The statistics I’m using are from their 2021 California government report on their website and the program length is listed as nine months. Which means that only 29% of people graduate within 14 1/2 months so while they might give extensions and not cancel the job guarantee. Ultimately people are not graduating. I actually don’t think this rate is very low and I’m not complaining about that, I’m just saying that the job guarantee might seem extremely appealing and you might feel like spring worth a safe bet to get a job but in 2021, 71% of people didn’t graduate in 14 1/2 months. So if you were aware that it might take you years to get a job and you may not pay anything for years I think that’s still a pretty good deal but just something to be aware of that it’s not gonna happen in nine months and you need money to live off of during that time.
The job guarantee kicks in once you graduate, if you meet certain requirements. So if you don't graduate, which it seems like most people don't, you don't get any money back.
Bloom Tech has moved in this direction as well. They quote the amazing placement rate amongst graduates, but the rate is amazing because they make it very hard to graduate. Meeting the criteria to graduate is an arduous journey and self selects for those who are likely to get jobs. The people lost along the way pay reduced refund rates and cut their losses or blame themselves for not being able to make it.
In 2021, according to their own data, in the SWE program, about 29% of people graduated within 150% of the expected time (and 7% graduated on time). So a lot of those ISAs are not being cancelled....
One very specific thing that came up recently in a different thread is that a lot of people misinterpreted their 87% placement rate.
There report clearly states that 87% OF PEOPLE WHO GOT A JOB, got the job within 6 months of graduating (and 13% of people who got a job took longer), but not that 87% of people who started got a job within 6 months of graduating.
They have a refund policy if you stick to their requirements, you get a refund if you don't get a job within 6 months, so that might also be factoring into the above \^\^\^\^
So the question I would ask them is how many people graduate, how many people dropout, and what are the common timeframes and reasons for people that dropout.
The other non-obvious thing is that they are entirely owned by Yandex - the global conglomerate. This isn't a bad thing at all and could be a good thing, but it's just something not obvious even in…
Oh wow, yeah if you used your existing network to get this internship then you likely won't benefit as much as others would from the network effects of a bootcamp.
I tried to explain the consequences in the above, if enough people do it, then companies will raise their YOE requirements to "4 years for entry level roles" and they will just ignore resumes without at least 1 year of experience - to weed out any bootcamp grads exaggerating their projects to be close to a year (like I see on all the Codesmith resumes that apply to my company)
Hey I think we might have chatted long ago (Reddit deleted legacy chats from before Jan 2023) but feel free to ping me. I think you should work with the manager to set yourself up to convert full time, take the position, give it 120% and don't do any bootcamp.
I know I might seem bias here because Formation is intended to help people like the above to get that really amazing second job/third job, but I genuinely think you will accelerate your career by taking trying to convert full time as soon as possible. By the time you would have graduated a bootcamp + 3 months (super conservatively to find a job) you'll have accumulated actual work experience that cannot be replaced by anything.
If you go to Codesmith and give that your 120% instead, you might get a $120K first job but you'll be starting from 0 at that job (don't let "mid level and senior" marketing influence this, you are starti…
And that's the dilemma.
Don't put it on, cross your fingers, better chance at job, but hurt all your peers who are applying right now.
Or put it on, tell your story, and cross your fingers someone finds it appealing. But gets rejected just for going to bootcamp.
Some are gone, but some are just the links not working because the links changed or they are seasonal and the site comes up and down. Airbnb, for example, has an active apprenticeship even though the link is broken, because it's active only once a year in the spring.
Codesmith, Rithm, Launch School are all doing well. Smaller programs with a high bar - while having lower application rates of qualified people - are finding enough people at the bar to keep running.
That said, we'll have to see how 2023 holds. Bootcamps are a great way to accelerate learning for motivated individuals but it's one step of many, and you'll need a lot of time and effort to get a job for the foreseeable future.
I get asked numerous times a day in DMs what IS the answer then. And I don't have one for everybody - it's a different path for everyone and there is no guaranteed single path - which I understand is super frustrating - but it is what it is.
This is such a tough problem and I hope we have some good discussions on here.
On an individual 1-1 basis, I strongly believe people should put it on their resumes and be proud of it. Your resume should tell your story and journey, and this is a part of it. And the more unique and interesting your overall journey, the more likely it will be to get calls - despite the stigma of a bootcamp.
From the company side, because some bootcamps encourage people NOT to put it on their resumes it has really pissed off a lot of bigger companies when they find bootcamp grads that squeezed through the process for experienced roles they weren't qualified for and waste interviews time. At Facebook, there was nothing more damaging than wasting an engineers time and when this happened - even once - there would be outrage. As a result, some recruiters at companies just ignore all bootcamp grads and anyone…
They did a call with two people that got jobs self teaching with many resources but not necessarily CSX and didn't publish anything, so not sure. I highly doubt anyone/many does ONLY CSX and no other resources and gets a job.
This is a bit sarcastic but I agree you could easily to this on your own. You could pay a Codesmith alumni to mentor you and sign off on each thing too.
In retrospect I think my comment is a bit too stern. I think people should give a thorough background, what they were expecting and why they went in, and then what their outcome was in the main post for an AMA. So people can evaluate in as much context as possible.
Open Source is a bit tough because it's so intimidating to contribute to giant projects. As it should be - because they are codebases similar to top tech companies and if you joined Google tomorrow it would take time to navigate the code.
So if you plan to contribute over 6 months and longer, you might be able to make some small contributions to large project, but you'll learn a lot.
There are a set of smaller projects, like MUI, that are run and maintained by tiny company of a few people. These are easier to contribute to and get something on your portfolio and still fairly legit. But harder to find.
Another option here is to start a company with friends and make a startup that does something legit and gets some users and has a bank account, state registration, etc...
For free work - startups. Ping YC startups before demo day and hope you get paid when they realize money. Or do pr…
I have nothing for or against TripleTen/Practicum and I don't know them that well but the 87% stat is not entirely correct.
"The outcomes presented in this report were collected through an online survey of 1613 alumni who’d graduated before 2H 2022 and reported working in a field relevant to their training." [SOURCE](https://practicum-content.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/usa-main/Outcomes_Report_2022.pdf)
87% of graduates **who got jobs**, got them within 6 months of graduating. That does NOT mean 87% of graduates got jobs. It's very clever language though and it's very clearly explained in large font so I don't think they are hiding anything, it's just that stat might be being misinterpreted.
So the 87% doesn't account for people who drop out, or people who didn't get jobs at all. It means 13% of graduates **who got jobs** took longer than 6 months to do it.
Just FYI a lot of ISAs now have changed, and usually the bootcamp does get a large chunk of the cost whether you get hired or not. ISAs have several agencies wanting to treat them like loans, and while no laws have been passed, the market has been shifting to where you take out an ISA with a financial institution, like Stride, and Stride covers your fees for the program.
I've seen both small and large projects be impressive and the key is that their most memorable ones solve some kind of unique problem or do something uniquely interested aligned with a passion.
Some examples:
1. Walt Disney World itinerary generator
2. Machine learning sheet music generator based on a classical composer producing printable sheet music
3. A iOS game that was like guitar hero but had a novel mechanic
If you forced yourself to do any of these they likely wouldn't be impressive because what was impressive was the creators hit walls that only someone super passionate about those areas would hit and tried many solutions inspired by this higher level of knowledge.
What I've been seeing is a strong demand for senior engineers, and decent demand for mid-level engineers (1 to 3 YOE) that have worked at pretty solid companies for a few years.
I've seen people with experience but not necessarily full time strong experience (i.e. they might have contract work, large resume gaps, lots of job changes, or are bootcamp/CS grads with no experience) get pretty good jobs that in the boom-times, graduates of Codesmith, Hack Reactor, Rithm etc... (i.e. the top bootcamps) were getting - i.e. 100 to 140K great junior positions.
So my advice to top tier bootcamp grads at these top bootcamps is to not try to sneak into those 120K entry level roles that 2021 and 2022 alumni were getting and to aim for apprenticeships and internships. e.g. start with [apprenticeships.me](https://apprenticeships.me). NOTE: I'm sure I'm going to get some people commenting on here that…
Hackbright has an extremely strong network that sticks together in the future and it has a lot of people that end up at top companies 3 to 5 years in the future.
Historically, Hackbright had a ton of support pre-acquisition. Many top companies, including Facebook, officially supported them by getting strong engineers to be mentors there.
Hackbright would then have these interview days where mentors could interview people to hire - and if they did hire, they had to pay like $20K or something as a fee (in addition to the feed the student paid Hackbright themselves). Problem was almost no one met the bar. Facebook hired a handful of people ever.
So a lot of the top companies dropped support and it wasn't worth the investment of time and cost - they could find good engineers elsewhere cheaper and faster.
Hackbright switched gears a bit and started to focus on apprenticeship partnerships…
Define "fails me". I think that's the key you need to look into. What did the program promise and how? What did the contract say? How did you pay for it?
Happy to give more advice if you start by answering those, or DM'ing me.
Success stories aren't anomalies but they also aren't the norm. It's somewhere in between and that's why they come across so polarizing - because people only talk about one end or the other.
You could be a good candidate for a bootcamp. Especially if you did some CS courses in college (which it doesn't sound like you did) I would say an even stronger yes. You can absolutely do more than web dev via a bootcamp. Bootcamps try to teach marketable skills so their graduates have a resume of buzzwords that overlap with the most jobs possible. Some try too hard and teach 6 languages and you don't end up learning anything. So the best ones end up in the middle, teaching one language / framework, while exposing them to a couple of others in a lighter way.
Anyways, look at Codesmith, Rithm, Launch School Capstone, and the usual suspects and see if they are a good fit for you. Look at the day to…
It changes constantly. We work with a lot of people who want canonical FAANG and we work with FAANG who want the even "better" tier of companies (FAANG level engineering bar and product but earlier stage with more upside). Notion and Figma (pre acquisition) are that level. Stripe and Square were also that level during COVID. Now it's shifting to AI a bit, like Open AI.
The three criteria:
1. super strong engineering culture and engineering driven decisions
2. product or service is leading edge / best in class and at a fairly large scale / making money / growing fast
3. top compensation and significant equity (on par with the canonical FAANG)
These companies also tend to have very similar levelling systems to each other
The reason I care so much is because I work with people aiming for FAANG and top tier jobs and a number of people come from Codesmith and we have materials on levels incorporated so people can learn how to navigate levels at these companies.
I totally understand how most bootcamps grads realize the levelling at their first job is different from FAANG but Codemsith is the exception where people come in wanting Senior FAANG roles because one person at Codemsith got a Senior role at Google and it's a whole process to explain that that role was entry level - not Senior and some amount of disbelief because Codesmith said it was senior.
Pragmatic Engineer just wrote about levelling today in an amazing post - with the subscription fee: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/what-is-a-senior-software-engineer
I've worked with a few people who have this kind of background and got good jobs. I wouldn't recommend Formation though for you because you are looking for practical skills. We do (as of July 2023) a minimal amount of version control and production coding - but we don't "teach" anything, it's all practice + feedback and you have to be the driver.
If you are considering doubling down on fundamentals and applying to to top tier companies, consider Formation. If you want to get practical experience and then a job applying those practical skills, then I would suggest getting involved with a large scale open source project (that has support from a large company) that checks the boxes and contributing fixes over a few months.
The job market is tough right now for someone with your background and there aren't any paths that will make it particularly fast.
I have a lot of questions!
1. What was your background before App Academy? Job/degree, etc...
2. What company did you get a job at (or type of company)?
3. Is it a full time job?
4. Is it a SWE job?
5. Is the job in any field related to your background?
6. How did App Academy help with getting the job?
7. How long post App Academy did it take to get a job?
8. How did you find the new job?
9. What do you want to do next in your career?
So for a lot of the people I've worked with - they are awesome, hardworking, driven, and those qualities lead to their success on the job. In some cases that gets misdirected to something Codesmith did - and perhaps confidence-building-as-a-product is the product you are paying for with Codesmith - and it's worth it.
That problem you talk about is a fantastic problem to work through and great in an interview, 100%. That doesn't mean it's "production level" though. I had several notable personal projects I talked about in interviews that were super impressive but the code was not "production quality code". One "project" we actually incorporated a company and it was featured on TechCrunch - and even the code was not "production level", it was a group project with tens of thousands of lines of code, had a ton of fascinating product, growth, and technical problems, and it got me a job at Fa…
I can add details and caveats from various discussions with dozens of Codemsith alumni and from analyzing public OS Labs repos
When people on here call Codesmith "culty" three reasons are
1. they convince students these projects are production level projects. They are not and I've looked at many of them. Most don't work properly, many have commented our code and terrible practices, mish mashing libraries, no planning, and fellows/mentors who have no experience. Ive done hundreds of interviews and I have yet to see a OSLabs CODEBASE (the ideas for the projects themselves are great) that would pass as a production codebase and any employer impressed by someone actual code contributions didn't look at the code or did so with the understanding it was a 3 week project and not expecting production code.
2. Do you get formal paperwork you were accepted into OSLabs? Do you sign paperwork wit…
There are other ways yeah :D.
Ada Developer's Academy is free, 4 months of training and 5 month internship with their partners. They had to scale back because of the economy but it's been consistently reliable for getting people into the industry.
I also know several people who are self taught with a tech-adjacent background (other engineering degree or math degree) - focusing on LeetCode and gunning for entry level FAANG roles and got those jobs too (e.g. Amazon and Palantir). **I would not advise this at all right now because of the market** but it's a path that can work for the right people.
Apprenticeships are another pathway - seen several people with no experience get Apprenticeships (e.g. via OnRamp) that led to good jobs.
There's no one size fits all here and the hard part is figuring out what to even do! Too many people do a whack-a-mole approach where they start everything…
I agree with this too, I just think it's important people sign up for it to play the game and understand the game well and not to sign up because they think Codesmith is a magical place that teaches them things they can't learn anywhere else. Don't just choose Codesmith because it has high outcomes and all the reviews say superficially great things about it being life-changing or they made amazing friends or that the program was intense and "hard learning".
I would say that all bootcamps students are signing up to play some kind of game but different programs have different ways of branding that and you want to choose the one that does things in a way you are aligned with... for some people that Codesmith and for others it's not
I have commented on this extensively from an outsider point of view but commenting for distribution. Codesmith leaders follow me with anonymous accounts so hopefully people will comment on this.
Correct, they are generally motivated and also can afford a super expensive service after just doing an expensive program generally from past success and savings.
I don't have meaningful stats because it's not enough people, but the range is 2 months to 14+ months and counting (we work with you for as long as it takes with no limits)
By the way, it totally trickles down. So we generally support people getting jobs at top tier companies and more people have been taking positions at good-but-not-top-tier companies that in the past Codesmith-level grads were getting, and Codesmith-level grads are getting jobs that less good reputation bootcamp grads were getting, and then those people are not getting any jobs.
Correct, market is not good for people with no experience and particularly bad with bootcamp grads. We work with a small number of bootcamps grads, to be the strongest they can be and those people still take a really long time to find jobs,.
I help run a coaching and mentoring platform and we work with hundreds of experienced engineers to prepare for and find jobs. In the past month or two we've seen a large increase in interviews, onsites, and offers. I don't have exact numbers (we're working on that too) but anecdotally, there were many more offers in June and we hope this trend continues.
That said, there are people who are really struggling and the market remains difficult and you'll see opinions and experiences all across the board, which is why having a birds eye view is useful.
Competition remains high. For example a top candidate might interview at all the top companies and get 2-3 offers instead of 6-7 - where many of the rejections the person passed the technical bar, but another candidate was more experienced or qualified.
Bootcamps enrollment is way down. Codesmith's NYC cohort starting Monday was still conducting interviews as of Thursday and they keep moving back deadlines. They are also doing an "apply-a-thon" to give people prizes for applying.
Rithm has said demand remains strong as has Launch School - but both are smaller programs.
On the plus side, the market is picking up and people are asking me more questions about going to bootcamps so maybe that will change in a few months.
I think about this every time I get attacked. These are my THEORIES (no strong evidence):
1. A lot of accounts have no history and are new, so I wonder who the people actually are
2. I know many people privately have problems with specific leadership at Codesmith ("sketchy", "sleezy", "used car salesman", "lied to me", "obsessed with Codesmith's image"). Apparently there are unofficial ways people talk where they discuss their issues with the leaders. Now we haven't seen a leader once use their real identity and respond to things, so I suspect there could be leaders with fake accounts replying sometimes and displaying the behavior of the words above.
3. Codesmith currently has about 100 former students on staff (full time and part time and contracting) listed on their website.And this list rotates constantly. So I suspect 25% of all students end up working for Codesmith in some capacity…
I constantly point out the pros and cons of Codesmith but I have to say that all the grads I've encountered in reality - with names and faces - are extremely professional, polite, hard working, ambitious.
Skill wise, most also have a lot of gaps to fill to getting to be truly mid level and senior engineers but they are truly solid entry level engineers and competitive with strong computer science graduates. I think a lot comes down to the personality and drive of the person.
Just FYI, disabilities are a "protected class" and hiring people with/without specific disabilities is illegal federally and in many states - so you might want to get some legal advice on this if you are in the USA (or a country with similar laws) or research that a bit more.
Frontend at FAANG:
1. You'll learn more about how the company works that will be useful later on
2. You'll work with really talented people that will be useful later on
3. You'll have opportunities to change roles at the FAANG if you perform well