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 😭.

Hi, thanks for sharing a well thought out argument. \- Lying on the resume is a tough topic and some blame goes with with the people hiring. The snowball of "6 YOE for entry level jobs" is kind of the result of both sides. Hire a bootcamp grad with no YOE for a job needing 0 to 2 YOE, get burned, list 2YOE+ next time, bootcamp grad lies more, increase again to 4YOE, etc... They are getting burned because the hiring process inherently is flawed and requires some amount of honesty, but there cost of mis-hiring is you fire the person and move on and it's a rational market. If it was too costly to fire someone, they would spend more vetting the people. So the way I see it - both sides are optimizing for their market conditions and Codesmith grads lying just enough to get through and doing just good enough on the jobs to not trigger the snowball is the market trying to balance everything out... and in this market there isn't any amount of lying that's working. \- VS Other Bootcamps - fair point, There are a lot of bootcamps with problems and more financial motives/pressures than Codesmith. I focus on Codesmith for three reasons: 1. they literally market themselves as an alternative to an "elite masters program" so I hold them to a different bar. 2. they market zero to senior on their website, which I think is a problem, and no other bootcamp does that. 3. their materials internally are no better than other bootcamps and their instructors aren't either. Instructors told me stories of copy paste code reviews, copying content from 3rd parties, rubber stamping people who weren't qualified, etc.... and the main thing they do well is they communicate well and make it sound different when behind the scenes it's been described in "scam" language. I'm not sure if you worked there. \- My company works with a lot of Codesmith grads, but it's not number 1 for bootcamps. First off about 1/3 of people or so did bootcamps and of that group the top 3 last I checked were Fullstack, Codesmith, Hack Reactor, and there is a long tail: Turing, Launch School, Hackbright, General Assembly, 42 School, Lambda School, Flatiron, Tech Elevator, etc... So based on that argument I should be going after all of these. And I do connect with grads from all these schools on LinkedIn while Codesmith staff call me a "creep" for connecting with Codesmith alumni in that very large group. No other program calls me a creep and instead then DM me to work with them win-win. I think if anything my frustration is being flabbergasted that they haven't ACCEPTED a SINGLE piece of feedback. They can't even spell Will Sentance's name right in a bunch of recent posts and graphics or his role right. They posted an AI article a month ago telling people to use ChatGPT 3.5 turbo and "davinci" and when I called it out they deleted my comment and their CEO "liked" the bad post. Icing on the cake was Will Sentance losing the phone number for their AWS account from incompetence and when challenged, he said that 'all two factor methods have problems and phone number is just as good as passkeys' indicating defensiveness and ZERO idea of how to properly secure AWS: Will it's not about a single two factor method, but it's about having a rock solid and robust credential management system. His reaction to being challenged was to lash out like a baby wining for doing something wrong and trying to distract you from it. I don't think they know how much I know about Reddit and LinkedIn and they should be ashamed of themselves, there are some flat out liars and the new CEO Alina should remove them from anything to do with Codesmith.