No one knows yet.
1. Look for job postings for recruiters and sourcers, it's a sign hiring is picking up
2. Interest rates aren't going anywhere so I don't expect to see 2021 anytime soon
3. We'll see.in January what entry level hiring looks like post the fall recruiting cycle.
I don't right now because it's a little in flux. So they were bought by Galvanize a while ago but run independently. And then two months ago they announced that they were merging operations with Hack Reactor and some leadership left so I don't know if it's going to be the same anymore.
What I used to love was that they had good in person partnerships with companies in smaller cities, like Cincinnati, and it was a great path to a job. The salary stats were lower than others because these cities have lower compensation.
But I heard they stopped or merged or slowed down some in person cohorts, a number of those partnerships ended, and I'm not sure what's going to happen in the future.
So I would ask them what's changed since Hack Reactor took over!
Fair point on people's goals and that was lost in this thread for sure. A lot of people don't aspire to "FAANG" and I help a lot of people go to NOT-FAANG explicitly.
I also appreciate the callout on "worse" and it's not at all pedantic. That should have been qualified since it meant "worse in most respects to top tier tech companies, such as compensation, empowerment of engineers, scale, challenges of work, career growth" but even then "worse" is still a judgy word and a mistake to use it.
I use a definition of top tier as follows (which I mean by "FAANG") and I'll be clearer from now on:
1. Tech focused company - the primary business value is the technology or a product relying on the company's core technology.
2. "High compensation" - which varies particularly by region, but generally offers include some kind of equity or ownership participation (or equivalent), extremely strong be…
It's a good question and there isn't one answer. I've even heard Codesmith's CEO changing his tone a bit here, he said recently 'by mid level and senior we mean real Software Engineer jobs'.
Which is a fair point. ENTRY LEVEL FAANG jobs pay about $200K with $150K base right now, so even measuring by cash, Codesmith's "$127K median outcome" would not be below even entry level of the highest paying roles so I don't think they are trying to say their grads are "canonical FAANG mid level and senior" but rather that they are "legit" engineers. Many bootcamp grads get much lower paying, engineering jobs, and Codesmith's point is that the grads get full blown SWE jobs.
My problem isn't so much debate over the choice of language, but that they claim the OSP PROJECTS ARE A KEY TO PRODUCING MID LEVEL AND SENIOR ENGINEERS and that is where I draw the line in my personal opinion. Any kind of non-e…
We have a chat thread, but yeah there are a small handful, like one that I know of who was full time (non contractor). I know a ton of people that work or have worked at Apple and can give my 2 cents if that's a company you are targeting.
Yup, and in info sessions they say that your OSPs are mid level and senior projects that will hundreds and thousands of stars. Or one project that got a tweet once from a prominent React figure that it was a 'good idea' has been now become 'industry experts love the projects'.
They are no, most don't get those stars, and the main source of people starring it are Codesmith residents themselves, and posting in the broader Codesmith CSX community to people who have just started learning how to code.
Marketing is marketing but when challenged on this marketing they double down and I'm shared all kinds of things staff and residents say to push back against me... they truly unequivocally believe at all levels of the company that these projects are genuinely mid level and senior work.
Yes it's a 4 person group project that's 3 weeks and you spend like 1-2 additional weeks puffing it up with blog posts, websites, social media posts and getting all the cohortmates to like and share it. It used to be called "marketing week" or something but they reframed it after that was perceived very negatively.
I can only speak to trying to generalize the people I know but everyone is a unique person with unique set of skills and experiences.
So the "hustle" comes someone who would do 11 hours a day M-F and 9 hours on saturdays. People who will ping and message recruiters, people who will genuinely apply to 1000+ jobs and send outreach for many of them. People who will come to you and say "how can I make this past accounting experience sound like 2 years of engineering experience" and then spend a lot of time practicing and practicing until they can make it sound convincing. Like someone who might post on Reddit about their journey and how hard it was to get a job, but leave out that they had 13 years of "web developer" experience that's on their resume that might have helped.
Again, not trying to be negative even though when I talk about this it sounds like blatant fraud, it's too easy to ju…
The projects are made from scratch and then released to open source. I would almost say they aren't "real open source projects" but I can't really say that because they technically area, but they are not done in the spirit of what "real" open source software was meant to be. If they were real, they would be less complete, more well thought out starting points, rather than rushed and almost unusable end to end projects.
Sorry, I don't
My advice is to:
1. Talk to alumni you can find about their experience and see if the day to day is a good fit. Try to ignore opinions about quality and stuff because they are subjective and try to understand how it works day to day
2. Search for "X scam" and see if anything serious comes up. Nothing is perfect and you'll find some complaints I'm sure, but just make sure they aren't like a true scam.
I actually find Codesmith grads have great hustle and produce a lot of code too. Look I hired a Codesmith grad and know dozens, I worked with dozens of new grads directly in my career.
Most of them have more hustle than new grads I've worked with but most also have way more skill gaps. Very much ready to have a shot at succeeding in entry level roles and that's commendable for a 12 week program.
I have looked at a few yeah! The documentation, presentations, and overall code structure is more consistent with a production codebase, the GitHub orgs and repos are setup more consistent with larger.o0en source work as well. I see more "good practices" and haven't seen the kinds of security vulnerabilities I see in Codemsith projects. But the actual code occasionally has commented out code and things and isn't flawless. The PR naming and structure could improve too on some I've seen. But they are a lot closer to a real production codebase than the Codesmith OSPs. I still don't think any of many become widely used or maintained projects though just like Codesmith.
The state of the Codesmith ones is a result of (my opinion synthesizing dozens of private comments):
1. Don't have anyone with extensive industry or open source experience so the guidelines and best practices are hit and miss…
I agree that there aren't enough Codesmith grads to make a dent in the system. It's why every time I talk to people about this they are super offended and some say they would never hire anyone who went to Codesmith, but no one does anything about it, because it's just not a significant number of people OR the complexity of training the ATS to block OS Labs is not worth it.
But the motivations are wrong and so think you know that. I had an AMA last week live that you could have come to and Neetcode, Blind75 and Sophie are doing a panel next week if you want to see our story and motivations and what we do and what we believe in, you can do so live and hear it from own mouths instead of inferring from comments I'm making in a minute or two typing like crazy on Reddit.
Anyways, this behavior will catch up to them. NY onsite paused indefinitely now, down to 2 cohorts a month instead of 4, c…
It's super hard at step 0, but you can start by just following a project without contributing. Pull the code, spend 10 hours trying to figure out how to build the thing and get it working. Run test suites until they pass and confirm you have things built properly. Watch the PRs, watch the issues. I think you'll find the time when you are ready to contribute. Maybe you'll try and not get anywhere, and it will take some time!
This can really simulate what it's like working on big scale teams if you are contributing to a super large project, but you can't just cram this into 1 week and slap it on your resume, you would be missing the point.
I would add to this to do open source work throughout. Like at Codesmith people do THREE WEEKS on a big open source project and then claim months to years of experience (4 months is signed off by OSLabs) and they claim that it turns them into midlevel and senior engineers
So you can only imagine how good you should be getting if you starting working on LARGE open source projects for actually MONTHS.
I did a break down of the "achetypes" of top bootcamp grads in their first year post job. And I do think the majority of top grads do indeed see the 12 hour days of the bootcamp as much "harder" technically that most non-top-tier jobs, and that communicating well cross function and to other engineers and making sure you are on the same page, is important.
I've heard in a Codesmith session that Software Engineers "nowadays" don't just write code like "they used to" and are collaborative team members. From what I've seen, nothing has really changed and that was always really important and hasn't really changed.
The biggest change is that entry level engineers don't need as much hard tech skills because we have AWS, Google Cloud, and all kinds of frameworks and tools, like VS Code, so entry levels engineers can differentiate themselves by being great team members and communicators.
It's…
Codesmith is fantastic for the right people! It has a very unique culture and that's why it's controversial on Reddit. I'm an under the hood type of person and try to look at how things work and Codesmith isn't super transparent about how it actually produces really good results.
So how it works:
1. High bar. Their process looks for numerous characteristics of successful grads and is an objective measure or raw programming skill. You need to be good AND have good communication and the right attitude.
2. You don't really learn much... topics are rushed through, you are told to snuggle the struggle, and all but one teacher came from Codesmith students themselves. BUT you are building strong bonds with friends and you are being supported infinitely from those instructors. You might have an hour long convo about your imposter syndrome that helps boost your confidence and do better.
3. Exagg…
So the 87% or whatever number comes from this full report: [https://practicum-content.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/usa-main/Outcomes\_Report\_2022.pdf](https://practicum-content.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/usa-main/Outcomes_Report_2022.pdf)
"The outcomes presented in this report were collected through an online survey of 1613 alumni who’d g**raduated before 2H 2022 and reported working in a field relevant to their training**."
The bolded thing is important because all of the data in the report comes from PEOPLE WHO REPORTED HAVING A JOB! And doesn't include:
1. People who didn't graduate
2. People who graduated and didn't get a job (and possibly were refunded from the guarantee, but I would like to know how many people that is)
The "employment rate" in this report is not people who GOT A JOB. But it's people WHO GOT A JOB WITHIN SIX MONTHS OF GRADUATING.
So 87% doesn't mean 87% of peop…
I think that's a good question to ask yeah, submit in the RSVP if you haven't because the questions will be moderated and not live.
I'm curious too what resources the people who make the resources use haha
I think this is still a good project. In the links provided, it looks like OP went to BloomTech last year and this seems like a great project to work on after and good hustle to get it out the door.
Making any idea grow and scale is infinitely harder than it sounds and takes years of sleepless nights and all kinds of non-technical glue and product building, and funding, and hiring, and the OP is at like step one with a project they build themselves and I don't think it was stated that it's the single thing that will solve LC practice forever.
Some aspect is selection bias, because to get in you have to pass interviews that explicitly look for "communication" (or potential thereof) and they are good about only letting people in that the program works for. I have heard of people getting in recently on one interview if they start ASAP, but typically people need two to three interviews to demonstrate that and they are strict.
✨ For the Leetcoders out there I have a mega-event to share.... the founders of Neetcode, Blind75, and Formation are hosting a panel discussion talking about DS&A and also a chance to get to know the people behind these things. It's on Thursday next week!
Bias disclosure: I'm the co-founder of Formation, but I'm not taking part in or involved in the event itself. Sophie (the founder) is moderating and Daniel (lead instruction engineer, 20+ year FAANG engineer) are representing Formation.
RSVP and **SUBMIT QUESTIONS!:** [**https://neetcodexblind75xformation.splashthat.com/**](https://neetcodexblind75xformation.splashthat.com/)
Happy to chat more in the thread!
✨ For the Leetcoders out there I have a mega-event to share.... the founders of Neetcode, Blind75, and Formation are hosting a panel discussion talking about DS&A and also a chance to get to know the people behind these things. It's on Wednesday next week!
Bias disclosure: I'm the co-founder of Formation, but I'm not taking part in or involved in the event itself. Sophie (the founder) is moderating and Daniel (lead instruction engineer, 20+ year FAANG engineer) are representing Formation.
RSVP and **SUBMIT QUESTIONS!:** [**https://neetcodexblind75xformation.splashthat.com/**](https://neetcodexblind75xformation.splashthat.com/)
Happy to chat more in the thread!
If it's not Codesmith, that's definitely THE one for the behaviorals. You spend more time working on HOW to talk about and present projects then you do on the projects. It's the most extreme place for focusing on that aspect at the detriment of the actual technical curriculum in my personal opinion.
I mean HackReactor and Rithm both have their own audited standards and I think that they're both pretty legit. CIRR actually has a lot of loose language in its standard that can be taken advantage of. for example, they specify the evidence needed for start dates but they do not specify any of the evidence needed for salaries. so according to the spec if you just ask someone with their salary is and then they tell you you can use that in the report. I think that could be totally fine, but a lot of people have a perception that lawyers and accountants are reviewing every piece of these forms for every possible thing and that's not the case even though the data is totally reliable.
The spec itself was developed by boot camp founders , marketing people, and a boot camp loan provider and I do think that there is some strategy used there too. make the numbers more marketable. for example, the…
CIRR.
It's appearing to fall apart from it though because they've lost a lot of board members. their results are delayed several weeks to almost a month right now. There's only a few schools left publishing from who used to publish, but the results themselves are reliable.
The main thing is to figure out how to interpret them. I have talked to a lot of people involved in the process that bootcamps and it's not as robust as it sounds, but it is at least something more reliable than nothing.
I don't have any universal data so I should make it clear that Codesmith claims 100% of alumni get promoted within 5 years (it's based on 120 grads who decided to reply to the survey and from a long time ago, vs the 3000 grads they claim they have, so I don't entirely believe this - and know counter examples that were probably not in the 120 people, but that's the most zoomed out data we have).
Anecdotally, four buckets:
1. People who get by but change companies within a year or around that time, or they get a contract job they don't do super well on and just don't get the contract extended and then switch to a similar or slightly better company after a year, and then do this a few times. And soon enough they have the 2-3+ YOE for real to make a bigger jump to a top tier company. Worked with a few of these people at Formation. So they kind of show up, give it a huge amount of hustle bu…
So for SWE and CS in the market, I would say Waterloo is #1 because of the co-op program. UofT is more academic and is the #1 academic school. I was going to my PhD after because I was primed for academics yeah.
In full transparency Engineering Science itself is a program within UofT that is the hardest program in the country to get into and the lowest 1/3 of people need to switch out of after first year (not sure if this changed), roughly tied with McMaster's Pre-Med program. So it's fair to say I did have a very good college experience and I only paid $5,000 a year for it at the time.
I don't like really touting on paper things like this vs factual statements about what people do vs credentials, but I think it's fair to disclose this in this context.
University of Toronto - Engineering Science (which is a somewhat unique program) but yeah it's a "top 3 school" in Canada at least. I would say comparable to Berkeley here.
I can't say anything other than we'll know more once this fall's hiring seasons is done , and I'm talking about like BIG TECH... I have less of a strong pulse on all the non-tech companies, like agencies, and basically companies that don't have equity/RSUs/options/etc... I see people get offers there, just can't speak confidently to those.
So what happens right now is a company has like say 100 new grad headcount, and they are dividing targets up per school, like 20 from Stanford, 20 from MIT, etc... And the recruiters go off and try to hit those numbers. But the students have lots of offers and might not just go to the company 100%, so after all the dust settles, we'll see in the new year how many slots are left AND if new slots are added or not.
I do think there is an oversupply of new grads so even if there are some left over slots from this fall after the dust settles they will jus…
Thanks!
Yeah I have to say I never had to use source code control in school, which is crazy haha! But I did extremely significant projects, several courses you spent the whole 4 months semester doing a project and learning how to do pieces of it properly (e.g. build a robotic assembly line from scratch, build a computer processor on an FPGA, build a prototype from ideation stage with scientifically proper user research, open ended thesis project that won Best Paper at the top HCI conference) and that's just 5 courses lol.
The market is indeed tough. It's not quite "improving" in the sense of going back to the good times we had.... it's changing.
I won't give my full background but I'm expressing my observations having a pretty good pulse on hiring at the top tier companies specifically.
Hiring during the freezes was senior engineers only. Like canonical senior engineers with 5+ YOE at strong companies and who have worked on large scale products already.
The hiring now has opened up to canonical mid-level engineers. At Meta for example, this means a bare minimum of 2 YOE at solid companies working on large scale products.
So this is benefiting people who have solid experience already.
New grads are generally struggling. There is new grad headcount during the current fall hiring season, but it's going to top tier school grads, like Stanford, and other schools they have dedicated recruiters for.
So for…
Hi!
1. Can you vaguely give more context on what kind of CS degree you had? Like the type of school or relative reputation?
2. Assuming you did a common 4 year CS major, how do you compare the amount and significance of hands on projects you did in college vs at Hack Reactor?
3. Have you noticed any changes in the bar for the cohort?.i.e. are the cohorts small because people who aren't qualified are moving to the 19 week? or is it smaller AND you feel like they are letting in people maybe who are borderline ready.
I highly recommend joining industry groups for underrepresented engineers that you identify with. A number of these companies partner with these groups to help spread word of these programs and the groups vet the opportunities before supporting the company, so it's a good way to find some.
RE: Outcomes, I summarized my threads a bit to respond to that. So what has been publicly stated is that average cohort size is down 25% from full capacity, people are being accepted until immediately before a start date, on their first interview, resulting in reported "lower bar" (a handful of reports from more "advanced" students who feel like they are working with more people were let in later, completed an accelerated pre-work, haven't been working for months in the Codesmith ecosystem before, and are struggling to "write basic code" as it was put) I don't have numbers on this but it tracks with the trend that Hack Reactor has done by making a "beginner" track (the 19 week one) as the enrollment of advanced people is down there too.
Placements are at not as strong companies as in the past. Their own data that was shown at an info session, albeit with the caveat of the presenter sayi…
FWIW Phil actually went to Codesmith a long time ago and doesn't have the best rep with staff. He works insanely hard and helps keep the ship running but I would recommend working with more instructors before judging them.
+1 to this, don't go to Codesmith for content. The instructors are your mentors and guides who care about you succeeding but.there just isn't enough time to really teach anything.
From their website it also appears their prior curriculum developer departed at the same time as the recent batch of layoffs.
Integrity is the point.
I'm not talking about those kinds of issues.
Watch the We Work drama on Apple TV or something for a breadth of other types of issues for example that companies can have.
We're talking a different category of issues here and I'm judging by comparables to other companies, again completely my opinions and judgements which you SHOULD BE skeptical about, but we're not talking about the curriculum, OSPs, OSLabs, etc..., but more fundamental things.
Look here maybe, but I don't think they are registered there: [https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vR5jkzQ5F0HJ1Vqk\_M-Sg62vTj0qq0OatFYfTDNoXxNLN6uU4vy\_UWiFnTXcdlzfvSV9pTGNxOkgysC/pub](https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vR5jkzQ5F0HJ1Vqk_M-Sg62vTj0qq0OatFYfTDNoXxNLN6uU4vy_UWiFnTXcdlzfvSV9pTGNxOkgysC/pub)
I would look at the "consumer protection agencies" in SC and look around there.
\+1 Codesmith is one of the most consistent experiences, even as they are making adjustments right now. I always recommend people look at Codesmith and see if it's a good fit for them.
I missed this, but I commented above on another thread to you, but yeah I'm interpreting your tone as you think I'm making up 'mysterious things' that don't exist in order to cast a negative view.
I assure you that's not correct, but since I can't prove anything because of agreements and my integrity you are also TOTALLY RIGHT to call it out and question it.
In having good discourse back and forth for a while, I would personally appreciate if your tone was more about the evidence than the intentions though. Calling out, 'no direct evidence of Y' is different from 'oh so you have some magical evidence, of course you do'.
I have an AMA next week you can come to and we can talk about it. We were also issued a patent and have additional ones filed on it.
I love explaining how this works!
Hi I commented in the [Formation sub,](https://www.reddit.com/r/formation/comments/17155jl/comment/k3or36f/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) with a thorough reply in the context of Formation and how we feel about the contract.
In the context of bootcamps, I'll share some other examples of this kind of thing. I do not think "this is the standard" is a good justification and ultimately you need to feel comfortable and confident with what you are signing.
[Codesmith terms for attending any public event](https://codesmithdocs.s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Codesmith+Documents/Code+of+Conduct+-+Events.pdf) (without joining the program):
>Codesmith, at its discretion, may record audio and video from the community event. Codesmith may use these recordings in various ways, including, but not limited to, for promotional and educational purposes, at its sole discretion. By actively par…