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.

Here's my analysis: Based on my close view of the market for the past 5 years, I would guess 2024 students will have similar placement rates to 2023 students. Based on the anecdotes people share with me from Codesmith, there are hardly any placement and hardly any alumni engagement - specifically in the second half of 2024. Codesmith itself loudly touts a CIRR-violating salary outcome and placement number on their website of 168 offers between March and August 2024 that we can also factor in. 1. Salaries they reported were DOWN from peak about 10% - when inflation ran rampant and salaries have gone up, this tanking salary shows that more people are taking non-SWE jobs, going back to their old jobs or taking temporary jobs as part of a longer term plan. 2. It's possible that people taking non SWE jobs and worse jobs instead of waiting for their dream SWE job will result in a higher placement rate. Codesmith can use LinkedIn and other sources to "confirm" a "placement" so if they can track down alumni going back to their old jobs, they can count them as a placement For example, It's possible that with AI, people will take AI prompting / training jobs that are shorter term jobs that actually pay pretty well hourly, and they will count those as placements too, and fewer of these jobs existed in 2023. 3. Some of the recent placements someone shared with me (because of the insane LinkedIn representation they had) had things like a 3 week personal project presented as 2 years 11 months of work experience. So the longer these people job hunt, the longer this 'fake' work experience and the more likely their resume gets through. Someone job hunting for 3 years might look like a mid level engineer at that point, and if we see an increase in people placed 1+ years after finishing Codesmith, I suspect this is related - and also absolutely unethical that I won't stand for. \-------------- So overall I think 2024 placement rates will probable be about the same on paper but very different makeup.