+1000% Even doing all the LC problems tagged Meta is severely missing the point. It can work for some people if you get a little lucky, but the interviews are not about doing LC.
I worked at Meta for 8 years, did 400+ interviews, and helped craft the Product Architecture style type.
I wouldn't be disappointed but I would also reset how you prepare for the real deal.
Being "close" doesn't count much at Meta because they are looking for "clean thinking". This is also why they do whiteboard-style interviews still instead of compiled code. If your process is muddled and jumpy then being close won't matter. If you haven't seen a problem, get a little lost and take a long timer, you can still pass by having clean and clear thinking and getting a reasonable solution out. You own't pass by scrambling and jumping around to a half baked optimal one.
What you said here to me is that the people attending Codesmith are awesome. The people graduating are self-organizing to run standups and encouraging each other in the job hunt.
That's all fantastic stuff but is it what you are paying $21K for? Imagine a random person added all those same people to a Discord and they all had self studied and were supporting each other just the same.
Similar arguments are made about going to Harvard Business School - you go to meet the people, not to learn anything special, so it quite frankly might be worth the cost.
I talk to a lot of alumni, and the lowest ballpark I've heard is 30% placed in a year, and the highest is what you just said at 75%.
Given that they had about 1000 students START in 2022, and 550ish offers in 2023, that sounds like a 50ish% placement rate within a year - maybe higher on CIRR because they reduce the number of people in…
Did you look at how those people presented themselves on LinkedIn or on their resumes? Would a reasonable informed individual read their resume and think those people had zero experinece?
Nice! This isn't atypical for bootcamp grads who are able to get that first job making a decent salary. People talk about their first job as if it's the end of a long journey through their bootcamp, but it's really just the beginning. If you continue to work hard, focus on impact, improve your skills, networking, practice, you can accelerate very quickly... I see it every day!
The problem I have with Codesmith alumni is that I'm not in fact attacking Codesmith or defaming them. I'm reporting on the facts, some are good and some are bad. But the WORST of all is the market for entry level jobs, which Codesmith has absolutely no control over, and that's the primarily reason people aren't going to bootcamps right now, not anything that Codesmith is doing poorly.
Formation isn't a competitor to Codesmith but I'm happy to tell you how we are doing. You can read it on our blog. Our 2023 offers tanked and people's average first year total comp increase dropped from $100K to $80K. Our top tier placements tanked from 75% of all placements to 50%. This is on our blog since December 2023. In 2024, which is not published anywhere, top tier placements are back up to 75% and average comp increase is $117K. We don't have any placements rates because it doesn't make sense the…
Node.js documentary out today! (Free on YouTube, created by Honeypot)
I would highly recommend people working on or interested in Open Source software watch this documentary! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LB8KwiiUGy0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LB8KwiiUGy0)
It covers some interesting topics:
\- Why companies "own" open source software and what that means
\- How really good developers work on major open source projects as their JOBS and not just for fun
\- How most of the decisions being made on open source projects are entirely about how people will use it and how the code is structured to enable collaboration - not just shipping a project and sharing the source code with the public.
Discuss in comments if you have thoughts!
Yeah we upped crowd control features and it could be that Reddit uses AI to minimize distribution of content it thinks is sketchy.
90% of people sharing courses get removed because it's blatant advertising, so the AI is not in your favor haha.
I can give my 2 cents as someone in industry for a long time.
I don't think anyone is lying to you, there are hundreds of legit technologies/frameworks/tools companies use that you could learn, and thousands of common combinations / tech stacks using those frameworks.
The truth is that there isn't just one answer. And if you seek answers from people without any real experience here, on Blind, or on YouTube you get people SUPER CONFIDENT that their way is the right way.
I see so many junior people jumping from stack to stack and project to project after getting one sentence of advice from an influencer who has zero experience or a comment in this subreddit. I see people post a success story and then someone comment "which bootcamp?" only to spend months obsessed with that bootcamp, never getting in, and then finding out that the "success story" person actually had 13 years of programmi…
I'm seeing this too. Entry level and new grad jobs are being held for top tier CS grads with internships.
The new grad hiring cycle is seasonal and ending now, so we'll see what happens in Fall 2024. If interest rates go down, layoffs go down, companies have room to hire new grads and invest in them,.and more.slots open up
Will bootcamp grads get hired again?
I think it's going to take a whole other seasonal cycle to flush out the backlog of CS grads before companies start opening the requirements... and it's possible that by then, some more bootcamps won't make it.
Thanks for the quick response! Good luck converting 🤞
I was curious for both.
Maybe if you have thoughts on who should do a bootcamp in this market.
If you were starting over again today would you go to a bootcamp or stay in your old job?
Congrats! The masters degree + internships were really critical and I think your background is kind of what you need to get a job 6-7 months out of a bootcamp right now and even then - 1 callback out of 400.
Would you recommend someone without a college degree who is a line cook at a local restaurant or a customer service rep at an online store even bother studying and getting into a bootcamp right now? (I wouldn't but I'm curious what your take is)
We aren't a school, don't teach anything, and don't educate. What we do is unique and the closest competitors are IK and Pathrise and we're still unique amongst then. It's on us to explain what we do in our marketing and materials, but we haven't figured it out yet so I'm here telling you directly from the source of truth to try to help.
I would love if you actually listen and ask questions to clarify and talk to me about what Formation does and then I don't have to write essays.
Which competitors am I discrediting? Our competitors are Interview Kickstart, Pathrise, and Outco (before they kind of went MIA) and I never say anything to discredit them on Reddit or anywhere and I've even ENCOURAGED people to go TO SPECIFIC ONES in specific situations, e.g. for Product Management - which we don't help weith.
Our recruiters talk day in and day out with people considering between these options (or only considering Formation) and these are our competitors.
It comes up like ONCE a month that someone is considering a bootcamp OR Formation and the recruiters escalate to see if the person is experienced enough for Formation. The bootcamps vary from Codesmith to Springboard and the majority of the time if the people don't have experience we tell them to go to a bootcamp.
If someone has legit SWE experience for 1+ years they should not go to a bootcamp in almost all circums…
I agree that it's critical CIRR forces both graduation and placement rates to be there.
The counter argument though is that they clearly say that a bootcamp can advertise ONLY the placement within 6 months as the "Placement Rate" in marketing, which isn't quite so accurate.
It's fair to consider both of these because people leave for all kinds of valid reasons, so maybe this lies somewhere in the middle?
What information have I refused to release? I've explained extremely transparently what information we have and don't have, and why we do what we do. You can see an entire list of every single placement's company on our blog.
If you think that CIRR would work for Formation, you don't understand what Formation is and how it works, and coordinated downvoting my comments doesn't make you all understand what Formation is better than I do.
If you want me to give you a CIRR report you have absolutely no idea how Formation works and you should not be signing up whatsoever until you understand what it is and what you are getting.
We very transparently explain the average compensation gain of a placement which tanked last year from $100K to $80K and will hopefully be much higher in 2024. We were also transparent about how top tier placements tanked from 75% of outcomes to 50% (which is back u…
They ask when you get an offer and fill out a form, if you put in 0 or blank then they wouldn't know and that sheet shared was the average of people who shared. I'll try to dig up the post, so this is just illustrative and not fact until I find it.
Thanks for sharing, do you might sharing what changes you observed since you graduated? A lot of bootcamps have changed a lot in the past year and things change - both good and bad
I wish I had a strong answer, but I don't. I think better information would include:
- backgrounds and experience of people before entering
- more clarity on the types of jobs people get
- more satisfaction related qualitative info, i.e. "how much do you credit your bootcamp in getting the job you got"
- histograms on placement times and salaries instead of medians and averages
- including all forms of comp in data, like bonuses, benefits, etc...
- salary increases - i.e. someone leaked data that mid last year the average placed student at Codesmith had a current/previous salary of about 70K - which is higher than the median placed salary at some bootcamps
- more transparency on hiring companies. too many bootcamps show a wall of logos of amazing tech companies, and talk about anecdotal placements there, but what are all of them. e.g. are people making $120K at a design agency v…
I wouldn't say it's the "only objective metric" no. It's a reliable and good signal to use, combined with other data and information.
The outcomes themselves are more indicative of the job market than the programs themselves, so judging a program by it's outcomes alone was never a good idea, even in the good times.
The fact that a CIRR report exists checks off one box of legitimacy, but it's far more concerning that Codesmith and possibly others had H2 2022 outcomes audited and ready for 6 months and won't share them, while they tout H1 2022 numbers in marketing. Even if this was not CIRR data, if that fact was true I would be demanding transparent placement rates before signing an agreement if it was me, but others might have a different bar.
Just to be clear, this post was a personal opinion and not one of Formation and not about Formation.
RE: Formation, I take that as feedback for sure, I don't think the 750K number is really effective too, but it's accurate and it's what our competitors do, so we took the easy there as we focused on other parts of our website.... Which I think is the fundamental reason we're on such different pages here, Formation isn't a bootcamp and CIRR-type data makes no sense. We've tried to cut numbers with artificial time windows for banks and loan providers and all those people love them and support us strongly, but we don't share them publicly because they used for math for finance people and don't help an individual understand their journey and likely would only mislead them because of the unique commitment and path that each person takes.... the timeframe is largely up to the person.
Not all…
CIRR appears to be done and irrelevant now - Codesmith needs to get off the Titanic before it sinks (Personal Opinion)
As many are aware, [CIRR](https://cirr.org/) started out a business-league from Skills Fund to try to standardize bootcamp outcomes in the early days of bootcamps.
While CIRR's stated goals were to create transparency in the Bootcamps industry, it was ultimately not a charity - and was a business league, like the Chamber of Commerce, whose practical value was promoting and marketing for it's member bootcamps (who pay fees to be members) that did particularly well. So as bootcamps started doing terribly - particularly in 2022 -> 2023, a lot of those backers left.
**You can see this in how important "transparency" was when bootcamps were doing well, and how quickly and efficiently they posted outcomes, and how when outcomes are terrible everything comes to a halt - this…
I went through some of CSX and did some of the materials, and it's fairly light, so you definitely need to supplement. From my experience working with prospective students, current students, and alumni, the universal advice is to leverage the pair programming and live sessions they offer.
Codesmith is looking for students that will ride-and-die with Codesmith and showing up to the live sessions and getting the vibe and fitting in will go a long way to progressing VS banging your head against the wall alone in your room... it's why you see a number of students and alumni so excited when they get in, and so supportive of the program publicly, and if they get a great outcome they will fit to tooth and nail about how Codesmith "changed their lives".
So TLDR: it works if you are the right fit, don't try too hard to BECOME the right fit - because then it doesn't work, and doing live session…
That's exactly why I used to, until the recent changes (which is paused until they settle), recommend specific people go there 1-1 if they are suited to it.
Just because I'm critical about a few things, doesn't mean it's not good for the right people.
But the market sucks for bootcamp grads right now. The most perfect person for Codesmith went there after college didn't work for them and is a totally fantastic person, has really struggled to get a job, even with exaggerating experience.
Yeah totally agree and not a criticism. just that when you go to their website, there's very prominent large numbers showing an 87% placement rate, but that's actually not the placement rate. it's the percentage of people who got jobs who got them within 6 months instead of just some longer time frame. Every remote program I've seen has a huge dropout rate, springboard's rate is somewhere in the 20% graduation rate based on their data on their website and BloomTech has somewhere around a 50% being generous so TripleTen should be publishing their graduation rates in some capacity just so people know what the odds of actually finishing it are.
My university was 25 hours a week classroom time and 40 of homework/projects but 3 semesters a year and summers were off to do research or internships.
I was commuting from home an hour a day each way, no remote classes, no recordings, and it was absolutely draining. I woke up at 5am and went to bed at 10pm, I worked all weekend, people thought I had problems haha and I didn't have any friends or do any hobbies. I read school stuff on the elliptical everyday for an hour, and I did scorekeeping for hockey on Sunday nights where I did homework in the box while doing it.
But other programs are way less intense and way more expensive so this is an exception case.... in the same way that Codemsith is a special program for special people and not something that anyone can just sign up for and make $100K
I learned programming abilities early in with Lego Mindstorms!
It's expensive, needs to be in person so it's happening in traditional schools and colleges.
I mean my university's web programming course was so bad that I wrote a letter to the dean explaining how I had already learned this on my own and got a job at Facebook lined up and what was taught in the course was embarrassingly wrong and outdated.
It took them a few years to finally update it and kept me in the loop.
The university cost $20K for 4 years and I did dozens of courses that actually were really good, and some not.
Finally, my program's goal was to get you into a top PhD program, and I did that path but withdrew for Facebook and they were disappointed in me.
So it's a completely different thing.
My department chair though was doing sell presentation that sounded an awful lot like Codemsith about how for 80 years they have produced engineers capable of solving the world's hardest problems and are leaders because of their ability to bridge communication gaps and execute…
Codesmith offers free lifelong job support i.e. resume reviews, mock interviews, negotiation, etc.... via being able to book calls with alumni dedicated to those things. This isn't so much free but included in your tuition, and it's a great feature to take advantage of. I've heard pay is about $45 session so the weakness and/or way to control costs, is by having a fixed number of slots and it being first come first serve. So if they were pressed on finances they could have fewer slots so you have to wait longer. They have pretty decent availability now, but in the past people have waited two weeks for a resume review for example.
I don't think they ever offered lifelong LEARNING though included in your fees. In fact the CEO said alumni would have to pay to join in new "minors" in ML-for-engineers and others floated around.
As far as I know, the cuts they made were primarily just scal…
NuCamp, Springboard, BloomTech are ones I know of that take experienced engineers as part time mentors.
The interview prep platforms like Formation (disclosure: co-founder), Interview Kickstart, and Pathrise also have industry mentors and pay more, but typically more experienced ones. 4 years at FAANG might be sufficient for some of the options there. I could look at your background and give more advice if you share it with me.
I'm personally very far on the don't tell people they are senior engineers side on this one but I've had many debates with people that "know someone that got a senior job out of Codesmith" who adamantly believe in Codesmith's stance on this.
I would argue with them why a program branding itself as a top tier program preparing people for jobs in the TECHNOLOGY industry should be using the canonical definitions of the top tier TECHNOLOGY industry companies.
Codesmith does this "how to get hired in 2024" talk that I saw most of yesterday and they aren't just saying this anymore, but the CEO spent almost 2 hours straight in the talk convincing people that using - what in my opinion - are incorrect arguments:
1. Argument: the 2024 market has changed and companies that didn't previous prioritize technology - like banks - are hiring laid off FAANG engineers to build the same level of produ…
Believe it or not they do want to hire people who are good engineers and not just perfectly solving leetcode problems :P
I tell people the biggest complement they can get is if the interview says they have a "clean solution" or "clean code".
Clean means:
- no extra logic, extra if statements, extra variables, good naming, consistent styling, etc...
- the conceptual approach is easy to follow, explained well, elegantly handles edge cases without a lot of special handling
Often times "optimal space" and "optimal time" come from having a genuinely clean solution. Sometimes they require extremely complex and awkward optimizations that are very hard for someone to understand.
So if the optimal solution is naturally "clean" then I think it's expected.
If the optimal solution is extremely complex, then a super clean less optimal solution + good explanation for how to do the optimal is go…
Yeah a lot of these shut down though sadly: [https://apprenticeships.me/](https://apprenticeships.me/)
My advice is if you identify as one or more historically underrepresented groups in tech, I would join various industry groups as many are advertised there as well.
It's definitely not an all in option to go with because thye are very competitive! Just one you should consider.
Plus one to the other response here, apprenticeships were designed for bootcamp grads and career changers and the fact that you don't know that is a failure on Codesmith's side kind of proving my point sadly :(
The challenge of posting here is they will be directly confronted by me - with my personal hat on, not moderator hat and not Formation hat - in a neutral territory about the three topics I have person opinions on:
1. Constant, loud statements that they product mid-level and senior engineers with zero experience
- I think this is the one we can debate well, because it's a definitions issue, and a debate over what definition Codesmith should use to communicate accurately to the public
2. OSP representation. I would never accuse them of explicitly telling people to lie because there is only evidence of the contrary. But I would not accept any other comments on anything without an explanation as to why they let the majority of people who get jobs exaggerate their experience and if they weren't aware, what they will do about it now that they are.
- I think this one would be scary for Code…
Maybe you are wearing Codesmith-colored glasses too? I totally comment on a LOT of posts and I get how that can be like the loudest person in the room. I try to ask a lot of questions and stimulate discussion if you read all my stuff, but I see where this is coming from.
But percentage-wise Codesmith is not dominating the content in this sub, factually speaking.
It makes total sense there would be a ton of discussion in the past two weeks! They shrunk down a ton and laid off / lost a third - possibly up to half - of their staff, like that's a huge thing to discuss for the "best", "s-tier" bootcamp and if there was no discussion I might be more concerned. If anything there hasn't been enough talk about how people feel about it.
No worries, was just answering very literally like a log-like answer hahaha
But yeah I've known Don for a long time now.
Formation sponsored one of his videos about 2 years ago, and Daniel and Sophie from Formation did a couple of collaborations on mock interviews with him around then.
I used to go to his live streams so that's why he was responsive and knew me in the video and we know other's personalities pretty well.
The last time I interacted with Don prior to this live session was December 8th, 2023, and he had no idea I was going to be there, nor did I, I joined when I saw the push notification about a live session reviewing Reddit posts.
At the beginning (edited out) he opened CodingBootcamp, CSCareerQuestions, ExperiencedDevs and scrolled through the first couple of posts looking for ones to talk about.
There was a lot of odd posts prior to the one Don reviewed that were removed by both mods and Reddit-level admins, so I suggested that post as the most reasonable RECENT post. I then found two more posts that were much older way past the fold about self teaching vs bootcamps, and cs degrees that I recommended as well. And he started with the Codesmith one.
I mean I've seen the paperwork and lecture notes and they very adamantly tell people not to lie.
But I agree that they in the same breath tell them that OSLabs will complete background checks for your entire time at Codesmith on the 4 week projects because they say you were in 'OSLabs that entire time'. And they tell you to list your other Codesmith projects in parallel with overlapping timeframes.
Similarly, the representation of prior jobs is borderline. Don't lie, that customer service job was actually a "Support Engineer" role you just have imposter syndrome and are underselling yourself. I work with a number of students and grads unofficially/casually to help them tell their stories because they feel like they can't tell their authentic story at Codesmith.
Finally, I know someone that worked with a career support engineer to squeeze 4 YOE out of their resume when they had 0, the…
I happened to pop into that live stream when he was going over recent Reddit posts in a few subs.
I answered some questions he had very neutrally since this was his stream and not mine.
Don calls out pretty strongly some of the patterns and behaviors I've seen too, specifically how he didn't know OSPs were 4 weeks because every grad he's seen lists months or years on LinkedIn and hardly writes any code when looking at the GitHub repos. He even challenged the Codesmith CEO to come in his podcast and explain that to everyone, since it sounds like he has done his homework and would fairly aggressively push him on this.
I mean I have a couple of spreadsheets over the years and I would also like to see the CEO's response going through the most recent one of these privately, why 48 out of 52 people stated they had on average 11 months of experience on their OSPs, many not disclosing it wasn…
Yeah don't want to DOX but I knew the company from the OP listing this progression in the original.
There are a couple of FAANG-tier companies that traditionally hired seniors only and didn't level seriously, and when they finally normalized levels, leveled the "common engineer" as Senior - because that was the bar. When they became interested in hiring juniors, they formed apprenticeship programs and internships programs to bring in the best of the best entry level talent, but we're still a little non-granular about the transition from junior to "common engineer" (labelled senior).
Anyways, some day I'll write a book about levels, today is not that day because no one cares haha.
Hi and thanks for sharing! I strongly encourage the apprenticeship @ big tech path and in my opinion it's the "ideal" path for ambitious bootcamp grads from the top bootcamps - because you get the ramp up and training needed to do well at the company - which clearly worked for you :D. But definitely a hard and competitive path and not a slam dunk.
There's a bootcamp that pushes hard to create "mid-level and senior" engineers and discourages people from targeting apprenticeships in general.
Question: If you were advising a super ambitious and hard working bootcamp grad on a path, how do you feel about apprenticeships vs the more "fake it until you make" strategy of over-marketing yourself to try to get into more experienced roles?