CIRR's domain expired 2 days ago, no one renewed it, and the website is now offline

CIRR's domain expired 2 days ago, no one renewed it, and the website is now offline CIRR's website (cirr.org) is completely down for 2 days and counting because they didn't renew their domain name. Their registrar, Google Domains, has put an auto-renew on it, to give them up to 45 days to pay up and renew before it goes to auction. The reason I'm posting this is that I repeatedly caution those against using CIRR as the "gold standard" (as several people have quoted here). Codesmith touts CIRR in all of their public sessions and has doubled down on it in their marketing. I understand their positive motivations of trying to help consumers weed out "bad bootcamps", and that something is better than nothing. But the amount of personal insults and attacks I've taken for suggesting that CIRR is just one source of information amongst a sea of information and opinions, is just unwarranted. I don't consider a service that can't figure out how to renew or auto renew their website, and then when it does happen, not being able to recover that within 2 days and counting, as the "gold standard".

I don't think I questioned the integrity of the results in my post. When you have been calling CIRR the "gold standard" if you meant the specification itself or the auditing process was industry leading you are extremely mistaken and every bootcamp leader I've talked to agrees. And I take all of their words over a Codesmith alumni who has no context there. I have read the CIRR standards doc (which I can't link anymore because the site is still down) many times and there are many problems due to lack of attention to detail. And they have similar problems attention to detail in managing their domain name. The reason I mentioned Codesmith, is that if you are telling your students "studies show that Codesmith is better than Harvard and MIT" (this is a quote a few people shared with me), and in your own description calling yourself competitive to "elite grad schools", then the bar is high and you sure as heck bet I'm going to be holding them to that bar. A lot of people stayed on the Titanic as it was sinking, and a lot of people tried to get out. If I was Codesmith, I would get out and make my own standard, like Hack Reactor did when they saw the signs years ago.

Yeah! It happens for a lot of reasons! Google uses Mark Monitor I think to protect their trademarks and domains, so there are different reasons for large companies versus small ones. That's why most registrars give you some time to fix things if it expires and your site goes down and most people would fix this ASAP... we're at 3 days and counting here

I want to clarify that I don't have an axe to grind here with CIRR or with Codesmith and please don't try to add drama to a non-dramatic situation. I worked at Facebook for 8 years and saw how misinformation spreads and this subreddit is a misinformation breeding ground. Every day, I see leading questions, one person answer confirming the question, and then the OP being like "I knew it!". This is straight out of the misinformation 101 textbook. No one here has bad intentions, it happens because people make generalized conclusions from one off data and when many people you see in your online community support your ideas. Just because 1 person says something and 5 people back it up it means absolutely nothing, but people take that point, spread it to others, and before you know it, everyone thinks something that is not based on anything valid. If you hear "trust the process" too many times, you really need to ask yourself some hard questions about what you think you know and I'm trying to empower people to think critically, be diligent, ask questions, etc...

I think the bigger point here is the auditing doesn't matter. I don't know where "audited" became synonymous with integrity. The CIRR process auditors just make sure humans input data correctly, and they don't do much investigating to dig into if that data is correct. For example, if a human put Susan's salary as $50,000. They will ask Susan, "was your salary $50,000?" and if she says yes, they are done. The CIRR spec doesn't say much about what auditing means, which is one of the flaws... they just throw the label on their to make it sound more legit... and it doesn't hurt, but it's a flaw. They don't even say clearly how salaries are verified! All they say is that start dates need to be pulled from an offer letter, but they say nothing about salary, so it can be entirely reported by a student incorrectly. All of this to me is much more important that slapping "audited" on there and calling it a day. RE: MIT/Harvard. This is from a lecture Eric K gives for job hunting that several people have quoted and offered evidence of. RE: Smoke and Fires, many students and alumni think exaggerating time frames on resumes is wrong and send me things... apparently it's something discussed often behind the scenes, in lectures, in 1-1 meetings, etc.... and there is definitive evidence of Codesmith in more than one occasion supporting people exaggerating their timeframes. If you want to verify, run a background check on a Codesmith student and seen what time frame gets officially verified by Codesmith staff for that OSP (yes, just the OSP and not other, separate, projects).... it's not 4 weeks... it's 3 months+. All of this said, I still think this is just one small element of the program and it doesn't invalidate at all everything good about Codesmith. I just think everyone should know for EVERY PROGRAM how it works, who it is good for... instead of 'I want the objectively best program' and 'Codesmith is the best, you just have to trust the system and it works'... be a good engineer! figure out why it works, figure out if how it works is a good fit for you, and don't just accept that 'it works' and make a decision!

Are board members not responsible for the companies they run... they sure are when it's Facebook, or Exxon, or companies people hate, no? If they are on the board to put their face on a website and to get the marketing benefits of being on the board of CIRR, they also have to take responsibility for competently running the company... If they can't renew a domain name (or at least resolve the issue immediately when it expires), are their taxes being filed? Is their governance up to date? Are their finances and credit cards in order?

And today...

It's possible but I highly doubt CIRR would shutdown and go offline without any notice. They would probably keep the website running with the standards documents so that others in the future could continue their work. I also think the bootcamps remaining in CIRR are the ones most serious about the process and would probably want to continue publishing data even if it's bad. If everyone's data is bad and yours is better, it looks less bad for the best ones... even if overall fewer people go to bootcamps because of the results, the ones that do will be more likely to go to the best ones. Based on anecdotal evidence from \~10 people at HR and Codesmith, results will indeed tank for H2 2022, but H1 2022 might not be that terrible. So it might help Codesmith to have H1 2022 published and people might mistakenly think the market is still good. And when H2 2022 comes out and the results are like 30 to 50% placement rates, that's when the bootcamp industry might take a ding.

It's back!