20 people did too until over 10 minutes the vote count dropped to 0... Codesmith (or their Marketing team) hasn't gotten the message after dozens of accounts have been suspended to stop paying people to manipulate Reddit... Reddit is on to you.
1. Check your contract for Arbitration clause
2. Check your contract for giving up rights to a class action (Triple Ten has this for example, and it's relatively common)
I completely coincidentally just posted here about this trend across the industry: [https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/1ggvdbo/in\_a\_last\_hope\_to\_survive\_bootcamps\_are\_going\_all/](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/1ggvdbo/in_a_last_hope_to_survive_bootcamps_are_going_all/)
OMG they are also using Codesmith's slogan. 🍿 for the IP dispute and who gets the trademark.
In a last hope to survive, bootcamps are going all in on "Gen AI" programs aimed at their own alumni - 3.5 major bootcamps pivoting to Gen AI courses (Codesmith, BloomTech, App Academy, Deep Atlas (original Hack Reactor team)). AA and BT have PAUSED all SWE programs as of today (Opinions Inside)
DISCLAIMER: These are my personal opinions based on my observations as a self-proclaimed industry expert in the top-tier SWE industry and in the bootcamp industry. My company offers interview prep mentorship for generalist SWEs with experience. We are not offering Gen AI programs at this time and aren't working on it at this time, and I do not consider that a conflict of interest.
I noticed today that App Academy's SWE courses are all "waitlisted" now and no longer enrolling. For me that was the impetus for this post, which has been a month or two in the making.
First, summarizing the state: b…
1. I would say that it's a possibility that almost every single bootcamp - intensions aside - shouldn't exist. I'm not arguing that, but it's a possible outcome.
2. I would be 90% of the ads you saw were general online schools that offer 100 different programs in all kinds of areas, not limited to programming.
3. Patterns over time - if this sub follows 10 schools over time very closely, then even if it's missing complete industry perspective, if you see trends impacting all 10 of those schools, that's a good signal.
I would look at Launch School Core, because the process sounds very aligned to your goals.
If you don't want to pay, you can follow a similar path, but you won't get assessed or benchmarked to confidently check off the box.
This has been my concern for a while, so many people post here (I'm a mod so I see a lot more get removed by Reddit and just blatantly share referral opportunities) and all of them are 1-2 sprints in and say how amazing it has been so far. But they disappear and never come back :(
I don't judge or care as nothing is perfect and I'm just more curious why this happens with TripleTen and not others.
From the one or two people I've talked to later on, it sounds like shortly after you are no longer eligible for a pro-rated refund, the materials get a lot harder and a lot of people get stuck in limbo forever. They don't drop out, but they don't graduate.
This is TOTALLY EXPECTED for a self paced remote program.
Another self paced remote program had a mandatory report showing something like a 15% completion rate on time and a 30% within 150% of the estimate program time.
TripleTen could ha…
If you can get a degree from a top 10 school, then go for it. It's not a guarantee, but you have a 10X better shot than anyone else at breaking into the industry. Caveat: do big tech internships each and every summer.
Otherwise, I think it's better than a bootcamp for the odds of getting a job, but your path will probably be unique and you should consider all options, with the expectation that it might take a couple of tries and several years to finally break in and stay in.
+1 to this. Titles tend to be scope of responsibility, and no matter how good you are, you shouldn't get titles unless the title matches the scope of responsibility. And you can't get that scope of responsibility without, as the blog says:
> Senior engineers have been through the crucible of major production outages. They’ve felt the heat of a system melting down in real-time and learned to stay calm under pressure. These experiences have taught them to diagnose issues rapidly and lead a team through a crisis, making critical decisions when every second counts.
If you have the capacities needed to do the above already then you should be able to quickly demonstrate those capacities in the line of fire to get promoted super fast, but you cannot be hired into these levels, it's ridiculous and makes no sense.
Any bootcamps telling you you aren't anything other than an entry level enginee…
Haha I wrote almost a year ago now and things are the same on the Formation side - we still don't take people without SWE work experience, and people with under 2 years have a very hard time getting interviews. On the Codesmith side, their grads are really struggling and those strategies aren't working anymore. Placements have tanked at Codesmith and people are taking significantly lower paying jobs (average salaries down about 15% from peak).
As of October 2024, NYC seems to have limited space for people and they prioritize more senior candidates on teams who are in NYC.
MPK is like Disney World. SEA is like Disneyland. NYC is like Disneyland Paris.
Honestly out of those ones Codesmith is still probably the best if you are entrepreneurial. Recent students and grads have reported that the bar has dropped from the past for technical skills, but it's high on communication and people tend to be driven achievers who go there. For all of the mess I mentioned, former employees describe it as even a mess internally during the peak times that was never run like a "real company" (reference from employee), and ultimately I think they try to produce a consistent experience for you the student.
It's a very uniquely weird one of all the others (which are more similar to each other)... it has a "cult-like following" (not in the religious sense, but colloquially). People who go in skeptical, tend to see it for what it looks like under the hood and feel like it's overpriced, the instructors almost all have no SWE experience, lots of superficial stu…
Sorry, I normally disclose more, Formation isn't remotely an option so I hadn't mentioned it but we do work with a number of bootcamps later on in their careers and a big reason I have a broad real time pulse on them and pay attention to the bootcamp industry.
That context is indeed helpful. I would look at structure linear courses that are less intense. Bootcamps are kind of a pressure cooker where you retain little of the actual stuff and instead are forced to learn how to learn under that much pressure (which is how your first job feels on day 1). The people who succeeded at getting jobs quickly already self studied and were ready to go hard.
If you are sure you can't do self paced, then I would do part time that isn't too intense.
Or you can do some classes first to get a headstart and THEN to a bootcamp.
But given your goal of starting a company/working at a brand new startup, I…
Yeah Rithm was fully in person before COVID and was a pretty cool office.
I don't know any that are left honestly. Office space is still to expensive, despite being very empty and no one wanting to work downtown.
You could maybe just get a co-working space membership for $500 a month and go there to do remote lessons, you'll probably make friends with engineers and learn some stuff they are doing and working on haha. Maybe work your way into an internship.
All of the bootcamps you mention are having struggles :(
**THESE ARE MY PERSONAL WELL-INFORMED OPINIONS HERE**, do your own research too:
App Academy recently downsized yet again a few weeks ago and is allegedly cutting back part time programs. It's relying more and more on "AI helpers" and it's all untested and hard to know if it will work. After some extremely loud and angry employee departures, I think it's risky to go because…
A couple of questions/scenarios:
1. Are you looking for something individual? Like a plan or roadmap to follow on your own time. OR are you looking for something group based/interactive/live with classes and stuff on your own schedule?
2. What's your end goal? I know a few PMs personally who have tried to switch to SWE and it's a different path than if you just want to be better at "thinking about code" to be a stronger PM or maybe founder eventually.
2a). Where do you stand on AI? If you want to be a SWE, ignoring AI and focusing on fundamental coding and problem solving expressed through code and product is more important. If you want to be a code-equipped PM I might lean more into using AI tools both to learn and to code.
The contract should specify how you withdraw and what notice you need to provide. If you provide notice according to the contract then even if the date passes you should have records of following the rules to process withdrawal.
Yeah I see this kind of thing often. I started doing an analysis of bootcamps grads trajectories and if they still had their first job a year out. I didn't complete it, but it was a shockingly high number of people who changed jobs or didn't have a job within a year or so after their first one.
The job is just the beginning. Bootcamps sell you the job as the end because for them that's when they advertise you everywhere and call it a day.
There's even a bootcamp Codesmith that after promising support for life after, just launched a cash grab AI followup course for $900 for alumni. A completely untested gamble and having the audacity to charge alumni for it. In all fairness, they don't charge for the classroom part of the course as they offer that in their bootcamp now and retroactively give that to alumni for free, so you are paying $900 for 4 Saturday workshops and a monthly "leadersh…
I edited my advice above to clarify that I meant a generalist SWE role at these companies.
If you want to do prompt engineering, or 'AI training' or like these kinds of AI jobs, I don't think you need much training and I would probably just do some very cheap online courses and build projects yourself that are useful to you and your friends.
Can you clarify what "specialize in AI" means to you?
Overall, if you don't want to be deep into ML then I would recommend getting a role at a top tier tech company that does a lot of AI and then learning there. Companies like Meta have: 1. thousands of AI and ML engineers, some of the best in the world. 2. confidential and leading edge research you can learn about. 3. internal courses, programs etc... to learn AI there while on the job. 4. they have really cool internal tools for employees using AI that you get to use and learn about.
If you want to specialize in Machine Learning and go that route, I would do a Masters specially in Machine Learning and even that won't be enough to get ML jobs but will be a step in the right direction.
If you want understand AI better for no specific reason, other than to know more how Generative AI works, I would do some cheap or free online courses…
Yeah I would at least apply and talk to someone to see more.
Signals of strong fit:
1. you are getting interviews already and failing them or feeling lost (would expect subscription or shorter time at Formation)
2. you know you need to practice leetcode, system design, etc... but you have no idea where to start and you are busy and want to be efficient about it (would expect 3-8 months)
Hi, general yes, assuming your FAANG bar is FAANG adjacent, the most recent 9 out of 10 placements (excluded one at a non-FAANG-ish company) Disney, TikTok, Meta, Coinbase, Patreon, Roblox, DoorDash + 2 good startups.
We work with people with a range of starting points with a common end goal of these types of companies, going through the intros channel, most recent 10: 5 YOE, 8 YOE, 7 YOE, 3 YOE, unspecified Senior, 12+ YOE, 3+ YOE in ML, unspecified Mid Level, unspecified, unspecified Senior ML.
The backgrounds of these people range from banks, startups, tech-adjacent, government-affiliated, FAANG engineer, non-tech consumer products companies.
So if you have a good amount of experience and you know what you are getting into approaching a FAANG company, it's a good enough fit to start the conversation.
I want to make it super clear (for everyone) that we don't teach any skills you n…
I would probably treat it as if you are paying for it and making the decision that way, if you would pay for it, then go and get it for free. If you would go if you are paying for it, and there is a reason other than you can't afford it, then I wouldn't go because that reason won't change whether you pay or not.
Why are they offering scholarships for free and what's the source of the funding?
For example, are you one of the only people getting it? Is it a scholarship fund? Is it more like a discount? etc ..
Hi, I can answer with my Formation hat on. It's a good question because there isn't anything else that operates like it, even competitors like Interview Kickstart are also super different.
In one sentence, we're an interview or and mentorship platform. Our focus is job hunting and preparing you for your upcoming interviews.
So philosophically we are based on the idea of mastery and helping you efficiently get form where you are to where you want to go. This means we try to spend your dollars efficiently by giving you the type of session we think you need at the right time.
If you want to hire an Open AI engineer who makes $1M to be your tutor, it would cost you hundreds of a ton and they wouldn't even be able to give you the time you need.
Instead, we give you mocks with those totes of people when you need it - usually when preparing for specific upcoming interviews, and when you don…
Ah yeah, ok we were talking different things. Yeah absolutely get what you are talking about. I think that is also a different type of engineer that is new and not yet defined.
Like the "shopify developer" rush during COVID when businesses moved online, or the Web3/crypto rush that happened when Crypto spiked pre-COVID.
During this period of transition to AI (especially in non-tech fields) there will be a lot of one-off jobs that eventually become real/stable new roles.
I think that's the exciting thing about AI, we'll see how it all settles.
Before it settles, all the power to you to find ways to have impact and help companies and build up stronger intuition about how to glue these things together.
Which companies? I'm not seeing this through discussions with people at Meta, Google, Salesforce, Palantir, Stripe, Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft, Adobe, Databricks, Figma, Dropbox, Uber, Lyft, NVIDIA, Apple, Shopify, Square, and that's all I can think of right now.
Many of these are using AI to help engineers be more productive, like searching the codebase and QA. But none of them are hiring generalist/full stack SWE roles requiring Gen AI.
If they are being the typical engineer this way, send me firsthand sources.
Oh yeah there are a ton of actual ML jobs too! Like actual Machine Learning engineers which is also different from SWE.
As you said, almost every big company is building out inference infra too which needs a bunch of SWEs to help setup and integrate into the broader infrastructure, in addition to ML people for fine tuning and all that stuff.
I just don't see the demand for full stack generalist SWEs requiring Gen AI skills for any of these jobs.
I see: ML engineers, Data Scientists, Generalist SWE, Prompt Engineer
+1. "Hiring risk" is the key term here. At big companies, as an employee, HR sees you as a resume and stack of performance reviews... and they run their numbers on which traits correlate to performance.
On average, Stanford, CMU, MIT, Berkeley CS grads perform better, so the company recruits more of them.
I had dinner with Mark Zuckerberg with about 10 other top performers and I asked everyone to share their stories of how they got there. Almost everyone has an interesting non-traditional pathway. One was Fidji, the CEO of Instacart, and OpenAI board member, who grew up in rural France and worked her way up the ladder over many years.
All of these people remember very well where they came from and that's what I love about Silicon Valley.
So hiring risk for HR is why we have the system we have, but people with non traditional backgrounds can earn their seat at the table through years…
I'm seeing a lot of kind of middle road non tech companies trying to use AI to open up new products for their company.
For example, Thompson Reuters is hiring a lot of legal prompt engineers to try to add some sparkle to a relatively benign business.
If these companies can present themselves as tech companies, valuations skyrocket, stocks up, acquisitions happen... etc.
Sadly, hoarding all the people that are great with AI tools but less great at raw coding might not help them make the sparkly products they think they are. But worst case they'll lay off a bunch of these people, keep some, and just end up being a little faster and more efficient than before and improve profit margins.
I've seen this and it's also a common complaint amongst my ex-Meta community - junior devs relying too much on AI and not understanding the underlying code or concepts.
Some day in the future, maybe not too far off, we'll all be using AI like when calculators replaced pencil and paper
But calculators didn't do that over night. My mom and dad actually met because of a calculator back in the late 1970s. Only the team lead had one.
During this multi-year transition phase, understanding the fundamentals and being a really good problem solving is what companies want first.
If you are a student and haven't strengthened those muscles and have instead just gotten good at prompt engineering, you will struggle to progress in the industry as a SWE.
I asked a poll to hundreds of my former colleagues who are now everywhere from startups to CTO of large companies. 90% of people said they don't l…
Hi, how did you get in the interview pipeline for your job and how did TripleTen help? Was it a contractor job or direct with the company? Why did you leave that job?
+100 to this. I try to call these out, when edge case placements are shoved in your face across TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, simultaneously... and when you look into the details you usually find something specific about their background. Like they were employed already before as a SWE, did tons of CS in college but had a different degree, had internships, their "placement" being highlighted was actually their 2nd or 3rd job, etc...
I totally understand everyone is unique and has their own story to tell, but why represent these as the norm?
Why not take a normal grad who thought they would get a job in 6 months, it actually took 12 months. They thought they would make $150K and they are making $85K. They are happy overall but want to make sure people are prepared and ready if they would consider a bootcamp....
Because if that message was shared NO ONE WOULD GO and spend $25K.
This is ju…
I agree. I was interviewing bootcamp grads since the first ones in 2012 and it has always been horrible from day 1. It's not because of hiring bias. Bootcamp grads actually performed more poorly in general on the job (not ALL OF THEM, but on AVERAGE).
Now that doesn't mean there isn't a place for bootcamps or something wrong with the people. It's just not feasible to prepare someone in 12 weeks for a job and it takes bootcamp grads severals to slowly fill in the missing skills their bootcamps left them with.
It takes time yeah, but learning fundamentals, like CS50 stuff (Stanford and MIT also have these courses) AND also spending hours and hours building things and learning the practical. Getting stuck and persisting until you figure it out.
Over your career your toolbelt will accumulate more tools, and you need a couple to get hired for your first gig.
I stand by my general bootcamp advice, bootcamps have 3 options:
1. Gracefully exit and maintain your legacy and do something else with your time
2. Stay small and lean and keep the gears turning to survive, but put all your energy into keeping the current status quo
3. Crash and burn by flailing and pivoting when things are bad. Existing students are upset because you are spending money on new stuff instead of helping them get jobs, staff are laid off and upset, alumni don't recommend you anymore because your program changed so much, there is only room for one pivot, if you are wrong you are going to flame out and take your legacy with you.
Rational people choose 1. Passionate people choose 2. Entrepreneurs choose 3.
Entrpreneurs will risk everything for a chance.
Problem is these are apps or games and even if the pivot is right, the train of destruction in your wake could still be…
There are three tones from bootcamps I've heard:
1. The market is tough, we're pausing indefinitely/shutting down to protect our brand while we can and end on a positive note
2. The market is tough, we know it and it's not easy for us, we have a small team and small cohorts of 20 people at a time, and it's going to be tough, but if we accept you we'll try our hardest to help you get a job in about 6 months of graduating, just be ready for the worst.
3. The market is rebounding (it's ALWAYS rebounding to them), or, the market is going through cycles! Our grads are getting incredible jobs before graduating, senior engineer here, leading engineer here. We teach you in topic/style/method that's different from other bootcamps so we don't have the same issues. You might see the CEO on social media promoting the bootcamp more than you do in the program day to day.
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I understa…
Bias disclosure: my company offers interview prep for experienced engineers so keep in mind in interpreting my opinions. We help, but not as much, in getting interviews, and we specialize in preparing you for actual interviews.
The short answer is yes, the industry generally doesn't like bootcamp grads, even in jobs #2, 3, 4, 5. But it's also not impossible to overcome that.
These are some common things I see to help:
- Recognizable name as your first company, e.g. a bank or even a solid tech company
- Career trajectory, i.e. fast promotions (or any promotions)
- Staying at the same company for 2+ years (and ideally with promotions)
- Outside of work activities: mentoring, projects, community leadership
- Excelling at something non-technical, e.g. Olympic-level at swimming.
But yeah it's much harder for bootcamp grads later on still. It's not impossible and I see those people get…
There isn't too much about it, but in summarizing what we have:
1. It's a self paced program broken up into sprints, and it takes people different amounts of time to make progress
2. People report feeling like first 1-2 sprints were good, well supported and worth while, often posting on here with referral codes about how their experience is great and you can save money if you use their code.
3. We stop hearing from people later on, and the couple that have discussed have said the materials become tremendously harder and you are no longer eligible for a refund unless you stick to it and complete all the job hunting requirements.
4. It's not clear how their graduation rate is calculated or how many people drop out. They claim to have about a 75% graduation rate, and then of those people WHO GET JOBS, 83% or so get jobs within 6 months and the rest, outside of six months.
So some ques…
Some alumni have talked to me about the materials yeah. They said they only received the 5 lectures but that the projects weren't done yet. I think the people starting Codesmith now will get the real material for the first time in abouf 2 months. Which is why it's insane to me they are charging $3200 (discounted for the first cohort in Jan) instead of making it free. They both have to iron out the bugs and also have no idea how useful this course will be.
The lectures sound laughable as you said. Like RAG and fine tuning spent defining all of these techniques that were invented in the past year but not really being that useful.
There are some excellent free under the hood YouTube series on AI. There is an amazing one I watched part of that is like dozens of lectures for 2-3 hours each that really explains from basics how everything works, and still often says things alike "this is a si…
Codesmith also launched their standalone AI course. 4 weeks part time for almost $5000: https://www.become-irreplaceable.dev/ai-ml-program
I commented on this and will continue to comment it.
The best way to learn AI if you are a generalist SWE is to get a job at a top tier company and learn through their internal materials, confidential research, and thousands of ML engineers.
These are cash grabs capitalizing on fear of missing out, unless you want to be a prompt engineer and not a SWE job. But those jobs haven't solidified at all to justify experimenting on you to try to get you there.