Why do you consider me personally your competitor or Formation your competitor? We don't consider you a competitor and I've stated that for like over 2 years now.
Not only that, but I've tried to explain in numerous ways why we aren't your competitor, in writing, in detail, to your leadership, which you haven't refuted and just keep calling Formation your competitor passive aggressively.
Are you seeing a bunch of people applying to Codesmith and asking about Formation? And if so, were those people OFFICIALLY ACCEPTED BY FORMATION or they just mentioned hearing about it or wanting to go there in the future?
I really want to sort this out, all of the alumni that have come to Formation that have talked to me about this (which is probably bias sample) have asked me to try to make sort this out with you because Formation is an amazing complement to Codesmith. These people have fully been i…
At Meta I had never heard the term full stack or frontend or backend engineer.
There were:
Product Engineers: work on user facing product (typically anywhere in the stack needed to solve the problem)
Infra Engineer: working on one or more specific systems powering a piece of Meta's infra
Product Infra Engineers: working on the foundational abstractions that all engineers use to build product on the infra
User Interface Engineers: building the foundational UI infra all engineers use
Production Engineer: building tools to manage the infra
The rest were considered engineering adjacent roles.
Why? If you limit yourself by a part of the stack you won't be able to solve problems, you will be limited by what you know.
My understanding is they exclude people hired by Codesmith. I'm very confident people hired short term as TAs (fellows) are excluded as they are not considered placements for CIRR. I'm reasonably confident that it excludes instructors. But if it did, the number of instructors hired in that time is 2 and wouldn't impact this data.
These are **first offers only!**, based on the date reported though and not when they started the job. I asked for clarification on that because someone who graduated in 2022 and got a job end of 2023 and submitted the form in August 2024 would count.... and two alumni reported being promoted to update or re-submit their data in August.
COMMENTARY/UPDATE: Codesmith updated their accepted stats today, 168 offers accepted between March and August 2024 VS 53 in March and April alone. Average base salary in those ranges down to $117K from $119K.
Disclosure: I'm presenting my analysis as my personal opinions and commentary on the data provided. If anything commented is incorrect, I'm happy to make corrections and updates.
Codesmith updated their recent offer stats sometime today and I spent 15 mins throwing together my top of mind thoughts below.
Source: [Previous](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_CPn4TtghvS4UDvkZ9pD6G4JYItLODd3/view) and [New](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1d7IGbYdtYPoI5Jbr4OxPwVgKyXhMTpI1/view?__hstc=109711322.0e322342ee14294aff502ad66630cdf2.1651003824655.1725406413979.1725413866740.756&__hssc=109711322.8.1725413866740&__hsfp=3801953514&hsCtaTracking=5fa5766f-6dea-46ee-b25d-ecf7276ecee9%7Ceed80937-e…
It's in the description and internal removal reasons but the sub doesn't have explicit rules posted. We enforce this consistently with everyone and it's one of the most commonly removed things, when people post things across a number of subreddits that is promotional to an external link.
This is right in my wheel house and I can give my broad personal advice. Note, disclosure that my company is in the interview prep bucket of expensive options for helping prepare: Formation, Interview Kickstart, Pathrise. I'm given this answer with my personal advice.
Step 0:
- I agree, I'm effectively self-taught because I taught myself programming at a fairly young age, and taught myself all practical programming. My degree was a broad engineering degree and I did a ton of CS courses that helped me in my career, but getting the basics too a lot of grit. Re-learning the SAME THINGS like 5 times over many years before things started to click one by one. Making a lot of mistakes and banging my head against the wall, only to find a one line erorr.
Step 1:
- I recommend JavaScript equally now too
Step 2:
- Following Step 0, it takes time and I recommend learning and relearning DS&A m…
This post was blocked because of a "reputation risk", "may be from a spammer or someone likely to break rules".
I think this is because your community rating is extremely negative right now.
If you want to share this in the community as original content (not a reshare) accompanied with an explanation of how it's relevant to the community in a non promotional way, then I will approve it (subject to removal from other mods that might disagree)
It comes from a fruit analogy. A fruit that's not ripe yet and ready to eat is usually "green", like a banana.
In this case it means they are too novice or beginning for the job, even if they passed the skills interviewed for or have the capacities needed for the job, they have less experience than a typical CS grad (who has lived in a CS world for 4 years and often had internships) and they don't hit the ground running as quickly - or they apply their capacities to hit the ground running but their gaps become apparent when they try to get promoted because they are putting their all into just getting by.
I have one personal example. There as a new employee at Meta I was supporting for a task they were working on and I had no context. The person was super nice, asking a lot of questions, but didn't understand fairly basic concepts. They asked a lot of questions and tried hard but I gave…
I haven't seen a concrete trend myself. The instructors haven't worked in industry (only a handful ever had but all but one were return Codemsith alumni) and Codesmith's codebase can best be described as a big OSP project and in some cases, some OSP projects have had more people touching their code than the Codesmith codebase. Based on the problems with some of the largest OSP projects which have their history plain for all to see, you can imagine the problems with Codesmith's codebase.
I haven't seen Codesmith's codebase but just heard casually from people who worked on it and from people who saw this system design talk and approached me about it.
If you've talked to alumni about the big OSPs you'll hear about how each new group tends to fail to understand the existing codebase and instead just builds something new. For example, a project containing 2 primary UI frameworks because a n…
I would argue that employers knew just how green bootcamp grads were well before the pandemic.
When I was at Meta, they had a couple of partnerships with bootcamps to try to offer mentors to their students and then also to get first pick at the graduates that they wanted to interview and potentially hire. So few people passed interviews and the people performed so poorly in general that it was frustrating. the engineers who were taking time to do the interviews and the pushback resulted in a lot of these partnerships kind of falling apart. there were a handful of people who were hired and some of them are doing well. years later, but my observation was that these people generally took longer to get past entry level and definitely had a harder time than their peers from top tier computer science schools.
This was maybe in 2014-15 and since then some of these companies have set up appre…
Do you have an opinion or facts on if this was a response from Will to Codemsith employees and specifically fellows, having a hard time placing? Or was the priority building a brand around Codesmith's engineering prowess to make the entire program seem more legit and like it has 50 engineers building it?
Parallels was another thing that started that has been dead for months now. OSLabs haven't done anything for a while and stuff in their web page seems like vaporware (6 months fellowship?)
Per Scholas has a relationship with Tek Systems and if you can get into a cohort that's being trained for a specific contractor role then you have a pipeline to a job.
Career Karma pivoted. Their homepage is all about AI companions they offer other companies as a product and don't talk about bootcamps whatsoever.
All of their bootcamp reviews are still hosted on direct links for SEO so they can continue to make money from traffic and referrals to bootcamps but it comes across that business is being run simply to continue to make money from the wealth of reviews they have collected over the years.
I believe all this happened earlier this year. I was digging into it a few months ago when I noticed as well and I think I narrowed it down to about April or so but not on the computer and can't check the exact date right now.
It's not surprising at all. With so many bootcamps pausing, shutting down, and laying people off, they have been going into turtle mode to try to survive rather than spending a few thousand dollars in commissions for each enrolled per…
Yeah some.other things to add;
1. Instructors are paid well and paid. I've heard second hand that salaries have gone down recently for new hires (not existing hires) and that a TA is paid like minimum wage, a mentor is paid like an intern/apprentice, instructor like entry level, and lead instructor like mid level. (FAANG levels).
2. Instructors are given a lot of responsibility. It has been expressed to me that the program leadership hovers a bit to make sure you do all your work and cover anything extra needed, but you are ultimately critical to the success of a cohort. A cohort has very few staff and each one is critical in my opinion. So it could be a rewarding job.
Yeah good point. The experience is definitely better than nothing and may or may not be better than other similar entry level positions at tiny companies. And it might be an advantage in getting an education related role later.
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
This is a quote from one of their leaders from November 2023 in a public talk: "we don't ever ever ever endorse lying, exaggerating, there is nothing other than pure authenticity when you come out of codesmith in terms of applying to jobs what you'll say in interviews what's on your resume everything will be 100% truthful, alright, so stuff you read other people say, it's a weird thing"
I'm fairly familiar with this and can offer my 2 cents, in no particular order:
1. I heard that instructors, mentors, and fellows (TAs) were listing Codesmith as their recent job, but it was becoming less effective, because people recognized it as a bootcamp and it makes sense that people would perceive "Senior Software Engineer at Codesmith" as really just a bootcamp STUDENT embellishing their resume. It wasn't made clear to me who's idea this was, but someone came up with the idea of creating a "CS Engineering" brand that these people could list to differentiate their REAL jobs from coming across like a student.
2. In all fairness, I think that's reasonable because people actually had jobs with Codesmith that they should get credit for. My opinion is the need for "CS Engineering" as a brand is a very clear sign of the problems of appearing to work at a bootcamp and how you get writte…
Yeah the tone and confidence of the speaker also impact people in a way that words on paper might not.
the direct quote is ."I think 6 months we'll be fully back to where we were, but it's really not bad now genuinely'"
Bundle that with charismatic confidence and (paraphrasing) 'I've been doing this for 30 years and know the industry better than anyone on Reddit'
You start to see how something might not be "legally" clearcut fraud, but might be misleading people with bad advice.
When bad advice crosses into fraud depends a lot about the intentions of the person and it's very hard to prove that in court.
In all of my research, I've seen very interesting interpretations of what placement rates mean, and accurate information about the market.
One bootcamp, said in Sept 2023 that their previous highs had two offers s day, and in 2023 they were seeing 1 offer a day. In Nov 2023 they said they are seeing an uptick and should be back at the previous high in 6 months. Then six months later they published data showing about 0.8 offers a day... even lower than the above but they are celebrating it as incredible outcomes in a hard time.
I don't think people are falling for this stuff anymore, but I could very easily see someone misled into thinking things are good now when they aren't despite recent numbers being presented.
Yeah I agree, we're on the same page here, I'm just trying to be real about how this has played out so far in the industry.
I don't think relying on bootcamps being convicted of fraud is going to solve the problem, in my opinion.
I don't necessarily disagree with the sentiment but I think you need evidence that the bootcamp made specific claims and evidence that they knew those claims were false and intentionally told them to mislead.
I have a lot of evidence from a lot of bootcamps about things they said sound a little sketchy, and evidence that reality wasn't lining up.
But to show that they genuinely knew this and that it was just a bad interpretation, a miscommunication, an issue of misunderstanding fine print and definition, it's really hard.
BloomTech is one of the schools with a lot of pressure on it because of statements it made that some people felt were misleading. Despite settlements and lawsuits and regulators, no one has been criminally convicted of fraud there.
Do you feel like the botocamps misled you when you joined about the state of the job market, or is it that the job market changed while you were there?
I have some recordings in my possession of a bootcamp leader telling people in November 2023 that the market was improving, that it was a normal up and down, the worst was behind them, and expecting to see outcomes back to their previous highs in six months. I don't have context from the recording itself to know if this was deception or just an overreaction to a brief set of good data at the time
The market has been terrible in 2024 for bootcamp grads and I would be extremely cautious about any bootcamp rooting a recover.
If you are promised a recovery, wait six months to see if it's real or not.
What's the rush? Why join now? If you feel pressured to join now, red flag. Do free and cheap self paced learning in the mean time.
Oh I have one!!!!
The dozen of accounts that show up out of nowhere and attack me and calling Formation a Codesmith competitor are all the same person... and it's actually my wife trying create fake publicity for Formation
(For lawyers and reddit admins - this is a joke following the jokes above)
sorry, those people = bootcamp grads who receive targeted personalized 1-1 advice/strategy
re: bootcamps - I think bootcamps should exist! I think two models can work right now:
1. small school, a couple of employees, 20 person cohorts, extended projects/support/help and dedicated effort for each student to help them find something (beyond just mentorship above)
2. school aiming to fill non-software jobs, like "ai prompt engineers", that can adapt to the demand of these "future blue collar jobs" much faster than other forms of education and get people into those jobs quicker. this is competitive with certificate programs more than schools, but a bootcamp could be the more flexible, exciting, intense pathway as opposed to a more boring certificate.
Yeah, unfortunately even then, the market is just nor working for those people.
A personal trainer might get you into shape, but there are physical limitations they can't overcome within their control.
Our mentorship product is only for people with a couple of years of SWE industry work experience and we're seeing it very challenging even for people who already have a year of experience to get interviews right now. I can only imagine how much harder it is for bootcamp grads.
Internships are key. Imagine being a bootcamp grad with a tiny 3 week project and competing with someone who did 3 months at Meta, 3 months at Google, and 3 months at Apple (which the top tier CS grads have on their resumes)... it's irrational to hire the bootcamp grad even if you have a gut feeling about their potential and the bootcamp grad will long term be a higher performer. Companies aren't gambling, they are trying to make rational scaling decisions.
Bootcamp grads are getting jobs but the way I frame it is that they are getting jobs through non-reproducible paths. Meaning that a bootcamp can't systematically place people at scale, and each placement is a unique path leveraging anything from past background, adjacent work, friends, network, etc... that won't necessarily work for many others.
So bootcamps have a place, they just are fundamentally limited in how large they can be.
Launch School is doing ok, staying small and dedicated tons of effort to each placement.
+1 to flairs (w/ harsh consequences for lying or misleading through flairs)
-1 to this isn't a wiki, Quora is a good place to surface collective wisdom.
I'm talking to Jeff (OP) tomorrow. I haven't talked much with him before (both public and private), but this is what normal people do to talk about ideas and get to know each other. I have no idea if we agree or disagree and it doesn't matter. We definitely don't 100% agree on everything but we can talk and respect each other.
Everyone has a story and journey that can at worst - teach you something, and at best - inspire you.
I'm sure there are reasons Will Sentance and/or Codesmith behave the way they to criticism. There are many personality disorders outside of one's control that could explain that, amongst other things. At best there's an inspiring story and at worst something to learn from, but shutting someone down (unless you feel your personal safety is immediately at risk) is the equivalent of throwing away that learning opportunity and you might even be throwing aware an inspi…
I dispute almost all of those "facts", but I don't care personally if they get posted and I need to evaluate everything super fairly and consistently as a mod or I don't deserve the position.
Personal opinion rant: Codesmith has dug a really deep whole for themselves with their own community and it's entirely on them. The more they go after me with statements I can prove are false, the deeper the hole. The more their placements are terrible and they gaslight alumni, the deeper the hole. The more they post in their slack about me (who RECOMMENDED PEOPLE IN 1-1 CHATS GO TO CODESMITH UNTIL THEIR RECENT LAYOFF ROUND), the deeper the hole. When an alumni, who I recommended go to Codesmith, actually went, and then is pissed off because they didn't feel like they liked it, and that alumni sees what Codesmith is saying about me to their alumni in slack, that absolutely **DESTROYS** their credi…
Congrats!
Can you clarify the timeline? 6 month would have ended in April 2023. Do you mean you were then job hunting for 14 months after? Or did the bootcamp just take you longer and you graduated in June 2024.
also replying to u/GoodnightLondon
I'm seeing the market fork a bit. I'll try to make a diagram to explain my views:
Appr = apprenticeships/internships/pathways, etc...
**FAANG CANONICAL LEVELLING SYSTEM**
2018 2020 2022 2024 2026
AI-Adjacent ➡️ ⬆️ (lower than entry level "SWE" but good jobs)
Appr. ➡️ ⬆️ ➡️ ⬇️ ⏹️
Junior ⬆️ ⬆️ ⬆️ ⬇️ ⏹️ (top tier CS grads only)
Mid ➡️ ⬆️ ➡️ ➡️ ⬆️
Senior+ ➡️ ➡️ ➡️ ➡️ ⬆️
So I basically see the entry to SWE but chocked off entirely - other than CS grads from top schools.
BUT I see this idea of "prompt engineers", "AI-training engineers", "people building simple things with AI tools that don't involve actual CODE".
**Bootcam…
I think at a minimum, the sub needs a little more explicit rules and structure so the mods can take more action within the rules. I expect most content to be negative because of the market, and agree with that, but there is a difference between people sharing
Reddit has launched a ton of new tools in recent months, both automated and configuration based to help moderators. The automated ones remove a ton of spammy and likely bad actor content daily. We haven't touched the other ones yet though. For example, when adding flair to posts to tag the type of post and having prompts and guiding questions if you choose those flairs. If someone tags something as a review, we can prompt with questions we suggest they answer to try to turn raw complaint posts into constructive negative feedback.
I edited my comment, another mod stands by not overriding that post and thinks it should be removed otherwise, suggesting harsher action.
I'm trying very hard with my moderator hat and didn't agree with taking a harder stance on moderation.
I would recommend engaging in comments and getting genuine positive engagement without manipulating voting or asking people on your team to vote or alumni to vote so your account is in good shape.
The other mod considers your pending post full of personal attacks so that kind of content is likely to be removed if anyone posted it. I personally prefer to rely on Reddit to decide and apply their rules consistently. Readers can judge content for themselves and make their own conclusions based on facts and evidence, so personal attacks that are not backed by any evidence do more harm than good to the reputation of the poster.
The question asked is at the bottom of the post.
Specifically any skills related to using Gen AI or building products based on Gen AI.
There are tons of roles for machine learning engineers and applied machine learning engineers.
Where are you getting your information from?
1. We had one Bootcamp Grad Open House and it wasn't that popular so we didn't do it again.
2. This subreddit isn't a "massive funnel", and what makes you think that? We put all of Reddit traffic under 'socials' and we don't even distinguish this sub because it's not a significant source of people.
Brian got back to me. He said he met another prospective Codesmith student in a live Codesmith session, who invited him to a study group and suggested he look at Formation. The person who recommended Formation did/does not work for Formation.
MODERATOR NOTE: Reddit removed the above post around August 28th 12:10pm, not a moderator of this sub. I don't see specific reasons why they did so noted in the logs.
If you are quite senior, become a mentor on an online platform. Formation, Interview Kickstart, Pathrise, Interviewingio, Hello Interview. You have absolutely zero risk, and you can do as much mentorship as you want with whoever you want and get paid a reasonable amount to live off of if you spend all your time doing it.
If you aren't super experienced and want to start a bootcamp, I don't have other options. You might be the most gifted teacher in the world but it will be hard for you to help junior people navigate the industry without experience too.
Product market fit. It's key to a successful business. During the boom times, some bootcamps had product + market fit. Now the market has permanently shifted - like an earthquake hitting and permanently shifting the landscape - it's recognizable but fundamentally different. Most bootcamps haven't changed their products to meet the market and are failing. This happened to Rithm School, which built a great product and had a great team, and great intentions, but their product no longer served the market and they closed up shop. Launch Academy similarly indefinitely paused for this reason too - their product isn't meeting the market and they don't have the ideas or team or resources to make that shift right now, and their best strategic move was to pause.
Because bootcamps have historically not been technology companies and have been schools, they don't have the ability in their DNA to chan…