2 is pretty interesting. There's an ok docuseries on HBO that just came out called "Telemarketers" that centers around call centers calling on behalf of "Police Associations of X" where X is a local city, and if they people donated, the charity only got 10% of the donation and the middle man company got 90%. But the callers were rotating through the various "police associations" they were calling on behalf of and they go extensively into the dilemma of representing police officers without lying. Overall not good vibes :S
Hi thanks for sharing! Question: where did the top of funnel come from? Are these people who just applied online or were you cold calling people.
Second, I'm curious how you handled representing different schools? Like was it obvious to people calling that they were talking to someone from 2U, or did they think they were talking to someone from the school they thought they applied to?
Third, what changes were made since the edX acquisition? I heard Trilogy was literally replaced - not just in name - with edX materials and I'm curious if that happened and if it mattered?
Thanks for the detailed explanation!
I see what you mean and how that's more foundational then most approaches, but still not what I would call "computer science fundamentals"
So we define four traits of successful engineers:
1. grit
2. curiosity
3. ownership
4. teamwork
What you are describing in our framework is 2. We define this as "the endless pursuit of why".
It's a fantastic attitude to have - understanding under the hood - but it's different from learning things from a first principles.
My first college class started with "forget everything you know... there exists a concept called a number and there exists only the number 1" and from there we built the logic of computation and then eventually all hardware and software.
It means starting at true zero and building everything from first principles.
Under the hood is the opposite. It's starting with something and going backwar…
Thanks for sharing, out of curiosity, what makes you think they teach computer science fundamentals? I'm curious if that's something they told you, like just your opinion, or if it's something new.
When I reviewed Codesmith's entire classroom materials I don't believe they teach any "computer science fundamentals". They have a few lectures on DS&A that were like lecture 1 of CS 101 for me in college (and I took 24 more course with 12 to 36 lectures each), and they assign daily coding problems, but they don't actually teach any of those problems under the hood.
I'm not trying to pick a fight, I'm just curious because I keep a super close eye on Codesmith and wanted to know where that comes from.
Congratulations on getting a job, that's super exciting!
Definitely been here when starting to code... it's the result of running a ton of Stack Overflow and tutorials line by line and installing many versions of Java (or Node or Python, etc....).
It looks like you have Graal, which is the most standard one, but the version of Java could matter if your code uses language features only supported in newer versions.
If it was me and I didn't have any meaningful projects on my computer that depende on specific configurations currently, I would look into "how to remove all java installations" and then start over with the Oracle Java 20 SDK
The contract is that we keep doing our part you until you get a job as long as you keep showing up to sessions, generally doing the stuff we give you, communicating with your team, and intend on job hunting.
We have only removed a small number of people and they fall under the second part:
\- People no-showing too many sessions/'disappearing' without trying to reschedule or notifying anyone after repeated warnings
\- People who are too busy in their day jobs or in their lives and they aren't doing anything on their weekly schedule. We try to work with people to adjust their schedules but if they just can't make the minimum 10 hours work then we'll have to remove you if we can't find a way to make it work.
\- People who aren't a good fit. This is really rare, but this is a bucket of people that do not want to follow the way we do things (i.e. they want to memorize instead of learning…
Definitely practice in online coding environments like HackerRank and CodeSignal and CoderPad before doing online assessments! It's something that trips people up for no reason! You can do practice tests/projects on all the platforms.
Facebook/Google/Amazon have their own environments you are sometimes coding in, but they'll prep you for that.
Most assessments are coding problems, but the platforms support much more complex questions, from multiple choice, to text-based, to system design, to practical problems.
I do think it's a fair question/comment yeah. It's also one of the reasons we don't publish "CIRR-like" outcomes.
I see day in - day out on here how people just programs strictly by outcomes and the fundamental problem is that a randomly selected person doesn't just get accepted into program X and it's a free ride to $Y salary.
Formation is VERY hard work, so it's not about selecting great people, they get great jobs and we get the credit. But it is both ways. If we select people who we know Formation is more likely to work effectively for, then we're more likely to have more amazing experiences, which might attract more people who it might not work for. I think that's fine if we are honest with individuals when they apply if we think Formation is good or not and that people trust that assessment.
Believe it or not, Formation is NOT good for people who have done all the LC Hard probl…
I've heard people outside of Formation who think we 'gamify the interview process' but I don't know where that comes from and I think it's a weakness in our public content and website if people feel that way.
The core approach to DS&A follows this method: [https://formation.dev/blog/the-engineering-method/](https://formation.dev/blog/the-engineering-method/)
And all of the practice is in applying that and getting feedback and practicing it in 1-1 mocks.
That link is free \^\^\^\^ so clearly it's not as easy as it sounds to apply it if people pay us a lot of money, and some people - even some new Fellows who signed up - have an instinct to fallback to memorization or trying to game the system - and for them the hard part is re-learning how to solve easy problems!
If you try to game the system and go into interviews, it's highly risky - you'll either crush it or fail miserably. That'…
I think that's a different program. We don't have any fixed length whatsoever and you have no syllabus or guaranteed curriculum you'll work on.
The topics individual people cover will vary based on their gaps, but post people cover:
\- Problem Solving (via DS&A, from basic concepts to graphs and DP)
\- System Design
\- Technical Behavioral/Hiring Manager preparation
\- Resume/Recruiter call preparation
\- Job Hunt tracking tools and job sourcing (up to 5 matching jobs a day sent to you)
\- Dedicated support team of 3 team members to make adjustments and respond to your needs (it's highly dynamic)
I definitely agree partially here. We are not selling false hope to new bootcamp grads who are struggling to get jobs and we don't work with them very often in this market. In a good market we've had pretty good success helping bootcampers in the middle of the pack fill in gaps... but it's crazy expensive to do back to back with a bootcamp and I don't recommend that.
If we accepting all of these people we would be a giant company right now, we unfortunately turn them down so we can try to have experiences like the OP instead.
But I firmly believe the evidence shows that there is a target audience we genuinely help for.
I can say that I had nothing to do with this post, nor did anyone at Formation, have no idea who the OP is and haven't talked to them on Reddit before, but what they say is pretty detailed and aligns with how the day to day is.
The OP didn't say Formation works on those things you mention.... we don't teach anything... we do pretty much as the OP said 'peer and group problem solving sessions'.
The bootcamp market has produced hundreds of thousands of engineers who - firehose style in 10 to 20 weeks - learned basic programming concepts and then have been learning practical skills on the job for a couple years and many hit a wall when trying to level up to top tech jobs because of being rusty, or never properly learning, more fundamental CS concepts.
There are thousands and thousands of people who feel this way and it's not unbelievable or something to shame someone about.
I have a tough question but would love to hear your thoughts!
You prepared a lot to get into Codesmith, so what's something that looking back you misunderstood about it before you joined that ended up being different from the previous impression?
Yeah a few things. It is a very very solid 3 week group capstone project. And they put a lot of effort in the presentation, like if you click that link it looks super buttoned up and legit in the writing and imagery and overview, etc...
But the problem I have (again, my opinion only) is that that 3 weeks gets represented as months of 'experience' - framed as an ambiguous job on LinkedIns and resumes. Many grads talk about it exclusively in interviews, for dozens of minutes talking about people-problems and technical-problems and all kinds of things from these projects that's really just squeezing them for more they they have in them. I've interviewed Codesmith grads myself and 'talk about a conflict with a non engineer' and people just make stuff up because they didn't work with non-engineers... like that didn't "come from the OSP" it came from practicing TALKING ABOUT the OSP over and…
Sorry, my bad, I'm a person of pros and cons and don't present my opinions often, except my strong opinions on this one: it stands for "Open Source Product". It's a 3-4 week phase of Codesmith spent on building an open source project, like this one [https://github.com/oslabs-beta/anago](https://github.com/oslabs-beta/anago)
Not OP, can't speak for them, but I think both are a problem haha,
a) is a problem with Codesmith - even though I've seen materials that clearly say not to do it, I've seen other materials that clearly guide people to do it without telling them to do it... It's like DO NOT LIE!!!!! Use this example though of how we recommend doing it: <link to example that exaggerates 6 months of experience>
So many people message me about this, I get the vibe that all of the staff at Codesmith GENUINELY feels the OSPs are a magical project that is GENUINELY worth month and months of senior engineer experience that they do this on purpose, but this is just proposed to me in theories. One person said a staff member went on a rant and had to pause the session to cool down after someone asked if OSPs we're being exaggerated and you'll see in the tone of many Codesmith employees in public talks an arroga…
A couple of notes. They are "legally" associated with OSLabs, a completely separate charity that seems to have a lot of ties to Codesmith but is not Codesmith. OSLabs signs the letters of reference for these people (it's a Codesmith employee too, but he's also a Board Member of OSLabs).
And second, yeah anyone can audit the GitHub projects for OSLabs and see how the vast vast majority have 2-3 weeks of contributions from each member, in these spike patterns following the cohort cycle that you don't see on any real open source projects. One of the projects had console.log(password) in the authentication code - and password wasn't hashed at this point.
But employers - especially the smaller companies that hire Codesmith grads - don't look at this stuff and are just happy to interview people with experience on their resume!
I'll confirm you're not me lol! But I looked up all the people in that screenshot and they all have fairly normal Codesmith-y LinkedIns with exaggerated OSP experience.
Some of those people have a lot of experience before too, that's not super common. I've seen info sessions before and Codesmith is pretty clear that people come from 'a range of backgrounds' and most people haven't worked as SWE's before.
Did they talk about that in the session? I'm sure they chose people that were all saying amazing things about Codesmith was and how they persisted with the Codesmith-way of doing things and it worked, without really saying what that means.
I'm sure Eric K was probably mentioned by everyone too as the reason why they got a crazy high offer. Several people have sent me Eric Ks advice (in various forms from audio/video) and it's very good, standard, bread-and-butter advice you would ge…
I don't want to speak for that person, but that person was thanking THE COMMUNITY ON REDDIT (not Codesmith), they were a member of this community for A LONG TIME and asked a lot of questions and really deliberated the right place to go and for them it was Codesmith, and that's great because they were happy with the outcome. For other people it's not Codesmith!
No, I just noticed the link disappeared from their website and someone posted this on Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/outco-san-francisco-6?hrid=16zLSvO1oDWJT3lJ7QUb4w&utm\_campaign=www\_review\_share\_popup&utm\_medium=copy\_link&utm\_source=(direct)
Congrats! I remember chatting a bit a long time and it's awesome to see you making progress! First job is just the beginning of the journey and not the end and a lot to look forward to 🚀
I'm someone who has been in the industry for 15+ years now, 8 years at Facebook (from 200 engineers to 10K), 4 years helping people level up their jobs into dozens of top companies, and various internships before.
Some observations I've made:
1. People tend to be unsuccessful who just always jump on the latest thing because most companies, even the top tier ones, have extremely robust and well established businesses and systems based on new-ish technology but they don't always just drop everything and convert everything to you saying the latest stuff. Some employees work on the latest stuff and they're typically world experts or the most experienced people and the vast majority of people are working on the core stuff. So If you're trying to get into the industry, I recommend being really good at the core stuff instead of always jumping to the latest thing. hoping that you find it in.…
Interviewing.io is currently the best in place to go if you just want 1 to 3 or so mock interviews and nothing else.
If you plan on paying for 5 or more, I would consider an interview prep program like Formation.dev (disclosure co-founder), Interview Kickstart or Pathrise (I've removed Outco because they haven't accepted applications in a month.
Exponent bought PRAAMP (which is free peer to peer mocks) and they offer paid mocks in a number of areas as an upsell but they don't have as many or as a strong mock interviewers as Interviewing.io or the interview prep programs. If you can get a good deal on them then doing a few there is probably fine.
A number of people might recommend various free options, Codesmith also offers alumni free mock interviews for life, but not all mock interviews are the same. If you aren't doing a mock with a person who has either done hundreds of interviews…
So one of the challenges with self-paced programs is the timeframe isn't fixed. So let's say 100 people started January 2022 and they are chugging along very slowly but haven't graduated but haven't dropped out... what are they?
It's reasonable to have them pending, but then I would want to know what the graduation time window is for people who graduate.
If something is free, always figure out how they get money because nothing is free, even from non-profits:
1. Is it a non-profit getting money from donations? If so, who is giving the donations and why.
2. Do they make money from placement fees? i.e. if they place you with a partner, do they get a cut?
3. Do they make money by contracting you out to companies for a lower rate than you would get on your own, and they take a cut?
4. Is this a special pipeline sponsored by a 3rd party and if so, why are they sponsoring?
5. Probably some more things, I'm sick right now and my brain isn't working...
I would make sure the post bacc program is legit and not run by a 3rd party that has a bad reputation.
But in terms of which one is better? It depends on you and how you learn and what's a good fit for you so I would focus on finding a program where the day to day work is aligned with what you feel is effective. For example, I did a degree but practical hands on learning works a lot better for me and the most valuable things I learned were from side projects!
If I were to generalize, which is not true in all cases, bootcamps are a firehouse of information and people whacamole concepts until they think they get it and then move on. I've worked with a number of grads from a top bootcamp that encourages daily algos, and people tend to rush through things and focus on getting an answer that passes LeetCode instead of actually understanding how things work.
Understanding how things work takes time and varies person to person in how that evolves.
I'm biased from my FAANG-ish background but I think the ideal is still a top tier CS program (top 10 or 20 from US World News). After that I'm not sure because those programs are the sure things where recruiters are lining up to hire people. Anything else and it takes a little bit of luck and determination.
Of the ones you mention, Launch School capstone is the most selective and has consistently strong placement rates.There are a lot of people going to WGU but it's unclear that that will result in jobs or not. People primarily go to get a degree for cheap but I suspect they also do other things and are a part of other programs too to get jobs
The entry level pipelines have always relied on the college recruiting system, which usually starts year 1 with internships and culminates in a big offer the summer before you graduate. Sure a bootcamp is more intense hours wise than school, but those internships are irreplaceable. CS grads without internships are finding it just as hard to get jobs.
But the simple one liner is that it's just impossible to rush education and bootcamp successes have relied on selecting for ambitious people that would do well in any industry. A number of bootcampers did their bootcamps just to make money but don't like programming, and I think those pope are "looked down on".
I work with a number of bootcamps grads later on and they spend way more time on average with us than they do at their bootcamps. It takes months and months to address many of the gaps.
I have never led Formation and despite being a co-founder, Sophie is and has always been the founder, president, secretary, CEO and face of the company inside and out and she tells me what to do. But you knew that I guess?
Seriously, you all seem passionate about this and maybe you don't want to be open minded about me but you should give Sophie a chance.
This has all the details: https://www.stridefunding.com/formation. You are better off reading the 4 ways the loan ends rather than me trying to summarize.
The new ISA is directly with Stride so we don't have any say or influence over your terms and you need to get the final answer from them directly.
There is some confusion, but a simple answer. We had an old ISA that we stopped offering a few months ago that was forgiven if you left the program without a job and don't have any job paying over 65K. We replaced that with 3 payment options and one of them is similar to an ISA but is not forgiven unless you leave early and make under 55K for several years.
So there are many people at Formation with the old ISA and the new ISA which understandably causes confusion. Many programs have gone through this transition over the past few months as well.
If you are ever confused, DM me or contact someone on the Formation team because it's really important for everyone's sake that you thoroughly understand the payment method you choose and we have 4 different ones right now!!!
We would love to try to support returning to work for criminals that served their sentence and can't get back into society because they can't get jobs. We are actively working on this space and hopefully will make progress soon!
Yeah please do, ask straight up what the graduation rate is. If they say that the program is self paced and they don't know then ask how many people graduate within 9 months or 1 year or whatever timeframe they can choose and you won't join without knowing.
Read the raw report. Someone is only an alumni if they get a job :) otherwise they are not considered an alumni and not included
"The information in this report was gathered through an online survey of 1613 TripleTen alumni who had graduated before 2H 2022 and reported working a job in their field"
Read that carefully.... only people who got a job are included in the report and 87% of them got a job in 6 months and 13% took more than 6 months.
Ask them how many people ever graduate, I can't find that anywhere.
It's here and the disclaimers at the bottom explain the methodology of how everything is calculated: [https://formation.dev/blog/2022-formation-fellow-placements/](https://formation.dev/blog/2022-formation-fellow-placements/)
We're working on a mid year update for 2023. Salaries have been a bit lower lately but we're still crunching the numbers for anything interesting!
We don't right now because auditing requires a framework of rules to check against first. But you can get any data audited that has rules and the auditors just make sure you follow the process! And believe it or not, CIRR data is audited AFTER the fact, not before (which is one of the problems).
Believe it or not but CIRR doesn't even say how salary information needs to be collected whatsoever, so just asking someone and taking their word for it can be considered the golden source of truth!
We collect detailed placement data for every single placement and detailed compensation info following an internal process, and some day we could potential turn that into something auditable to make sure we don't make any mistakes in collecting the data. Right now just have a crazy strict authorization and verification process to touch this data to make sure every pixel is correct, but we could pr…
Sure happy to answer:
1. We are not a bootcamp or educational program and we don't have the data CIRR requires. We don't have end dates, we don't have a program length, we don't have a curriculum, even though the pace is dynamic - we don't have any even theoretical length of the content itself to benchmark against, people ramp up or down hours as they please and we have no control over that, people pause for weeks and go on vacation, people have no expectation of what work they will do going in, people don't "graduate", roughly 2/3 of people are ALREADY CURRENTLY WORKING. So it just doesn't make sense and trying to manipulate our data to fit into CIRR would be extremely misrepresenting and misleading and not what you think it would be.
2. We published some outcomes on our blog and plan to every year with extremely fine details of how every single thing is calculated. This goes WELL BEYO…
That would be a good idea and send the results to Ludo on here! NuCamp had a pretty sketchy sponsored post in Google results that I thought was sketchy and they are indeed a for profit business like many other bootcamps.
I don't think anyone goes to NuCamp thinking it will get them a job from what I've seen in their info sessions. People go because it's cheap. They never talk about jobs.
Yeah the CEO was asked why they don't report job outcomes and he answers it directly and says he doesn't want to play games with outcomes that you are forced to play if you report them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEFri1zB\_PM