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LinkedIn Post - Bootcamps vs. CS Degrees

r/codingbootcamp

u/AngeFreshTech wrote (the comment Michael replied to):

Thanks for your answers.

u/michaelnovati replied · ★ FEATURED
I'll try to summarize haha: 1. I used to be on them like anything else, pros and cons, and I recommended people go there with Rithm and Launch School. I was very consistently hard on three things: \- marketing mid level and senior placements for people with zero experience (which I felt was wrong) \- marketing their OSP projects as 'equivalent of months of full time SWE work' when they were full of junior problems and most people worked on them for 3-4 weeks \- their instructors all went to codesmith itself and were promoted up the tree in a pyramid shape so they don't have SWE experience 2. Codesmith didn't see things the same way and framed me as a villain - which I completely ignored and kept doing my thing as a public service to offer my opinions through my lens 3. Throughout that time, former staff, current staff, students, etc... have proactively contacted me and told me about things that were concerning. I flagged these but kept my recommendation overall. 4. As the market has died down, all of those concerns flared up and went from pros and cons, to like major major red flags with very few pros. Things went off the rails and they doubled down on those problematic things instead of fixing them and around February 2024 they had massive layoffs, downsizing, and STILL doubled down. I officially paused my recommendation to see how they play out. 5. Finally in the middle of last year, they didn't make enough changes so I removed my recommendation. Around then, they paid this guy in Kenya on Upwork (which they sent me their own evidence confirming this) to 'post' on Reddit. This same account posted lies about me and then tried to get permanently banned, and also raised suspicion that a ton of Codesmith activity was fake, and possibly that the founder of their subreddit is fake (which is not confirmed). I basically flipped a table then and was enraged by that. I asked them to apologize and they declined because 'everyone involved with that is not at Codesmith anymore' and they don't know how or why it happened. So I basically think it's a garbage company full of people with no integrity who can't take feedback and refuse to correct lies they told their community of 20,000 people about me that they did not have evidence for - which is the definition of libel. Any questions about it? :D