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 😭.

That was a marketing trick :( Codesmith doesn't spend money on marketing because they instead put money into paying staff to run free courses and run the pre courses at a loss. The goal of these programs is to get you bought into the Codesmith ecosystem for free or minimal cost and once you do it, if the Codesmith way of thinking works for you then you'll pay $22K for the bootcamp. Codesmith wasn't "hard to get into", rather it was extremely selective for the "type of person" they were looking for: a smart, ambitious, good communicator with low self confidence in their coding ability. If you were that they thye want you to fail a few times to confirm you have low self confidence and high grit so that when you are let in you are ALL IN on Codesmith. If you didn't get accepted it was becaue you weren't a good fit. Some brilliant people who saw through this wouldn't get let in no matter how good they were and failing 3 times made it seem harder to get into. Once you talk to instructors you start to see how the sausage is made and it's very different than the public perception and a story that you need to know before being manipulated by marketing.