I found the source here: https://www.bloomtech.com/reports/outcomes-report-2022
\#17 - " A BloomTech graduate who has been unresponsive to outreach, has explicitly indicated they are not pursuing a technical role, or has explicitly indicated they have paused their job search."
Yeah the super high non-job seeking rate is something I want more commentary on. I definitely think slapping a 90% number on the homepage without explaining all of this is concerning to me personally in that I don't feel like I understand how this works.
BloomTech moved to a cohortless self service platform with live lectures you opt into every week.
50% graduation is in the ballpark of Springboard's public numbers as well.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing but it's something that should be made clear to people.
Instead of focusing on how to get a job, people should focus on how to graduate, because graduating seems much harder and once you do, getting a job seems more likely.
See my comment above. BloomTech is totally in their right to market the heck out of their results, but after all the lawsuits they've had, I would give them the benefit of the doubt their outcomes are "legally accurate", and use it as motivation to read between the lines.
I asked Austen on X and found out that only 37 people did the backend program for example, but the big news is that enrollment dropped by 1000 people and they laid off half their staff recently. So I think people realize what's going on, but I'm not someone to hold grudges and want to try to judge everyting new with a clean lens.
I have looked line by line yet, but I skimmed and major note is that the backend programs results are a result of the Amazon Technical Academy, which guaranteed interviews for people at Amazon and resulted in solid outcomes for backend.
This is why I think the best path forward is for bootcamps to make partnerships to get graduates into apprenticeships. Do that for 9 months instead of job hunting then convert to an entry level FAANG role.
That said, haven't heard anything about this program continuing into 2023 yet.
Another thing that jumped out was the high number of people who "weren't job hunting" and excluded from placement states. Seemed high compared to other bootcamps.
The original post was deleted but I would like to provide my insider view on this.
Most ISAs now are offered from banks and not from bootcamps directly. So it's not like the bootcamp is selling off ISAs and speeding off with the money (at least if you are assuming good intentions for how the business model was intended to work).
So most ISA/ISLs are done directly with a bank (via an intermediary like Stride or Ascent) and you are getting this "loan" to pay the upfront fee of the program.
The program itself has little involvement, other than that interest rates and terms are based on a program's outcomes and if a program doesn't work, the bank will stop supporting it. And typically the program won't get the full program cost upfront, as a way of sharing some amount of risk if the person disappears or doesn't ever get a job.
So it's like a loan to compare against other loans and the di…
Yeah I wrote about this in my predictions post but if you are a bootcamp it's tough right now because there just aren't any entry level role pathways (similar for CS grads from non-stop tier schools as well). So the only strategy working is the aim for roles requiring experience and hope that someone reads your resume as a qualified for them (and other strategies to connect with jobs).
I think Tech Elevator's model can work, where they have partnerships, specifically the ones in Cleveland, Cincinnati, etc... to get people into entry level roles.
Amazon's Technical Academy worked well for BloomTech, they published 2022 outcomes and that program was an anomaly that pulled up all their averages. Haven't heard anything about this for a while though.
Codesmith is going to launch Future Code for the city of NY in the spring and it's for people making under 50K who live in NYC and have littl…
Ah, I can't give an answer for you and my advice depends on you and your background/circumstances.
Launch School Capstone will support you in building really good structured projects, optimized for the job hunt. I think this is something that Launch School, and Codesmith have really focused on (i.e. making these projects marketable and helping you market yourself in a super nuanced way).
100devs (i.e. an official cohort) is fantastic for free, and the approach isn't all thaaaat different, but there is a little less machinery involved in the resume part. Like Launch School/Codesmith/etc... will guide you through producing a very specific resume and many grads looks look the same. 100devs has a wider variance of resume outputs from the ones I've seen. If you do real client work, then that's also fantastic for a resume.
I don't know that many people who officially did a 100devs cohort, b…
It might be a conflict of interest because I'm the co-founder of an interview prep platform. I didn't disclose that above because it wasn't relevant and I genuinely wanted to answer with my Meta hat on, not my Formation hat, but I'll disclose here because now it is if we're talking about paid/free interview prep.
RE: "If you want something better – then you’re going to have to make it. That’s what I’ll be doing."
I know a couple of bootcamps that started for just that reason. I think one thing many people fail to realize when starting a business is that the skillset needed to run a business, manage, people, grow people's careers, etc... is completely different from that needed to make a "better bootcamp".
So it's more than just the skillset to make something better, but a large set of skills that I have not seen land all in one place.
I think Lambda School in my opinion WAS best marketing (almost so good everything else fell behind and caused a lot of problems). Codesmith in my opinion is like best at community building. Rithm in my opinion is best at live instruction.
We see all of the building a "better bootcamp" efforts turn into program that are the best at one thing and that's exactly wh…
You want to do BFS and DFS with muscle memory but you don't need to do quick sort with muscle memory.
Maybe anything 5 lines of code or less that does one thing might be muscle memory level?
I don't want to share anything from my company but a problem solving method can be helpful and we have one on our blog that we suggest.
Like a step by step problem solving approach you have in your head that helps you walk through problems cleanly.
Not finding edge cases isn't a failure no, but id identifying edges can show a detail of the extremes of how your code works. So accidentally not noticing is one thing, not understanding an edge case might be a problem.
And yes, practice makes perfect, the best way to try doing all these tips all at once in a realistic environment.
The coding is the same! You often do 2 system design interviews and they are looking closely at your experience to pattern match to Metas levels.
I think E7+ might have more unique extra interviews now, I left 6.years ago and keep in touch with people but dont know for 7+... when I was there there were only 150 E7+ and most were promoted internally
I stand in the "fundamental skills" camp and that you need to build genuine fundamental skills needed to be an engineer and then you need to get an entry level job to apply those skills and build experience you can't get anywhere else.
So I see a bootcamp's role in this to build those fundamental skills and help align people with entry level jobs.
That said, CS grads need 4 years to build those skills and even if accelerated, we're talking way more than 12 weeks to build those. So it puts bootcamps in a tough spot in this market.
I think this is why Codesmith and I butt heads so much on this topic, because their CEO believes that if you have soft-hard skills like problem solving, communication, teamwork, then you can be a mid level engineer.... you don't need fundamental skills if you can learn to learn, then you can get by anywhere.
Very different approach, but the market is demandi…
There is a large pool of suggested questions, but people can ask their own too. The questions are listed in the feedback and the hiring panel will take into account both the questions and how well calibrated the interviewer is with those questions (and many more data points) in interpreting the feedback. Much more complex than it appears.
Meta is extremely practical so they will spend as much time improving this process as they deem necessary to catch the most number of "memorizers" with an acceptable false positive rate - which will be corrected for through the performance process and firing people quickly later on who aren't performing.
This is a bit cynical but I somewhat agree that there is a "sales process" in selling and marketing yourself to companies. Many job hunt processes are like this, but rely on your work experience to anchor on and I find that bootcamp grads tend to build narratives out of hardly anything (relatively speaking to experienced candidates), so the process feels a little weirder and some people naturally are good at this to their own benefit in the job hunt. But at a meta level - the market keeps changing and people are doing what they need to to get jobs, and this is where we are at right now.
People can get through the cracks who memorized but it was rare and almost never when I was there because of this:
- interviewers are extremely calibrated amongst each other
- you'll end up doing three to four coding interviews which is 6 to 8 problems and patterns emerge for how someone's approaching those problems and it was clear if someone was memorizing or cheating because out of those problems will be at least one and usually many where the person shows signs of that
- something the more experienced interviewers would do is ask what might sound like a trivial follow-up or might even ask something that's incorrect to throw you off a bit and see if you actually understand the problem or if you were just memorizing
- similarly, when people walk through their problems we could interrupt them to ask them specific trivial sounding questions, but it was actually to prevent someone from st…
I worked at Meta and did 400+ interviews there. My advice:
- No smalltalk, you'll jump very quickly into coding and go with it, because you want to spend the most time coding you can
- Whiteboard style - they generally don't care about perfect syntax or compilable code. They also want to see you walk through and explain your code without an IDE telling you what's wrong or by running the code and guessing and checking.
- Generally 2 medium questions in 45 mins and you want to solve both with clean solutions. You don't have to have the perfect approach if you have a very clean good approach. Clean code means: no extra logic or if statements, no overusing variables you do f need, readable names, visually tidy, consistent white space.
I don't recommend any specific programs broadly because it really depends on your.goals, your starting point, your natural affinity to programming, your location, your savings, your past work, your prior education, and more.
So what I do recommend is doing as much free content as you can with a handful of the programs that appeal to you and getting to know exactly how they work, and seeing if any are aligned with you.
Finally, in this market I recommend having the mindset of doing a bootcamp to learn and the outcome is a bonus, because bootcamps CAN control their education but CANNOT control the market. But you'll have to own your job hunt.
In terms of free resources: I'm a fan of doing free I from courses from Harvard, Stanford, and MIT and following along with class notes and lecture archives from older sessions of the courses. This is for more academic minded people. For practical…
In the past few weeks any of my comments mentioning specific bootcamps have been getting instantly downvoted. I wished everyone a happy 2024 and got like 30% downvote rate when I checked :(
I strongly believe that it's in any program's interest in this market, to be transparent about who and if your program is for and why it might not work. Maybe you won't get everyone with a pulse signing up, but I think the industry would be better off if people went to the right places for the right reasons, and don't go anywhere unless it's a good, well informed, choice.
Do you have more details on why you think it's going downhill/what you "heard"?
Someone from TE personally attacked me above on my comment for the way I characterized the consolidation and it sounds like a sour subject. Would like to know more details if you have that because, that person is characterizing it as a 'difficult time for staff' but still independent curriculum and instruction.
Sorry again, but I would like to discuss these more because you are mischaracterizing my statements and I would like to get on the same page, as I support TE overall and recommend many people go there. I feel like I was clearly giving advice on what to ask Tech Elevator given the market and corporate changes, so I hope that was clear I was not making an authoritative statement and was stating my opinion on what to ask you.
I am under the impression it is public knowledge that TE is part of Galvanize's "machinery". **I'm going off of the official press release here: https://www.galvanize.com/blog/galvanize-and-tech-elevator-announce-operational-consolidation/**
"To capitalize on the significant opportunities ahead, we are bringing these companies together to form a single operating entity."
That seems pretty clear to the typical personal reading that, that TE is part of Galvanize's mac…
I don't have a ton of insight on Tech Elevator so take this with a grain of salt, but a unique aspect to their programs is their industry partnerships in Cleveland, Columbus, Pittsburgh and Cincinnati. The education and curriculum part of the Galvanize/Hack Reactor machinery now, but those partnerships can be a unique valuable proposition.
That said, ask them for more details, because anecdotally I heard they went quiet during the post-COVID market collapse and picked up a bit recently, but I have no idea where they stand now.
If only a couple of people are being placed through them and/or you don't live in one of those 4 cities, then I would consider a wider range of bootcamps (including TE) before making a choice.
Happy Holidays everyone! ❄️🎉☃️🛌 Wishing everyone a great 2️⃣0️⃣2️⃣4️⃣, I am hoping for the best!
Hi all, if you are a regular hear you know me as someone who comments on many posts in here (and posting at 1am PST on Christmas eve), so I just wanted to send best wishes to all my Reddit-friends. Everyone has their own story and I've loved getting to know a bunch of people on here and hearing their stories. There's a lot more to someone than just their Reddit comments, and I hope people here see me the same way.
I know there are some people here who don't love me or my comments, but I wish you a great 2024 as well and hopefully we can find common ground where we can contribute to a better world together, or at least a better /r/codingbootcamp
If anyone is still around, I would love to hear:
1. What you are doing over the holidays? (work or non-work related haha)
2. What your wish is f…
I've interviewed Codesmith grads and my background is having done over 400 interviews at Facebook.
This is entirely my personal opinion, but these were some of the most awkward interviews I've ever had yeah.
This is the summary of one, not a direct quote but a summary of the conversation.
NOTE: the job I reference was the 3 week long Codesmith project presented as 8 months of experience on resume.
Me: "So what is this recent job you've had for 8 months and why did you leave before a year"
"I worked on X, it's a scalable developer tool to visualize and debug Y"
Me: "So why did you leave"
"The team kind of wound down"
Me: "How big was the team"
"Its like a startup sized of 5 people"
Me: "So what non engineers did you work with, like designers, PMs, marketing, etc...
"The team was only engineers, it's a developer tool for improving developer efficiency"
Me: "Interesting, so how…
At Formation we also believe in the value of peer mock interviews and do those too, but imagine having unlimited mock interviews with actual senior FAANG engineers who run them like the real deal... just a different level of prep for a different target role.
Again, just illustrating the difference and this is with my Formation, biased, hat on because my team has received some nasty emails from Codemsith grads like 'Never email me again, Codesmith gives us all we need forever' and such so clearing that up is self serving for me but I feel compelled in this context.
I've seen people get a little help with mocks and negotiation from Codesmith for future job transitions and not use any paid service, so I'm absolutely not saying anyone needs or doesn't need this, it's ultimately a personal choice, but just want the options out there as clear as possible so people can decide on their own.
Since you seem to have a lot of info too, can you ask your friends how long all those people are taking to get jobs and not just that they are getting placed?
I would also expect about 70% of job seeking grads get jobs in a year. But it used to be over 80% in SIX MONTHS and I want to push Codesmith to be more transparent about that so that people know going in that it's going to be 4 months of CSX plus 3 months of Codemsith plus up to 12 months of job searching, and if it happens to be a 70% chance it will take 19 months to get a job, that's insanely different than 85% chance in 13 months for people who have savings, families and kids and medical considerations and all kinds of things.
Like people need to know to plan the timing properly, and won't be scared away from Codesmith, and Codemsith has these numbers, they have internal reporting on this from my understanding.
I've worked with a couple dozen Codesmith people later on who have paid for Formation for their second, third, fourth job transitions and many still get advice from Codesmith at the same time. The main problem is those support engineers are like your PEERS at Formation and the mentors are actual FAANG-level recruiters and engineers who give better perspective for how top tier companies.
For example, someone's Codesmith mock interviewers told them to "practice their buzzwords more" and they have two mock interviews who focus on DS&A - who could be peers at Formation, versus dozens of FAANG-tier senior, mid, staff, manager level engineers you can choose from to do mocks with at Formation.
These alums have found the Codesmith network useful for referrals because people tend to stay connected for years after graduating.
If you get an offer on your own, free negotiation help from Eric K is…
Interesting, yeah I would like to see more data on placement times.
Codesmith has provided a whole blog post on salaries in 2023, and published a bunch of aggregated data in info sessions, like schools people went to and industries people got jobs in.
So it should be trivial to publish the length of time it took people in those placements, since they do that for CIRR already.
Maybe prospective students should push them on that. Slower placement times don't mean anything bad about Codesmith, but it's critical to know about if you are planning your life and savings.
Do you have more stats on that btw? I have good data on offers/outcomes but not on placement rates.
I do see a number of those offers are peopl way more than 6 months out, and as you saw in my illustrative analysis, people who take longer and longer tend to have their OSP's appearing as more and more "experience" the longer they wait, which would help with getting interviews in this climate.
Codesmith doesn't have a major "job searching portion". There is a week or two of lectures going over resume, job hunt strategies etc...
They walk you through writing your resume with worksheets and then during after Codesmith you have access to resume reviewers and career support engineers (all are former students who have jobs now).
There's a major focus on overcoming "imposter syndrome" because a key part to people's success is building self-confidence that you can do it and are just as good as any other engineer - and it's one of the reasons people can walk into these $120K job interviews and get by.
They also give very good advice on reaching out, like the "Codesmith double down" and such.
Codesmith very strongly tells people not to lie on their resumes, but we tend to see [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/18cpq98/analysis_of_52_most_recent_codesmith_offers…
I wrote about this here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/18cpq98/analysis\_of\_52\_most\_recent\_codesmith\_offers/](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/18cpq98/analysis_of_52_most_recent_codesmith_offers/)
I got a lot of attacks after posting that so I want to triple emphasize this is not trying to send a message to go or not go to Codesmith, it's simply pointing out a pattern to help people get a sense of how alumni are getting placed right now.
/u/Swami218
I'm not trying to harp on this too much but I saw this today and it reminded me of Fanzter.
[https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/21/24011448/hyperloop-one-shut-down-layoff-closing-elon-musk](https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/21/24011448/hyperloop-one-shut-down-layoff-closing-elon-musk)
"The company is selling off its assets, closing down its offices, and laying off employees. It will formally close at the end of the year, at which point all of its intellectual property will shift to its majority stakeholder, major Dubai port operator DP World"
This is fairly similar to what happened at Fanzter, company shut down, staff left and got normal offers at ESPN, Fanzter Inc, Coolspotters all essentially stopped. Sold off some IP to make investors whole.
The typical person characterizes this as a "shut down" and not a "sale".
Nothing in life is free so you should dig into how it works.
For example:
- are they a non profit and if somewhere does there money come from?
- are there any conditions? for example, do they set you up with hiring partners and do you have to accept their contracts first (which could be lower paid than your market rate)
- if they are non profit, check their track record, financial efficiency and ideally who their donors are
- do they make money from placement fees?
- are there geographic or demographic restrictions?
- if it's a small thing, are the leaders likely to stick around long term and offer this for free?
I have no comments at all on YearUp, just general advice if something is free to look into.
I would make sure you have a sense of how many people who start end up graduating. I haven't heard concrete numbers from anyone but, like all self paced part time programs, getting people to graduate is not easy and people who don't presumably get some kind of partial refund if they give up part way through.
From talking to people it doesn't sound like they have a magic formula for engagement that is completely different than say Springboard or others to counteract these problems.
I don't expect a specific graduation number because in a self paced program, people can take a long time and are still active, but if there isn't a reasonable answer to this question, and transparent explanation about how long it might take and why people drop out, then to me that would be a flag.
Again, see my other comments, I'm very bias and this is my personal opinion, people can upskill their day to day practical skills a lot on the job and this why I believe it's important for people to get the RIGHT job out of their bootcamps (if they have the luxury) and not the highest paying job OR the most prestigious company to brag about.
If more bootcamp grads were able to take the top-tier apprenticeship route (e.g. Airbnb, Dropbox, Asana, Intuit, etc...) they would get the support and ramp up they need to catch up to the CS grads with 3 internships and enter top tier impactful roles as amazing entry level SWEs.
Unfortunately these tend to be 1. paid at like $90K to $100K so top bootcamps like Codesmith steer you away from these and rarely talk about them. 2. they tend to be focused on increasing diversity in tech and promoted in channels focused on those areas and not necessarily…
\+1 to therapy not as a joke but as a tool to strengthen your emotional state.
At the same time though, just like you can have a therapist for your emotional state, a personal trainer for your physical state, a nutritionist for your dietary state, you might also benefit from a personal trainer for your SWE fundamentals.
Again (see my comment), I need to disclose that I'm the co-founder of Formation which was mentioned and I'm bias, but just like some people benefit from help in these areas and others don't, some people benefit from help with their CS fundamenals, be it Formation or Interviewing.io or Exponent or LeetCode Premium, or Structy, or reading a 200 page PDF someone shared on LinkedIn, and others don't, but it's something to consider)
I have seen a number of people in this position who have gone both ways. Note: I'm the co-founder of Formation, which you mentioned, that works with people with 1+ YOE as a SWE, you are the target demographic but I'm not commenting to talk about that and I'm purely trying to give you advice based on your post and wanted to preface with that before I get accused of ulterior motives. Genuinely trying to help here and I hope I have some useful insights.
Overall advice: don't quit your job, but what you are experiencing likely isn't just you and is indeed a long term consequence of crammed/12 week bootcamps that focus on getting a job over fundamental skills (this is a bias statement but my opinion).
\- having at least exactly 1 YOE or more at a single company is a good sign for recruiters that you weren't fired within that time so it's a sign you are a decent performer, so that's one good…
I mean I appreciate your post, but in being transparent I think posting a referral code isn't the best because anyone can get 25% off on their website directly and it could mean you have an undisclosed financial benefit from posting this, and if you don't, being clear about that in the post would be helpful for the credibility.