One of the problems with this though is it is very non inclusive. /u/-procrastinate- I'm not sure if you have comments on diversity but it takes someone who is reasonable successful in a prior to job to have the money and/or support system in place to do 11 hour days + saturdays + extra study time for 3 months. Sure the people who put in the effort get rewarded, but statistically those people tend to be less diverse demographically and this kind of approach can make tech LESS DIVERSE long term. For example, mothers are still more often primary caregivers to their children, and with these hours it's very hard to be a primary caregiver and do Codesmith (or Hack Reactor) without savings for childcare, or a supportive family to help.
Bloomtech publishes diversity numbers and 75% of graduates identify as Male. Codesmith doesn't publish diversity numbers but I've hear they are dominated Male…
I see both sides of this working with alumni who are also conflicted. I agree with OP that it's not something trained as the key to success officially, it's more something people do because they see alumni do it and succeed, or they get stuck on the job hunt for months and day by day massage the resume a little more.
Some people do intentionally pride themselves in bs'ing their OSP under pressure and passing interviews, but not many.
I think the reason it's important to talk about is that it's a tool in a toolbelt. And when we talk about people tend to go to extremes defending or attacking this strategy. There are consequences to a lot of things in this world and there are consequences to this strategy. I think it's important people understand their tools and use them effectively instead of being sold on a magical hammer that can fix everything with no effort.
I have push notifications turned on for every single post in this subreddit yeah and I'm an inbox zero person where anytime, anywhere I try to check push notifs ASAP of all kinds (and I aggressively manage them so they aren't spam)
My day job is coding and the green boxes are the proof http://github.com/mnovati
My priority is helping Formation Fellows with advice, bug fixes, and new features and managing my team and I spend about 10 to 30 mins on Reddit a day (depending on the day)
I'm actually glad you asked, because a leader at Codemsith just assumed because I'm so on top of things on Reddit that I'm a 'dark disturbed individual who spends all day on Reddit trying to take down Codesmith' and it's always better to ask instead of assuming and making such strong conclusions.
\+1 to this, talk to people and ask what it's like.
Like zoomed out - people exaggerate their OSP on their resumes and in interviews - but it's not like Codesmith is like spending 10 hours a day teaching people how to stretch the truth without officially lying and that fact doesn't represent the vibe and feel of Codesmith as a whole.
Yeah, but maybe a caveat is that this is at bona-fide "tech" companies. Ask any eng manager and they'll tell you that internships and juniors are ,on average, net-negative financially, and the main goal is to turn them into super mid-level and senior engineers.
This doesn't apply to non-"tech" companies (it does to some but not as strong), where you are expected to have a skillset coming in and then are deploying that skillset on day one, for example, agencies, contracting companies, tech-adjacent companies (like healthcare or financial companies).
I completely agree that more Codesmith conversations should be about the substance. I'm in a bucket where I complain about people not discussing HOW Codemsith works and instead just saying fluffy reasons to go there or fluffy and vague complaints.You need to know HOW it works to know if it's a good fit for you.
I'm frequently involved in controversial discussions on here to try to steer them to more concrete discussions and present more sides. If someone posts a vague positive or negative answer, you won't get more details and valuable discussion by yelling at them.
The most frequent DMs I get are 'I really respect your consistent and thorough comments' or 'I'm at Codesmith and can't believe how accurate and representative most of your comments are' and that's my goal.
I have seen people with no SWE experience but have Ivy League school math/science degrees, friends at FAANG who do backchannel referrals, and a few years an i-banking, get $200K TC at FAANG-level companies, if that's what you mean by competitive.
Feel free to DM me if you want to share more personal stuff or your resume and I can give you my quick 2 cents on your background specifically.
1. Codesmith has a bimodal distribution, so there is a chunk of people making on the low side and a chunk of people making on the high side, and few people making in the middle.
2. But that $137K was Q2 2021 when a ton of people went to Capital One and Amazon, both companies with high base salaries (which is the only thing reported to CIRR) which bump that up significantly. It fell by $10K in Q1 2022 as those companies slowed down.
3. That is the median of PEOPLE PLACED WHO REPORTED SALARIES, not the median of all Codesmith grads, add in the 10 to 20% of people without jobs who have $0 salaries and that's not the median anymore.
I commented this above but copy pasting because it's important, I agree with the qualitative arguments, just an important note for the CIRR data:
Standard disclaimer: several people are mentioning average salaries, it's super important with CIRR data to recognize that the numbers at NOT averages, they are medians, and they are NOT the "average Codesmith grad" it is the median salary of PLACED CODESMITH GRADS, not ALL CODESMITH GRADS.
So it's the 50th percentile base salary of the 80% of people placed of the 95% of people that graduated. If you put $0 for the other 20% that didn't get jobs, the "average Codesmith grad" is making FAR less than this and the median would be shifted down to about 100 to 110K based on the CIRR distribution.
Just important to note, because I'm constantly on top of people who misrepresent CIRR outcomes.
CIRR outcomes don't include stock and bonuses so the…
Standard disclaimer: several people are mentioning average salaries, it's super important with CIRR data to recognize that the numbers at NOT averages, they are medians, and they are NOT the "average Codesmith grad" it is the median salary of PLACED CODESMITH GRADS, not ALL CODESMITH GRADS.
So it's the 50th percentile base salary of the 80% of people placed of the 95% of people that graduated. If you put $0 for the other 20% that didn't get jobs, the "average Codesmith grad" is making FAR less than this and the median would be shifted down to about 100 to 110K based on the CIRR distribution.
Just important to note, because I'm constantly on top of people who misrepresent CIRR outcomes.
CIRR outcomes don't include stock and bonuses so the actual median and average compensation is probably a lot HIGHER than what CIRR says, so I'm not saying this to bash Codesmith, I'm saying it to pro…
I'm familiar with Outco (disclosure, they are a competitor to my company Formation, and both of us are not bootcamps or directly comparable to bootcamps) and have also had some peope at Formation get super confused by their recent marketing thinking Outco was offering them a job, rather than coaching and mentoring that they were already doing with us.
I would give them the feedback that their new marketing campaign is sketchy. They are a very small company with only a few full time people, they don't have investors, and I don't think this is intentionally trying to be offensive. That said, I'm not saying anything about the quality of the training because I'm super bias and I don't disagree that it might not be worth $5000 for a lot of people... I can say that for many people having structure, direction, FEEDBACK, and practice are extremely valuable and a catalyst to a new job making \~$…
And here is the larger campaign: [https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/13jeiy4/build\_a\_dev\_upcoming\_cohort\_1\_for\_verification/](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/13jeiy4/build_a_dev_upcoming_cohort_1_for_verification/)
Their primary account was banned from this subreddit and by blatantly circumventing that ban they are risking permanent ban from Reddit :(
I commented a longer reply but it got lost because I think you deleted the comment and moved it here.
TLDR: FREE programs can have great benefit short term because you are getting value from someone doing something for free (whether it's to give back and do a good thing, or to grow a brand), but long term they aren't sustainable My post went into evidence why with numerous examples.
To give a quick example, Build A Dev used to be PAID and suffered this problem of teachers leaving and disappearing and the founder couldn't supplement. I know they have a new teacher Wei who claims to be super committed. But what happens if OpenAI gives them a $1M offer (those are real) or Wei gets a full time job and has to leave suddenly.
BTW did buildadev ask you to review/post or comment? They kept popping a few weeks/a month before the next cohort started and spammed with out of place comments about buildadev (and december cohort was cancelled and refunded afterwards). They have a cohort starting in a few weeks and now that they are banned they can't post here, but I noticed several students posting about it all at the same time yesterday.
I don't actually think you are sus like the other commenter, but just curious if BAD prompted this.
I'll post some other time about how the bootcamp industry works, because it's an essay, novel, or feature-length documentary topic.
This is a grossly oversimplified example, but hopefully gives you hope.
So in the industry a really good senior engineer is worth about 10X a typical junior engineer in the value they deliver the company, but they are paid 2 to 3X in compensation. So companies really really want good senior engineers for a reliable bang for your buck. But the best senior engineers go to FAANG-level companies and make $500 to $1M+ a year in compensation. If you are a 2nd, 3rd tier company you can't afford that talent (who by the way is delivery 10X their salary still to their company, even at those high rates).
What do you do?
You need to hire entry level people for a lot cheaper and grow and train them (and cross your fingers) that they can make a junior engineer beco…
I have a lot of questions because the founder was banned from this subreddit and almost all of their content across a dozen subreddits was deleted by moderators as spam.
They also hadn't refunded someone who paid $1000 for a cancelled cohort at least until a month ago and making up excuses for why. It's been so long the person can't PayPal dispute it anymore.
Questions:
1. How many cohorts are there? They founder said there were 300 people signed up and space was limited. But it sounds like your cohort had 15 people.
2. What is the background of the instructor? Do all the cohorts have the same or similar instructors?
3. Where do they get their money from? Even though they are not for profit, they are not a charity and they can't accept tax deductible donations.
4. How much collaboration do you have with others?
5. After 2 months you have 6-7 people left in the cohort. How many do you…
Open Source Project. 4 weeks at Codesmith are spent coming up with a group project, building the project, releasing it as a new open source project OR releasing a new version of an existing project, marketing the project, and then updating your resume to reflect the project.
The controversy around them is
1. Most people list the project as a company and as a Software Engineer (with very fine print "Project supported by a accelerator OSLabs")
2. Most people list the time spent on it as 3 to 18 months (the average being about 6)
3. The average person only committed 2 to 3 commits on the projects over 2 to 3 weeks in a sample of 200 GitHub profiles analyzed a year ago
4. The projects are supervised by a former student as a mentor who typically don't have any or much industry experience, but the projects claim they are "mid to senior level work equivalent"
Don't get me wrong, the project…
I've worked with (bias disclosure, co-founder of a coaching program for experienced engineers) a wide range of alumni from right after Codesmith, during Codesmith, down the road, people who work at Codesmith, and everyone is super professional, polite, hard working, and driven.
I've been the target of several attacks (where people have told me that posts were shared in both official internal slacks and unofficial discords) where alumni, staff, etc... have said some pretty mean things personal things about me but I think it's a very small number of peopel. Codesmith has been extremely defensive to things that I've called out. I criticized their "sponsored talks" for a lack of proper referencing of content and they staunchly defended that telling the entire student base that I'm wrong and incorrectly quoted laws that don't apply. All of that because a student blatantly copied the code sa…
Yeah I'm not hypothesizing why because I have no idea, I just haven't seen a post go from +1 to -1 to +8 to +2 on subsequent page reloads. Super weird. Like the fuzzy vote algorithm usually is +/- 1 or 2 or 3
I flagged this post for logging and it's insane how the upvote/downvote count is being attempted to be manipulated. Reddit has algorithms to prevent abuse and the way the upvote and downvotes are changing by +/- 10 when you reload the page is an indication that a lot of sketchy accounts are attempting to manipulate the post.
Hmm Philip Troutman is still listed as Head Instructor and Chief Academic Officer and most recently as a Senior Software Engineer as of Dec 2022, which was after this fork. I doubt they would do such a crazy legal risk without vetting it with an experienced lawyer or they just don't know the consequences of what they are doing.
Hi, can you confirm that the number for a reference on an OSP is actually a Codesmith phone number? My understanding is since June of last year, OS Labs Inc was forked as is an independent official charity that can't have conflicts of interest with Codesmith and must be run entirely separate by independent board members. The letters of reference I've seen are signed by Philip Troutman, Board Member of OS Labs and don't say Codesmith anywhere on them.
Yeah I think if you go into it knowingly, expecting two years of your life focused on it, and then go for that great job afterwards, it's not a bad path. I'm concerned about people that have no idea what Revature is apply to their job postings, only to realize they will be locked in for two years.
I'm also concerned for people that take the jobs and don't actually do any useful work or are like "on the bench" for the whole time. But that can work out if you spend that time studying and learning on your own for that next job.
I've been consistently commenting on this, but in the past, bootcamps have always been not that great for learning and were being over credited for the results because of the hot market. We haven't seen bootcamps go through a tech downturn EVER.
All of the "There were a lot of challenges but I followed the advice to just stick with it because it works, and I got a six figure job!" .... are turning into "there were a lot of challenges but I followed the advice to stick with it because it works, and no one in my cohort is employed, what a scam!"
1. It's so important to learn HOW a bootcamp works to see if it's a good alignment for you. If people say "firehose", "hard learning", "just follow their advice" then you should start asking how it works at all and what people are actually learning. If they are "learning how to learn" or vague things like that, dig deeper and be honest! At Codesm…
Yeah the OSP posts that get tons of engagement have also been controversial. On the one hand, an incredibly supportive and engaged community. On the other hand, Codemsith steers that raw awesomeness and it comes across people spending almost more time promoting their OSP with posts, websites etc.. than they actually spend on the OSP itself and then get celebrated for it.
I also think some of that fear above is misplaced. Like it's very very very rare someone disappears out of the community (from what I've heard) but people seem to really really want to do what Codemsith tells them to do because the community is so close and the remote possibility of losing touch is so scary that people are super cautious.
I mean why the community is abnormally strong is for you to decide. Some say it's a family who have "family dinners" every week and some say it's unintentionally cult like.
I watche…
I've spoken with several people who are currently in Codemsith or recent graduates concerned about identifying themselves for fear of being removed and shutoff from the community. Codesmith staff monitor this sub closely and if you give any info that could identify your cohort or OSP project and they find you, you might get in trouble. There was a mega AMA thread recently that disclosed a ton of numbers and info that was allowed but it was very positive.
So I agree this won't be useful without the why, but the OP might have reasons.
Spark is a heavily trademarked word used by Apache for "Spark", a popular query language.
So if this is revolutionary you should look into that before you get sued and have to change the name.
I'm a principal engineer with 15+ professional YOE and I spent an hour today figuring out that someone named a variable \`blankId\` that was not an "ID" but was an object. If ChatGPT told me this straight up, I would have saved an hour, but I would not have gained the permanent problem solving insight for our codebase (and the engineers working on it) that digging into it myself resulted in.
Hi!
1. How many people made it from start to end in your cohort?
2. What kinds of group projects did you do and what kind of review or mentorship did you receive?
3. What were the backgrounds of your instructors and your TAs?
This is true for the most part. They are working on updating their materials by having alumni in the industry give official feedback. The ethos of education is "hard learning" and they want you to learn how to learn when overwhelmed, so I don't think they care that much about the curriculum. But enough people have complained I think they are looking into it.
I kept a close on on the staff backgrounds since I was shocked to see the vast majority of alumni exaggerating their OSP experience in number 4.a. I investigated after numerous staff members where I work didn't realize Codesmith alumni had no experience based on their resumes and the people were not super clear in their interviews either :(.
There are about 80ish +/- a lot out of 130ish employees on their website that are alumni of Codesmith itself (it fluctuates a lot, check for yourself!)
50ish are TAs/Fellows, 15ish are career…
By web developer I mean people who are doing just HTML and CSS and primarily working in tools like Webflow, or doing custom Shopify websites or marketing emails.
Someone in that role is a common person to do a more advanced program to level up to. “Software Engineer” role
Codesmith is aiming at getting people legit software roles and it’s one of the reasons outcomes are high. A lot of bootcamps place people in support roles or customer analyst roles or developer roles… again why it’s so important to find the right program for you because depending on your goals, do you want to choose the right path or you don’t wanna just go to Codesmith because the numbers on paper so high
I think it will help figure out if Codesmith is for you and what is needed to get in - which is the goal right?. If your goal is to learn and not get into Codesmith then I would use other resources as CSX isn't the focus.
In general, the bar is set so you kind of have to figure it out on your own. Whether that means leveraging the community, self studying, googling, hours of trial and error, finding pair programming buddies, etc... Codesmith selects for people that can figure it out on their own and it's a trait that will help you succeed as an engineer.
While in Codesmith you have access to more people for support, but oftentimes it's peers and recent alumni who are TAs and many describe it as a firehose of constantly feeling behind (which is what staff say is expected and normal). So if navigating a state of constant confusion isn't for you then it might not be the best program for you... not saying it isn't, just suggesting to consider if it's the right program for you vs wanting to get in because you think it's the best program.
Some possible things to consider for help:
1. Ask in Slack - don't just…
Codesmith is a top bootcamp yeah and produces arguably the best results of any bootcamp.
But it really matters most if it's best for YOU and how it happens is more important than the raw results.
It's more like they only let in people who are more likely to succeed and hence more people succeed than other program.... rather than anyone who gets in has a golden ticket to success.
Reason why they are really good:
1. Very high entrance bar and only let people who meet the bar
2. Excellent alumni network who stay close to Codesmith
3. The founder cares a ton about teaching... I bet he would love to just teach all day and not deal with the business side haha.
4. They are extremely good at helping people leverage their ambitiousness to present themselves most strongly for jobs
1. This is often controversial because some people feel they support you in lying on your resumes to get past…
I've been keeping my eye on the NYC Codesmith one and their in person demand is much much much lower than remote despite in person being a really powerful experience there. They even held open enrollment for the next cohort until much longer than normal and were pushing applications on their channels.
Can't wait for scientists of the future to analyze how COVID changed humanity.
I think their representation on CIRR doesn't jeopardize the reliability of their data, but rather it's a conflict of interest because the specification itself is written by the people who have a vested interest in their data looking the best possible. And the issues with CIRR lie in the lack of clarity in the spec and reporting requirements that mask things (i.e. reporting percentages vs absolute numbers, lack of clarity on gathering salary data).
I think the bigger conflict of interest is with OSLabs - which is a legit-donation-accepting charity that offers letters of reference for students that make it look like they were involved with a separate entity without disclosing that the student was PAYING to do said work for CODESMITH's immersive program.
Hello friend, you asked for tough questions, so I'll throw out some of the tough ones since you are an employee, I expect you might not be able to answer them but you've repeatedly asked for tough questions so I'll try!
EDIT: just want to make sure that I disclose that I'm the co-founder of mentorship and training program (that is not a bootcamp or direct competitor to Codesmith, but we tend to work with a number of people who graduated from borocamps at some point in the past) to be transparent about biases.
Hard Questions:
1. How does Codesmith staff handle when a resident gets called out for OSPs not being real work, e.g. in the offer process or during interviews? Or phrased differently, is there a stance internally on how to handle students that have issues with their OSPs during interviews?
2. How do background checks work for OSP projects and how does Philip Troutman get away…
I don't run a bootcamp (Formation is meant for people with existing professional SWE experience) and a Codesmith leader has called me a 'dark and disturbed individual who spends all on day on Reddit with the sole purpose of taking down all the great work Codesmith has done' so I wouldn't say I'm positive about bootcamps.
I feel like I grill them pretty fairly, I'm surprised no one is asking any tough questions on here!
I agree that it does sound a bit like leadership may have directly or indirectly promoted this person to post, or discussed it with employees (which OP is currently) but I also think they disclose the bias which is a good step.
If it means anything, I've been chatting with this person for almost a whole year and they've been pretty legit the whole time.
I'm not supporting or defending Codesmith here, just adding that fact
The part time program seems to reach a fairly different demographic and have a different vibe than the full time program. It has the highest rate of people ghosting post graduation and more people delaying/deferring/leaving early, etc... and a lot of people I know are encouraged to join the full time one.
It really depends on your goals and your personal situation. I would try to do free prep from all of the options, or your top 3 options, and see which one you like the most and feel is most effective and choose that.
i.e. Codesmith CSX, Rithm School, Launch School, App Academy Open, etc...
Oh yeah it's absolutely a factor in your decision making. To rephrase my point, you should not perceive the outcome you will get as proportional to the cost. i.e. I'll go for the $10K bootcamp to get a $70K job because I can't fork over $20K for a bootcamp to get a $120K job. Someone who goes to Codesmith and gets a $120K job will probably get a similar job from any legitimate bootcamp.
I don't know Coding Temple but I would make your own decision of if Codesmith is right for you and not over index on one negative post.
Codesmith leadership hates me and thinks I'm trying to take them down for some reason, but I'm a very middle of the road person and I see a lot of people over indexing on one or two anecdotes on Reddit so I want to caution people against doing that.
The post highlights numerous weaknesses of Codesmith - it's not perfect, it has many caveats and nuances. But for the right people it's the best program out there and if you've done your homework, talked to alumni, understand the day to day of how it works and what you do, then I would choose it!
Course Report is sponsored by a ton of bootcamps and creates content/videos/blog posts for sponsorship that is not disclosed. So it's not entirely unbiased.
The cost of Codesmith doesn't have anything to do with the success rate. It's not like you can spend 15K and have an ok outcome and $20K to get a slightly better one.
Codesmith's outcomes are because they have a very high bar, let in people likely to succeed and then nurture them. Getting in is the major factor, not paying more because it's more expensive than others.
If you leave the program early without a job because you, for example, no longer want to job hunt, or have a major unexpected life change, or you can't commit to the program anymore, or you just don't like it and want to leave early, then you pay a pro-rated amount depending on how long you were in the program.
If you get a job, or are actively interviewing early on, you get access to our full arsenal of support, including 1-1 mock interviews targeted to the types you need (if we support it: i.e. algos, live coding, system design, behavioral, hiring manager, and more) and negotiation support, and you have to pay the full price.
At the end of the day, if the vast majority of people don't get a "return on investment" from Formation than the program doesn't work, so we want to make sure you get your money back and more in value - whether that is cash value in your negotiations, a permanen…
We now have more upfront options including loan with partners, deferred loans (until you get a job, up to certain time limits), interest-free loans (if you qualify), and are working on more income-based deferred options.
Our mission is to help improve diversity in tech and we want to be accessible so we are doing the best we can to offer more pricing options so people can find one that works for them.