Yeah they are on my radar! My understanding is that they were founded and run as a non profit and didn't do the VC/fundraising route that I mentioned.
I wrongfully thought Ada was originally a for profit that converted non profit recently to fundraise via grants but I'm wrong and I think it was always a non profit! So I'll edit that!
I've noticed a lot of people jumping ship from Ada to Techtonica in the past few months and a word of caution - Ada shut down for good reason - they lost their partnerships to put people into internships and they didn't lose them because they are poorly run, they lost them because the companies just can't hire no experience people right now and there's no reason to think that Techtonica will have some different partnerships that Ada doesn't have. I hope they do!!
That was Turing School. Nucamp is Ludo and Nucamp fairly transparently doesn't do job outcomes because they want to focus on satisfaction instead. Which I think is a good idea because you are paying for teachers and curriculum development and not a job so why judge it by if you get a job or not? That said, asking for reviews is sadly a common practice.... have you noticed how Codesmith has like 600 Course Report reviews where they pay them to sponsor, and wayyyy fewer reviews on other sites.... and similar things with other programs: where their online reviews are skewed across different sources.
I wrote a paper in undergrad about online reviews that wone a best paper award at CHI and since then I don't trust online reviews haha.
\+1000 to woman founded, woman lead, diversity focused programs. The only one left I know of is the one I co-founded: Formation (founder and CEO is Sophie, majority of leaders are women), but it's not a bootcamp and it's for experienced engineers. Hopefully some day - when we're confident we can deliver an exception experience - we'll be able to help people get from zero to one as well.
Source (sourcing is important!): https://www.geekwire.com/2023/ada-developers-academy-significantly-reduces-headcount-pauses-admissions-names-interim-ceo
About two years ago I didn't really follow any bootcamps except Lambda School because I had a lot of info made available to me that was inconsistent with the public info but I was friendly with most of the bootcamp founders (and still am). Codesmith came on my radar after numerous people applied to my company and appeared to be 1+ YOE engineers until I interviewed them and found that their narratives fell apart and they were entry level engineers... and then I noticed OSLabs on two resumes and dug deeper... ever since then I have had so much info sent to me about how Codesmith works and OSLabs that I find it incredibly fascinating and have deep dived into it more than any other program and I understand it better than many employees who talk to me even do.
So yeah, not sure how to answer that but short answer - yes I follow other bootcamps and I connect on LinkedIn with bootcamp grads fr…
Update us in a year. I have an analysis of 1000+ Codesmith grads a year into their career and how many have changed jobs already. At Facebook, changing jobs in less than a year was a red flag for recruiters so maybe it means nothing but it's something I'm trained to notice. My working hypothesis is that Codemsith grads mislead smaller companies with the exaggerated resume and get hired as experienced engineers at small companies that don't do their homework and a number don't make it a year when they are found to be less experienced than expected. I have a busy day job but we'll see when I get there time to process the data.
Okay it's not that bad and being so negative only provokes them to be more defensive!!
But yeah if you say bad things about Codesmith, you get weird anonymous accounts on both sides coming out of the woodwork (my observation is that it's mostly supporting Codesmith, but not 100%).
I used to have way more crazy convos on here when people didn't know me, but day in day out I've been unexpectedly consistent and students, graduates, employees, managers, etc... have noticed, sent me volumes of interesting information and facts and anonymous trolls can attack facts - whether for or against.
I'm in numerous Discord groups, Neetcode is solid group and a good cheap/free way to practice in general!
Some things to watch out for with Discord groups:
1. There are a lot that are "secretly" run by a company of some kind. So while they appear to be useful groups, they are trying to recruit people to use the company's paid products.
2. There are a lot of groups that look great, and seem active, but they die off and end up like ghost towns. It's unfortunately hards to have a completely free group that is dedicated long term to learning and practicing DS&A as it's a skill people tend to learn short term for interviews.
Some products I think are pretty good are: Neetcode, Structy, good old Leetcode
BIAS DISCLOSURE: I co-founded a very expensive paid program that gets people to a top tier DS&A bar, so I'm a bit bias in this space.
There are different programs for everyone s I can't say for sure!
The content is self paced - which is good if you are motivated to complete it on your own. The mentors work in the industry, and while they aren't necessarily all very experienced, that's different from other programs where mentors are all graduates of the program itself. The content was developed with Rithm and Colt Steele and is fine.
You should download and read the report here: [https://www.springboard.com/outcomes/](https://www.springboard.com/outcomes/) (requires email for full report)
And from here: [https://ddf46429.springboard.com/uploads/resources/1675095611\_Performance\_Fact\_Sheet\_SEC\_12.2022.docx.pdf](https://ddf46429.springboard.com/uploads/resources/1675095611_Performance_Fact_Sheet_SEC_12.2022.docx.pdf)
I don't want to misrepresent any of the raw data.
The point I was making was that even if the "placement rate" looks good, it's based only on people who graduate and since the majority of people don't graduate.
The fact sheet says clearly that for 2021, only 29% of people graduated within 150% of the published program length.
Interview Kickstart is based in India and might be a good option. I'm the Co-Founder of Formation.dev and IK is a major competitor but we don't support many international engineers and IK might be a better option for you at this point in time.
No coding bootcamp places people at MAANG regularly. Codesmith is one of the best bootcamps and they have 10X the number of people ever who have gone there than we do but have about the same number of MAANG placements (excluding contractor jobs) in absolute number... so I think if that's your dream, go with the career accelerator and interview prep bucket.
Yeah as someone said below, this is a strong TRUE mid-level FAANG offer, or low end senior FAANG offer.
Their previous salary was $145K already, so they were probably someone who didn't really need to go to Codesmith.
I've worked with a couple people in this bucket who dropped out in their first week because they really needed something else (like Formation.dev - disclosure, co-founder, Pathrise, Interview Kickstart) and not a bootcamp. but didn't know those existed.
While this is a little opinionated in tone, I think this is all true except that there's no point in sharing it. It shows a super key thing, which is that the median Codesmith grad was about the same in their LAST JOB that the median bootcamp grad in the whole industry makes AFTER THEIR BOOTCAMP. I think that's a pretty important thing to note for people looking at their options and Codesmith had this data all along and didn't share it!
Sorry to hear about the layoff, we've chatted on here for quite some time now and I know you are in for a career-long journey and not a short term job and it you'll find something great!
This is really hard to extrapolate, I have a lot of data people have shared and I threw it into cohort-based charts.
For CIRR, it's placed within 6 months of graduating. Some of these 73 people are people that graduated more than 6 months ago so they wouldn't even count in the "83%" and some are and would.
So you can't extrapolate anything from the number alone... whoever at Codesmith shared this knows exactly what they are doing and shared no dates and no timeframes to make a point about hiring picking up to motivate people and not a point about actual placement rates
Or as Ludo said below:
https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/162t5y6/comment/jy0n28j/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3
I commented above but it's also interesting to note that the median salary going in was in the $70Ks and 20% of people were making $90K+. So it depends on where you are starting from! If you make 40K across two restaurant jobs, the odds are much lower of making six figures than someone who is an accountant making $90K.
That's cool!
I think clustering is interesting here because there clear personas of people going into Codesmith and there's more value in someone understanding what "someone like them" does than aggregated stats. Try exploring that a bit if you have time!
I added these to my comment above that I think are super interesting from this data,
​
>It's really interesting to see "past salaries", the number of people making six figures BEFORE CODESMITH is an anomaly for bootcamps, and one of the things that skews the numbers. 16, or 20% of the people made over 90K BEFORE with and I would say most people on here are hoping to make 90K AFTER. People really need to know this going in... that part of the success is that a number of people going in are already successful.
>
>2. This gives more insight into the split distribution - lots of high salaries, lots of low salaries - which, like 2., is not the norm for bootcamps. You can see personas in the data. Some people with $140K+ salaries started with high salaries anyways. Some didn't, those people are the "all in Codesmith" people who defend it to the bitter death - but it's like 5 peopl…
I'm talking the official the spreadsheet (with the same columns the one you posted has) and it having about 20 more people on it since mid/end of July, but it could be incorrect. The other data source was someone said the celebrations channel had under 20 people on it in the past month (but said those can be opt out, and sometimes delayed by months) but given how proudly most people share their outcomes with their cohorts, I doubt THAT many people would opt out of sharing in the celebration channel.
Hmm are you sure about that, I have two sources that show the number closer to 20 in the past month, and one of those was based on the same spreadsheet.
ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY. I think people know me around here well so I won't introduce but I have a lot of comments. Most important point is in bold, the reset is just commentary.
1. **IF CODESMITH HAS THIS DATA SO EASILY ACCESSIBLE - BE TRANSPARENT ABOUT IT AND TELL PEOPLE THAT SALARIES ARE DOWN $20K (median/mean) FROM LAST YEAR.** I've seen a few info sessions where employees say that outcomes are "similar" to last year but at "different types of companies". Second, I've seen numerous documents shared with me where Codesmith ties it's "excellence" with the high salaries compared to bootcamp and CS degrees, so they have to take a hit with this kind of drop, when the best CS grads from Stanford and Harvard are still all making $150K base salaries at Figma, Asana, Palantir, etc...
2. The columns of this data align with their post-graduation CIRR collecting intake form so I think this is r…
I mean they are using the full and proper data set for CIRR, but this is the source yeah. I'm just surprised how much Codesmith cares about talking about compensation and pushing people for compensation, yet they don't even collect granular compensation information. With the quality of data they collect, they can't say someone got a $400K FAANG offer. Every FAANG offer needs to be considered in terms of base, signing bonus, performance bonus, equity, vesting schedule, job location, and benefits (e.g. Amazon has much worse benefits than Apple and pays a lot more cash.... you are not smart at all if you compare the base salary one on one and say one offer is better than another.
Anyways, I'm writing up more separately!
So believe it or not but the column titles are the real titles of the official data they collect. Literally from their CIRR collection worksheet. I was shocked too when I saw this because they collect such little information about compensation, e.g. someone put "some stocks" and this is the data that turns into CIRR outcomes.
But yeah, meaningless in this context... doesn't even have the companies or time frames.
Nothing has gotten better post-acquisition because the best programs relied on human-power and humans don't scale.
My team is solving this differently and we hope to scale.
You and me both! I never heard of Codesmith until I was interviewing numerous people that all claimed to be engineers and had the same pitches about their 'experience' that quickly fell apart when asking any real questions about the team they worked on, and then went deep down the rabbit hole on Reddit, and I now I know more than most employees, including instructors, about them hahaha.
Thanks for great candid replies btw, really appreciated!
I know CIRR is one of the number one reasons people look into Codesmith and it's internally it's an important part of their strategy.
cc /u/InTheDarkDancing who is also interested in this
When we had a non-senior role posted we got hundreds of applications in a week and we're tiny. They all looked the same and we don't have the resources to look at them all.
I think it might end up hurting a bit but hopefully not. Hack Reactor's brand was hurt a bit when it was acquired, because it used to be like the Codesmith-level entry bar, and since being acquired they grew to larger cohorts and a lower entry bar.
My completely personal opinion hunch is they will replace the instruction and curriculum in Tech Elevator with Hack Reactor/Galvanize curriculum, and leverage Tech Elevator more for it's partnerships in smaller cities like Cleveland and Columbus.
I could go into each school and what I think would happen to it. Hack Reactor will probably survive as a brand.
So Stride Inc is a public company worth about $1.7B that owns Galvanize and Tech Elevator. Galvanize owns Hack Reactor.
This announcement is basically merging two independent subsidiaries, but really Hack Reactor has just been a brand on top of Galvanize's operations for years now and this merging will make Tech Elevator another brand under Galvanize's operations.
What does this mean "operations"?
It means Galvanize has all the corporate business operations stuff, it has the sales people, the marketing, payment processing, legal reviews, etc... Consolidation is when these companies can merge so that all of the humans doing duplicate work can be laid off and the combined programs are more profitable as a result.
You should DM me or LinkedIn message me, especially because M2 sounds like it might be Facebook and I worked there 8 years as well.
I can look at your exact experience and try to get ideas, like one of your best options could be to to make a series of hops within a big FAANG company into engineering work.
I would 100% start with self studying with resources like Odin Project before jumping into a bootcamp.
I don't have a lot of data points but if you are already super experienced and comfortable in a field there's a lot more to this decision mentally and I think patience is better to give yourself room.
If you have downtime in this next job hunt, I might consider doing an intense program, while job hunting for your old job, getting your old job type, and then trying to find ways to add in programming at that job on the side in the goal of making a long term internal transition.
Fo…
That's a subjective question and I try to just answer with evidence backed facts so that people can make up their own minds of if it's good or bad FOR THEM.
Do not go there if you need a job ASAP after graduating. No program in fact will do that and the closest thing is a bootcamp like Revature - which comes with numerous catches and down print that many find concerning.
If you can get a job in your old industry that works though for Codesmith, or getting a less intense job now and doing part time. You could definitely get your old job back and job hunt for a SWE job simultaneously after Codesmith.
I've written more details about the market as a whole, but it's terrible for bootcamp grads right now and it's opened back up for experienced engineers... we have had offers at Formation in the past month or two at Google, Adobe, Capital One, Apple, and people currently at on-sites at Meta…
Hi! Yeah send me a DM so I can explain a little more how the new ISLs work. They are very different from these old ones as the payment term is longer and the individual payments are typically smaller and what the typical person will pay back is expected to be closer to the cap.
You have to start making payments after a year, but only if you are making the minimum salary at the time, so if you are unemployed your payments won't start. This is less friendly than the old ISA but it helps solve the problem that numerous programs have discussed where anecdotally, people don't feel motivated to look for a job as aggressively as those who paid upfront.
I say this all the time but it's very important because of the down market that no program, including Formation, hands you a job and you are not paying for a job. You are paying so that you present your best self and become a better engineer an…
Again, have to know who you are and exactly what you've done, if you've had pauses, where you are benchmarking right now, what interviews you've had and why you haven't passed them, or why you aren't getting any interviews, what kind of support you've asked for and look at the entire history of what we've tried to work with you on already.
I know the market is really tough right now, and 2 years is not the norm, but advertising that you have been getting training for 2 whole years, have not put a penny down and we keep supporting you, is kind of showing the value of the program because I don't know any program that does that. Like looking at the handful of people we have had for 1+ years, most have 1000+ hours of sessions and tasks they've done and even $13K to $25K is less than programs for that many hours. And the fact we keep on going and still haven't billed you is a testament to th…
Like I said you should contact me privately internally because I can't discuss your ISA publicly and have to verify who I'm talking to.
You selectively copied a portion of the contract page and you should look for a "Financed Amount" below that, and you had the option to pay that amount upfront as well.
If you were unaware that you could pay upfront, ping me, or someone on the team, with details explaining the situation to discuss more!
$7500 is just one price point typically for senior engineers with about 4+ YOE and the price point would have been higher for you.
Yeah we chatted with their founder a while ago and I think they were purchased by SNHU during the peak of the Amazon Technical Academy unit's success and it became a non-profit within SNHU: [https://www.snhu.edu/about-us/newsroom/press-releases/kenzie-academy](https://www.snhu.edu/about-us/newsroom/press-releases/kenzie-academy)
But as Amazon has slowed hiring, I think that hit them pretty hard and it stopped making sense to run.
We don't have any ISAs that cost exactly $25,000 so I'm happy to explain your ISA better if you ping me internally! There is a cap to make sure your ISA has an upper bound that is meant to be a positive feature for you and that is not the amount you owe necessarily. The amount you pay back depends on your salary so for this specific "full option", $25K is the cost if you get a BASE SALARY of $167K or higher.
In the past few months we have clarified our payment options to help explain this so hopefully this will only be clearer in the future that the ISA option (which is just one of many) is an alternative to paying the upfront cost but with a higher cost for the luxury of deferring payment.
The price of Formation varies by experience and needs, as it is a mentorship platform as opposed to a form of education, so that was an example for making a simplified point, but for anyone reading…
Said by a true Codesmith grad with a $130K job that says they couldn't have gotten it without Codesmith.
The Ivy Leagues have dampened diversity efforts for 100+ years with that attitude and the industry will be a hell of a lot more productive if everyone with ambition and drive had a way to fulfill their potential.
Having talked to a very wide spectrum of Codesmith grads, from those who loved it and wanted more, to those who hated it and wanted more, to those who hated it and never want to talk about bootcamps every again, to those that loved it so much that they won't even look anything without a Codesmith lens and are limited themselves and closed off to growing their careers at the rate their could if they were more open minded, to those that were meh about it and got fired from their first job after 9 months and are a little lost, to those say they couldn't have gotten their first job without Codesmith but it prepared them zero for the actual day to day.
The world is complicated. One thing for sure is that if you are accepted into Codesmith, you are likely to be successful at a number of similar top programs, because their bar is high, they have strong consistency in that bar, and they have a…
+100 go to a bootcamp for the curriculum and skills you'll learn and not for a job... that's what you are paying for and you aren't paying for a job. A lot of people who are negative in this market about their programs are people who thought they were paying for a job and not the training. What the training is worth is up to you to decide and join a bootcamp if you think it's worth it!
The old school ISA: I think Coachable might be the only place where you just owe them later on and things aren't done following the latest regulations and you just owe them when you get a job.
All ISAs from legitimate providers have become "income share loans" where you take out a "loan" for the upfront cost and you pay back the loan with a percent of your income for some time, until you pay back the loan with interest. It's basically a loan where you only make payments if you have a job vs a loan where you have to make payments regardless.... but that loan will follow you and the providers are clear that you are taking out a loan for the upfront cost and no messing around.
We provided more old school style ISAs with an ISA provider and they just don't work well because even if people sign clear paperwork on what they will owe, they don't feel the true cost until they get a job or they…