u/Tanker70 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Michael - you've made a lot of posts here and your contributions are generally positive. However, the last post you made and the comments you've made come off SUPER biased - you're literally a founder of a competitor. I have an extremely hard time believing that you are really co
u/michaelnovati replied · ★ FEATURED
I appreciate you sharing your views professionally. The fact that I'm extremely open about who I am enabled this kind of reasonable discussion, and anonymous new accounts that might have their own biases cannot possible be evaluated fairly.
Codesmith isn't a competitor in my opinion. There are a small number (about 15%) of people who go to Codesmith who might be a candidate for Formation, but likely not. We don't work with new college grads right now and people with zero experience is an edge case. Like the 15% is an edge case for both Codesmith and us that neither of us market to, in my opinion.
I in fact talk to make people 1-1 and suggest they go to Codesmith and to consider coming to Formation in a few years.
The way Formation works though could expand in the future to people who don't have any coding experience but it's not on the radar right now. I think it's fair that the fact that it could be is a bias.
I don't agree with the removal of that post for the lack of history of the OP btw unless Reddit moderators discovered bad actors.
Codesmith has said that "a quarter" (vague to protect sourcing) of people come from Reddit so I do indeed think it's something they care about. Formation's main sources of people are word of mouth, LinkedIn, partnerships with industry groups, and proactive reach outs. Reddit is a small fraction of social media sources. We're not a bootcamp and the content in this sub, both good and bad, isn't really representative of Formation - as you said.
But a thought experiment is: what if I didn't have my name on my account and had a dozen anonymous accounts and said all the same things across all those accounts. My opinion is that that would be very unhealthy for the sub and for all we know people are doing that from Codesmith and Hack Reacotr because they have no official voices here like many other programs (Rithm, Launch School, App Academy, NuCamp).
If Codesmith, or someone like Will or Eric or Phil were on Reddit, I think we would have really intense but professional and valuable debates that would benefit all. Instead I debate students and alumni with unequal balance of information and I debate these leaders through their anonymous accounts. We would probably sort out a lot of things and they wouldn't be so polarizing!
Like on my post about the quality of OSP projects, lets say their CEO commented and said more insight into the projects and that he's looking into why students are claiming so much experience on their resumes and will try to stop it! Or w/e like it would be a lot better discussion. We would end up with a good understanding of what these things are. What mid-level and senior mean to each of us, etc...