Checking in on Codesmith a year later. After recommending Codesmith for 2 years I stopped recommending them a year ago because of massive staff loss, program cutbacks, and tanking outcomes. A year later, things are even worse 😭.

I feel like I'm transparent about it, but I will summarize here my arguments that have been consistent for a period of time. I'm extremely transparent about these reasons, so either people think I'm lying or they think that there's some like secret motivation. I don't know. Codesmith thinks I have all kinds of motivations that they are just incorrect about, and believing them is only harming them even more and making their situation worse. So I don't really know why they're doing that, but it might make them feel better than accepting the truth. I have been consistently clear that Codesmith was one of the top bootcamps, that their number one strength was in helping ambitious and driven people build self-confidence in their programming abilities, and that they had three things that I didn't like. 1. They were consistently marketing placements as mid-level and Senior roles, and in my opinion, misleading people with the language. In the tech industry, your level is based on a meritocracy, but at the same time, there are experience requirements along with it, and by definition, you cannot be anything but an entry-level engineer when you have zero experience. 2. Their open-source projects were marketed as Important tools embraced by the tech industry, equivalent to senior-level projects. I've looked through a lot of the tools and they have completely abnormal commit patterns. They were fishing for stars by begging the community to vote for them. They don't have any maintenance or processes that open-source projects have. And worst of all, they're full of bugs, inconsistencies, security problems, etc., and they don't fix them when these are pointed out. So I found it offensive that they were talking about their projects this way. 3. The vast majority of graduates consistently market their 3 to 4-week project as months to years of software engineering work on their resumes on LinkedIn. They position this work beside other placeholder projects that they did simultaneously to make it up. They then Codesmith signs letters of reference for the time, claiming that the people claim they worked on their projects, which is almost always far more than the 3 to 4 weeks that they did. I think this is unethical. I think they misuse a registered charity to do this, which is also a moral issue. It harms the entire industry by celebrating job placements for people who did this, but not being transparent about how and instead celebrating the "zero to one" magical journey. Now these are completely valid criticisms that don't take away from the good things that they've done, but I think they need to be discussed transparently because Codesmith gaslighted people who bring this up and get very angry. One staff member got so upset when asked about number three during our live session that they had to pause the session to cool down. The only personal part began in the summer of 2024 when they paid someone to post marketing posts on Reddit, and that same person tried to lie and create fake reports to try to get me banned from Reddit, which made me very upset. Dozens of accounts posting cosmic supportive stuff were permanently suspended from Reddit around this time, and I was very upset that they didn't try to stop this behavior and they just denied being involved. Their founder was telling people on LinkedIn that I had some kind of personal vendetta because my brother didn't get hired at Netflix because a Codesmith grad got hired instead and they have absolutely no idea what he's talking about. I don't know that my brother ever interviewed at Netflix. it's just really sad how they're completely imploding and delusional, and the inability to acknowledge reality is just destroying the company and it's really sad how they're taking some very strong engineers with them. who will hopefully see in a couple of years what happened to them and get some good mental health support.