Ok, I understand, and I appreciate that you judge my posts by the evidence I provide, challenge me (because I am very explicitly vague with certain things right now) and I love that you do that and would love if you keep doing that. If some day you see solid evidence revealed somewhere of something I talked about vaguely in the public, ask yourself if it's possible I knew about that in my vague comments and was trying signal that the best I could while maintaining my integrity.
I agree with a lot with this other than the way you characterized me and clarify that I would never dox anyone on here, one of my friends leads a company entirely about safety online and she is an industry leader figurehead on this and I've learned through her how harmful it is.
I don't know if you don't reply to my DMs because you don't want to talk (which is totally fine) but in case it's stuck in Message Requests, check it out!
Accounts tend to not get suspected for vote manipulation alone, just things like harassment. Vote manipulation is handled by algorithms that learn to ignore the votes when other people look at the post.
If people are systematically upvoting through a fraudulent scheme or posting a link somewhere and asking for upvotes, it's impossible for Reddit to tell on their side 100%.
There are about 5% of people that might overlap is my estimate.
So if you don't have 1 year as a SWE or a full time job that will be 1 year by the time you are job hunt ready then we won't even accept you and will reject you, I ironically recommend Codemsith often for ambitious people who are trying to move a little too fast but don't have that yet.
If we reject you and you spend a significant time talking to the team and we do think Formation is a good fit for your goals and your goals likely aren't 200K job in that case, we may accept you or wait-list you because we limit the number of people in that bucket. These are also the people who might show up in this subreddit in the very limited talk that there is about Formation (and also why stuff in this sub is likely not representing the typical person at Formation).
Our reporting is clear on what YOE means in that context and it exclu…
Reddit is very strict about doxing, and a number of people who I think Codesmith deeply trusts are less bought in than they think and things get out, I have to strike a balance between presenting these facts and not doxing or revealing anyone's identities.
It's confusing as heck yeah... but Reddit is completely anonymous and people should be going to authentic sources if they want actionable information.
Like I said, I'm confident because facts can't be manipulated and misinformation can't be backed up.
1. Codesmith admissions staff during an info call 2 weeks ago said the average cohort size is down 25% to "25 people"
2. Will Sentance shared data in an info session last week that Q1 2023 median salaries were $110K and Q2 2023 median salaries were $115K, that's a huge drop.
3. They had reported layoffs of up to 10% of staff a few weeks ago. There website staff was updated and you can use the way back machine if you want to compare.
4. The CTRI cohort was cancelled for the rest of 2024 and after the layoffs, it's possible other people are looking for jobs too.
Now about Formation:
1. We don't have any program costing anywhere near $20K, you might be talking about ISAs, loans or interest that hit that much, but the underlying cost is much lower than that. We move fast and things change.…
"People like you", I don't know you and you clearly don't know me.
Sophie and I have had $0 salaries since day one. Sophie has pledged paying forward gains she makes from founder stock in the future, if any.
You don't know our leads investors, like Kapor Capital, you want to shit on them too - THE preeminent investor in companies championing diversity? A16Z is indeed a huge, classic VC, and that's a fair call out, but you don't know us or our investors and you might be surprised how some of the biggest critics in the industry have invested in us after spending a significant amount of time getting to know us and what we do.
I was bullied my entire life for being a "loser" and a "fat kid", and given my lunch money to "people like you", and I won't be bullied by you. I'm here authentically and confident in who I am, my strengths and my weaknesses, and what I stand for.
Who said this was a marketing channel for my business? I've explicitly said otherwise very transparently so you are making false assumptions or calling me out as a sketchy liar?
I have a business motivation to encourage people to go bootcamps, because then there are more people who go to Formation in 2-3 years. So I assure you this commentary is not "business motivated".
My entire life's mission after leaving Facebook and coming out of semi-retirement afterwards, is to address inequality in tech and I see day in and day out how people who are from underrepresented backgrounds who thought this was an honest industry get passed over with their 1 YOE for people putting down 2 YOE for their 3 week project and getting interviews and that's not fair either.
You see the same thing in the OSP playbook instructions. Post on Reddit, share with your cohort, get cohort-mates to comment and/or ask questions as if they don't know you. "Wow this project is amazing, can't wait to use it!", "What do you think about adding Y next?"
I have 3 people (either employees or alumni - assuming they are being truthful) in the past week independently frame this as "a culture of toxic positivity".
I'm not trying to be a downer here and a grumpy person in the room, I'm just asking people be more transparent and open in their posts instead of doing the OSP playbook.
I used to be more open minded on this based on all the materials I saw that every clearly tell you not to lie.
But there have been some layoffs recently, employees are concerned and some ask/have asked me for advice on what to do because they cannot express their concerns internally.
I don't think it's a mega conspiracy but they are well aware that alumni resumes don't portray what their guidance is internally but they have no control to change that.
The reason I changed my mind is that these placements are celebrated by Codesmith as mid level and senior placements. Not everyone lies and they handpick the ideal alumni to talk about how they didn't lie and got high level jobs, but they are well aware of the ones that are and getting high level jobs and bucketing them all together showing that the handpicked cases are just common examples of the larger pool.
I'm sorry I can't break peo…
This is a not so secret-secret to how a number of bootcamp grads get past resume screens. There are two critical pieces if you do this:
1. You have to practice your narrative and story to not get caught (you can't fake real experience so you won't pass every interview, but you have to get good enough to pass some.
2. Since you'll be in more senior roles than you should be, you have to be ready to fake it on the job to not get fired while also not telling the company the truth about your background and getting the support you need. I've seen some amazing people get fired or let go (and they might not even tell the program they were placed because it happens so fast sometimes). But I've also seen people make it with a little extra sweat, but they make it. Can't give numbers on each bucket, but it's not an easy journey for anybody.
I work with hundreds of people from zero to 20+ YOE and h…
It depends how you define outcomes. Again, since we're not a school or program, we are trying to help people achieve their goals, we take you from A -> B in C time for D cost, and those expectations have to be aligned for it to make sense to join. But everyone's A, B, C, D are different.
We currently focus on preparing people for top tier DS&A/SD/classic interview pipelines and if we scale super large then it wouldn't make sense because every top tier job would be competing for Formation Fellows and so many people would want to join, there probably wouldn't be enough jobs.
So the vision for us is to actually figure out what the best company is FOR YOU, help you figure out your best "B" target. And on the other side, we can help companies find the RIGHT people for them. If we can match everyone up with the right jobs for them and help every company find the right people, we have a scala…
So really the main legal factor then is just taxes? If somewhere in the money chain taxes aren't being paid as a result of the scheme, that would be an IRS issue, and if a fraudulent scheme was in place to avoid taxes, could be a criminal issue.
That's interesting, so ultimately it's up to the public then to see a scheme like this and just not trust the games being played?
So what if only Codesmith is the funder of this non profit, and the purpose is to legitimize the work Codesmith students are doing and give them letters of reference from an "independent" company?
So if tax deductible donations are used to pay "mentors" who spend their time only reviewing Codesmith student's projects, that could be a problem?
And it would be a problem for individuals who might be irresponsibly balancing their responsibilities and not the parent organizations?
I disagree that it HAS to destroy mission drive people even though it does sometimes.
VC-backed for profit education has tried to scale fast by just "temporarily" hiring humans (which cost too much and don't scale) or by buying 3rd party software that doesn't meet the needs.
I worked at FB for 8 years and despite many failed features, I observed what building "good product" means and I think that's the missing piece in high-touch expensive training. The nuances of building good product at scale I can't put into a single post or comment but it's the secret sauce people don't talk about. We're taking that approach - hiring very strong product engineers and building good product to not just "scale something that works at a smaller scale" but to make an experience that GETS BETTER THE LARGER IT IS. Our algorithms and platform genuinely get better the larger we are because we can match peop…
I might want to move this offline but can we connect on Codesmith's OSLabs. Feel free to DM me or LinkedIn Message me.
It's a 501.3c charity but:
1. President went to Codesmith a long time ago as a student
2. VP is a paid consultant for Codesmith who co-founded a subsidiary of Codesmith
3. Treasury is Director of Community for Codesmith
4. 3 Codesmith employees posted about how they are helping hire / involved in hiring the executive director position at OSLabs
5. The contact phone number is the same for OSLabs and a Codesmith for profit subsidiary.
6. Letters of Reference from OSLabs are signed by Codesmith's Chief Academic Officer but titled as a OSLabs Board Member who is not listed as such.
I'm curious because we've explored sponsoring non-profits in various ways and consulted expensive Silicon Valley lawyers and non of this would fly according to them.
Hypothetically, if the Koch Foundation is giving CIRR like $1M a year and the there is only one member, wouldn't that potentially be seen as some crazy loophole for the Koch Foundation to funnel money to support just one program indirectly.
(I don't have time to write all my thoughts, but starting a comment and will edit throughout the day)
RE: ISAs. It's more complicated because of the way ISAs are financed, but I generally agree. The newest wave of ISAs have time limits after which you have to start repaying (.... only if you currently have a job) which makes the math different, so I wouldn't say to avoid them all together, but I would say to question the solvency of the company you are working with and each one is different.
RE: Quality. Not all VC backed companies need to grow like a hockey stick, but most do yeah and their investors can execute control to push for that. But not ALL, if the bootcamp has investors, ask questions about who they are and why they invested. I don't work for a bootcamp, but we do mentorship and job hunt support and we raised funding from Kapor Capital - which is a super mission driven VC th…
CIRRs standard doesn't have clear processes for everything. For example there's no clear process for collecting salaries, while there is a clear process for collecting job start dates. The document itself isn't written by lawyers, like GRAD (Hack Reactor's version) is, which has clear language and a clear structure. In addition, the worksheets they provide have formulas in them and some are not explained in words in the docs. Like if I remember correctly, there are some about excluding students or deferring graduation dates where the sheets were.doi f something that wasn't explained in the spec.
Finally, Codesmith extends the graduation date for people that get hired back as fellows/TAs. While they don't count them as placements (which is good) they do extend their clocks for the life of the contract, which gives these people an extra 3 or more months to find jobs and be included in the…
Anyone know what's going on with CIRR? H2 2022 Results delayed, two more board members no longer working for their bootcamps - which leaves potentially just Codesmith and Launch Academy left managing CIRR
Hi all, sorry for posting so much recently, but I hope it's useful!
So we are all waiting for CIRR H2 2022 results to be posted. Last year the first wave came out mid September with Codesmith's results coming out at the very end of September, but now it's October already and I made some concerning observations.
I have made some observations below in trying to collect the facts.
I have been really on top of CIRR because the signs of this decline have been apparent for a while. It was setup as a business league from a bootcamp loan provider, and the standard was prepared by outcomes members for marketing purposes (according to one of the founding members of CIRR in a Reddit comment) .…
lol, the AMA is next week!
It's a harder question to answer than it sounds, but I don't want to misrepresent our size so I'm going to try to answer properly.
First, we are a mentorship platform. We're not a school or educational program or training program or anything comparable so we don't have "students", "curriculum", "classes", "cohorts", or even "programs" (we have an ongoing project this year to try to improve marketing to be clearer what we actually are lol)
We don't have any kind of fixed offerings and we work with people on a 1-1 contractual basis - for as long as it takes to get a job if you do your part - and the cost is based on your skill gaps and work experience, which we bucket into 3 tiers, but we're constantly working on new pricing models. But everyone comes in with different goals and needs. Some people need mock interviews, some need group mentorship, some need c…
I'm doing a live video AMA next week and would like you to come! I don't talk on camera often and I'm nervous, but I want to try to dedicate some time to answering the most questions possible, candidly and authentically and I'm going to try to do it live without preparation.
Wednesday October 11th, 3pm PST / 6 pm EST, on Zoom, get the link and invitation here: [https://michael-novati-ama.splashthat.com/](https://michael-novati-ama.splashthat.com/)
Nothing is off limits, BUT I will only be answering questions I feel I can give more unique or useful advice on and will pass on questions that I feel I'm not uniquely qualified to answer or that you can get answered elsewhere. I'm hoping that I get asked a lot about my days at Facebook, as it grew from 200 engineers to 10,000 and I have a lot of stories to tell that are funny, interesting, and unique.
**Transparent disclosure**: I'm the co-…
It's really hard to answer this question. It's just impossible to work on this scope of project in 3 weeks. I would say that having a smaller scope project would LIMIT the potential, and the potential is NOT limited by the scope of the OSP, it's limited by the time.
Even if people worked 24 hours a day for two months it wouldn't be enough.
[Ada](https://adadevelopersacademy.org/) is a 11 month bootcamp, where everyone spends 6 months learning and then 5 months at a top tier internship with a partner company. It's a non profit with very strong partners like Zillow, Redfin, etc... And IF these people convert full time at the end of a 5 month full time internship, they are hired as entry level engineers.
Ada has paused enrollment because of the market and they can't guarantee those internships.
What makes Codesmith's 3 week OSP a secret sauce that makes it's alumni not just equal to a f…
👋 Welcome back! NEW: Some new features for the community!
The community is back and open to the public... with some new improvements to nurture thoughtful and authentic discussions.
1. **User Flair:** on the right hand column, you can set your role in the community by setting your "User Flair", ex. Student, Alum, Industry, Beginner and these tags will appear by your name on your posts. This helps people have more context on who you are, while still being anonymous.
2. **Post Flair**: set a topic on your posts, ex. News, Reviews to help loosely organize content in the community.
3. **New Rules**: nothing special, but the rules have been updated to promote authentic and useful content, check them out!
4. **Anyone Can Post:** anyone is allowed to post and comment and posting is no longer restricted to members only.
As the community grows I look forward to growing moderation, and having…
Thanks for sharing your views. Yeah I agree and that's how it was originally introduced, and focused on how people of different backgrounds face this in performance reviews and promotions at work.
If you are the OP you see some stats: view counts, upvote rates, and shares. I don't post often actually, so when I do I track analytics to see the traction they get
So practically speaking, their grads are pushed to judge level via salary, e.g. if you get a 65K offer, you'll get a call from Eric convincing you not to take it, regardless of the actual position and if it's good for you long term, just based on the salary.
The thing they do is repeatedly tell people they are mid level and senior engineers just by finishing Codesmith. This sounds like there must be more to it, but the materials I've seen literally just start convos with, "Alright so since you graduated and are a mid level engineer, we'll have to do A, B, C on your resume" or "The OSP is the secret sauce that makes you a mid level or senior engineer by the end of Codesmith", or "Mid level engineers solve problems on their own and that's what Codesmith prepares you to do"
Yeah entry level FAANG is in the $150Ks base salary and about $200K with stock and bonuses, not including strong ben…
I agree that that's the view some people take and I understand where it comes from.
It's ultimately up to you to decide what you want to do. If you want to do that, go to Codesmith with the knowledge that this is how it works and be ready to go down that path.
My main goal here is to prevent people who DON'T WANT TO DO THAT from going to a program that has fantastic outcomes but isn't aligned in the how.
It's not always "imposter syndrome" you feel, sometimes you are an actual "imposter", but that's ok <3: acknowledging that makes you stronger!
I had some interesting discussions this weekend about imposter syndrome. It was discussed one person's bootcamp has a major emphasis on overcoming "imposter syndrome" and have several classes and lectures on the topic thoroughout the problem.
Before going farther I want to make it clear this write up is my own opinions and also has my own biases. I did a traditional CS degree and graduated into a FAANG career path and even though I work/have worked with hundreds of people from bootcamp backgrounds, I have inherit biases in my views. I also can see how these views might be perceived as gatekeeping or discouraging to people struggling right now to get jobs and learn programming - and this cannot be farther from the truth.... I AM TRYING TO HELP. T…
Thanks for sharing. Yeah some people who push back on this think I have some kind of hidden interest in calling this behavior out, but it is solely because I know thousands of engineers, recruiters, product people that I've met during my Facebook days, who now work at hundreds of other companies, and the sentiment is unanimous that this behavior is anywhere from lying to fraud. Not one person has condoned if for any reason. That said, I very much understand the other point of view and acknowledge it as well: industry gatekeepers are blocking ambitious new engineers from getting a foot in the door so the ends justify the means. Which practical speaking, is a reasonable argument for the small number of people who genuinely fall in the bucket and then get appropriately levelled jobs they wouldn't get otherwise.
My concern is lack of transparency in behalf of Codesmith. When called out they…
Yeah but you can also build account history by commenting valuable, non identifiable responses, and building enough karma before posting said anonymous AMAs.
I also think people can talk about their experineces without giving away context.
If you are doing an "Ask Me Anything" you are going to get questions that result in you giving context on your background that is identifying at the end of the day.
I appreciate you sharing your views professionally. The fact that I'm extremely open about who I am enabled this kind of reasonable discussion, and anonymous new accounts that might have their own biases cannot possible be evaluated fairly.
Codesmith isn't a competitor in my opinion. There are a small number (about 15%) of people who go to Codesmith who might be a candidate for Formation, but likely not. We don't work with new college grads right now and people with zero experience is an edge case. Like the 15% is an edge case for both Codesmith and us that neither of us market to, in my opinion.
I in fact talk to make people 1-1 and suggest they go to Codesmith and to consider coming to Formation in a few years.
The way Formation works though could expand in the future to people who don't have any coding experience but it's not on the radar right now. I think it's fair that the fact…
I worked at Facebook during the beginning of the "fake news" era and people blamed Facebook completely blind to their own biases, so there's only so much mods can do.
Us vs Them narratives get a lot of activity and further polarize the narratives and that's why I use my real name here and try to sources things.