Anyone attend Codesmith to move into SWE when current job has a high salary?

I post criticizing using CIRR as the "gold standard" often :D. But you should trust their reported numbers as reliable. The issues lie more in 1. the way the data is presented and trying to understand the outcomes for someone like you versus someone with work experience already. 2. they borderline sketchy ways people can be excluded... however these are edge cases and not the bulk of the data. 3. data is too slow -> need more real time data on outcomes All of that said., the reports trail graduation by 6 months, so the next report will be for H1 2022, which was a GOOD HIRING HALF. H2 2022 -> present has been terrible. Amazon has stopped hiring and Capital One has slowed down hiring for and those accounted for a large chunk of the > $150K salaries you see on there. We won't know the implications of that until June 2023 at the earliest and you'll be done Codesmith by then! From people in the program now, the placement rates within 6 months have tanked anecdotally. But that's the market and it's not better elsewhere... unless you are experienced already and shouldn't go to a bootcamp and should go to a program like Formation (disclosure: co-founder), Outco, Interview Kickstart, Scalar, etc... You should highly consider Codesmith among the top handful of bootcamps in your selection process.

If you have really good data-engineering experience to talk about, you should highly look into some career accelerator options like [Formation.dev](https://Formation.dev) (I'm the co-founder), Outco, Pathrise, Interview Kickstart, etc... These options are more part-time. Formation is completely scheduled around your availability. Most people we work with have day jobs and take about 6ish months to find a new job. If you have decent fundamentals already, transitioning to a SWE, or at least a SWE-like-data role is feasible at Formation at least. I can't speak to the other options for this, e.g. Pathrise is focused more on staying in the same vertical, but maybe Scalar would be useful too. Anyways look at these options as well to compare and constrast.

I was looking at one of the OSP's that got a lot of buzz relative to the others (I think, I can't tell if it's real or just the people working on it promoting) called "Svelvet" https://www.linkedin.com/company/svelvet/ Only 2 out of 18 people listed have jobs now :( So I think H2 2022 might be a really really bad placement year. The only redeeming factor though is if the market improves and it's now June 2023, no one will care about poor H22022 and it will be explained away as the market is now better! If the market remains this tough though and placement rates are 50% or less, I think people will stop going to bootcamps that require them to put their lives on hold and drop everything to attend.

1. The reports are audited annually after the fact 2. The CPA who signed the last audited report said "Direct request of confirmation from Graduates regarding Employment outcomes andobservation of LinkedIn profiles" [Link](https://static.spacecrafted.com/b13328575ece40d8853472b9e0cf2047/r/eb6e615ccddf47e9a891a9c69f223025/1/Codesmith%20Los%20Angeles%20Full-Stack%20Software%20Development%20Audited-AUP%20H2%202020.pdf) So sure it's audited but it's also self reported by people and uses LinkedIn as a source to see if people have jobs or not. The auditing is to make sure humans put the right numbers in the right boxes, not to audit that people's salaries are what they say they are. Read through the entire [CIRR Standard](https://static.spacecrafted.com/b13328575ece40d8853472b9e0cf2047/r/aa1e118858a548ec9484b7b714e694c6/1/CIRR%20Standards%202021%20%28rev%202020-07-07%29.pdf) and it's extremely not specific about the evidence required for base salaries and the auditors are not required to go above and beyond CIRR standard to sleuth those out. They are similar asking people "What is your base salary" over email and confirming it matches the worksheet! I'm 10000% not saying that this unreasonable, I just think it's very reasonable to not take CIRR as the one and only gold standard. It's a fantastic resource to help trust the outcomes of people who use it! It's better than many other attempts! It's not the one and only gold standard as people have claimed. I have learned the hard way that "audited" doesn't necessarily mean what you think and it's on you as an educated consumer to do your homework.