u/michaelnovati replied · · edited ★ FEATURED
I would do a masters over any bootcamp. Or consider Launch School.
Codesmith and Merit America are entirely different options with no similarities so I would also spend more time trying to understand deeply how these things work if you don't cross them off entirely.
So my personal opinion is to avoid Codesmith at all costs. You can read my history and I'm intimately familiar with their workings for years. I used to recommend people go there all the way up until they had about 50% layoffs and in Feb 2024 shrunk about 75% in their offerings. I was curious then and paused recommendations to see how they adjusted.
Unfortunately they didn't adjust well and instead of just removing my recommendation I changed it to actively recommend not going in fall 2024
The short reason is that they are imploding in my opinion. They have a skeleton crew of full time staff left. All of their full time instructor team has turned over in the past year or so and all of them are Codesmith grads. All of the senior staff with higher salaries have been laid off or left.
Their program coordinator is insanely overloaded running two cohorts more than 8 hours a day and they are hiring a part time person to help and then paying them MINIMUM WAGE.
I heard enrollment ranked and applications tanked.
Now all this is majorly the market but my harsh recommendation comes from how their leadership has handled the market and not the market impact itself.
They:
- Kept insisting outcomes were great in my opinion (even though they knew that current unpublished outcomes were much worse)
- Paid some guy to post on Reddit about Codesmith (proven fact)
- Have staff members posting all over Reddit about Codesmith without disclosing they are staff - because they also went to Codesmith itself so they are posting about their experience. Coincidentally they just all happen to post and comment on each other's stuff with fake discussion.
- They have a fake Subreddit full of fake AMA (they claim to not have control over it yet I know for a fact the Hello Codesmith account is a moderator of the sub)... all these old AMAs have almost all of their content collapsed or suspended because it was sketchy.
- Have been caught giving someone a letter of reference for fake work dates without checking them according to what the person told me.
- They continue to say their sister charity OS Labs used to sign letters of reference is independent when it's not. The "director" says she has been indefinitely on leave and redirected questions to Codesmith staff. The director doesn't know anything about the background check letters either and says Codesmith manages them entirely.
So the TLDR: Codesmith was great when the market was great because it helped extremely ambitious people exploit a marker inefficiently.
Now that the market tanked it exposed all of the tricks, almost all of their staff have left or been fired, and their leaders delusionally think that Codesmith still has the secret sauce to succeed.
It's sad, embarrassing, and an extreme lack of integrity in my opinion.