Quality of Codesmith/ in general bootcamp job help?

I have some insight on this as an outsider that has worked with a few dozen Codesmith alumni later on in their careers or immediately after Codesmith. This is going to be a polarizing comment thread for sure. PROS: - many alumni that get jobs credit Codesmith's job hunt support for helping them. they typically site: mock interviews, weekly office hours, their cohort mates emotional support making it feel less lonely, and Eric Kirsten's negotiation help giving them confidence to ask for $150K offers when they otherwise wouldn't - compared to many other bootcamps - which hardly do anything post graduation, I think Codesmith does a lot more than most - they give you "lifetime support", which means you can always go back and ask questions in the future, get resume reviews or even do peer mock interviews anytime in the future and some people have found that useful - one of the most powerful aspects is support from your cohort mates. people really stick together in the job hunt, like a family. - Codemsith has 100 or so employees who were graduated of Codemsith and work part time now while doing a job. This helps great a strong alumni community that can help with referrals. CONS: - all of the mock interviews and resume reviews are recent alumni being paid $25 to do the mocks. so you aren't getting independent senior feedback, you are getting "peer reviews" and "peer mocks". people describe these as confidence boosters but often admit they are not run like real interviews and the people doing them have often never run a real interview in industry. For example, I know someone that did a mock there (who was also at Formation) and the Codemsith mock interviewer told them they were great but need to use more buzzwords and be a little sharper with their buzzwords. This might be helpful for a new engineer with no experience trying to work their way into a mid level job, but it's useless for most people. - people have said these have been booked up for weeks or sometimes a month. some Codesmith students have asked me for reviews and tips recently because no one at Codesmith is replying to them fast enough and they need urgent advice. - the lifetime support isn't super useful - which is why Codesmith alumni pay for mentoring at my company later on. Codesmith specializes in getting people with zero experience to market themselves a certain way in order to get amazing first jobs, but they don't have much expertise for engineers that already have experience. once or twice a week people message me about bad advice or lack of advice they are getting from Codesmith later on in their careers and ask me for my opinion. - their negotiation tactic was summarized to me from some notes as 'ask for $150K, only a mid level or senior engineer would ask for that and it helps them see you as a more senior engineer'. Surprisingly this actually works for smaller companies that don't know what Codesmith or OSLabs and one of the key reasons people get high offers. A few people have credited negotiation support with helping them secure good salaries on future jobs, but from my view, those people were leaving money in the table by returning only to Codemsith support and not maximizing their overall job hunt. NOTE: You'll get a bunch of comments that their career support is amazing and all they need to get a job. And this is true primarily for 1. alumni peer support and referrals and 2. negotiation tactics being effective. But at the end of the day, the majority of the support is around peer support and confidence building that is most effective and not the technical content of those interactions. As I said, I work for a company that does mentorship and training for engineers later in their careers so I want to disclose bias in my perspective. We have over 100 mentors who are senior, staff, and principal engineers/recruiters at/previously at FAANG companies and have done anywhere from in the dozens to thousands of interviews on the job and give truly authentic mock interviews. We have dozens of FAANG recruiters doing resume reviews and negotiation support and these are the people actually looking at resumes and negotiating with you. Lots of downsides come from this too, but I'm definitely biased that the peer based model at Codemsith is not nearly as effective as services that excel at this. Other ones are Interviewing.io and Interview Kickstart. It's not fair to compare directly because Codesmith's services are included in their tuition price and these services are an extra huge amount of money on top of that and for good reason.