BREAKING NEWS: Codesmith 2023 official outcomes published: CANNOT BE WORSE - placement rate crashed from 70% to 29%. Enrollment also tanked over 50%. The software engineering bootcamp era is over.

I agree that scenario isn't so clear and when there was a market inefficiency for hiring SWEs a lot of companies came up with ideas: 1. Bootcamps 2. Post-BACC CS diplomas 3. WGU - self paced quick CS degree 4. EdX free courses from MIT and Stanford 5. Udacity "Nano Degree" \----------------------- Ultimately - you just can't become a solid SWE in 12 weeks or a few months, it's a fiction and a myth. It would be like deciding to become a Lawyer in 12 weeks if you are an engineer by training. You can develop skills, hyperfocus and accelerate your learning, but some of the process of getting there is just letting ideas bake in when they bake in, getting involved with lawyers and listening to them inside and outside of work, etc.... \------------------------ So then why do people come to Reddit saying Codesmith or HackReactor changed their life and went from school teacher to $150K SWE in 12 weeks??? Prologue: market inefficiencies meant the industry needed more engineers than it had, and it's robust sources (CS degrees) couldn't product people fast enough, created an opening for people from the other sources to get 'a shot' at being a SWE. 1. Now look at people's long term careers. A number of anecdotes and posts and reviews are weeks/months after the hiring happened and not years later. A bunch of these people don't make it. Codesmith has notable grads that got a SWE job and transitioned out within a year. Now they transitioned to product manager, prompt engineer, test engineer, or other adjacent things - and they still credit Codesmith for the life changing experience - but a number of these people that loudly shouted about their amazing placement didn't make it as SWEs, were not prepared to be SWEs, the bootcamp didn't give them all the skills they needed, and even though they get 'a shot' because of the market, it didn't work out. 2a. For the people that DIDN'T make it later on: was the bootcamp still worth it for them? I'm sure it was! They might be in SWE adjacent roles that are great fits for them. But the marketing is all screwed up... like these people didn't have to go to a SWE bootcamp to become a SWE to end up as a technical product manager. They should have gone to a 'General Engineering Bootcamp" to learn engineering skills and mindset, so move into the tech industry (in any role). Codesmith's persistent marketing that it creates mid level and senior engineers and how they have gone all in on that despite my years of criticism on it, shows that Codesmith doesn't understand this point overall and that failure has caught up with them finally. 2b. For the people that DID make it: these people are the minority edge case. They are people that would have made it with or without Codesmith and could have gone to any reputable bootcamp. They could self study most of what they need and then network and participate in open source volunteer projects on their own OR go to a bootcamp to build out a minimal network of alumni to try to get that foot in the door. This group of people succeeds on the job not because of what they learned at the bootcamp, but because of their innate diligence, conscientiousness, work ethic, etc.. I know a lot of people in this bucket from Codesmith - people who put in 80 hour weeks on their first jobs to catch up and had to come up with ways so the company thought they did it all in 40 hours. What Codesmith does for these people is build their self confidence so that they can hustle their way into the job and believe they deserve to be there, instead of being so self-doubting they don't get the job. These people might credit Codesmith with that - deservedly so - and say it was worth the money. But this outcome 1 - doesn't happen to most people and if you see one of these people's success case, you shouldn't think it will happen to you necessarily, and 2 - Codesmith isn't transparent about this to anyone and similar to 2a, they might just not admit it to themselves and think all the results are because of their founder's brilliance instead. And similar to 2a, this failure caught up to them.