Reddit best boot camps vs internet

A lot of the online best bootcamps resources sadly are sponsored to various degrees. CourseReport is one that has several tiers of sponsorship package and they do videos and blog posts for sponsorship that is not disclosed. But Codesmith sponsors them so they show up there. Similarly Switch up gets paid if you join sponsored bootcamps through their website. A lot of blog posts you read are sponsored as well. Codesmith doesn't do much traditional marketing other than CourseReport, and Career Karma sponsorship. They invest their marketing dollars in the above and in developing public content that will get people to show up to a live session as the goal. There's a good podcast with Will Sentance where he talks about Codesmith's growth and marketing strategy (which is pretty interesting because the extremely strong word of mouth is the goal of their marketing and it clearly works) that you can Google for. The other thing is Codesmith is much smaller than the other big bootcamps. It's similar to why Rithm, which is even smaller, doesn't show up a lot of lists. All the bootcamps that are owned by big companies, have the parent company marketing engines supporting them.

Hack Reactor is a relatively good program that has scaled pretty well post-acquisition where a lot of other programs that scale have lost some of their steam. I think their size and parent company growth pressures have resulted in them have a lower entry bar than Codesmith in order to take on more people, but they keep a reasonably high bar and the result of a lower graduation percentage (\~75%) and they have kept the outcomes for graduates strong. The people I've worked with from Hack Reactor and Codesmith are all fairly ambitious, hard working, driven people where ultimately any of the top programs might have good enough for them. If you look 3 to 5+ years down the road, there are many many Hack Reactor alumni at top tier and FAANG companies in their 2nd, 3rd, 4th jobs. I think this is a result of them being San Francisco focused pre-COVID where once you get your first job in person in the city, you are just surrounded by FAANG employees everywhere you go. I also think the remote transition during COVID resulted in those outcome salaries being less strong, but percentage placed has held up well.