u/GoodnightLondon wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Yes, because I'm sure an organization like Codesmith tracks and saves its data in an excel file called "Untitled Spreadsheet".
u/michaelnovatireplied·· edited★ FEATURED
So believe it or not but the column titles are the real titles of the official data they collect. Literally from their CIRR collection worksheet. I was shocked too when I saw this because they collect such little information about compensation, e.g. someone put "some stocks" and this is the data that turns into CIRR outcomes.
But yeah, meaningless in this context... doesn't even have the companies or time frames.
u/Competitive-Feed-359 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
It’s funny that I had mentioned this exact thing in my comment. If what you’re saying is the reality how can anyone put stock on CIRR when it’s just a bunch of correlated data points that are cherry picked to present a good outcome.
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
I mean they are using the full and proper data set for CIRR, but this is the source yeah. I'm just surprised how much Codesmith cares about talking about compensation and pushing people for compensation, yet they don't even collect granular compensation information. With the quality of data they collect, they can't say someone got a $400K FAANG offer. Every FAANG offer needs to be considered in terms of base, signing bonus, performance bonus, equity, vesting schedule, job location, and benefits (e.g. Amazon has much worse benefits than Apple and pays a lot more cash.... you are not smart at all if you compare the base salary one on one and say one offer is better than another.
Anyways, I'm writing up more separately!
u/michaelnovatireplied·· edited★ FEATURED
ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY. I think people know me around here well so I won't introduce but I have a lot of comments. Most important point is in bold, the reset is just commentary.
1. **IF CODESMITH HAS THIS DATA SO EASILY ACCESSIBLE - BE TRANSPARENT ABOUT IT AND TELL PEOPLE THAT SALARIES ARE DOWN $20K (median/mean) FROM LAST YEAR.** I've seen a few info sessions where employees say that outcomes are "similar" to last year but at "different types of companies". Second, I've seen numerous documents shared with me where Codesmith ties it's "excellence" with the high salaries compared to bootcamp and CS degrees, so they have to take a hit with this kind of drop, when the best CS grads from Stanford and Harvard are still all making $150K base salaries at Figma, Asana, Palantir, etc...
2. The columns of this data align with their post-graduation CIRR collecting intake form so I think this is real and true that someone from Codesmith shared this from their official data.
3. These numbers are meaningless out of context. There are no dates, company names, job titles.... etc... you'd be surprised how many graduates jobs are actually contracts and not full time work, with worse benefits and no fixed timeframe but they are portrayed as $150K American Express jobs... Contract jobs pay higher cash becasue they have no benefits or stability and about 1/3 to 1/2 of those people are not employed anymore at that company in about a year from (my anecdotal estimation of Codesmith grad analysis).
u/DEV-Christopher wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
i posted this because a lot of people on this sub are saying bootcamp grads are lucky to even get unpaid internships. to the point it was even getting me down.
Also if a bootcamp has about 700 grads a year, then a month and few weeks timeframe showing 73 grads reporting recent
u/michaelnovatireplied·
Is this 73 placements all of the placements for 2023?
u/DEV-Christopher wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Its about a month and a half of placements starting July 2023 to mid august. thank you for clarifying that
u/michaelnovatireplied·
Hmm are you sure about that, I have two sources that show the number closer to 20 in the past month, and one of those was based on the same spreadsheet.
u/DEV-Christopher wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
i know alums apparently have their own spreadsheets for their individual cohorts but this is taken from codesmith's official spreadsheet and it spans all of july and part of august for their whole program.
u/michaelnovatireplied·· edited★ FEATURED
I'm talking the official the spreadsheet (with the same columns the one you posted has) and it having about 20 more people on it since mid/end of July, but it could be incorrect. The other data source was someone said the celebrations channel had under 20 people on it in the past month (but said those can be opt out, and sometimes delayed by months) but given how proudly most people share their outcomes with their cohorts, I doubt THAT many people would opt out of sharing in the celebration channel.
u/DEV-Christopher wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
I was told by admissions they get 1-3 grad offers a day. This aligns to a full july and part of august time frame. Unless you work in codesmith's admissions I dont think anyone has (or should be having) access to the real job sheet.
u/michaelnovatireplied·· edited
Admissions says a lot of things...
u/InTheDarkDancing wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
CIRR only takes into account the base salary, so it's not as essential to track the additional compensation. And it's not as if they don't track it at all, and the data you collect is limited to what the respondent offers, so for this sub's perspective it's not really relevant in
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
I added these to my comment above that I think are super interesting from this data,
​
>It's really interesting to see "past salaries", the number of people making six figures BEFORE CODESMITH is an anomaly for bootcamps, and one of the things that skews the numbers. 16, or 20% of the people made over 90K BEFORE with and I would say most people on here are hoping to make 90K AFTER. People really need to know this going in... that part of the success is that a number of people going in are already successful.
>
>2. This gives more insight into the split distribution - lots of high salaries, lots of low salaries - which, like 2., is not the norm for bootcamps. You can see personas in the data. Some people with $140K+ salaries started with high salaries anyways. Some didn't, those people are the "all in Codesmith" people who defend it to the bitter death - but it's like 5 people out of 73. The more typical case is someone making 50 to 80K in a good job before Codesmith going to low six figures after, and this is a fantastic outcome and the bread and butter Codesmith-supporter who thinks it's absolutely worth the tuition but acknowledges the imperfections.
u/InTheDarkDancing wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
For some fun, I converted the image to csv and played with the data in ChatGPT. I asked ChatGPT to perform an analysis on the data to find a correlation between starting salary and outcome salary. It found a .26 Pearson coefficient.
Here is ChatGPT's explanation on the significa
u/michaelnovatireplied·
That's cool!
I think clustering is interesting here because there clear personas of people going into Codesmith and there's more value in someone understanding what "someone like them" does than aggregated stats. Try exploring that a bit if you have time!
u/icybreath11 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Maybe a more general question but what is the general experience level/background do these people have prior to codesmith? I'm currently working towards getting into codesmith and I find it wild to me that I could do a bootcamp (obviously a lot of effort but i've been self-studyi
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
I commented above but it's also interesting to note that the median salary going in was in the $70Ks and 20% of people were making $90K+. So it depends on where you are starting from! If you make 40K across two restaurant jobs, the odds are much lower of making six figures than someone who is an accountant making $90K.
u/zerabellaa wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
that’s if 73 represented their placements for the entire year…it’s august and this data is a month and a half of results.
So 73 grads over a month and a half is ~389 grads over 8 months (where we are now) and ~584 grads over 12 months.
That’s an ~83% placement rate overall wh
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
This is really hard to extrapolate, I have a lot of data people have shared and I threw it into cohort-based charts.
For CIRR, it's placed within 6 months of graduating. Some of these 73 people are people that graduated more than 6 months ago so they wouldn't even count in the "83%" and some are and would.
So you can't extrapolate anything from the number alone... whoever at Codesmith shared this knows exactly what they are doing and shared no dates and no timeframes to make a point about hiring picking up to motivate people and not a point about actual placement rates
Or as Ludo said below:
https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/162t5y6/comment/jy0n28j/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3
u/starraven wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Thanks for the sheet, gives me some hope that my pre-layoff salary wasn’t a fluke. I’ll get back there soon.
u/michaelnovatireplied·
Sorry to hear about the layoff, we've chatted on here for quite some time now and I know you are in for a career-long journey and not a short term job and it you'll find something great!
u/GoodnightLondon wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Someone's touchy about people insisting the data presented was cherry picked.
This is a bullshit spreadsheet made to give students warm fuzzy feelings; by not being an official spreadsheet, it lacks any and all context that would give the data meaning. You have no idea where
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
While this is a little opinionated in tone, I think this is all true except that there's no point in sharing it. It shows a super key thing, which is that the median Codesmith grad was about the same in their LAST JOB that the median bootcamp grad in the whole industry makes AFTER THEIR BOOTCAMP. I think that's a pretty important thing to note for people looking at their options and Codesmith had this data all along and didn't share it!
u/Real-Set-1210 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
$400k at faang after a bootcamp? Uhh
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
Yeah as someone said below, this is a strong TRUE mid-level FAANG offer, or low end senior FAANG offer.
Their previous salary was $145K already, so they were probably someone who didn't really need to go to Codesmith.
I've worked with a couple people in this bucket who dropped out in their first week because they really needed something else (like Formation.dev - disclosure, co-founder, Pathrise, Interview Kickstart) and not a bootcamp. but didn't know those existed.
u/starraven wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
I’ve got a temporary job now but I had to take quite a pay cut. Thanks for the well wishes!
u/michaelnovatireplied·
Send me a DM if you want my thoughts on your resume or strategy or ideas for where to apply! Would def checkout LinkedIn Reach opening Sept 1
u/OutsideSignal4194 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Just out of curiosity why isn't Formation Dev part of CIRR?
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
Sure happy to answer:
1. We are not a bootcamp or educational program and we don't have the data CIRR requires. We don't have end dates, we don't have a program length, we don't have a curriculum, even though the pace is dynamic - we don't have any even theoretical length of the content itself to benchmark against, people ramp up or down hours as they please and we have no control over that, people pause for weeks and go on vacation, people have no expectation of what work they will do going in, people don't "graduate", roughly 2/3 of people are ALREADY CURRENTLY WORKING. So it just doesn't make sense and trying to manipulate our data to fit into CIRR would be extremely misrepresenting and misleading and not what you think it would be.
2. We published some outcomes on our blog and plan to every year with extremely fine details of how every single thing is calculated. This goes WELL BEYOND CIRR's definitions, which are quite loose and have holes in them.
3. If we did publish using a standard we would probably make our own standard or work with others in the industry to make a standard that meets our bar and CIRR's standard does not meet our bar or pass our legal review.
u/OutsideSignal4194 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Do you have any plans to have some sort of third party audit the outcomes you do have on your blog for example or anything that is being actively promoted or advertised? I am sure there are outcomes that should be verified by a third party like how many end up at FAANG companies,
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
We don't right now because auditing requires a framework of rules to check against first. But you can get any data audited that has rules and the auditors just make sure you follow the process! And believe it or not, CIRR data is audited AFTER the fact, not before (which is one of the problems).
Believe it or not but CIRR doesn't even say how salary information needs to be collected whatsoever, so just asking someone and taking their word for it can be considered the golden source of truth!
We collect detailed placement data for every single placement and detailed compensation info following an internal process, and some day we could potential turn that into something auditable to make sure we don't make any mistakes in collecting the data. Right now just have a crazy strict authorization and verification process to touch this data to make sure every pixel is correct, but we could probably have a more looser process that is easier to maintain and rely on auditing to check it's being done properly.
u/OutsideSignal4194 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Thanks can you link me to blog article that had data you mentioned? I would love to see the outcomes thus far. It looks like a cool program
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
It's here and the disclaimers at the bottom explain the methodology of how everything is calculated: [https://formation.dev/blog/2022-formation-fellow-placements/](https://formation.dev/blog/2022-formation-fellow-placements/)
We're working on a mid year update for 2023. Salaries have been a bit lower lately but we're still crunching the numbers for anything interesting!