Codesmith or Launch School?

This still feels like you graduate and go in "support mode" where some other students/graduates (edit: graduates can be employed SWEs or not yet employed) hired as coaches (i.e. peers) check up on you. It's a wonderful and amazing community but it's still peer based. At Formation.dev we have a bunch of people who are/have been Codesmith coaches or mock interviewers and they are just graduates themselves without jobs or with minimal work experience. So the support is more like "enhanced peer support" and not the full weight of Codemsith behind you. Maybe over time it will be stronger as graduates many years into their jobs give back. Codesmith experimented with a DSA course for alumni and they charged them for it at a heavily discounted rate so I would expect them to charge for any true future support. At Formation we give people lifetime access to our version of slack and to some community events, but people have to pay again to come back and train with a new starting skill level and new goals... and people actually do that no problem. Training people well is very expensive on our side and requires us to pay hundreds of the best engineers and recruiters in the industry well, and people would rather pay for something that has an average first year compensation increase of $100K and is well worth it, than receive free lifetime peer based support alone. Sorry this went on a tangent a bit, it's something I talk to bootcamp grads a lot about who wonder how Formation can help if they have lifetime support from their bootcamp and I need to disclose my bias as the founder of a program where a large amount of people are bootcamp grads a few years ago.

I edited to clarify that, I meant both employed SWEs and not yet employed SWEs, I know more than a handful of mock interviewers and coaches with no experienced at all except at Codesmith itself as a paid employee. I also consider graduates who are employed as "peer support" imo. At Formation we have senior engineers at FAANG companies as normal Fellows looking to change jobs believe it or not who will be peer with each other, but also peers to bootcamp grad Fellows with no job yet. Those are just standard peer sessions and interactions. The actual mentors/mentorship is from very senior engineers (or from 5 to 10+ year FAANG recruiters) who are experts at 1-1 and small group mentoring and they are paid very well at their day jobs and we pay them well as well. Again sorry for the tangent, I just talk about this a lot to people 1-1 and this is meant more for others who might read this.

I've been yelled at for not disclosing my affiliations before. I talk about Formation as a reference because I don't know anyone else here that his worked with hundreds of bootcamp grads from all kinds of bootcamps at all stages in-after-much-after. Nor are there any other E7-principal FAANG engineers here that helped grow a FAANG company from 200 engineers to 10,000. I've been here for almost a year now, giving all kinds of advice and telling dozens of people to go to specific bootcamps... Codesmith lines seem longer than ever to me! I'm obviously super biased and I try to disclose that, but I also have a unique point of view that many find valuable! I don't pretend I don't have biases, and don't mind some criticism, but I appreciate a kinder calling out if you find me annoying :D