Amazon has the "Amazon Technical Academy" which partners with Kenzie, BloomTech, and more to train people for apprenticeships and entry level roles. BloomTech alone placed 20 people last year, so I could see the sum of people being in the hundreds.
I wish they would explain more on the companies though.
Rounding up: 7 cohorts X 4 timezones (east, central, west, onsite) + 3 part time is 31 cohorts a year times 35 people is about 1000 as an upper bound.
That said there are about 2000 grads total ever so and from CIRR last year I would peg it at 700 for 2022.
Which makes me realize that Codesmith is actually growing quite fast by adding the NYC onsite.
Enrollment for cohorts has been way slower, numerous people interviewing to start a week later whereas last year it was full months ahead of time.
A cohort has 1 lead instructor, 1 instructor, 1 mentor, and 4 part time TAs. At 150K for lead for 12 weeks and 120K for instructor and mento and $25 an hour for 80 hours a week of TA time. I get $125K a cohort in people cost plus career support, overhead and leadership, etc.. that's shared across cohorts.
But they probably need only 10 people in a cohort paying $210K upfront for a cohort to b…
They don't actually get away with it all the time, but because they are so small in the grand scheme of things, it works enough to make a difference for individual students. Other than Capital One, which is a very large company that the alumni have a machine to get you into (referring each other to jobs and practicing known questions with them), alumni spread across hundreds of companies. There are some small companies that explicitly love Codemsith grads and no need to use the Codesmith-style resume there. But most people are just slipping under the radar with a recruiter that misses this.
More importantly - Codesmith students are generally wonderful people and perform well enough on the job (even putting in hours of extra work a day to keep up) so that most companies don't look back and question the on paper experience later on.
There's some amount of imposter syndrome but it's not the primary thing holding people back.
Bootcamps grads truly are lacking numerous skills required for jobs. In many ways, everyone lacks some skills or another and not just bootcamp grads, but a significant reason for the challenging market right now is a genuine skill gap and not imposter syndrome.
You are right that attitude is important. People that keep being optimistic and diligent are finding jobs and people that are pessimistic because of the market aren't.
The key is that, while you are job hunting, keep learning so you can address the skills gaps and make them smaller and smaller.
We have this discussion a lot and people keep sending me more detailed info that makes me believe otherwise. It's very clear from official instructions to not lie but it's in office hours and 1-1s that the pressures come out in subtle ways. I am far too busy to dive into this but have all the raw ingredients to definitely demonstrate the stats on how every single student ever presents their experience and I have primary evidence of an employee telling people that Codesmith tells people to put 3-4 months of experience for their 3-4 week OSPs.
I showed some people on my eng team in person, without any context whatsoever, a guideline to consider separating OSP from "open source projects" on your resume to make the OSP stand out and how to make a LinkedIn company for that project (while also clearly saying don't lie) and someone very senior said "that's fraud".
The market right now is not great for bootcamp grads. FAANG hiring is opening up again for people with 2+ years of SWE work experience, but not for people with none. And you can't fake this work experience or stretch your resume - it's either 2 real YOE or not - faking your resume will just piss off hiring managers that will tell the recruiter that sent you over to never consider candidates from your bootcamp again and waste their time.
The only data I have here is from Codesmith. They had H1 2022 CIRR placements of 80% within 180 days of graduation for people who graduated and were job hunting. I've seen Codesmith's placement numbers for H2 2022 and for recent cohorts and they are hovering around 50% +/- 15%ish (these are not official numbers but from primary data from students and alumni) and are about a 20% drop from H1 2022 in H2 2022 and H1 2023 (which still has a lot of time left…
I've seen almost a dozen founders start programs with similar goals and ended up making the same old same old bootcamps y'all complain about today.
"Devil's in the details"
If you want to build a small program for up to 20 people at a time - what you are saying is nothing new and there are a couple of great options with similar intentions as you.
If you want to build a big scale program that serves everyone's needs, I have seen many offers fail while starting off with the same intentions.
It's really hard to read into this. I've been on the other side where I get 20 emails a day about a job posting, and I click on some things and not others in between my many other duties. Maybe they are already interviewing someone and want to wait to see if they make an offer or not before talking to you? Maybe they just forgot to reply? Maybe they are going on vacation and don't have time? Maybe they have 50 messages in their inbox and want to choose the best person?
So I wouldn't hyper react to every little thing you see. That said, it's good to be persistent and up to 3 follow ups that are short and polite is good.
\`Hi, I'm really looking forward to chatting sometime next week and wanted to make sure I didn't drop out of your inbox!\`
But I would give a few days between these messages, even if they look at your profile.
Sorry I think I completely miscommunicated and will edit. I meant you will not be one of the CODESMITH $150K cases, but you can totally do it a different path that's not CODESMITH. If you did Codesmith you might be one of the people up my DMs complaining about how bad the curriculum is and how they make you lie on your resume to trick people into getting senior jobs
Codesmith's process is extremely rigid and they know exactly what they are looking for and exactly what traits people successful in Codesmith have. The result is that they have very strong outcomes for the people they let in. So if you get rejected, it's probably a good thing, because you won't be one of the $150K success cases...
I strongly believe an engineer should - on the whole - not feel bored and if you do, you aren't being utilized for your full potential. Getting out of that though might be harder than the day to day work for your next job, but if you can gather than the motivation to do so, I would love to see you in a better spot!
I mean that might be part of the challenges too, and I would try to take initiative to do a project that will be notable for the future if you can. and asking questions like 'why is this project so important' when it's being formulated. or start by finding out the impact of your work. companies aren't charities so you must be generating more value for the company than your salary and your work has to mean something!
1. 2 years at a company is very solid and will help a ton, but try to add some of the impact/accomplishments you had and not just what you did. i.e. measurable results, or truly notable projects or accomplishments you had.
2. Consider removing bootcamp, since you have a CS minor
REPOST FROM CSC (even in tough times, be careful about stretching the truth on your resumes): "Friend got fired from one of the WITCH for showing fake experience. Is this the end?"
\+1 to all this. There's one more case that I bump into, which is if your REAL numbers look like another programs "massaged numbers" then your program is incentivized to participate in the game and figure out the best way to present your numbers so they get treated equally OR put a lot of effort into marketing that explains how clear your numbers are and how unclear the other people's are.
Question. It's a fact that the auditors use LinkedIn to verify employment. Someone puts their OSP as a "job" why hasn't this caused more problems with their audits or been discussed transparently? I've audited 200+ Codesmith LinkedIns and have a beautiful spreadsheet showing 2/3+ representing their OSPs as "Work Experience" as a "Company" (whether the company is open source or not is irrelevant from the way it's presented on their LinkedIn to an auditor who has to follow strict rules). I can give you hundreds of LinkedIns that from the "LinkedIn verification" standard in CIRR would be flagged as jobs to an unsuspecting auditor.
So based on what you are saying, either:
1. Auditors flagged to Codesmith discrepancies and Codesmith is aware of this problem and not doing anything about it to stop it.
2. Codesmith has instructed the auditors to ignore all of these companies on their LinkedIn…
\+1 this, a lot of people misunderstand what auditing means. After I called out Codesmith's auditors/and-or Codesmith for signing off and publishing the wrong report to CIRR that contained incorrect data, Codesmith published a video AND blog post about what auditing is and why it's important in validating their results and I think that it further re-iterates this notion that auditing = "better results" instead of actually explaining what auditing is.
I will keep being loud about auditing is but appreciate this haha.
Right, 14.6% of people in pacific time group didn't report salaries so might have been confirmed from LinkedIn or another source.
RE source. Yeah so CIRR has no requirements on how the salary is verified and the auditors for Codesmith said they just ask people to confirm - no offer letter required or anything.
This is the GRAD standard and sounds similar in that it's self reported:
\`\`\`
Compensation Rate
The Compensation Rate includes only annualized base compensation and excludes bonuses, equity, relocation, and any other non-base compensation. If a Graduate has held multiple positions of the same outcomes classification code within the Job Search Period, Galvanize reports on the position acquired at its discretion. If compensation information is known, it must be included. A GRAD Report must indicate the total number of Job-Seeking Graduates as well as the percentage of succes…
We agree on something again haha! Yeah the numbers in the report are audited and you have to assume they are accurate, and the focus should be on WHAT AND HOW these numbers are calculated in the super detailed weeds rather than just the numbers you see at first glance
Finally someone who reads the standards line by line!! Hello and nice to meet you!
I would love if people ready CIRR line by line too - it has many loopholes.
One of the auditors who does Codesmith said, quote, "LinkedIn is almost as gospel as anything else. So we use that to help us validate and verify as much as we possibly can" ([link](https://www.codesmith.io/blog/codesmith-outcomes-reporting-a-conversation-with-james-white-of-banks-finley-white-company))
Anyways, this is a tangent lol
I was going to spend about 10 minutes doing a deep dive but Monday mornings are very busy for me so I will come back and edit this later.
It definitely caught my eye last night!
The right thing to do here is to compare it to Codesmith's H1 2022 but since this is a different standard than CIRR you have to compare it properly and accurately.
Hi, I respect all opinions and I'm sorry your experience wasn't what you expected. Hopefully you feel like leaving was the right thing and left on a fair note. While the majority of people successfully get placed (on no guaranteed timeframe) and we try to accept people who are a good fit for what we do, we very much understand Formation is not for everyone and support people leaving who aren't a good fit.
I want to correct some inaccuracies though for others reading this and I hope my response is very fair and transparent.
1. I agree Formation is very intense and I discourage a lot of people from joining who don't seem on the same page. I'm sorry you might have joined with the wrong expectations. You can change your workload and schedule week to week up or down as things change and no other program I've seen allow this but it might be that even with that, we couldn't support your needs…
Yeah we work on fundamental skills and those people that got those jobs mentioned did not have portfolios - they openly showed up as entry level and crushed technical interviews at top companies. In this market it's just almost impossible to get those opportunities and you might end up a bit lost between "I need a portfolio!" and "I need strong fundamentals!".
In think in a perfect world the fundamentals are sufficient to kickstart your career but we'll see if the market agrees or not in Q4 2023.
Referrals are a complex topic and are not all equal, for example:
1. Referral from another Fellow
2. Referral from a mentor
3. Referral from a team member
4. Referral from a partnership/b2b connection with Formation
5. Support in finding referrals from your own network.
Not all referrals are equal and effectiveness depends on the market.
So in summary - we don't guarantee any referrals and…
You absolutely don't need to go to a bootcamp to get a job. I know many people in India who strive to go to the best IIT schools in order to get the best jobs.
The culture in India is much more intense around grinding Leetcode problems as well and people seem to have a super strong dedication to that that I don't see as much in the western market.
I'm not sure what the point is though haha maybe that's why it was deleted.
I've been thinking about this a lot and I think that feeling is a result of rising inequality in general and not running out of problems. The rich are getting richer and the gap is widening.
The bootcampers group of people is particularly sensitive to this because a bootcamp is a viable pathway for a small number of people who make the jump into the "rich person bucket" and are set for the rest of their lives - benefiting from the widening gap.
But the world is complicated and it's not so binary - rich or not. You can set yourself up on a good path, that might take several years and several steps in the journey, to achieve that dream that some bootcampers want to have in 12 weeks.
By the time this happens engineers will be working on other things.
Engineers are problem solvers and the world isn't running out of problems. If you are an engineer and not a problem solver, you are in the wrong job and your job might be replaced in the coming years/decades.
Hi, Formation isn't a good replacement for a bootcamp for most people. There have been a very small number of people that have done this but the reasons have to be right and we usually reject people without some kind of relevant experience. For example, self taught but contributions to large open source projects might be a good fit.
I don't recommend doing it in this market because almost all of these cases were people who got top tier entry level roles and sometimes from new grad headcount, and the market has tanked for entry level and new grad roles. The same struggles apply with going to a bootcamp, but I'm not also not advising doing Formstion right now in this bucket, UNLESS you have a job already and are doing it part time over a long period of time.
Second giant note: ISAs are great for the reasons you mentioned. But if you end up being one of the minority percentage that give…
The results also vary wildly based on the entry bar. So a program like Codesmith that is struggling to fill cohorts right now because of its high bar and lack of demand, has good incomes partly because the entry bar is so high to start with. This matters much more than the quality of education. Stanford and Harvard don't have some magical curriculum no one else has.... they have a high entry bar and brand that attracts the best people.
A controversial example of why I think AI will create new engineering jobs not take them away...
This is a interesting product and (while not mentioned) also shows how AI will create engineering jobs over the next few years.
Putting aside the fact that this product is both creepy and unsettling and might be very unsettling for some people (I'm sharing this based on the technology and not based on the actual use case specifically) - it's showing how a job traditionally done by humans is being enhanced and "replaced" by AI, but also creating the need for a fleet of engineers and product people to support this product.
In this case, certain police officers's jobs are being replaced/augmented but more engineers are needed to build this really world system. For example, integrating it into "any camera system", creating interfaces to communicate across different police departments, creati…
What about it made you want to join? I'm just curious because I have a soft spot for scams in this industry and try to be super thorough and I'm wondering what pulled you in and made you felt mislead.
Also curious if you had/have options to leave with pro-rated or a discount if you don't want to continue?
A bootcamp might be an ok option for you. The market is tough and a bootcamp won't get you a job within a few months for $10K to $20K. I would consider doing one if you basically want to cram in a few missing pieces under the broader CS umbrella, but not a 100% perfect solution.
I would also maybe try to get a foot in the door job at a solid tech company so that you can get the ball rolling, like Support Associate in a big tech company where you can use data skills to crush it and try to find ways to slowly convert to programming internally.
Their placements rates on CIRR seem much lower: [https://cirr.org/data](https://cirr.org/data)
And these placement rates are only OF PEOPLE WHO GRADUATE, so 70% on CIRR means "of the people who graduated, how many got a job"
I have a couple of questions to help advise:
1. What was your undergrad degree? MIS from a UC is a solid credential, but it doesn't demonstrate amazing CS skills necessarily so undegrad matters
2. Have you had a job before the MIS and what was it and how long?
3. Have you tried meeting recruiters that go to your UC?
PROTIP: try to contact new grad recruiters in September during undergrad hiring season and apply for new grad roles
I'm pretty familiar with IK because it's a direct competitor to the company I work at. I actually am not as familiar with SwitchUp - which I agree is much more like a bootcamp, whereas the other three options are shorter for job hunting support and not appropriate as a bootcamp alternative.
The only kind of hidden thing that's not obvious is that company is based in India with most (if not all) of their full time employees working in India: [https://in.interviewkickstart.com/careers#Job-openings](https://in.interviewkickstart.com/careers#Job-openings)
Their audience and majority of customers are India, but the company has numerous mentors and ties to Silicon Valley so it's still effective at preparing you for jobs in the USA based market, it should be noted that the tech market in India is extremely different than in the USA. For example, SWEs at Google in India are evaluated with much…
I would try to make a job change then, even if it's lateral. It might open up some new opportunities and can't hurt to interview for some places and see how it goes.
Look at Career Accelerators like Formation.dev (disclosure: I'm the cofounder of this program), Interview Kickstart, Pathrise, Coachable, Outco. These programs are expensive and might not be for you, but if you are looking at bootcamps you should also consider these.
These kinds of programs aim to prepare you for interviews and fill in various weaknesses you might have in levelling up. They all work well for highly motivated people by acting like a coach to get you across the line. Most of these programs are also part time and focus on people currently working.
If you are really far behind it's possible an advanced bootcamp like Codesmith could help. A bootcamp is a huge time commitment and somewhat of a waste if you are already a competent coder.
The only catch is that Leon is doing this for free. So there are no guarantees he will continue to do so, or continue with the same commitment.
If something is free and grows super large as a result, there is a cost to managing the community, the dozens of questions a day, the random people spamming, getting those people web dev jobs, adjusting the curriculum continuously as AI replaces a lot of the "Shopify developer" type jobs. If at some point he doesn't want to do it, doesn't raise funding to pay amazing people, or can't find amazing people to do it for free, it might degrade the experience.
Leon might have a lot of gas on the tank, but it's just a risk, and there are lots of risks with paid programs too.
I love the idea of the guaranteed internship. We looked into different kinds of program models based on this and many are legal gray areas that we couldn't scale. How did they solve the problem? Or are they legitimately paid internships? Or internships where you don't produce any meaningful code/IP and are just learning?
...and automobiles created tens of millions of engineering jobs and trillions of dollars of economic value.
We agree AI will drastically change the engineering industry. My view is it will create 10X more jobs than we have now doing computer related work.
I downvoted it and can explain my reasons. I don't think it's entirely bad it's just making a series of conclusions where each point could be sourced better with either data or a first principles argument.
For starters, no proof or evidence cited that AI can replace 99% of junior devs.
You might be just earlier on in the journey. The message in the video is meant for people who are already coding and concerned about the future of coding.
Full disclosure for bias - this is a video published on my company's LinkedIn page and this is my partner speaking, but this is one of the best answers to the question I've heard:
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7084626623039209472
I commented on this in another thread, this isn't meant to be mean but I want to make sure proper info is presented.
1. Springboard no longer offers an ISA. Instead they have regular loans and they have deferred loans.
2. Springboard's SWE program in 2021 had a 29% graduation within 150% (i.e. 14.5 months) rate. Which means that 71% of people that start drop out or take longer than 14.5 months to graduate.
3. The job guarantee only kicks in once you graduate. HOWEVER, interest on the deferred loans accumulates from day 1. So even if you are refunded under that (... and again 29% of people finish in 14.5 months, so odds aren't in your favor) then you will still own A TON OF INTEREST ON YOUR LOAN, even if the principal is refunded.
So don't join Springboard (or any program for that matter) that appears to have a too good to be true deferred payment method.
I said this in the other threa…
Yeah I think Colt Steele is great! We've talked to Springboard years ago as well and no complaints about the motivations and goals. Just trying to make sure people see how these things actually work so they don't go the right program for the wrong reasons.