Also a +1000 for how often I get similar messages privately to your analysis.... They have marketing efforts to brand it as the solution for anyone great to get a 130K salary but it's really no where near that level of program, it as a bootcamp, it's fantastic.
I wish Codesmith would realize this. Several staff members call their leaders delusional and have left or are leaving shortly but haven't told them yet. Instead of being so delusional that you are creating mid level and senior engineers in 13 weeks, be honest with yourself and be honest with residents, everyone will be better off... go back to why you are doing this to begin with..m
i.e. this https://vimeo.com/42713491
Hi! Can you comment on your perception of Codesmith before and after joining? If you could share some things you perceived before starting that were as expected and not as expected that would be super helpful based on the questions people ask me daily.
I'm very much on top of Codemsith on here because it attracts both the right people and the wrong people and I want to make sure everyone ends up at the right place for them and gets past marketing.
Practically speaking, what's important or not is if recruiters from top companies are dedicated to the school, i.e. if you have a dedicated recruiter you can go through.
In the past Meta did at UCLA, and I personally did a couple of on campus interview days, but not sure if they still do. Either way, if that recruiter exists, find them and message them. Ask upper years who worked at companies to refer you to their recruiter and put in a good word for you.
I'm way more middle road than I come across here. People can do whatever they want, and some people are in circumstances where they stretch the truth for personal reasons consciously.
But people who come here are are like "$150K, Codesmith, mic drop" is just very car-saleperson-y that makes people want to go there for the wrong reasons.
If you are super ambitious - as many Codesmith students are there might be a number of pathways that could work better than Codesmith and judging the $$$ alone isn't ideal and in their outcomes advisor throws around big offer numbers like candy - "I was talking on the phone to someone this morning and she had a 150 and we got a 10 signing bonus" - not the lack of use of the "K" or "thousands"
Yeah I agree Codesmith is still one of the best bootcamps, they just bill themselves as an elite grad school and are unabashedly talking about how good they are in all the talks I see and I see graduates carry forward that vibe... when on paper they are doing like a "good bootcamp" education and not anywhere close to something billing itself as an way better.
For gosh sakes, their contract is a Google Form equivalent that doesn't meet basic requirements of a contract, it's a one way form.
If you have paperwork showing what your IP relationship is with OS Labs then I would back off on that. I hadn't seen it in the contracts sent to me by people asking about things in them.
Correct, Formation is not ideal for bootcamp grads who can't get jobs right now. We have people who joined the hot market with no experience and we stand by our unconditional support until they get a job but it's a rough market and we don't do miracles . We take a very very small number of people who do it with no experience while job hunting because they don't care about the cost and want structure instead of just job hunting alone but they enter with reasonable expectations.
So you can consider it but I would strongly recommend getting a job first and coming back in the future when you are ready to level up.
Yeah but do you sign any paperwork that you are part of OSLabs or that you are admitted to it?
I volunteered for a number of charities and you always have to sign paperwork.
Otherwise your IP contributions are ambiguous. If you aren't just committing open source code but are a part of OSLabs, then your contributions to the projects they own (regardless of open source or not, they own them) need clear IP ownership.
If they aren't educating you on how open source really works, then you arent being prepared to use open source properly on the job either. I learned all this almost immediately st Facebook and many friends learn about it too at their companies. If you are going to be a mid-level or senior engineer and you aren't learning this stuff, that is a major hole.
Codemsith can't have it bofh ways. If they want to use open source to accelerate people then do right... otherwise it's a…
This is why I so strongly eco this loud and clear no matter who pushes back or no matter how much Codesmith leadership badmouths me to their staff to try to turn them against me.... you know what their response to my recent wave of calling this out: 'Codesmith is the best and the best always attracts haters'.
No... systematically supporting lying and looking the other way attracts haters.
Thanks, I largely agree with your assessment too and it's why I try so hard to help the right people go there. People who go just because of the outcomes won't do well.without those other traits and attitude.
RE: OSP, it's a straight up lie that you worked for 3 months on the OSP and Phil saying that is actual fraud if he said that he does that. I understand that he thinks all of the time at Codesmith goes into that OSP but residents are also listing all of their other projects on their resume too, and their tech talks, and their "publications" (I e. medium post about the OSP) and that is all double or triple counted if you are getting 3 months credit for the OSP.
That said, they will also verify time spent after Codesmith. I found someone who removed a word from the README file 4 months later and they claimed 7 or 8 months in their LinkedIn.
I know several alumni who are floating 1 t…
This post is sadly something I hear often right now and is why I'm not happy about CIRR changing their metric from 6 months placements to 12 months placements.
So much happens in that year of job hunting that it's largely irrelevant what the bootcamp did. The bootcamp could do nothing and then you could spend NINE MONTHS studying DS&A and get a job and the bootcamp gets credit.
Anyways, sorry to hear about this.
I know it's doom and gloom but it's also true that the market is just overloaded for entry level and the only consistent path I'm seeing is if you are a new grad from a top school, all other placements are one off. Sorry and Codesmith grads that lie about their experience are also getting placed.
I also monitor Codesmith offers and one interesting thing going on here, is there are a number of people being placed who have been job hunting for almost a year now.
They still list their OSP as X - present, so the longer it takes them to get a job, the more fake work experience it looks like they have. This is the dirty secret in many of the struggling-graduate Codesmith resumes I see (many people send me resumes for reviews outside of my day job).
As /u/SlowestTriathlete said, they are trying to motivate graduates by showing recovering results.
The market is indeed doing better, but it's not doing better for people without any experience.
Congrats on doing well btw! It gets lost in my post but one thing Codesmith does very well is choose amazing peope to let in who really give it their all.
Yeah their lead instructor tells people no one looks at the projects.
I did and posted on Reddit about some many security issues like secrets checked in, sql injection, and no auth on a delete endpoint, and the response internally was people assuring themselves their code is at the mid level bar and that I was being an asshole.
Just by lying. For example
Software Engineer, Kronos 2022- present
People who do this don't even say they are lying! They say it's true just missing the months they were there and the last line of a 6 bullet point write up says, "product accelerated by OSLabs" and they think that is transparent disclosure that it was not paid..... but at the same time have this under experience placed right beside another section called "Open Source" with their personal projects which clearly makes that look like experience..m if it was open source why would it not be in the Open Source section?
So if the startup doesn't have scale and doesn't have process, a person can get by easier through sheer will compared to a FAANG. At FAANG, performance is calibrated and our performers are aggressively PIPed and fired. At a startup, lots of hustle might carry you, even if you are clearly operating at a lower level but adding value.
I actually hired a Codesmith grad as an entry level engineer (I think Codesmith called it mid-level in their stats, which was very clearly entry level but compensated against top tier benchmark) and this is the level all the Codesmith grads I work with are at immediately after Codesmith... should be going for entry level top tier jobs.
Many people tell me about how their outcomes advisor pushed people away from that roles and says they are grunteork roles that set your career back... but that's extremely inconsistent with what I've seen.... people who take m…
Yeah a bootcamp could be appropriate. Look into the top ones and see how they work and which approach is right for you.
I see a "Codesmith." comment and it's a top one or consider but look into how it works. Most people said things like "it changed my life" but don't explain how it works... it only works for certain people that will stretch the truth in their resumes (even most people here who say they went there and didn't do this often "stretched the truth")
If time is not an issue I would also look at Launch School. similarly it's a solid program but look into hired it works and see if that's good for you.
Also look at "career accelerators": Formation, Pathrise, Interview Kickstart. these are typically for people with SWE experience already so I probably would not recommend at all in this market, but you should look at them to compare "how it works" to how bootcamps work.
Codemsith doesn't have onsite in LA anymore, only NYC but they are moving focus online. 70K rent a month isn't worth it when people would rather go online.
My point isn't how much I'm doing here, my point is that I'm not spending all my time on Reddit as this person thinks.
Sounds, like that dev on your team working is working hard all day long continously!
I agree about taking too much from it, but the fundamental point of if you have enough grads that are owed refunds that you weren't planning for, it could brankrupt a company or result in massive layoffs to pay back people. The fact they are delaying those guarantees for 3 months is a sign that might happen, and people should look more into that because it will impact the experience.
Thanks for sharing. Springboard is a startup and has been a large shift in this climate to startups being profitable. Springboard had raised funding during the boom times based on its rapid growth and I'm sure the job guarantee helped fuel that growth too. In a good market where people get jobs that job guarantee wasn't really necessary because people were getting jobs before then. And now when people are not getting jobs, we see that the job guarantee is not a stable business model.
At the end of the day, they have employees they are paying and they are offering you services and they are teaching classes and they are giving you materials and all these things and someone has to pay for.
If you use all the services and then don't pay a single penny then you got something great for free, so of course that's why you would sign up. But it's not a stable business model and right now compani…
I mean at the end of the day it's very irrelevant to most people and it's you can call yourself whatever you want. There's a Codesmith grad who is a "Vice President Software Engineer" at a bank!!!
It comes into play on here, and I feel strongly about it, because you DO need to define your terms to compare apples to apples and apples to oranges.
Codesmith's overall point is that Codesmith thinks their grads are "better" (their outcomes advisor says "Codesmith is the best" a lot) than everyone else. There was a panel where the CEO sitting (in person) beside Hack Reactor and other CEOs and said straight up that Codesmith was better because it's grads get "mid level and senior roles". They want to emphasize that Codesmith is not a "bootcamp" per-se and if they used canonical terms, they might get compared to the other programs.
So I think that's reasonable in that comparison. But the down…
What role was this? Was it SDE I, SDE II, SDE III, or was it a tangential role? a contractor role, a frontend role, a solutions role?
Amazon's promotion cycle doesn't allow stuff like that so this would have to be some kind of special case signed off by a director or VP to correct for a hiring error.
The number of times I've seen this EVER for super legit reasons, I can count on one hand, and those people quickly became industry renowned engineers.
So even if this happened where someone went from SDE II to SDE III in 3 months it would be absurdly rare and not representative of any program.
I asked a couple of Senior Managers at Amazon and no one thinks this is possible on their teams, so it's definitely a very weird case.
Every statement like this that I've looked into has been some kind of caveat or weird case that was not as people believed it to be.
For example, the $400K Netf…
The biggest misconception that Codesmith teaches is that mid level and senior are based on 'how ambiguous and novel a problem you can solve on your own' and that's just like entirely made up by Codesmith leaders. Will keeps referring to some LinkedIn post from a Facebook engineer about this as the justification and it's just not true. I'm a former Facebook employee who was deeply involved in hiring, performance, and leveling and I'm telling you it's not true. There are dozens of "traits" senior engineers have that include being able to solve larger scope problems, but that's not the defining trait of a senior engineer.
Fair point, I shouldn't say "all" there, it's more of a "most" or "almost all"
The people I work with/talk to made it seem like it was a unofficial pipeline of alumni referring grads and helping them prep for the interviews and I wanted that to come across clearly.
It's certainly not easy and the people who get these jobs are very strong and well rounded, and great overall.
The main difference is I'm not a journalist and I don't want people getting sued. There's a whole set of ethics around journalism I'm not trained in so I take a cautious route and I think that has resulted in more people feeling very comfortable sending me things. I never reach out to anyone who works/worked there because this isn't my job to dig into, and all of this is inbound.
At the end of the day, everyone has biases and that's why I am non-anonymous, so people can easily get to know me and decide how they feel about my commentary. I'm not some kind of perfect robot (and even the robots have biases haha)!
I gladly accept feedback on my tone, balance and how I can be more useful to the community.
FWIW, PhD grads at Meta entered at the "mid level"/E4 and I think still do. assuming you did a number of legit internships or published research throughout.
It's hard to tell, but a large amount is in the interview process and asking THEM the right questions. But ultimately companies are companies and things change and there's a bit of luck involved.
It's much easier to decide between FAANG for example that have well known patterns and publicly communicate their cultures. Each FAANG is SOOOOO DIFFERENT, it's massively important to choose the right one if one were given that opportunity (which is obviously not common), but if you dont' have that opportunity, at least understanding the culture enough to know the areas you should focus on and the areas you'll be weak at.
For example, Meta values getting work done over overthinking things. So if you overthink things, you can try to change…
1. They do fire them, I do think most survive but I know peopoe fired too
2..There is a range here. Capital One hired like 50 Codesmith grads in the boom. Senior Associate is like below FAANG entry level and Senior Engineer is like FAANG entry level. They comp all cash so that Senior Associate pays like 140K ish total and that Senior Engineer 160K ish.
In some ways so many people going to Capital One messed up the stats because of the title inflation and all cash compensation. And the interview process that asks the same 4 questions for one of the interviews that all the Codemsith people shared and practiced with each other.
I also watch a lot of documentaries: highly recommend [https://www.netflix.com/title/81615919?source=35](https://www.netflix.com/title/81615919?source=35) on Netflix.
It's about two people that start a coaching company and eventually grow it super large by hiring all their students as coaches and leveling up to higher titles, and their status is largely based on recruiting new people and publicly spreading word of the organization.
It's really good!
I take a journalist approach of collecting information and trying to be objective. Just like journalists, everyone is biased, but I've built a reputation on here for being rational and look at things from multiple sides.
I would rather Codesmith replace most of their leaders and change, rather than burn it to the ground. If I wanted to do that I would be sharing way crazier things people have shared with me so I hope my commentary does come across balanced.
So there's two aspects to this, civil and criminal.
Civil, it would be more about a company suing an employee for lying and causing "damage" to the company. This is pretty rare, people just get fired for lying rather than sued. If Codesmith did something criminally wrong, there might be a case for students to sue Codesmith as well.
Criminally, there has to be some kind of bad intentions by individuals to intentionally deceive people for their person gain or in a way that harms others. So you would have to both prove that these actions harmed people or that individuals gained financially from it AND that individuals did this on purpose. If there is no evidence that someone intentionally said something like 'we need to fake these OSPs and figure out how to get people to lie on their resumes' then it would be really hard to prove criminally. Like It's possible the leaders genuinely believ…
I mean the person who says that keeps saying his last company was acquired by Disney, yet I can't find evidence of that on paper, and have other pieces of evidence that it wasn't.
That's what I say but they defend this to the core internally. The staff I've spoken too think it's part of the effort to build people's self confidence in overcoming imposter syndrome and if they kind dropped this narrative then people might not have the confidence to get those jobs anymore and if they don't have $125K CIRR numbers, people won't join anymore.
I'm very familiar with this topic and have seen the full spectrum as well as seen most of the data round this. I time box my answers and might edit this later with more details:
1. Short answer yes some people do,
2. Codesmith judges level based on both titles and salaries when they say "senior" so it's not a canonical "top tier level" senior bar. By Codesmith's bar it's about 15%
3. The people who get these jobs fall into three buckets
1. Non-SWE roles, but adjacent, e.g. "senior solutions engineer"
2. People who have experience already as SWE's or adjacent roles
3. People who fake it and lie about their experience to squeeze through at smaller companies, startups, and non-tech companies
4. The average ENTRY LEVEL FAANG engineer has a $150K base salary, so even though the outcomes are high at a median of $127K, these are clearly not top tier senior roles. Codesmith grads that…
- Most schools want people to move around and not stay at the same school for the whole thing
- Most PhD students do internships at top companies because industry has way more resources.
I was supposed to do my PhD and was offered a research job at Intel before I even started the program to do in conjunction with the program and cross publish research.
A number of papers have cross company/academic publication in the CS space
Feel free to DM me and I'll send you over the forms used for that, it's absolutely happening. I can't talk about what current employees said, but it was shared that they will confirm whatever you put in the form. So many people "keep working on their OSP" ;) ;) and put that on the forms and then get it confirmed. One person changed ONE word in a Readme file 7 months later and said they worked on it for an 11 month period.
Yeah that's probably why were not on the same page here, that's what I see far too often and you might have been talking about something else this whole time.
I interviewed someone who said his "manager was Philip Troutman" and he was "selected to work on this by his acquaintance and didn't have to interview for the position" and that "he hasn't gotten any performance reviews yet" and that it was a "not a W2 full time relationship"
That's what you call not lying?
That's a Codesmith line and the lies continue to the interview.
The policy is to not proactively bring up that it's unpaid and only explain that if explicitly asked. I've interviewed a number of Codesmith people who dance around this and come across incompetent in the first 10 mins until the truth finally comes out and makes the previous 10 mins feel like lies.
So you practice and practice how to talk about the project to both: 1. not get caught in the first place while not saying it was paid work, and 2. if you do get called out, how to handle that smoothly to clarify instead of the interview falling apart.
Presumably the people I talk to need more help because I wouldn't talk to them otherwise, but they all said that's how Codesmith mock interviewers told them to do it.
It sounds like Codesmith was the right choice then for you and if I talked to you before I would have recommended you go. And for others reading this, this is what you need to do to be successful in it.
So something a lot of people don't realize is that Open Source !== free/unpaid work. Look at this resume: [https://www.linkedin.com/in/feross](https://www.linkedin.com/in/feross)
People who contribute legit open source work often work at companies who pay them to do it, or they have some kind of grants/support to do it.
People who do one off contributions here or there, or on the side, do not list that as "work experience" and they do not list it for 4X longer time then they spent on it. So you lied on your resume and you might not even realize you did.
Amazon is the most gamable FAANG but you are doing it wrong by trying to game the interviews. My entire life now is teaching people how to be better engineers and helping them pass interviews by investing in becoming better engineers instead of investing in gamifying the interview.
I know all the Codesmith alums at Amazon and Capita…
\- Instructors (all but one) are former students -> Fellows -> hired as "Mentors" -> hired as "Instructor" -> hired as "Lead Instructor", and almost none have SWE industry experience
\- The instructors I know are overworked and told to let people do "hard learning" instead of helping them too much - but they love to help when they can and are allowed. Several people have independently told me this.
\- Did you put your OSP as 3-4+ months of work while double counting all your Codesmith projects as well? Did you put in the Project or Open Source section or did you put it under experience? Did OSLabs have to do a reference call to confirm your time there?
\- I know people hired as seniors who are paranoid they'll get fired when they realize more junior people are outperforming them. I advise a number of these people because they can't talk to anyone about it without getting found out and…
Me, I'm a non-anonymous member who has been here for 2 years and comment a lot.
My background is I worked at Meta from 2009 to 2017, grew from new grad to E7 principal engineer, did 400+ interviews of all shapes and sizes, participated in calibrations and interview offer panels, and was the number one code committer at the company when I left.
After I took a break, I joined my partners company which helps engineers with experience level up their careers. We work with a lot of bootcamp grads later on in their careers so I know about and hear about just about everything with bootcamps.
Codesmith caught my interest about 2 years ago when I was interviewing people to join Formation for leveling up and they had these really weird jobs at "OSLabs" that made no sense, and were being nervously vague about them in the interviews. I then went down the rabbit hole and found out that OSLabs was (…
I mean I want to have a productive discourse about it, the Codesmith people are downvoting this thing to oblivion just like I thought they would and not saying anything because it will only attract more attention to the post.
It would be great to talk about what you are paying for and where the money goes. Businesses can be for profit and still be incentive aligned, so I would love to have a discussion about where the money is going and what you are actually paying for.
They had layoffs a month or so ago so clearly the money is going somewhere and I genuinely believe that they would rather not take profits off the table to avoid those layoffs, so if the content is not great and instructors are being held back and overloaded, like where is the money going and is it being spent effectively.
Since I've been mentioning this publicly they have stated in info sessions that they are proud that all their instructors are alumni who stay to teach.
I just watched this documentary called "Escaping Twin Flames" on Netflix and they had similar vibes... two people started it and then hired some of their first students, who then hired more students, and then became leaders in a hierarchy of members. Paying customers -> teachers and coaches. And similarly that program has extremely polarizing views about it.