Congrats on your trajectory! Would love to hear more about how you got the first job. I work with some people self taught and we found that they often have equal or better outcomes than bootcamp grads (NOT ENOUGH DATA TO MAKE A CONCLUSION ON THIS) and it's interesting to me.
I couple of people have told me about weird interactions with Will that resulted in them staying clear of Codesmith, like he had note card of facts about people that he paused and looked up in front of them when he met them?
But I'm an extremely socially anxious person and sometimes a bit awkward and it might just be his personality or sense of humor too.
I would say in general though the second largest anecdotal complaint I get is social pressure to participate is very off-putting if it's not for you. The examples reported to me are:
1. Trying really hard to make people turn cameras on. But passive aggressively…
I haven't heart yet.
One of the main recruiters/public figured representing the program moved to a new role: [https://www.linkedin.com/in/adelcastillo17/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/adelcastillo17/)
So maybe the marketing of it will be different this year with new people involved.
Yeah absolutely my entire job now is helping people prepare for interviews. The questions alone aren't enough though for the top top companies. I did over 400 interviews at Meta and was trained in how to get signal of people knowing questions etc... But you absolutely should be prracticing the types of questions, the format, the topics they often cover, etc... Like at Meta, DS&A have no small talk, don't make friends with the interviewer and manage your time.
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+1 I tihnk software engineer lets you have some of the most impact out of any job. In the market right now thought a bootcamp might not be the right way to to it.
It quite frankly is, I posted about this here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/1dpyh7t/warning\_codesmith\_subreddit\_is\_mostly\_propaganda/](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/1dpyh7t/warning_codesmith_subreddit_is_mostly_propaganda/)
OP was banned from their sub today because of their post HERE.
I would stay in you degree and try to get internships instead, possibly extending your degree to buy more time for internships.
If you can't get an internship use the money you would put into a bootcamp to start a mini-startup and work on it full time through the summer. Launch it publicly and try to get users even if it's a small amount.
It's not a joke, no, I called it semi-serious because the day to day is SO different than programming that if someone was already a SWE this might not make sense.
The message is important though - genuinely if someone is doing something like line cook at a restaurant and doesn't know how to program and is interested because of the outcomes, that there are a lot of very high paying other jobs to consider. Using police officers in SF as an example, but a lot of similar jobs in SF pay a lot too!
But there aren't YouTube sponsorships from your favorite creators from SFPD like there are for bootcamps.
Lambda School did that. Someone came to Formation and got a great third job and Lambda School posted a screenshot congratulating the person on their job in the placements channel. Looks like a new placement but didn't explicitly say that. I was like WTF, we helped them!
When you say the "questions are extremely limited" for your job, did you get the questions from other alumni and make sure you had good answers before hand?
That's for DS&A mocks or other mocks?
July 8th in unacceptable if they claim they are offering career services for life. We have hundreds of slots from today all the way through the week including the holidays.
Common: no, most engineers went to a top CS school
They then looked at the best engineers at Meta, looked at the schools they went to, and then recruited from those schools.
BUT, a number of "best of the best" engineers either didn't have a CS degree or went to a not well known school at all.
The theory was the best of the best will find Meta or Meta will find them through acquisitions or because they like hacked into Meta and were offered a job.
The best way to get in right now without a top CS degree is to get another job for 2 years and then apply for the Rotational Engineer program. At Formation, we've sent maybe 10+ people through there and it's super super ideal for non traditional grads with 2+ YOE at non-top tier companies.
Base salary ranges from about $100K for L1 to $147K for L3 and you get there through gradual raises over 7 years.
A huge chunk is overtime yeah. I don't know why so many thousands of people have overtime, there are 2,140 officers in SF and over half of them make $200K all-in. Benefits and pensions are big factors too.
But yeah, not an easy job, and lots of hours (maybe same as tech?) but a GED and no further schooling required other than SFPD bootcamp 😉
I messaged him after Codesmith declined to comment on if Alex had Zoox's approval to do the curriculum yeah so I put even more work into it. But time-wise very little time.
Yeah doesn't have a problem being connected to his DSML work, he just doesn't want it to be implied that he is currently working on it or recently worked on it as it's fireable and worse at Zoox to create IP relevant to your job without permission.
I sent him all of the links that made it seem like he was more recently involved and Codesmith has since modified those, including the blog you linked to, that was modified as a result of this.
The title of that blog post changed from containing Alex Zai's name, and you can see the remnant in the url.
Jared's name was not mentioned nearly that much in marketing materials it was all Alex Zai and a little James and Jared had significant involvement in DSML.
But the recen…
"In 2023, no San Francisco police officers died in the line of duty due to gunfire. Comprehensive sources, including the Officer Down Memorial Page (ODMP) and various news reports, confirm this information. There were incidents involving gunfire and injuries to officers, but none resulted in fatalities."
If you want to do a bootcamp solely to make $130K a year and change your life, become a police officer in San Francisco instead - hundreds made over $300K last year (see source). You only need a GED!
This is a semi-serious post, but I'm seeing far too much focus on the money in a lot of bootcamp marketing. A lot of controversy over the top bootcamps surrounds people not believing outcomes, and then alumni defending them as real, etc...
So my advice if your number one priority is money and you don't have a particular interest in programming, is to become a POLICE OFFICER IN SAN FRANCISCO.
[Here](https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?a=san-francisco&q=police+officer&y=2023&s=-total) is a list of police offer public compensation:
# 1,116 PEOPLE MADE OVER $200K ALL-IN IN 2023
Include base pay, overtime, benefits, other pay, and pension.
[Here](https://www.sanfranciscopoli…
I have no doubt that's the vision. But they've published stats and only a tiny number of people at Codesmith didn't have a degree (single digit percentage?) and the majority cummulatively went to top public schools or presitigous private schools.
So it's more like a place for Ivy League people who changed their mind and want to quickly go into SWE than Ivy League for everyone.
I could talk for hours about this topic, it's super complicated but if that's the vision, I'm sure he speaks about it and it sounds awe inspiring but it's incredibly impractical and I could rip it apart piece by piece.
The first step to understanding all this is what unpacking what "gatekeeping" means.
It's not a group of privileged people intentionally trying to protect their jobs and culture and exclude outsiders.
Second is to unpack these top 1% jobs. The are paid so highly because it's a free market. If e…
For OP or any alumni. OP mentions services for life. Do you know how to book a mock interview and let's say you want to do a DS&A interview, how easily can you book it and for when?
That sounds fine if the people disclose that in some way too or if it's disclosed on the landing page that students get a $20 referral fee if you join through this article.
Two different things to debate
1. being paid to write stuff
2. disclosing you were paid to write stuff
I mean laws and laws and everything in the USA requires interpretation.
But I don't think anyone can possibly say that an institution has integrity if it's paying people to write reviews. And maybe that's why the bootcamp industry is so messed up.
Stanford isn't paying people to write reviews.
If you want to do this a better way you create a prize with Course Report (anonymously) where a random person who submits any review to any school will be chosen for some kind of prize.
This is an incentive that isn't biased to one school and is an effort by the Platform to increase content on it even if one school secretly funded this because they think they will benefit from some of those new reviews.
Well Codesmith is absurdly selective and creates a community of tight knit people that support each other.
Sounds exactly what he did - simulate the Ivy League gatekeeping model where he is now the gatekeeper and selects the most brilliant people from non-tech backgrounds and gets them into tech.
Nothing wrong with that, it's a good idea that has gotten some exceptional people (I've worked with some of them later on!) into tech much faster and easier than traditional paths.
I'm not a lawyer either and I chatgpt'd to try to analys it in forming my opinion. I think my opinion is reasonable but open for debate and I still don't agree with your interpretation either haha.
But I concede it's not explicitly stated "you cannot be paid directly or indirectly" for reviews.
Zooming out, let's say Course Report says this is totally fine (I reported it to them already). I'm going to post about it, and I don't think it will look good. Someone has to take responsibility for manipulating online reviews whether everyone else does it or not.
I know at my company we have never once offered anyone anything to write a review. We used to indirectly say long ago 'Reviews are important for people deciding on their options, consider writing one on quora' but I felt that was even not good so we removed it. We don't do it, and I'm offended others and everyone can be wrong even if…
The list of recent Codesmith placements is much more of 'intern', 'it analyst', 'program manager', 'technical writer', 'apprentice'. There are still SWE jobs, but people who had committed to a bootcamp a year ago are really struggling and taking whatever jobs they can get. And this is on top of the fact that placement rates are down significantly
The story needs to be told because celebrating the 15% of success cases only is misleading.
I actually think your questions are fine and good to stimulate discussion. But you can't win in this sub. People are suspicious about scams they should be questioning everyone, it's just not a fun place right now now :(
I agree it's not explicitly stated literally as not allowed, but these are two places imo. This is good discussion and I appreciate being asked - I should have shared this first so people can judge from first hand source.
1. "Write a Review" page: https://www.coursereport.com/write-a-review.
"I certify this review is based on my own experience and is my genuine opinion of this school, and that I have no personal or business relationship with this establishment. "
- Being paid to write a review is a relationship IMO
2. TOS: [https://www.coursereport.com/terms-of-service](https://www.coursereport.com/terms-of-service)
"You agree that you will not upload, post, transmit, distribute or otherwise publish through the Site or any service or feature made available on or through the Site, any materials which \[...\] constitute or contain false or misleading indications of origin, endorsemen…
It violates Course Reports terms of service. Imagine I offered non-placed alumni $50 each to write reviews, would that be cool? That's the exact same thing.
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Someone who worked there said they have people good at "finding people" specifying more details, and they try to track you down and correct.
Someone wrote a fairly negative view on here "anonymously", they found the person and offered them a high paying contract job at Codesmith, which the person accepted. This was shared with me by the person themselves and not second hand information. I'm sure the job was actually good intentioned to help someone struggling, but the person perceived it as being paid off.
They're definitely some successful alumni who graduated in 2023 the number of people getting really good jobs from my personal view smaller than in the past but it's not zero.
The people who are getting placed, though are not super keen on broadcasting into the world because they know that some other best friends and people who they were in the trenches with during the immersive didn't get placed and I think that's actually holding them back from talking. I also know some people who wouldn't recommend Codesmith at this time who got pretty good jobs eventually, but wow, it was a rough journey. Finally, I know people who are really exaggerating their resumes and they just don't even care or feel bad about it anymore because they have absolutely nothing to lose and they would just leave the industry entirely otherwise.
... I guess shit show of the market pretty much summarizes all this…
Codesmith paying for reviews was something I knew about and documented but no one has shared with me the exact text.
You might be doxxing yourself with that date and maybe should edit it to XX because they told different people different dates to stagger the reviews and they only sent this to people placed.
Thank you for publicly sharing because this was something people talked about in confidence and I could share yet.
I spent too much time trying to people but if others want to DM about this, I'll do a top level post sometime when I catch up a bit over the weekend.
I have careful documentation of all of this too and it's desperate. Codesmith is not doing well, not filling their cohorts even though they have reduced them significantly.
They lowered the price of JSB and CSPrep to get more people into them even though JSB Flex videos are entirely free anyways in their website (unless this is an engineering mistake, there are so many odd engineering choices and user information being shared out from their website all over... I'm operating the assumption that this is all intentional because it's so widespread and pervasive it would be incompetent otherwise)
Before attacking me, look into the mirror Codesmith. If Hack Reactor was setup this way would you think they are the best of the best and maybe look within and fix things before coming after me.
Alumni: if you hate me at least try to understand what I'm saying and think about it s bit.
I 100% agree people should respectfully question me and push me. I'm one of the most responsive people on Reddit and I'm here to talk reasonably.
My company works with people later on in their careers and the more people that go to bootcamps, the more people that come to us. So I feel like I have major bias to promote bootcamps and not take them down.
Now others seem to feel I'm here to take down bootcamps so my company is the only option left.
I strongly disagree with that but people can share their opinions, all I ask is that people can see all sides fairly and judge for themselves and that people present evidence for their beliefs for why they feel that way.
Prove that my involvement in the sub has boosted my business. Prove that people are leaving Codesmith or other bootcamps in droves to come to my business. They aren't so there is no proof! Just people trolling.
Yeah, I mean they are increasing AI based stuff and mods don't have that much control. They collapsed someone's comment about me because she was flagged as a highly suspicious account likely trying to break the rules. I don't know how they determined that whatsoever and cannot do anything about her comment.
10% fight publicly for it, work there, keep in the community, keep doing talks and calls, etc... and "stay in the family"
Many more are positive or neutral-positive about Codesmith, thought it was worth it because of their outcome but not the content or the advice and they move on after settling into their careers.
I'm also bias there because the people that move on come to be too lol. The largest groups of people coming to me on a weekly basis are current students or recent alumni venting about something, and then older alumni who trust me because they feel like my analysis is spot on and want my advice about the industry.
I think it's about 10% of alumni and it's because they credit Codesmith with changing their lives. And I don't argue it didn't. Something can change your live and not be perfect.
The people that just can't acknowledge that are going to have a lot of problems later on in their careers, lots of struggles with progression. Codesmith is far too early to see that yet.
With $130K salaries come layoffs at the drop of a hat, and other negative things that will need to be confronted.
I've worked with a lot of alumni that love Codesmith. Both officially and unofficially and some more directly than others. I have no idea if they like me as person but I think they understand better where I'm coming from once actually getting to know me.
It's really sad that the staff are so locked in. I was talking to Eric Kirsten over email a bit but that died off when Will yelled at me for 3 minutes straight in a public talk and banished me from the community forever.
I didn't auto hide anything and I didn't touch any settings for this post or any comments or any users.
Reddit identifies and hides accounts it thinks are sketchy and maybe that's why the comment was collapsed. Our subreddit at the top level has typical Reddit filters on and they have been improving their algorithms over the past few months.
This is all great advice to me too, thanks for sharing.
Do you have a sense of the placement rates in your cohort now that it's been a year, versus the historical placement rates from that bootcamp?