Yes, most people think learning programming is a straight line but it's more like a tornado.
You are constantly spinning in circles and revisiting things you thought you know and trying to steer the tornado in a productive direction but keep getting pulled all over the place in rabbit holes.
So short answer yes.
But the bootcamp also isn't the end of the journey, it's a tiny step along the way. And in this market many are doubting the cost and quality tradeoff but that's a decision for you to make, not expecting a job and expecting many more steps.
This is true to some effect. It was always smoke and mirrors that 12 weeks could teach you any actual skills.
The bootcamps with the best outcomes selected for the best people with low self-confidence in their abilities, gave them self-confidence, and then they got placed.
But during the best times, bootcamps grads were the bottom of the barrel at big tech, a last resort .
Not that the bar is so much higher that's not enough anymore.
The bootcamps that figured this out have pivoted away from SWE bootcamps.
This is off topic for the sub but I have an expert answer anyways.
First off, we do need to check AI. Humans make more mistakes and their code needs to be checked.
But AI itself can do the checking and there are strategies to start with that produce fewer mistakes.
The async nature of AI,.that you can run effectively infinite agents in parallel asynchronously, means that if you can manage them well, they can replace a lot of work humans would do.
But the exact problem you point out is actually why bootcamps are toast and junior jobs are in trouble and seniors are flourishing... the taste and judgment needed to sign off on AI code and to manage AI requires a huge amount of experience that cannot be rushed or faked just because of your capacities or potential. Building systems not that are objectively correct or false, but building them to surface signals needed to make a judgment call…
The other commenter has dozens of generic comments promoting Agentix Labs and the abnormally high comment view count from Bangladesh is outside of the normal pattern.
So if your OP post was not disingenuous, your comment could be unknowingly supporting someone that tricked you and you fell for it.
And this creates a disingenuous record in the subreddit that you might unknowingly be a part of but still shouldn't be here.
You're clearly not aware of the sub's rules, so please read them before trying to invade another community and imposing your way of doing things on it. there's some of us who care about this place and we try to keep it different than than other places on Reddit strictly enforcing authentic and fair discussion and it's very tough.
Hey, I'm very familiar with this area, the transition (note, my company started because we saw gaps in people with non traditional backgrounds so that's how I know a lot about this, but we **do NOT accept bootcamp grads with no experience and I am not recommending at all to you).**
I have a FAANG lens and that's my bias, 400+ interviews conducted at Meta, trained interviewers, helped create interviews, candidate review, recruiting trips, juniors, interns, seniors, directors, etc.....
So first off, almost all bootcamps promise 'career support' and all these words on their websites, that basically we're not accurate. I got into many Reddit arguments 3 years ago with staff from a particular bootcamp that insisted it provided all the support you need for your lifetime (where the people conducting the mock interviews were mostly recent grads with minimal or no work experience).
The fact is…
Characterizing a negative piece as a journalist’s reporting when that characterization is inaccurate materially changes how it is received and can independently harm my reputation, regardless of the substance of the piece.
Please share any evidence that Lars has described himself as a *journalist* or that this piece has been presented by him as a *journalistic article*, rather than an opinion blog post.
Based on what I’ve seen so far, the piece appears to be a personal blog post, and third-party references (including platforms like Muck Rack) describe him as a blogger rather than a journalist. That distinction matters, as opinion commentary by a non-journalist is treated differently from reporting published as journalism.
If there are statements, bios, or representations where Lars explicitly characterizes himself as a journalist in connection with this post, I’d like to review them so we’re aligned on how the piece should be framed and evaluated.
Absent that, my understanding is that this should be treated as an opinion blog post, not a reported news article. If you have information that suggests other…
That person does not call himself a journalist, he calls himself a "marketer" and that is labelled as a "blog post" by the author.
You are just doing exactly what I stated you are doing that I perceive as harassment and you haven't pointed out what's factually wrong with my points.
You’re free to express your opinions.
That said, your comment history toward me consists largely of sarcastic remarks, name-calling, and repeated accusations of bad faith over an extended period of time. I don’t view that as substantive engagement.
I understand that some people in the Codesmith community strongly disagree with my tone or conclusions. That’s fine. What matters to me is whether the underlying facts, sources, or interpretations are wrong. To date, no one has meaningfully challenged those. Recently, I haven’t seen rebuttals of the data, alternative analyses or arguments to discuss, or disputes over methodology, only personal commentary.
I’m here specifically for fact-based discussion. If you believe something I’ve said is incorrect, misleading, or unsupported, I’m open to that conversation. Point out the specific issue and explain why it’s wrong, and I will review it and…
Facts and accountability are foundational. You can troll all you want, but facts are the facts and your assumptions about my intentions are not facts.
The press release I quoted says that "Federal selection followed rigorous evaluation of Codesmith's independently verified outcomes: 85-90% of graduates placed within 12 months, two-thirds promoted within three years, and an average starting salary of $130,000. Unlike competitors, Codesmith relies entirely on word-of-mouth referrals rather than advertising, with all outcomes verified by the Council on Integrity in Results Reporting."
Website: "Codesmith has proven this thesis true with 5000+ alumni. 90% of graduates get hired within 12 months, most land leadership roles within big tech & AI labs and many directly contribute to the world’s largest open source projects"
**There is nothing at CIRR that says that 85 to 90% of the 5000 gradu…
Hi and welcome. This is an interesting case because really you should be doing ML in the Masters unfortunately. ML is a more academic topic and the jobs are closer to academia (more Masters and PhDs recruiting from the top ML schools etc...).
The order of goodness is:
1. Internship at top tier tech in ML: you see the real massive scale that only top companies have
2. Academic ML at top school: you learn from the people who work with the top companies and the school has some smaller resources to poke around with
3. If you don't want an ML job and just want to learn I would take one of courses in ML from Stanford and MIT that they offer. They are quire expensive but that would be my compromise before a bootcamp. These are online certificate courses but not MOOCs in disguise. Like these things cost like $6,300 and aren't cheap: [https://online.stanford.edu/courses/cs229-machine-learnin…
I don't know if they are having it again this year but this is something to consider if you are making under $50K a year and live in the five buroughts: [https://www.codesmith.io/future-code](https://www.codesmith.io/future-code) But even in that program you have to 42.5 hours a week online (remote but it's very intense) and they suggest not having a full time job outside of that because of after hours work.
I also have been monitoring the placements because their heavily measured on people getting jobs and based on LinkedIn a see a handful of placements from the first cohort a year ago.
So it's worth looking into for sure but zooming out, even with all of that support it's insanely hard to make the transition right now.
My personal advice would be to learn as much programming as you can and then try to get an adjacent tech job, like customer support at a tech company - leveraging you…
I feel like one of the sides is behind this but I can't tell which.
Against: enrage and offend people that the masses would support billionaires
For: get attention because it sounds ridiculous but make some neutral arguments that amp down negativity towards billionaires as a generalization.
🍿
I'm not commenting on the sub but the product. My opinion from absorbing a lot of materials on this is that InterviewCoder is intentionally branded differently from Cluely and it's goal is to attract buzz and hype, but that Cluely's "real" long term product has nothing to do with interviews and a tool to help salespeople sell during live meetings. For example, by suggesting what to say during an interview.
So I also get the vibe, entirely in my personal opinion, that InterviewCoder (and really any other tools) are kind of a gimmick to get attention, and that its kind of working haha.
I'm surprised people can answer this without knowing your goals first, are you trying to learn? trying to get a job? trying to upskill for your current job? If you let me know, I can give my ideas.
And yes, the only top bootcamp that doesn't appear to have a fast timeframe or giant salary/outcome banner on their homepage is Launch School (the "slow" way to becoming an engineer).
People can say incorrect things with good intentions.
Problems happen in two cases:
1. You have bad intentions (these are the words like 'fraud', 'defamation')
2. You are negligent in verifying your statements. This one is trickier because people with good intentions might say false statements and not realize it. If you do that a few times and you promptly correct and you act in good faith... that's called being human. If you make the same mistakes or typos over and over and over despite being corrected in the past, or you repeat statements that a reasonable person doing reasonable research would not consider hard facts but you call them facts, then you start entering the gray area.
\#2 is most of Reddit. People who think they are right and they probably aren't. Bootcamps that make math mistakes and they didn't mean to.
The problems happen if you make math mistakes every time you…
Following up on this, the person who nominated me actually put "Michael's Mom" as the nominee and not me.... little do you know, my mom was a professional, employed, programmer 40 years ago.
I mean there are anecdotal spreadsheets, and you can pull up GitHub and LinkedIns and get more insights.
The key thing I'm watching right now is the number of 'did not respond' entries. That used to be almost zero, which means that the data was based on most people's reported outcomes that got audited.
Things went downhill last year in 2023 and got worse in 2024 where that number skyrocketed. The first sign I called out was the H2 2022 numbers that were obfuscated into the full 2022 report with reverse engineering.
This number means that we have placements counted based on their LinkedIns. All those 'self employed' people could people people putting placeholders on their LinkedIns for all we know because there is no methodology on how LinkedIn verifications work.
I criticized CIRR about this and they updated the spec without changing this and instead just adding to the reasons allowe…
I think there are more evil things than that.
If a generic bootcamp were to try to encourage students to push the marketing narrative even farther and to encourage the community to silence fair criticism that tries to call attention and evaluate those claims.
Nothing in life is free and in some ways that's a cost you pay to get that non-scam guarantee at the end.
I can't say that that's something I would do, but I've definitely a valid option for some people if they're transparently aware of the costs and choose to do it because it's the right thing for them.
\- I will edit to correct for 100 hours.
\- the training portion is not paid as far as my understanding, but it doesn't cost you anything like this kind of training normally would.
There is no evidence anyone is lying because lying requires proof of intent and it's extremely hard to prove intent.
I have been accursed of all kinds of "intentions" on Reddit and I'm just one person, acting as an individual, and I can yell loudly what's in my head, but it's hard to prove that, and it's hard for someone else to prove my intentions when I'm just commenting from my brain directly too.
But yeah just be careful to conclude intentions or guess them and give people room to explain. If you disagree, disagree as a matter of opinion and not fact.
Unless you have conclusive evidence of intention to deceive.
In my opinion, these numbers wouldn't encourage me personally to go to a bootcamp, but it's also a fact that some people get SWE jobs via bootcamps as well.
The conditions are important. I agree on more transparency about what jobs, where and what backgrounds people is critical for any individual who is trying to figure out if they are one of the few it will work for.
However I have to be careful because Codesmith published an official press release on the wire that claims they have a "85% to 90%" placement rate of the "5000" graduates, "$130,000" "average" salaries, "all outcomes verified by by CIRR". So that has to be assumed as fact because stating incorrect information on a press release is a whole other can of worms to deal with.
So you can't make assumptions really.
I would guess that most of them are SWE jobs or SWE adjacent jobs (like Sales Engineer). Generally the people placed from Codesmith are solid placements. But if the vast majority of people aren't reachable to confirm the placement, it's hard to judge from LinkedIn alone.
My opinion is that I think the 12% are solid mostly SWE or SWE adjacent placements yeah, and you can see a good number of those in the $100K+ bucket in the report.
The report that's coming out in April-ish is the 2024 report for CIRR, which includes nationwide students, not just California (which was about 200 students) and CIRR also has 12 month placement numbers.
The 'did not respond' rate for CIRR last year was similar to the 2023 CA report (about 40% did not) but this year's CA report had an increase in non responders.
So that's the number to watch.
This is a rough example, but if you have 100% students start, 90% graduate, 63% had jobs in a year, and 34% (of starters) approximately reported a salary.
So the 'median' salary of $110,000 includes about a third of the students, which is fine, but it's not a median salary of 'students' or of all 'graduates'. Since the data is pretty clear on this, if people feel like this representation of 'the typical grad makes $110,000' is reasonable then I think it's important to call out the qualification…
I'm proactively commenting this because a number of Codesmith-adjacent accounts (staff, alumni, etc...) have been going after me this past week with no substance and referring to this article about me: [https://larslofgren.com/codesmith-reddit-reputation-attack/](https://larslofgren.com/codesmith-reddit-reputation-attack/)
I vehemently disagree with the conclusions the blog post comes up with and the examples used not being representative of the real discussion happening, or of both sides.
I think that any discussion that's not about the facts is a distraction from critical conversaion.
Now more than ever we need to be able to argue, debate and discuss facts without insulting me, name calling, threatening, harassing with nick names, and assuming my intentions.
**Discuss the facts, not the speculation about my intentions and motivations.**
DEVELOPING: Codesmith 2024 California Government Outcomes report is out today. Only 12% are placed within 6 months with reported salary (50% including 'no salary information available') but press release also out today says '85% to 90% placement rate within 12 months' 'CIRR verified' (no time frame)
SOURCE: [https://bppe.ca.gov/webapplications/annualReports/2024/document/98d87f0e-23c1-4af7-aabf-7c91d4ea7312](https://bppe.ca.gov/webapplications/annualReports/2024/document/98d87f0e-23c1-4af7-aabf-7c91d4ea7312)
I can't legally comment much on this so instead I ran it through a neutral AI with the following prompt:
"Summarize this document and compare it to information about Codesmith you can research and flag any good things and flag any concerning things. Summarize in 5 bullet points."
* **Completion is very high, but placement is not.** Codesmith’s Software Engineering Immersive show…