We don't have classes or assignments so it's kind of nuanced how we manage people doing stuff.
We have dozens of ways to monitor and adapt to people's progress so people can do what they want to do.
We have an incentive to not waste money so yeah our product needs to get people doing stuff and improving.
If people don't want to do it anymore they can leave under a refund policy.
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
Similar to other feedback, this person graduated Codesmith in 2017, and has had 3 jobs since then and her trajectory and path don't reflect what a person going to Codesmith today will experience.
I love reading profiles about people and their trajectories and I loved reading this post, I'm just giving feedback that Codesmith needs to deal with the market today more directly and not the market they want to have. And appeal to people who they think will succeed in this market through Codesmith.
I would love to read a profile about someone who is struggling on the job market and doesn't have a job yet and how much they love Codesmith anyways and how Codesmith is helping them the best they can. That is representative of the common grad right now unlike when the person above graduated and started their career.
You can do it with a bootcamp but the market is really tough and it will take a long time and additional effort post bootcamp.
I would consider a master's degree too and other part time options you can do at your own pace while you are working, and then be ready to go all in when the market is better for bootcamp grads or a specific opportunity arises.
Bootcamps can't consistently place people in this market, no matter how good they are. Launch Academy wrote a blog post on why they are passing indefinitely as a result.
That said, you could be one of the people who gets placed, just approach carefully and make sure you, and the bootcamp, are clear on the reality of the market.
These offers don't exist anymore. Read the fine print carefully! Modern ISAs require you to pay them back even if you don't get a job (but you can defer at least a ND pause if you lose.your job or don't have one)
Question #1 wasn't responded to and I think Question 1 is most important because it's critical for how prospective students understanding your process for creating curriculum that delivers outcomes.
I say this all the time, but it's critical to understand HOW a program works and not explaining this is a lack of transparency IMO - even if the answer is we don't tie curriculum to outcomes.
Tis should be my number one concern as a curriculum manager - if you can't measurably demonstrate your curriculum is improving outcomes then why does Codesmith exist (rhetorical question).
Again, I'm being tough because if you call yourself the best, you have to hold yourself to that bar.
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
Prior experience as a SWE or prior experience in tech? Those are two completely different things. Prior experience as a legit SWE, do not do Codesmith. Prior experience as SWE-adjacent or other tech role, consider Codesmith.
Since you are answering this "Official AMA" representing Codesmith, be careful misrepresenting the company.
The vast majority of alumni according to your own data had no prior SWE experience and it's not even super correlated to Codesmith outcomes (it is a bit, but not really).
If you haven't seen your own data ask for it before trusting other Codesmith staff.
The one off single anecdote about a PayPal manage graduated Codesmith SIX YEARS AGO and took THREE YEARS to become a manager.
I'm familiar with all three of those grads actually yeah, but I'm curious what data is backing this narrative. From hearing Will it seems to hypothesis on the idea that "capacities" are all that matters, but no one is giving me hard experimental evidence this hypothesis stands up - it's all anecdotal and quotes from individual alumni. And all you need is single counter examples to disprove a hypothesis so this is not a valid argument and I want to know more!!!
Like I know these people and I wouldn't say these are reproducible paths that any Codesmith student could choose to follow.
For example, if you had a bunch of alumni at OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity and generalized from them and resulted in each person with a unique path, that would make more sense to me.
But if everyone is a unique case not in these large scale consistent AI roles as hiring managers and building orgs of tho…
+1 to the market being so different now that no matter what worked for alumni when they got a job, it's not the same today. I'm not saying that you need a degree or don't need one, but not acknowledge the changes in the market is detrimental and we're seeing bootcamps drop like flies as a result.
I reloaded this a couple time and the voting went from +3 to -1 to 1... these are critically important questions for a bootcamp and downvoting for whatever reason doesn't change that fact even if you hate my guts.
Hi James! I have some tough questions about the logistics. Codesmith markets itself as the best so I have some tough questions I expect answers to from the best :D.
1. How do systematically measure the impact of curriculum updates on placements and outcomes?
2. Related to 1, how do decide what updates to make based on the job market? For example, I have talked to a bunch of the top AI companies and if you aren't being hired for an ML role with a PhD and 10 years of ML experience, they don't actually want or need any AI experienced whatsoever to hire you for product and infra roles. So I'm curious where the decision to add AI/ML comes from if it's not related to getting people jobs.
3. How do you systematically identify and prioritize "best practices across the software engineering landscape"? I'm aware of a survey that's given to alumni and a curriculum panel of 6 or so alumni in in…
Its a specification for Bootcamp outcomes that used to be the industry standard but effective has just one large scale member left in it, but is still the only board industry spec: [https://www.cirr.org/data](https://www.cirr.org/data)
I would probably talk way less about Codesmith if their CEO commented on here, because the discussions would be efficient. I will absolutely grill him on the facts, but respect his views and people would efficiently see different sides of the argument, no name calling and anonymous attacks from people making false assumptions.
Without that voice, we have a dozen alumni contributing pieces of that discussion and not being qualified to respond to challenges about the pedagogy and strategy.
Yeah we only take on Fellows we can support, right now in this market we have more capacity, but in the past we've had a waitlist when we didn't think we could operationally provide the experience we want.
You do four primary activities:
1. Practice (doing problems by yourself and with others)
2. Benchmarking (you do a ton, probably dozens or over a hundred practice assessments and get evaluated on each one)
3. Mentor Sessions (typically 3 to 5 person group sessions where the mentor guides people through a problem and you all work together to solve it)
4. Mock interviews (1-1 run by actual engineers as real interviews but with feedback on where to improve)
You do a combination of all of this and it changes week to week based on how you are doing.
And when you get to the point that you are consistently at the FAANG-level bar, we switch to job hunt mode and we track all your applic…
CIRR changed it's specification to now report placements for up to one year after graduating. It used to be six months but so few people have been getting placed, they changed it to 1 year.
Outcomes are still down and haven't recovered, but I would expect six months to one year and not 3-4 months.
I know a number of bootcamp founders/CEO and have talked to people about these things, structure of a cohort, unit economics, etc...
These are just my personal opinions based on my experiences, so take it with a grain of salt, but I think it's an informed opinion.
In general, we try to look for recent outcomes of people who are similar to your background on paper, and where you are starting from and compare that to your goals.
So if your goal is to become an E5 at Meta and your background doesn't support that we might say, people similar to you have gotten E4 Rotational Engineer jobs at Meta and we would be aiming for that if you came to Formation. That job pays $175K base with a $50K signing bonus and is a 12 month rotation that converts to full E4 if you ramp up as expected.
It's really personal and through examples and pattern matching but it's much more specific than any aggregated numbers could be.
I haven't worked at any bootcamps. My partner ran a free in person bootcamps for 2 years that I helped with, but that's it.
I work with people who have graduated from a ton of bootcamps though and have a very broad lens
One of the challenging aspects of Formation for us to explain how it works, is that more experience people tend to not broadcast on LinkedIn that they went to Formation and people with less experience tend to put it out there to build a profile. Like if you currently work at a good company at doing Formation to level up, you don't want your company to know necessarily you are doing Formation or that you were doing it for the past six months to leave.
So if you are experience (which most of the people we work with are) then it's harder to find people like you to talk to.
Add in the fact that our entrance bar was slightly lower in the boom times and we took more bootcamps grads about 4-6 months post bootcamp or CS degree, a number who are struggling still in the market, and you end up with a biased sample size on LinkedIn.
I also fully expect Formation to not work for everyone too! We'r…
Hey, short answer to long prompt but I did read it all and appreciate you sharing your thoughts about it. I think you are trying to pull conclusions from my writing and tying them together and the missing piece is that it's not my job to blanket recommend or not recommend programs. Every program has good and bad things and the larger the program the wider range of experiences people will have there. I actually stand by most or all of the things you quoted.
Codesmith itself (staff and leaders) are strongly against lying. Somehow though most graduates I've seen on LinkedIn end up with embellished resumes.
I have heard numerous theories why, but it's not as clear cut as Codesmith the entity is a bad actor manipulating the industry and some people do go through it feeling like they didn't lie about anything and got a great outcome. So if I think you would be one of those people, go for it…
I don't really think this is a great number but it's far from misleading, it's very clear what the number is and how it was calculated, and that it was the highest reported offer in 2024 up to April 22nd.
We then talk to each person before joining to explain how Formation works and learn about your individual goals and advise if Formation is a good fit or not.
I can't give specifics about that person because it's not public and I haven't asked for permission, but the person placed at Meta in a SWE role and has about 13 years of experience. The person took their time and was currently employed when doing Formation. The offer is very reasonable for everyone at that level and we have a couple of people in Formation now at that level who are looking at changing companies. That number is a bit low for them and we had to talk and explain to them about what their outcome might look like.
At…
Can you block the ads, we genuinely have a low ad budget on Reddit and I don't really want it all going towards you hahaha.
I pointed out some challenges in number 5 above. I think it would fair to publish more data with detailed explanations of what it means.
The motivation is actually the opposite. If we publish data that is misleading it's a much larger risk for us then not publishing data. We can spend 30 min calls one on one going through your personal situation and making sure you are clear on what we do to make up for it. But if we publish averages without a lot of explanation and caveat they might mislead people a lot.
The average comp is so high right now because of a bunch of people that got senior offers at Meta. And it would be absurdly misleading that anyone's starting now gets $300k to $500k offers. hence why we need to be really careful and explain things really carefu…
It's a hobby, I get really interested by things like Codesmith. I watch documentaries about all kinds of business things like I've already seen the new Ashley Madison doc on Netflix and the Con Queen one on Apple+
Codesmith is just a super fascinating entity that is absolutely unique amongst bootcamps and extremely polarizing. People love it or hate it and maybe I'm the only person in between lol.
Conflicts of interest exist whether you call them out or not and a lot of people have them... discussing what I may or may not have is an incredibly fortunate opportunity we're in.
Imagine anonymous accounts claiming to be normal alumni that are people employed by a school with no way to check it out.
Or people claiming they got a job with no experience but their LinkedIn says they have "10 years of experience" and I can't say anything without DOX'ing them.
These are two cases I know about and can't say anything about without DOX'ing people and how I know, but these kinds of things go completely UNQUESTIONED because people are non transparent like I am.
I except to be respectfully challenged but that also involves listening to what I say and judging the facts and not making false conclusions because you are suspicious.
Hi, yeah there just aren't that many of us around because it's kind of a new idea. We compete with Pathrise and Interview Kickstart directly. Interview Prep or Career Accelerator maybe?
The idea of getting like a "personal trainer" for your career is kind of new and some people are still shy about sharing that they went to these places.
As you pointed out it's crazy different to have like 10+ year Google hiring managers who have really seen a lot and genuinely have insights advise you than at a bootcamp where an alumni who worked at Google for a year is advising you who hasn't interviewed anyone yet, neverless managed, or done dozens of hiring committee reviews, etc...
On the recruitment side, it's not super lucrative yet for these companies. There are still so many people applying naturally big tech doesn't really need to partner with anyone and there has to be a reason. Will these c…
This is a false narrative. If you think my narratives about Codesmith or Launch School or CIRR are false, you are entitled to methodically poke holes in the arguments with other facts and data, or opinions (stated as such).
1. I have to say we are not a bootcamp whenever anyone calls us one because we are tiny and have little presence so the public is mislead by those false remarks. The question should be why are people accusing us of being one in the first place and not dropping it when I explain so often why we aren't.
2. We spend very little on Reddit ads, we mostly spend ad dollars on Google search keyword ads to appear above Beyoncé's Formation album in results. You probably see the ads because you click on them and engage with Formation, that's how online ads are meant to work!! To target messages to people who engage with Formation for the lowest cost possible.
3. I can see how…
I appreciate this discussion! I have my real name on here so that we can have this discussion! If you have anonymous accounts it's hard to track people's backgrounds and biases and that's even more concern for manipulation than people being transparent.
As other people pointed out, Formation isn't a bootcamp - we are an interview prep, practice, mentorship, and mock interview platform. Our acceptance bar varies with the market and right now we are taking mostly mid level senior engineers and a surprising number who formerly worked as senior engineers at FAANG companies.
I don't know why Codesmith people think we compete with them, including their Director of Outcomes stating that in their AMA. The most recent 20 reviews on Course Report: ALL 20 speak to either how they had no experience prior to Codesmith or they didn't say anything about it, but more generally how they recommend it f…
I can speak for LeWagon but Codesmith is pride and not greed from what I've seen.
They genuinely believe they have a unique and special program and anyone criticizing it is jealous or a competitor trying to leech off of them.
The CEO has FrontEnd Master money and could do a number of other things to make more money.
Their founding advisor could do a lot of other things and does Codesmith because he likes helping people.
Admitting they aren't better than the market is a pride thing. I would love to see them say "the market is impact us and we have slowed down to save money, were trying to break even and pour every penny we can into Codesmith but we can't do as much as we wanted to and we are focusing on offering one incredible cohort with a minimal team".
They still have far too many staff members. You don't need more than one outcomes person to manage a few offers a week and 30 peop…
Ah ok, I see and agree, I don't know any other programs that just paused their entire enrollment, I meant paused or closed.
I think Codesmith pausing enrollment in specific programs and Hack Reactor shutting down some programs is similar to "pausing" too perhaps.
Another CIRR school pauses enrollment due to the market. Bootcamps have to face reality or they will not survive 2024. If you are looking at bootcamp that doesn't warn you about the market for bootcamp grads, run for the hills!
SOURCE: [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/launch-academy-announces-strategic-pause-immersive-pamjc/](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/launch-academy-announces-strategic-pause-immersive-pamjc/)
Selected Excerpts:
>While our graduates are of high caliber, there is a difficult cognitive leap for hiring managers to overcome when comparing our entry-level graduates with established engineers affected by recent layoffs. With such an ample supply of the latter, it leaves the former at a strategic disadvantage. Even with the best available preparation, there is no substitute for work experience.
>
With so much seniority in the job market, it's difficult even for the str…
I can't speak for all companies, but I am very confident in how the FAANG-level companies see this.
These companies don't make hiring decisions based on your resume.
They have interview types (e.g. system design, and technical behavioral) to test your practical experience and compare it to what they need for that position at the company.
You could say you have 10 years as a "Vice President Software Engineer at Goldman Sachs" (this is a real job title) and be leveled as a mid-level engineer at Meta.
Sadly the whole point of these interviews is to test real experience and you can't fake it. If you have the experience, you can fail because of lack of preparation and practice, but if you don't you can't magically get it without having it.
Unfortunately it's the job market and people aren't hiring junior engineers right now so there really isn't too much you can do.
The Codesmith strate…
I don't think so and it might even create more jobs soon. I expect a of non-technical jobs will be replaced by "pseudo-engineers".
For example, instead of having 5 customer service reps, you might have a prompt engineer working on refining AI that responds to customers on the front lines, assisted with AI tools that they use and training - but WITHOUT MUCH ACTUAL PROGRAMMING.
There will probably be a wide spectrum of types of engineers and the compensation won't be nearly as high for these less-coding ones, and will probably be HIGHER than it is now for the ones that are behind the scenes running the show.
Lying on your resume works, but it's kind of like being the person who always "takes a penny" and never leaves one in the "take a penny leave a penny" jar.
If everyone takes a penny, there's nothing left for anyone, including the people who actually need a penny.
RE: Background checks. It will absolutely come up with legit companies that run standard background checks through Hire Right and Checkr, etc...
What will happen is it will come back as "unable to verify" and the consequences are up to the company to decide if they care or not.
Some companies care about date discrepancies and some don't, and the magnitude of the discrepencies matter.
I know a common strategy amongst alum from Codesmith is to exaggerate on their resumes with a footnote that their experience is "developed under OSLabs".
When it comes to the background check, even though it's on the resume, a person can not…
This is true, it's the default response to legally protect the company and it makes it really hard to know anything.
In fact most companies don't give any kind of feedback for this reason and it's one of the practice and mock interviews before real ones so you can get real feedback.
Any bootcamp that's teaching you in 12, 14, 16 weeks is going to make compromises on something and be good at other things. So you have to look into each of the programs individually for what works for you.
Codesmith is a good place if you prove you can self study (and peer study) your way to basic coding skills, previous professional experience (not in coding) and you have the ambition and drive to exaggerate your resume a bit and hustle your way to a job, messaging hiring managers and presenting your projects as if they were the equivalent of mid-level engineering work.
I don't know anything about Actualize.
But other top programs like Launch School - which calls itself the slow way to get a job, is more about mastery progression.
Rithm is more about educational quality and getting your money's worth there, but is far less aggressive on the job hunt side.
Choosing the program for…
There is only about 6 or 7 weeks of materials and you spend like 1 to 2 days on major topics that individually take months to become even intermediate in.
You work on projects and get trained in how to communicate in your resume in messaging how to pass recruiting screens.
I pulled up the LinkedIns five people who just released one of their projects called ReacType and all five of them portrayed this project as full-time software engineer work at a Company for 3 months without specifying that it was a open source group project for a bootcamp and that it was 4 weeks of work.
Yeah sure DM me, I talked to a good number of people about bringing out of Codesmith is a good fit or not them.
If you are a good fit for how it actually works under the hood than it is a very, very uniquely good place to go.
If you are not a good fit for how it works under the hood. then you will not be so ha…
It's a personal choice. If you can commit the time and have a support system enabling you to do full time, I would do it full time. You honestly don't learn that much technically and getting it over with will accelerate your job hunt.
CSX is fine but it's pretty minimal compared to some more robust platforms. The best part of pre Codesmith is free workshops.
Codesmith doesn't do much paid marketing and advertising (other than Course Report) and CSX is a marketing tool to get you into the Codesmith ecosystem. Stumble on FREE CSX, join slack, meet others, go to a session, go to another session, and then you get pulled into the system.
I don't know anyone that recommends CSX as the only tool someone new should use the learn JS, I would start with a cheap Udemy course like Colt Steele.
This article just came out yesterday and I'm also cautious about anything 2U related right now : [https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/education-technology-2u-debt-e7218eeb](https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/education-technology-2u-debt-e7218eeb)
A bootcamp provides two things:
1. Structure and accountability
2. Network
It sounds like you already have #1 and I don't think a bootcamp will speed up your learning. Spending a few days on a project and getting some feedback probably won't help you much if you can build projects on your own.
#2 is more relevant when you are job hunting down the road, but given the market, I'm iffy on if it's worth going to a bootcamp for the network.
If you want to work with others more, I would recommend trying to get involved in large scale open source projects like MUI and Mattermost (both are medium sized, approachable projects).
Hmm I don't know of any good "AI bootcamps" yet. BloomTech just launched one but they are in a major rebuilding phase and almost all their staff have turned over, so I'm not sure I would recommend that yet haha.
But it's far too early and the standards aren't set yet. Every few months major new models come out that change the game. Just today OpenAI launched GPT 4o - which does intense multi-modal processing that can significantly impact how AI is used for marketing.
So TLDR: I think you need to learn the AI tools to do well at your non-tech job, but I'm not sure a bootcamp is the right path.
I think you chose the wrong bootcamp. Or perhaps if you can get by for the time being and then you'll be fine as a lonely SWE later on.
So communication is critical but that doesn't have to be live 1-1 communication. It can be written communication too that's async.
I would also consider this when choosing a company to work at.
Automattic is a company that is entirely async and the interview process is also async and chat based!
I know a lot of engineers who are super introverted and don't talk to anyone and are paid $2M a year because they have tremendous impact.
That said, it's rarer because you can have a lot of impact by working with people and talking to them. Having an impact as a lonely SWE at a company-wide level is harder.
But yeah, you'll be just fine, just consider it when choosing a job so you end up at the right company.
Bootcamp grads have such a hard time finding jo…
It's more about the "types" of engineers. For example, if you are a product engineer working on user facing features, you don't want to inerview with like infrastructure.
So asking "I'm a \_\_\_\_\_ engineer, can I get an onsite with engineers of similar backgrounds?"
where \_\_\_\_ would be the type of engineer at Facebook: UX, Growth, Infra, Site Integrity, Social good, Product, Tools, Monetization, Ads, etc..
I'm bias because my company prepares people for top tier interviews haha, but I understand the confusion. Everyone gives different advice and speaks confidently that they know the right way :(, including me.
Stepping back, this interview is aiming to test your experience with large scale systems and complex problems.
How that happens varies and that's why there isn't just one or two ways to do it. It will vary by how experienced the interviewer is as well. And some of it is a bit of luck.
One highly under appreciated tip is to work with the recruiter to make sure your onsite loop is similar engineers to yourself. More chance of a good vibe with the interviewer to help move things along.
In terms of the interview itself, I do recommend focusing on your strengths and being transparent about gaps, but remember - it's because it helps you demonstrate experience and expertise and that's t…
I would break question apart into part time VS self paced.
I think Codesmith is probably the best part time program. But it's super intense still 3 hours a day + 6 hours saturday for NINE MONTHS STRAIGHT. For example, someone who said they have a job and want to part time but they can't imagine committing to nine months of no Saturdays for their family. So as with Codesmith's general offerings, it's ideal for ambitious single people with a lot of savings. I know some people who did part time even though they didn't have a job, to pace it more.
Now self paced is a whole other bucket. Most self paced programs have very low completion rates and they naturally have less of a community vibe as people start and stop and progress at their own paces. Because they rely more on self-motivation, it's hard to interpret outcomes the same way as a part time fixed program because of a lack of meanin…