u/annie-ama wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Hey everyone I’m Annie, one of the Directors at Codesmith. I’ve been part of this team for over 5 years and many of you may know me from previous company updates here and from my AMAs I wanted to share a quick update with this community that has always mattered so much to us.
u/michaelnovati replied · · edited ★ FEATURED
Alina is more capable of running the company for sure but it's too little too late honestly.
She needs a capable team around her and almost everyone has left.
The whole industry is changing and the teaching style and pedagogy at Codesmith is dying out and you don't have a team left to invest in building out.AI ways to learn. You have to flip your company on its head. But you don't have the money and you don't have the talent to build that.
Even if Alina has a vision, the team is delivering garbage code (as her and I both know the quality of) and people there isn't even realize it. They celebrate the heroes of the past - who themselves really didn't know what they were doing either.
Will needs to leave the company entirely, which it sounds like might be over time and he floats to academia - where maybe he should be - because he just doesn't have the experience to forge software engineers - as this market has demonstrated and exposed the Codesmith pedagogy as a trick to fake your resume, rather than a rigorous curriculum.
All the people who trusted him and then realized he doesn't know the industry, have all left and many are super unhappy. They aren't leaving blaming the market, but they feel like they were taken for a ride and are feeling disoriented getting off of it.
Look at the blog post, so many superficial words that mean nothing but sound good. It's the curriculum, it's not the curriculum. It's the community, it's not the community.
What made Codesmith special is that it took exceptionally ambitious people from other industries and boosted their self confidence.
Finally, the AI course right now is following the same old sketchy marketing tactics (spinning stories out of context) and is really just convincing alumni to fork over money for something they were promised they would get for life. $4600 for 4 weeks to be taught by people with very little experience is absurd.
I want to disclose that Formation is working on an AI productivity course that doesn't overlap much with yours but is much closer to competing than the immersive way. I'm not here to talk about that but want to point out that for about 1/3rd the cost people will get to learn from literally one of the most productive engineers in the entire industry.
Your AI course comes across like what happens when Private Equity buys a company and tries to milk every last penny out of the community at the cost of what makes it special.