It's a classic sales funnel.
It's a pre-arranged cold outreach sequence.
It's like a sales funnel to sell yourself as a candidate and is leveraging the fact that cold outreach sales funnels have decent conversions.
They don't call this a special method and it's not a secret what the steps are and how they work.
I would love to interview you and see how much of the "workings of React" you absorbed in a bootcamp.
I've interviewed a bunch of people from Codesmith one of the top bootcamps, with a Facebook-level technical behavioral interview, and within 5 mins their technical abilities fell apart, all of them.
What I observed was the people were learning how to appear to understand things for an interview but people didn't actually understand things the way they portrayed they did.
People would have been better off portraying less understanding and actually having that understanding than portraying a deeper understanding that they don't have.
It's nothing against bootcamps, it's just true expertise takes a lot of time, and takes different paths for everyone. A fixed length bootcamp where you absorb as much as you can in the allotted time just isn't an environment conducive to expertise and is…
Yeah great point! These outcomes are still very strong and consistent with the industry changes in bootcamps.
My analysis is on the tougher side because Codesmith doesn't call itself a bootcamp, and it compares itself to the top grad school programs in the world so I'm anlyzing against the top in the world bar.
A student pasted some data shared with the alumni in a session and it showed that the median person with an offer sometime last summer was making $70Kish BEFORE STARTING CODESMITH. But this post isn't about "who should go to Codesmith", it's just an analysis of the data.
Codesmith posted an "Early Look" into 2023 outcomes w/ 2022 comparisons. My personal opinions and anlysis. Notable to me is both that median salary was $130K in 2022 and that it was $115K in 2023. Placement rates are missing, but I would guess much lower, for a double whammy 🥺
SOURCE: [https://www.codesmith.io/blog/early-look-2023-outcomes-and-analysis](https://www.codesmith.io/blog/early-look-2023-outcomes-and-analysis)
DISCLAIMER: These are my personal opinions about the data. I'm human and I make mistakes, but I'm giving my quick personal thoughts and opinions the most open and transparently I can, comments and corrections with sources are appreciated. I have a long history of being around this sub and giving my opinions from the FAANG angle, and the bootcamp angle (having worked with hundreds of bootcamp grads from all kinds of bootcamps over the years). I'm the co-founder of an…
\+1 would recommend this.
The only downside is you have to carve out 9 months with daily dedication, including Saturdays, to it and no travel or Saturday activities.
So some people choose to do the full time immersive to dedicate 100% for a shorter amount of time.
I was just pre-empting the discussion in case you stepped into something unexpected as the OP has history that might have been missing based on your original comment, again trying to moderate the discussion from going sideways.
Thanks for being here and sharing your views.
I'm acting as a moderator because there is an ongoing conversation that OP is involved with making very large claims about Codesmith with I've seen first hand evidence of some of those claims. Some public messages called out certain individual Codesmith employees resulting in the account being suspended and the person appears to be trying to steer the conversation in a constructive direction with this new post.
It sounds like you made the right choice going to Codesmith and it's a fit for you. Some people don't like the "cringe moments" and some alumni, as they get real industry experience, feel like people there don't "know their shit", but instead know how to portray that they "know their shit". You won't be able to judget that until you are in the industry for a few years, but regardless, it doesn't mean the experience can't be effective at helping the right people find jobs.
Where…
Yeah I agree it's a fine line. Like if someone is a leader of a company and touting their industry expertise, they also can be called out as a result (obviously in a fair way that's not liablous), and that's the nature of the job. I feel like if you are publicly an instructor at a bootcamp who is present in the public domain on the bootcamp's behalf, LEGALLY it might be more ok (idk, I'm not a lawyer), but just on a human level, I personally would be more sensitive because not all lower level employees might realize that job they are signing up for like leadership would.
Those are all good questions. Despite a lot of people having those questions, I still don't have answers though so I hope you make progress in finding them.
Someone recently went to TripleTen who has been talking about their experience and hopefully they chime in.
I have yet to talk to a person who did TripleTen in the USA and finished it and instead have talked to a lot of people in TripleTen.
I personally support productive conversation about bootcamps and I agree with OP that that shouldn't involved calling out people by name that you had a bad experience with on Reddit. There isn't a different between "reviews" on review websites and "reviews" on Reddit, but Reddit has rules against DOX'ing people (other than public figures) to protect against anonymous harassment - which I totally support.
I have the impression OP plans to continue to share their experience but without naming people, not that they are being silenced or not wanting to share that experience.
\+1 to "It is 100% not "imposter syndrome" when you don't know what you're doing."
Hit the nail on the head there. Sometimes people just don't know things and it's not imposter syndrome haha and with engineering it's often a little of both: you don't realize what you do understand and you have no clue what you don't understand, and you need to figure out how to get by.
Can you elaborate on why in your opinion? I have super strong opinions but I just want to hear in your words, because Codesmith is very aggressive about producing "mid level and senior" engineers.
Hey, thanks for sharing your experience with everyone, two follow up questions in bold below. There's a lot of common stuff I hear about career support at Codesmith (in terms of response times and the idea that they don't really care if you give up after a year because it won't impact CIRR numbers anymore). Additionally, people often report that alumni mentors tend to regurgitate the lectures, repeating the same solutions and people who get it, do well and people who don't just get told they are "hard learning" and to figure it out.
**I have a follow up question, which is how many people in your cohort do you think were in a similar boat, i.e. what was your approximate placement rate within 6 months?**
Codesmith aggressively markets that their alumni are mid-level and senior engineers and bluntly, I saw [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/18cpq98/analysis_of_52_most…
It is indeed a broad term (in the USA, different elsewhere). It's also why there is so much range in salaries and experiences that "software engineers" have.
I'm a little bias because I come from the FAANG background, so I think the "canonical Software Engineer" is someone who works at:
1. A product/technology first company - the business follows from the product
2. Engineers are empowered to make significant decisions and/or the decision makers
3. The founding team has significant technical talent and technology is in the DNA of the company
4. General compensation and leveling is vaguely consistent with the other simialr companies.
This is beyond FAANG and FAANG+ to a very large number of companies.
But I consider software engineers in this kind of environment to be the more canonical type of Software Engineer CS students think of becoming when they graduate in the traditional pipel…
They are similar questions but will focus more in product use cases, whereas 'system design' asks more napkin math and intense questions on scaling the backend.
"Design Instagram"
Product: focused on APIs, high level block diagram, supporting web and mobile clients (and differences needed)
Systems: focused on scaling photo storage, performance of feed and optimizations to get the best performance, etc...
Their goal is to hire you as an intern next summer, but it's fine to do internships this summer.
However, their goal is also to improve people's skills in hiring them and not just hiring people who are already at the bar. Formation is 15+ hours a week meant to improve you as an engineer, so they want people who are all in on that and not appearing to possibly trying to find a shortcut to get to Netflix.
So if you are committed and want to work at Netflix and ready to juggle Formation and an internship it probably can't hurt.
It's entirely behavioral yeah. I don't know specifically but I believe, some amount is confirming your information and eligibility and commitment to doing what Formation and Netflix ask of you during the program, and then the other is talking about your motivations and passions
Feel free to DM me more about your personal circumstances. I did over 400 interviews at Meta between 2009 and 2017 and helped create the product architecture variant.
I would say two buckets (without going into specifics in public that might be a security issue)
1. Lack of attention to detail on the basics
2. Oversharing student information in info sessions
It's out of date I believe yeah, it says copyright 2023 and all the past data was wiped
I mean they can call themselves whatever they want, we as informed consumers have to interpret
I don't know but Codesmith is one of them, also don't know who the new president is.
If the new president is from Codesmith then it basically makes CIRR a marketing tool to validate their outcomes, just like GRAD for Hack Reactor and Rithm 's own standard. Which is totally fine just have to realize that.
There are no bodies and I don't expect one to happen because CIRR had more force than anyone and failed to get schools on board.
100% agree and it's why Codesmith tend to not work at top tier tech companies and end up getting $120K jobs at non tech other companies, like Mavis Tires, who can't really tell and are happy to have a hard working ambitious engineer.
Yeah Codesmith has a sister charity called OSLabs and that charity does background verification for your time at Codesmith plus additional time you worked on your main project afterwards.
A letter was forwarded to me and it doesn't say Codesmith anywhere. It's "X was a software engineer working on Y as part of OSLabs"
I know a ton of industry companies that don't hire bootcamp grads for these reasons.
So bootcamp grads have gotten creative with resumes to try to get by. And companies have raised entry level experience requirements to 4 years.
Codesmith is the one that stands out where grads [tend to do this](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/s/QfiCldAoPA) but they also tend to not get fired - some do, but I know many that have struggled to ramp up and not found it easy to catch up, the gaps become very evident but some people are able to fill them.
Same here, although the engineering courses were broad, like civil engineering, mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, but only 3 courses out of 40 in my degree were not engineering
For CS though alone, courses:
- Data Structures and Algorithms 1 and 2
- Software Engineering 1 and 2
- Databases
- Web Programing
- Operating Systems
- Computer Architecture
- Human Computer Interaction
- Distributed Systems
- Thesis
- Computer Graphics
And then related:
- Calculus 1, 2, 3
- Linear Algebra
- Physics 1 and 2
- Electrical Engineering
- Electro Mechanics
- Fluid Dynamics
- Civil Engineering
- History of Computing
- Engineering Ethics
- Business for Engineers
- Engineering Design
- Chemical Engineering
And I was in an accelerating learning program for the top high school grads in all of Canada to learn this stuff as fast as possible, so if you can learn all of this in 12 weeks you hav…
Yeah it's certainly interesting. It's more of an object oriented systems design than bug scale systems.
Netflix historically hasn't hired junior engineers at all so it's relatively new to hire interns and new grads, and I think that is why they look for some of these things - it's a culture biased to senior engineers.
The highest score is 1000 but it's not linear.
hello@formation.dev!
No, you'll also need systems design topics covered. In terms of getting accepted, having a good video is a start! Reaching out to team members won't help and all applications will be reviewed fairly. But if you are nervous about the application or have logistical questions please reach out to the team.
Good question!
Netflix is looking for all kinds of skills beyond just DS&A, such as systems design skills, and you'll work on all of those during Formation.
Second, the assessment is just a gauge your readiness and doesn't have any actual code in it. To have the highest chance possible of passing the interviews you also need to practice other skills for how to work through a problem live with the interviewer, breakdown problems you haven't seen before, communicate well, and right clean code. So all of those things are things you'll work on as well.
Other people might have weaker DS&A but lots of potential and the program works for those people as well and will adapt for the things you need to work on.
I can clarify that my motivation for the original post was to point out that CIRR appears to be falling apart and that Codemsith is the only entity left with motivation to keep it going, so that a former Codemsith employee being connected to CIRR to work there could possibly indicate close and control between CIRR and Codesmith.
That's all, I don't think I implied anything about anything nefarious going on or changing standards or a Codemsith person backdooring anything and if I did, I'm happy to edit that to make it clearer.
When I reread the title, it's not the best, it's limited to 300 characters and I could have done better. I'm literally skiing all over Hokkaido and waking up at 5am every morning to work and dropped the ball a bit with the title in terms of communicating what I intended. The content itself is only briefly about Codemsith and is mostly about concerns about CIRR.
I don't believe there is a minimum score, but overall Netflix is looking to invest in people that Formation's program will help improve significantly and not necessarily the top students with perfect scores.
+1 to switch majors and add a year and do a bunch of CS courses
AND do an internship this summer if possible as close to SWE as you can.
and also +1 to consider defense companies and airplane companies with some aeronotics overlap
I know we have a rocky history of getting along but can you DM me. I'm strongly against any unsourced claims against anyone good or bad and might be productive if we have a direct line of communication.
A lie is something you know is false and state.aa true..This was an honest mistake that was corrected as soon as I realized it. Showing I'm human and act with integrity to me sets a better example than deleting a post.
Yeah I mean I'm not trying to call any individuals out, except maybe Eric K because he seems to be at the center of all the stuff people tell me about that is personal about me by name. But the CIRR people: nothing personal in calling this stuff out, literally just open and transparent and want people to see interesting realities
Words are easy, actions are hard.
Kind of like Eric K was trying to help someone who was laid off and connected them to the CIRR folks?
Seems fine but just doesn't help whatsoever in CIRR's independence
It's even more weird if a CIRR.org owned Google Drive is being edited by a former Codesmith employee, no?
Like it's not flip the table conspiracy theory, it's just this is not the bar I expected from CIRR or from Codesmith and they all need to get their stuff together! Codesmith has so many problems with their website, privacy, cookies, sharing of data, I don't know where to even begin, and this CIRR thing isn't helping convince me otherwise lol
Yeah, when the times are good, people can't wait to shout the results from the rooftops, when they are bad, lots of excuses, changing the metrics, changing definitions, etc...
The USA is a capitalist market and the companies are doing what they should be doing, and we as consumers (I mean I represent a company too and I need to always disclose that, but I'm on Reddit representing myself personally) also need to do what we need to do our homework as well.
Anyone have any updates from CIRR and their new standards for 2022 full year outcomes? All the "official standards documents" on their website are "owned" by Codesmith's former product manager (!?!), not someone at CIRR, and haven't been updated in a long time.
Hi all, I'm hitting the slopes skiing in Japan and what else would I be doing but checking up on CIRR's website because we're all awaiting new updates any day now! However, I'm more concerned than ever that it's kind of falling apart :(
1. All previous data seemed to have disappeared, so there are no past reports to look at, zero data on the site. After the site changed ownership and hosting behind the scenes, I'm concerned they lost access to the previous data and it's gone :(. I would love any evidence anyone has if this is correct or not, just a theory because I can't imagine why they would delete all the old data.
2. I notic…
This could be two questions, so I'll answer both:
1. Last summer we ran a smaller program and many people received offers, and those that didn't found all the training was did helpful in other interviews and I think people unanimously found the program very helpful according to the exit survey they all do, and anecdotally. These engineers were preparing for full time roles though and not internships.
2. If you are asking if a non-Netflix program Formation Fellow has gotten a job as Netflix intern, then no. In the paid Fellowship, we work with people with existing SWE work experience and we don't work with college students looking for internships, so it wouldn't be expected for them to get internships.
Yeah the flexible nature is a big selling point right now and the challenge that others have faced, like Springboard and BloomTech is much lower completion rates than in person immersives.
Not a bad thing, people can just do them to learn and then leave, just need to make sure you understand the program you are going to, how it works, and why it works, and be very careful about researching,
Perfect! Then you're in a good spot for the interviews!
For the bar raiser, have a REAL example for each leadership principle - there are a lot of them, but that will get you most of the way through.
For the SD, how are you feeling?