u/4estgirl wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Codesmith grad here and this is not true. While Codesmith doesn't guarantee placement, you have LIFETIME career support. Alumni have access to slack and discord where they can ask questions from other alumni, and the Codesmith team puts out weekly workshops for things like pair p
u/michaelnovati replied · · edited ★ FEATURED
This still feels like you graduate and go in "support mode" where some other students/graduates (edit: graduates can be employed SWEs or not yet employed) hired as coaches (i.e. peers) check up on you. It's a wonderful and amazing community but it's still peer based. At Formation.dev we have a bunch of people who are/have been Codesmith coaches or mock interviewers and they are just graduates themselves without jobs or with minimal work experience. So the support is more like "enhanced peer support" and not the full weight of Codemsith behind you. Maybe over time it will be stronger as graduates many years into their jobs give back.
Codesmith experimented with a DSA course for alumni and they charged them for it at a heavily discounted rate so I would expect them to charge for any true future support.
At Formation we give people lifetime access to our version of slack and to some community events, but people have to pay again to come back and train with a new starting skill level and new goals... and people actually do that no problem. Training people well is very expensive on our side and requires us to pay hundreds of the best engineers and recruiters in the industry well, and people would rather pay for something that has an average first year compensation increase of $100K and is well worth it, than receive free lifetime peer based support alone.
Sorry this went on a tangent a bit, it's something I talk to bootcamp grads a lot about who wonder how Formation can help if they have lifetime support from their bootcamp and I need to disclose my bias as the founder of a program where a large amount of people are bootcamp grads a few years ago.