u/michaelnovati replied · · edited ★ FEATURED
I can give my 2 cents on this, which is as usually fairly middle of the road.
1. I'm well aware of the coordinated Reddit interference initiated by leadership, specifically on me and my comments. I never talk about this because it's childish and I want to focus on what's important.
2. Running a program is hard. Not everyone will have the best experience, scheduling is a nightmare (we have so much software to do scheduling and there are always last minute surprises because humans are human). So while it's easy to pile on and criticize how it's run, I do think it's overall run well relative to other programs. Codesmith should obviously minimize session issues and I would be concerned if scheduling problems happen the majority of the time.
3. I believe their CIRR numbers are legit. There are a lot of things people can do to maximize their outcomes and spoke at length and I think Codesmith does that but I don't think their published numbers are fraudulent. If you have evidence of that, I'm all ears, but people left out I believe are left out for legitimate reasons, but just in them most advantageous way for Codemith (which is very reasonable IMO, it's our job as consumers to put equal effort in understanding the numbers and loopholes).
4. Career support issues. I personally think their career support is oversold drastically for what you get and agree with that, but relatively to other programs I think it's really strong. They sell it like it's better than career accelerators (which focus on this alone) and it's definitely worse that those, but it's also a lot better than most other bootcamps.
5. Curriculum out of date. So I actually don't think the curriculum being hour of date is an issue, but I think their attitude is that it's ideal (someone sent me a quote where an instructor said "trust me, Codesmith has experts who have spent hours making every minute of the curriculum the best, it can't be improved" and that was insane to me) . I actually really like Will Sentance's approach to reinforcing really how things work at a first principles level, and apply rigorous thinking to everything you do. It's a learning strategy that can carry you through anything you haven't seen before. It takes much longer than that to actually learn things. He spent FOUR HOURS a few weeks ago teaching people the basics of how HTML state works and how JS interacts with it.... yet Codesmith spends four hours of lecture on ALL OF REACT.
6. I've talked about OSLabs before, but yeah they created a legit charity for it to double down on that strategy and I'm definitely curious to see where it goes. I.e. if it's used to build better open source projects for the world, and which give Codesmith students opportunities to work on them, or if it's used to give the appearance of legitimacy to the existing OSPs. Curious if you have thoughts here, but I think it's the former as the goal.
Overall, we should all keep in mind that no program is perfect and any kind of company that has been around for a while and is successful will have made mistakes and missteps and have people (both customers and employees) with bad experiences.
Might update with more thoughts but just wanted to add a little of pros and cons thinking since the post is largely negative.