Launch School's capstones are the most comprehensive projects I've seen personally. They are similar in spirit to Codesmith OSPs but have a solid level up in terms of the structure of the code, presentation of the projects, etc... They are more similar to "real" open source projects, rather than a group project that was open sourced.
There are some that follow me and very quickly downvote almost anything I comment about Codesmith that doesn't say it's the best program.
It might be that.
You are just digging a hole for yourself and proving my point. I have nothing against you, but just be nice and make Reddit a better place.
1. Here's my GitHub and clearly code is what I do all day: [https://github.com/mnovati](https://github.com/mnovati)
5,435 contributions in the last year
Today for example, while I'm allegedly spending all my time on Reddit: "37 contributions on Friday April 7th".
2. Ask anyone at Formation how responsive I am in channels. Fellows are the #1 priority in supporting.
I know a leader at Codesmith thinks I'm a "disturbed" person spending all of my day Reddit obsessing over them but don't listen to that garbage.
I work almost all the time, absurdly hard, and training and mentoring is my entire life and I'm lucky that my partner is doing it with me so we can spend all of our time doing it.
I think you are reading what you want to read from my more controversial comments. Your entire comment history on Reddit is about Codesmith on Codesmith posts.
I've been here for a year, giving daily helpful advice on all kinds of topics that aren't Codesmith. I've talked to dozens, possibly over 100 people, advising them to go to bootcamps (often Codesmith) based on their situation and goals. I've even advised people to go to competitors to Formation.
Instead, I get Codesmith leadership following my posts, circulating internally, anonymous accounts commenting on my posts, and complaining about me, when they should probably be paying me for helping a bunch of people choose Codesmith who weren't sure about PRIVATELY IN DMs.
I've said many times that we don't have that many direct-from-bootcamp alumni and we actively waitlist many or out right reject, this is not our target demographic…
For Formation, we don't typically take people directly after a bootcamp, but sometimes we do. It's a really hard market right now so we don't take people who are struggling to get a job and expect us to hand them a job. On the opposite end, if you graduate and immediately want a FAANG job, it's not an ideal time to join unless you have a very long time.
The bootcampers we would consider taking right now are people that have a lot of time, want to fill in fundamental CS gaps that no bootcamp covers, and see the cost of the program as paying for that skill boost, and are aiming for the best job they can get in whatever the market is. We also have different capacity of different experience levels and as it takes longer for these engineers to get jobs, there are fewer slots.
We don't have any behind the scenes deals or partnerships to feed you to companies. We have dozens of staff and men…
Looking into a career accelerator. I'm the co-founder of Formation.dev, and other ones you should look into are Interview Kickstart, Pathrise, Outco, Scaler, Coachable. All of these programs are very different day-to-day and focus on different things, but they help people with step 2, 3, 4, etc... of your career.
If you have a solid year of experience, you probably aren't missing any practical skills for big tech. Big tech expects to train you in their own stacks, which are so complicated even experienced engineers need training.
You are probably missing the DS&A fundamentals, interview practice, system design, and behavioral training to talk about your 1 YOE effectively, and these are the things the above work on \^\^\^\^
If you can't stomach another $5 to $15K on a new program, then consider a la carte Interviewing.io sessions. If you are super lost, try to leverage your network, D…
Fun story, but I was the sole engineer on the first version pre-Workplace workplace (i.e. Facebook Groups for Work) so I never made a Workplace account! When I left you could choose between Workplace or personal accounts and it wasn't until later they forced you to have a WP account.
I used to have a weekly newsletter that was on old Notes so it's probably extremely hard to find now that they are gone :(
If I was starting today, I probably wouldn't know that many people. I was engineer number \~220 at FB and when I left, there were about 8 to 10K engineers. I was the number 1 most internally followed non-manager and in the top 20 most followed employees over all in the internal workplace version of Facebook and I knew literally thousands of people.
I can only give second hand information from first hand students, employees, former employees, so take it with a grain of salt.
The reasoning provided, summarized across a few people with similar versions - all being told this from the same employee, was that 'entry level jobs at FAANG are full of grunt work and easy problems that you are overqualified to solve' and that 'mid level and senior jobs involve hard problems that Codesmith is training you to solve'
Even if you believe the argument (which I strongly do not), I don't know why that means that your career though is hindered by it.
I've heard from numerous people over a year or so now that: the outcomes advisor's negotiation strategy is 'just ask for $150K, only a mid level engineer would ask for that so it help legitimize your position' and from the head of instruction: 'the OSP projects are mid level work equivalent to severa…
Hi, it's a bit off topic but I'll answer since based on your history you seem to be asking legitimately and not trying to troll me with new accounts haha.
First, overall we're focusing on top tier companies broadly. We always meant FAANG as "FAANG-level" companies, and we're adjusting communication to make sure people don't come expecting a LITERAL FAANG job - since most aren't hiring right now.
Second, we work with people for no fixed time period, so how people are responding to the market is very personal - some want to wait it out (and we support you for as long as it takes if you keep showing up and doing the training) - some are focusing on other top tier companies - some are casting wider nets. Some people are frustrated with the job market and giving up. Some people are taking the change to level up so they are ahead of the pack. We liken ourselves to a personal trainer, so we'r…
I edited it, this isn't the best comment thread and it's more of a rant on the "mid-level" topic and I agree you should never trust strong blanket statements and ask for more qualification on them
I stand by it for FAANG companies. It's why they almost always round down levels if someone is in between.
At a bank, or non-tech-focused decent company, it might matter less and you might not plan to stay for a long time, and you don't have the possibility of making millions of dollars following this.
Eric at Codesmith tells people that mid level worse companies are better than entry level FAANG jobs because FAANG companies make you do all the grunt work. And that's the thing I thing I'm pushing back on as I believe the exact opposite and can back that up for FAANG companies.
The companies for 3 are critical to understanding position level, which makes the levels and titles somewhat meaningless.
I know a number of people that even after normalizing for the actual responsibilities and company still get more senior roles than they should at "medium" level companies. As Fluffy said, it's stressful, constantly worried about getting fired, in a an environment of layoffs, constantly worried about being the lowest performing midlevel/senior on the team.
I feel extremely strongly this is something to avoid and will happily debate their outcomes advisor publicly about this.
(EDIT: From a Facebook, Google, Amazon, perspective) I'm very biased because all junior people I know who were under leveled and out performed had amazing careers and received disproportinately large stock grant bonuses, and the people who were over leveled were managed out or fired within 1 to…
When live instruction is "free" some questions to ask are:
1. Who are paying the instructors? If they are paid, where is the money coming from to pay them? If they are not paid, why are they volunteering and how reliable and committed will they be?
2. How does the program make money in general? Donations? Grants? Do they get paid to place people at partner companies? Do they place you in lower paying jobs and take a cut from the companies behind the scenes?
3. Do you have to sign any contracts? If so read the fine print.
I can add more to what "encouraged" means. They have lecture and references materials that do no encourage anything strongly as the "official" stance. Where these "encouragements" come out are:
1. Former students who are resume reviewers, TAs, etc... might give that advice 1-1 because of "other people who did it and succeeded"
2. In verbal Q&A's it might come up as an option to help you
3. You talk to alumni directly on Slack who get placed, ask them for their resume, see what they do, and copy them.
It sounds like Codesmith is the one you are naturally leaning towards. No one will shame you or force you to exaggerate at all, they help you represent your work however you want to represent it. You might be one of the few that get a really good job regardless or you might have a harder time. A lot of people I know end up in the middle. They don't want to exaggerate, but you have Eric Kirsten constantly telling you that you are hurting your career by taking a junior job and that Codesmith prepared you for mid level jobs, and you see the resumes of the people getting those jobs, and it starts to feel not so bad just leaving off the months on that OSP project on the resume to make it appear longer, but always 100% telling the truth to anyone who asks.
Here is my 2cents having worked with a number of Codesmith grads anywhere from during Codesmith, immediately after, or down the road, for a variety of goals, from just wanting to get a job, to wanting to get a top tier job.
Overall Codesmith is a great program, an incredible community of amazing people. Every one I've worked with is professional, hard working, and great.
It's great for people who are super ambitious and work hard but it's not magic. So I try to help people choose to go for the right reasons and look beyond the on paper results.
I have the same 3 issues you do and comment about them often.
I also have a different perspective with these issues because as an industry engineer who knows literally several thousand other FAANG/ex-FAANG engineers, the dozen or so peers I've asked have had reactions to Codesmith resumes ranges from "omg that's sketchy" to "this is blatant fr…
Yeah I think Codesmith for the most part treats the fellow job reasonably with CIRR, but the loophole to watch out for is that they can "delay the clock indefinitely" by 1) extending contracts, and 2) hiring more Fellows. e.g. hiring 20% of a cohort back (7 people) is a MASSING clock delaying event for CIRR results. It pushes back 20% of people who might have otherwise not gotten a job, into the next report.
Thanks for sharing details as well, I suspect many programs have similar results and it's expected, but it should help people in navigating the tough market!
Again, I think they handle this reasonably, but they should disclose in a footnote on their reports how many people are fellows in each cohort as it manipulates the data.
This is another problem with CIRR, it's not crystal clear on layoffs, promotions, job changes, etc... that could happen in the six months. It assumes people just get one job and they don't specify any requirements on how salaries are collected.
So if I was Codemsith I would
1. Include anyone who got a job, regardless of layoffs
2. If people got multiple jobs or promotions, use the highest salary within the six month period.
See below, not much change from H2 2021, similar to TechElevator. I commented on problems with talking about the median outcomes as I normally do with detailed calculations of why they are not really the median outcomes :D
Here is my detailed analysis, neutral look at the data (some points might seem boring, but just writing it up thoroughly). I tried to put the more controversial points first as I doubt people will read all of this.
# SUMMARY: Not much change from H2 2021, slight downshift in salary buckets, but overall very similar numbers.
# 1. Median salaries continue to be super misleading because of multiple cutoff points (a CIRR issue I describe often is pronounced here)
So the part time program exemplifies these the best, explaining via example.
37 people included in report. 10% of people were excluded because they said they weren't job hunting when starting Codesmith.
Now 31 people were placed. 21 people salaries, and 3 people did not report salaries. So of the **\~40 people who started, 21 people reported salaries and the median of those was $137K**.
For the full time program, 301 people…
I'm working on a big write up. Some numbers to look at here and more than meets the eye. Will post in about an hour or so, I'm on an airplane with wonky wifi
Re: job market, agree through April 2022 it was 🔥, Then from may to October it was 👍, and then from Nov to Feb it was 🤮, Now it's 🥴
So NuCamp has no bar and focuses on experience outcomes instead of job placements. To be fair, if you wanted to compare it to Codesmith say, you would need to take a sample of people who got accepted to Codesmith and have them do NuCamp instead, and then compare the outcomes, otherwise it's apples and oranges.
That said, NuCamp only has 4ish hours once a week of live instruction, and the rest is self study, homework, graded work, etc... so that's also how they keep the cost down. Whereas a lot of programs have instructors 8+ hours a day... and keep costs down by hiring former students to teach.
It doesn't seem much different than the USA market, but we have seen fewer Canadian interviews. The big tech companies have classic DSA and the smaller companies have very varying processes (some practical, some DSA, some live programming, etc...).
Side note more broadly for other readers as well, even though we do a lot of DSA, the goal is to train you how to problem solve an interview settings and people who fully buy into this tend to find the training really valuable for every single kind of interview. I think the OP and some of the comments that focus too much on DSA are also people who haven't been through the entire program and job support people get during real interviews. Like If you have a practical interview at Square coming up you can do a mock practical interview with a senior Reddit engineer or Google engineer, or Block engineer.
They don't have enough money to refund you but they claim to have enough money to pay 8 instructors (300 students with 25 students per instructor) for the upcoming free cohort. That sounds like a scam to me.
All of their posts and comments have been deleted by moderators except for in this subreddit and in the Leetcode one.
It took me years to fully digest position attribute but try this:
1. start with a box that's position relative
2. put boxes inside of that box that have position absolute and positioned by top, left, bottom, right
3. add z-index to the position absolute boxes to layer them as you want
Position absolute and z-index can solve a lot of exact positioning problems but the key is to put it all inside a position relative box that you completely control. That box will isolate all the absolutes inside of it.
Making you grind Leetcode like that is an inefficient use of time. The fact that you feel barely able to breathe means you aren't absorbing the materials and it's even more of a waste of time.
There's nothing special about Leetcode problems, anyone can just do them for free online, it's about HOW you do them that you should expect a program or bootcamp to help you with.
At Formation we train you to learn problem solving methods rather than raw grinding LC. We have hundreds of years of FAANG engineering experience in our ranks and this is an almost universal recommendation.
This is a simplified version of the approach we work through and every mentor problem solving session you work through these steps and get feedback: [https://formation.dev/blog/the-engineering-method/](https://formation.dev/blog/the-engineering-method/)
Even though a method like this sounds simple, it's really hard…
Apprenticeships.me is an open source resource to start with.
Otherwise, pay attention to your network. If you see people hiring for more senior roles at small companies, message and ask if they would consider a short contract to hire with you or fixed time "internship".
I would suggest looking at career accelerators if you are considering another bootcamp and it's probably more inline with what you need. I'm the co-founder of Formation.dev, which is an option that focuses more on technical skills gaps and job hunting. Other options to look at are Pathrise, Outco, Coachable, Interview Kickstart, Scaler and each one is different cost, time commitment, style.
The 20 placements? It's out of date now since there have been about 10 more since then so including all the recent placements, the distribution follows a similar pattern to the recent data on our blog, about 1/3 had no experience, 1/3 had 1-3 years and 1/3 has 3+ years.
I don't have aggregated info of who was employed or not already but anecdotally I also feel like it followed the similar trend of 2/3 working 1/3 not working. The typical Formation demographic would not be in this subreddit and probably doesn't know it exists, so you lose that point of view here.
A huge factor in these people's success is showing up and chugging though every day, staying as positive as they can, and appreciating advice and feedback - even if they don't always agree. People that have turned more negative to the job hunt and rejecting feedback are definitely struggling more in the job hunt right now.
We…
In many cases you are not eligible for big company internships because they require you to be returning to school. There's all kinds of reasons why, but I wouldn't bank on it. You might be able to find an internship with a startup or small company, that is more of a contract to hire type relationship. Apprenticeships are the more common alternative to internships for bootcamp grads - but are incredibly competitive and the selected engineers often have more experience.
Hi, we aren't able to help with DE specific areas or with DE specific domain knowledge. We have a number of mentors who are strong in frontend, iOS and Android, so we do one off mock interviews with them if you are in those areas, but we don't have anyone to do that for DE right now (March 2023).
We have very minimal bare bones SQL practice (\~5, 2-3 hour long practice assessments of varying difficulty, not hooked up to our training algorithms) but we constantly update and change things (which as OP posted can be a bit hectic as things do change frequently - all in an attempt to get you the best resources, practice, etc...) and more basic SQL skills have been creeping into more SWE interviews lately, but nothing formally launched.
We have strong systems design for a junior, mid-level, and low senior engineer, which is useful for full stack, generalist, backend, infra, dev-ops, sre, an…
Sure https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OJqKJSd4tBcG5j7sWQjVr5gGceSVAtmQ/view
It's from Hack Reactor and Googling "galvanize G.R.A.D" might help find more too
I've read the CIRR spec and the GRAD spec numerous times.
The CIRR spec sounds like it was written by outcomes managers at bootcamps. It's well intentioned but it's not structured like a legal document, with definitions, consistency, and rigorous thinking for loopholes and edge cases.
The GRAD spec looks like a legal doc with clear definitions and consistency throughout and looks like a lawyer looked at it.
Tech Elevator has to reissue their H12022 CIRR report because of issues in CIRR worksheets, which I have also found have issues and misalignment with the spec (ambiguities) when I've looked at them.
It's not terrible and it's well intentioned but people put way too much weight on it when making decisions.
Yeah I was a bit too hard on 6, I do know a number of people who genuinely have good intentions here and this might be overly deterrent to people from trying to leverage their networks - which is important right now. I also see many people get pulled into their jobs for a month here and there and their time ebbs and flows.
I'm particularly concerned about things like Build A Dev that offer people free bootcamp options (while they refuse to refund former students) and offer people false hope during a challenging time.
ChatGPT can generate curriculums and advice that sound great on paper but words are just words.
Meta just did the "10000 layoffs over the coming months" approach so it's less of a surprise if you are laid off. There are ways to do it more gracefully yeah but I don't expect a tiny company like App Academy that is largely self funded to have expertise in layoff strategy.
If their biggest concern was retaliation of bad actors then they have some bigger problems with their company culture they have to sort out. People don't often retaliate at tech companies because they might never get a job again, and companies have a record of suing and winning when this happens.
+1 passionate side projects. The best projects I've seen exudd natural passion that can't be faked or rushed.
How do you feel about bootcamps that steer you to making open source projects (Codesmith and Hack Reactor). Presumably people are not personally passionate about a graphql debugging tool.
u/ludofourrage might have some comments about NuCamp, which relies on satisfaction and effectiveness ratings over placements outcomes.
I feel pretty strongly that bootcamps shouldn't be judged by job outcomes and should be judged by education quality value for the cost. It will improve the quality of education, which is what most of the employees at the bootcamp work on.
CIRR encourages bootcamps to be judged purely by placement rates and salaries and I think that not in a great direction. I think it's a piece of the puzzle and useful information, but not the sole way to judge a program.
I also think bootcamps play a part in this by having the "wall of logos" on their websites and advertising the placements in bold. Stanford doesn't have salary numbers of graduates on their homepage in giant numbers like BloomTech does.
I don't think career accelerators like Pathrise, Outco, Intervie…
Bootcamp Predictions for the rest of 2023 (Personal opinions based on public information and my understanding of the industry, disclosure: no material inside information, not stock trading advice)
There has been a super negative tone in this sub this past week and I think it's going to continue as the job market remains tough and people question the value of their tuitions. It's certainly a departure from early 2022 when post after post was an anecdotal amazing placement about why the person's bootcamp was amazing. Just like you shouldn't give too much weight to a few people's super positive anecdotal opinions you shouldn't over value the negative ones either.
I have stated in several places that I think 2023 will be a hard year for bootcamps and I wanted to elaborate more what I mean by that. As usual, I aim to be middle of the road and intellectually honest so some of these are posit…
I was trying to write more objectively, but person to person I definitely feel bad for you and that the change disrupted your experience completely out of the blue.
After it all settles in, try to be positive and remind everyone else to stay positive and make the most of the situation. Once you get a job you can look back and criticize. From all the people I work with, I've seen people who stay positive get jobs and people who turn more and more negative not get jobs and get more and more frustrated.
This is an ad for LogicMojo, you can see the user's history posts very similar posts on this and other topics all talking about LogicMojo as the common thread.
Almost all of the posts get almost zero engagement because a lot of Redditors have blocked their accounts sadly. The content itself isn't bad, it's just meant to create SEO for LogicMojo.
(UPDATED BELOW BASED ON CEO'S EMAIL + ADDED INSIDER PERSPECTIVE)
I watched the video at super fast speed so hopefully I got it all. These are my neutral notes. The questions asked by students are very good by the way, professional but challenging.
\- It sounds like they eliminated the "TA" role that was almost all former alumni who were hired back by the school.
\- They claim that the responsibilities will be spread amongst other people and load will be increased on current employees.
\- It sounds like they are making more "changes" to leadership and "considerings" for internal salaries and compensation, so it sounds like things might not be great overall financially
\- Investing in technology, tools and software to support backend staff. This is off the shelf software they didn't write themselves, but unclear.
\- Asked about the timing, few weeks to plan and decide on, triggered b…
I 100% agree their goal isn't to teach you to become a React expert in a day and I don't think people are mislead into thinking that. So everyone is on the same page expectations-wise.
My whole point above is that most bootcamps are like this and you don't actually learn enough in a given topic to be good at that topic on the job. You do well on the job if you learn quickly, pattern match, communicate well, and I think bootcamps with a very high entry bar selected for these types of people and teach them how to present themselves as engineers to they can get jobs. The actually day to day teaching is not really a factor in my opinion - for the top programs with broad curriculums with these high expectations. For programs that specialize in teaching you a narrow skill for a narrow certification for a set of jobs, that's a different ballgame.
I have absolutely no problems with this either…
A lot of the people I've worked with didn't use React on the OSP, and have filled in React gaps because of their debugging skills and overall work ethic. Codesmith selects for people that are strong in those areas already and I don't think you can credit Codesmith's React training for preparing people for React roles.
It's risky in this market so I would give more than a year of buffer just in case. If you are confident you can take your old job or a part time job then that might be a good idea.
I think your network will probably help you more than others, but it's still a hard market out there.
No one can predict when it will bounce back and what it will look like when it does. I suspect we are in for years of more normal market conditions, like pre-COVID