Second best bootcamp?

There is no best or second best bootcamps objectively. You should talk to people at the bootcamps to figure out what is the best fit for you and how people of similar backgrounds do. 1. Codesmith. Great for ambitious people who work hard. People come in at a high bar. Alumni network is strong and supportive. 2. Rithm. Great intimate experience where the founders and leadership strongly believe in directly teaching students rather than scaling and growing. 3. Launch School. Self paced month to month and aiming to get into the Capstone path, which is more intense with strong outcomes. 4. Hack Reactor. Strong all around. Very strong alumni network of people a few years down the road. 5. Hackbright and Ada Academy: these focus on specific demographics. Tech is fairly male-dominated and some people might learn better in a more diverse environment. Now separate topic, CIRR results because it's bound to come up here 😁 and I love this topic, this is usually a controversial. First off, to clarify one thing, CIRR is registered as a business league (i.e. lobbying group or trade organization) and is not an unbiased source. It's like only trusting dental advice from the American Dental Association and not trusting any other source of information about dental hygiene. I sure do trust the ADA but I'm open minded to other ways of looking at things. So anyone that says to only trust CIRR please just look into things. It can be trusted and there is nothing wrong with it, but that doesn't mean there is not other points of view. PROS: 1. Standard questions and data format so you can compare results easily. Require auditing and bookkeeping for consistency. This makes it easy to reliably see who has better outcomes and if the marketing a company is telling you aligns with their CIRR reports. 2. You can extrapolate how many people start a program, graduate, and what their time frames are to get a sense of how many people actually get jobs who start. 3. You can get a breakdown of the ranges of salary outcomes instead of a single number, so you can look for patterns and trends on your own more so that one number. CONS: 1. CIRR includes base salaries only so they don't factor in stock and bonuses (Codesmith people this actually makes your results appear lower than they actually are) 2. They don't factor in experience levels. This is a big problem with Codesmith, for example, as 20% of people make under $110K and 20% over $140K. Because people with prior bootcamps and work experience go there, you can't get a good breakdown. At Formation (disclosure: I am co-founder) we just updated our numbers and we show averages by years of experience, so the average 0 year experience is $116K base, $134K TC and the average 1-2 years experience is $137K base, $181K TC. Average 3+ year is $155K base $204K TC (all of these exclude private stock and options). So there is a huge difference based on years of experience. If we just published our overall base salary average of $135K that would be super misleading to someone with 0 years of experience. Sure the top offer for 0 years was like well in the $200Ks and you CAN make that much, it's just not useful. 3. It's pretty hard to tell "of the people who started what are their outcomes". For example people can be excluded ([this thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/wap6a4/comment/ii48t7e/?context=3) is about Codesmith excluding people for not passing tests and I've heard things like this from other bootcamps). When you factor in graduation rate, and different drop off rates. It takes a lot of digging to figure this out. BloomTech for example has about a 50% shot at getting a job within 6 months of graduating for all the people starting, according to their latest report, but it takes some math to figure that out. 4. In the engineering field, your long term compensation will be much higher if you end up in the right place. For example, if you get a $90K apprenticeship at Dropbox out of bootcamp, sure your salary is lower for a year. But in 3-4 years you might be making $300K TC. If that's your goal, that would be much better than making $120K at an agency or 3rd tier company out of a bootcamp. (Please don't attack me ❤️ 👋 😃, I love discussing this topic by diving into published hard data and results, and I don't love anecdotal comebacks and personal insults, I just find the topic of outcomes interesting)