u/michaelnovati replied · · edited ★ FEATURED
>As the husband of a current CodeSmith student, and a lead engineer, I agree with this description of the program. The tactics can be very surface-level. A tech talk and an open source project (that is made to look like a company on LinkedIn) can make a candidate appear much more senior than they actually are, on the surface, and give someone with no production engineering experience the false impression that they have more experience than they really do. And that is the secret sauce of CodeSmith.
The problem is: Everything is taught so quickly that it's impossible for most students to absorb it, and there is very variable quality beneath the sauce. (For example, a whole semester worth of data structures in an undergraduate course is taught in 2 days during the first week of the program). There's no possible way to do that deeply and well. Furthermore, classes are taught on powerpoint slides by recent graduates of the program, none of whom have real world coding experience. All they know is the Codesmith way, and they don't actually understand what it means to solve deeper problems than the formulaic projects at CodeSmith.
Meanwhile, the program tells students it's okay if they have impostor syndrome and only understand 20% of the material, while doing 20% of the work. One issue I have with this model is that a lot of students actually don't retain or understand deeply what they drank from the Codesmith "firehose." The very underprepared students manage somehow to get by anyway, and with stellar resumes based on other people's work, that can get hired at good companies. At CodeSmith, every student is paired in groups of 4 for most of the projects, so if you have at least one student who had done prior software engineering work or is more advanced in some ways, it's possible to have a good final project, as long as all the weaker students are distributed evenly in the groups with stronger students. But at the end of the course, there are still many students who are left floundering, without a strong enough foundation in any of the basic materials to be able to do high-quality engineering work.
The CodeSmith resumes are also a little bit ridiculous. It's supposed to look more "technical" to recruiters, but they advise residents to write a bunch of fluff in which students spell out in excruciating detail the the buzzwordiest definitions of basic technologies like React and PostgreSQL onto their resume, while deleting actual prior job experience... It actually reads like the Google searches of a very amateur total newbie programmer. The resumes are wordy and meaningless, and they waste everyone's time. They're extremely easy to spot. (Yet Codemith somehow manage to get alumni into mid-to-senior level jobs with these tactics. Not sure how.)
As an engineering manager with interviewing and hiring responsibilities, I would never touch anyone with a resume that looks like that. I let my wife know she should change her resume after she gets out of CodeSmith because she will be repelling so many potential employers with a suspicious and dumb-looking resume like that.
If Formation can do as it advertises, which is to cover the gap of technical skill between what even the top bootcamps like CodeSmith teach and what is actually expected in a real production codebase -- then it would be worth the price tag. Formation advertises that the program pairs junior engineers with senior mentors at top companies, with extensive code reviews to make sure their code is production quality. If this is true, then it is fulfilling a really worthwhile (and dire) need.
In that case, the focus should not be only on winning the game of FAANG interview prep, especially now that all the FAANG companies have imposed a hiring freeze. Instead, the focus should be on real software craftsmanship, and mentorship to write excellent production code, in the style of whatever company they are interviewing for. The code base at Google looks different than the style at Meta and Amazon -- it would be extremely valuable to get direct mentorship from engineers at those companies, to learn better professional engineering practices, and simply become better engineers.
That would be more substantive than putting on a superficial costume of a resume, learned at a top bootcamp. And more importantly, it would make hiring people from non-traditional backgrounds, like such bootcamps, less of a risk for companies.
Hello! Thanks for adding so much well-written details. Agreed on the resumes, we often do rework Codesmith alumni's resumes and (sorry if this embarrasses any of my friends) but they have pushed back on our changes because Codesmith really pushed their requirements hard and it's made people a tad uncomfortable making changes.
At the end of the day people come to Formation to improve their outcomes, so we don't care which resume you use and our job is to help you build the underlying engineering and problem solving skills to crush your interviews, be confident in finding the right company and team for you, and do well there.
You said a lot of nice things about Formation so I'll list some of the challenges that arise with this model. The biggest one is that our mentors are genuinely senior/staff/principal engineers at top companies.... their time is valuable, not just financially, but in terms of the wisdom they can theoretically impart on Fellows in a fixed time. So a lot of what we do behind the scenes is crunching through everyone's schedules, then figuring out what skills they need to work on the most, and creating hundreds of 3-5 person interactive intimate sessions on very specific topics every week with mentors. Each Fellow gets \~2 to 5 of these sessions a week, dynamically created every week. This is almost comically hard. People have work emergencies, people are all working on different skills, mentors have bad days, people have mentor preferences. It works but it's kind of the "secret sauce" that makes it possible to leverage that mentorship in a way that is valuable to Fellows and fulfilling and sustainable to the mentor. The stronger we get at this the better and better people's schedules are every week and the more and more efficiently they can develop.
RE: mid and senior. I've had a few intense discussions on this, and what I've concluded is that Codesmith evaluates these based on compensation and not on actual FAANG-equivalent-levels. If you are competing with bootcamps where people get $50K super junior roles, then calling a $120K solid entry level job in NYC "entry level" is a marketing-disservice to their outcomes. That said, we worked with a Codesmith alumni at Formation with zero experience in between who genuinely got a mid level job at a not-FAANG but solid tech company and this person very transparently said they went to a bootcamp, but I would be embarrassed to say "Formation got you a mid level job" because it's utterly irrelevant and we want to make sure people are in the right job at the right company at the right time to accelerate their careers.