a good fit. I advise this for all bootcamps, but each one has its own style of learning and you want to make sure you connect with it instead of relying on others saying it worked for them.
2. They are small. You get personal attention and support in your job hunt that is effective, but it's very hard to scale past a cohort at a time to maintain what makes them special. This isn't a negative thing, it's actually a positive thing for you as a student, but it means that they will likely stay small and selective and aren't the magical answer for the whole industry that 10000 people a year should go to.
I mean I don't disagree with the rationale for that arguments but I'm just asking for the data!
I helped grow Meta from 200 engineers to about 10K engineers and it was about the 3K mark that without a consistent and data based hiring process you start getting variance.
Apple is a company that has the complete opposite and has made it work - each small team has complete autonomy over their hiring process (after recs are approved), and each team hires for whatever they want. So like if one engineer insists open source is important, that team might not hire open source people.
If your brand is really strong that approach can work too, other companies that have that process have a lot of complains for opaque and unfair interviews that rely on subjectivity of the interviewers.
RE: Internships - it can be different things for different companies, not all are the same.
Amazon is actually a…