u/InTheDarkDancing wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
In my opinion you spend too much time using FAANG as a reference point or a yard stick. You frequently incorporate them into your arguments, disregarding the fact that the majority of people here will never work there, particularly not in their first job after a bootcamp. Yet, yo
u/michaelnovati replied · · edited ★ FEATURED
"FAANG canonical levels" are just the leveling system that the majority of TECH industry currently adopts. So if you want to be an engineer in the tech industry, you should be familiar those levels or you'll have trouble navigating the industry, even if you use other names yourself. Other industry use other words, like in the banking industry you can be a "Vice President Engineer" which is a tech industry "senior". But if want to be in the tech industry and you insist on a vice president title you'll struggle to navigate (from what I've seen for exactly the Vice President case while I was at Facebook)
My advice has been extremely consistently to get a an appropriate job for your experience and skills and then over-perform and have steady career growth from there. The levels don't matter, it just so happens that no bootcamp gives you the experience needed to go beyond entry level. If you have that experience and went to a bootcamp then go for mid level!
I have viewed a number of information sessions where the Codesmith CEO continues to say that Codesmith is trying to be the Stanford Business School or Harvard Law School of "technology". So I keep holding them to that bar and it's fair if they keep communicating that to prospective students.
I feel like I've been openly transparent about who I am and what we do and when there might be biases, especially in my post [https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/18cpq98/analysis\_of\_52\_most\_recent\_codesmith\_offers/](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/18cpq98/analysis_of_52_most_recent_codesmith_offers/) where I explain that the data shows that 10% or so of Codesmith students overlap with Formation and we could be considered competitors for those people. If those people are exaggerating their backgrounds then it might be almost no one, so I can't really tell if we're even a competitive choice for those 10%. But I was very open about even talking about that.
But that doesn't change the fact that we aren't a bootcamp and we don't teach anything and have no curriculum, we are strictly a mentorship, benchmarking, mock interview platform, so anytime anyone has a misunderstanding I have to correct it so people don't come to us for the wrong reasons and waste their time.