Are the Codesmith Numbers Manipulated?

I comment a lot about Codesmith and it's not "a shitshow" internally but it's also not run flawlessly. They don't have a typical company org chart and I've corroborated some of the anecdotes of HR/internal stuff, but every company has things they are doing well and not well and that's not a reason to flip a table because overall it's doing a lot of things right too. Now in terms of outcomes. First off, CIRR hasn't been updated and is overdue. They have released some numbers though of offers signed in 2023 and the Q1 median was $110K and Q2 median was $115K and Q3 median was $120K. Presumably H1 was when most of the H2 2022 grads were placed so I don't expect their next CIRR report to be nearly as good. These are ways the numbers can be steered, but I severely doubt they would be intentionally fraudulently made up. 1.CIRR lets you confirm a placement by external sources including LinkedIn. meaning that if you see that an alumni who might have ghosted says they have some kind of job on LinkedIn. You can count them as a placement. They would report the salary as missing though, or they might be more likely to call and text the person to try to get their numbers. 2. and that leads to number two which is that the spec doesn't say how salaries have to be confirmed or what evidence is needed. so if someone replies to a text message with some numbers those can be used for CIRR. You need to document the text message but if the auditor is try to contact that person and can't confirm anything it will be noted but probably will still pass audit. 3. They notably do not follow the CIRR rules for their fellows/ TAs and people who sign up for that role get their graduation date pushed back until they're done their contract. so hiring those people who they may think might be struggling on the job hunt gives those people an extra 3 months or more to get placed and still count. during the boom times I was asked to waiting they were hiring four to five people from every cohort and they actually cut that back to two recently which makes me think that there might have been some kind of strategy behind that if they could get by with just two right now. 4. Their auditors accidentally signed off on the wrong version of their last CIRR report and the number isn't that one were actually lower than the final ones. so that makes me think that they do have a concerted effort when they see the draft reports to get like instructors and fellow alumni to try to contact people at all costs that they think got a job so that they can use any means necessary to get them into the report. I can't give out sources, but I suspect that this is happening based on what I've heard. And There is nothing wrong with this. 5. someone I think with good intentions. published a screenshot with a list of 70 recent placements with their current salaries and their salaries before Codesmith. The medium before was somewhere around 70k and about 20% of the people had 90k or more before. So clearly the people going there are reasonably successful people on the most part who are leveling up their careers. 6. The entrance bar is very high both in terms of the level of concept you need to know and also the hurdles you have to jump through that show them that you will be a good Codesmith resident. many people spend months doing their sessions and peer sessions and people do more than one interview to try to get in. This process eliminates people who are not completely bought it on the process and you don't have the determination to trust their system and make it through. In many ways just by getting accepted if you kind of drink the Kool-Aid and follow what they say, then you're statistically likely to be getting one of those 120k median offers. But that doesn't mean that someone maybe struggling to understand concepts or maybe went to another boot camp and didn't get a job. should think that Codemith will solve all their problems. 7. Finally, I've talked extensively about the way that the majority of alumni resume I looked at exaggerated, to various degrees. They typically listed out at least a three to four months experience which was actually there 3 week project. The theory is that Codesmith will sign off on 4 months of experience on that project because they feel that all of your time there contributes to that project and is really a part of it even if it's not spent on that project. However, people also list out all of their other Codesmith projects as separate items on their resume, so they end up with a full 600 word resume of many things that is really just 12 weeks of immersive. They very clearly tell people to not lie or exaggerate on their resumes but then they give them examples and the examples all do this. They give you step by step guides to making your resume and if you follow them, you are essentially doing this. They Tell you that if you keep working on your open source project after you're done that, you can keep putting longer and longer dates on your resume and I see a lot of that, but when I look at those open source projects, i don't see any code or activity from those people, so I'm not sure what they're involvement is, nor do I see the resume bullet points change from graduation to 6 months later that they keep claiming they were involved.