Job Market

The market is indeed tough. It's not quite "improving" in the sense of going back to the good times we had.... it's changing. I won't give my full background but I'm expressing my observations having a pretty good pulse on hiring at the top tier companies specifically. Hiring during the freezes was senior engineers only. Like canonical senior engineers with 5+ YOE at strong companies and who have worked on large scale products already. The hiring now has opened up to canonical mid-level engineers. At Meta for example, this means a bare minimum of 2 YOE at solid companies working on large scale products. So this is benefiting people who have solid experience already. New grads are generally struggling. There is new grad headcount during the current fall hiring season, but it's going to top tier school grads, like Stanford, and other schools they have dedicated recruiters for. So for bootcamp grads, apprenticeships remain as competitive as ever and haven't opened up more (some have actually shrunk). Entry level spots haven't opened up yet. I'm optimistic we'll know more in the new year after the new grad hiring season is over. I'm also seeing that the YOE for these mid-level roles is really strict. I've talked to 4 Codesmith alumni (independent of Formation) in the past few weeks who have all got jobs or late stage interviews (yay!) but all had resorted to portraying themselves as several years of experience engineers because they couldn't get interviews otherwise.

I can't say anything other than we'll know more once this fall's hiring seasons is done , and I'm talking about like BIG TECH... I have less of a strong pulse on all the non-tech companies, like agencies, and basically companies that don't have equity/RSUs/options/etc... I see people get offers there, just can't speak confidently to those. So what happens right now is a company has like say 100 new grad headcount, and they are dividing targets up per school, like 20 from Stanford, 20 from MIT, etc... And the recruiters go off and try to hit those numbers. But the students have lots of offers and might not just go to the company 100%, so after all the dust settles, we'll see in the new year how many slots are left AND if new slots are added or not. I do think there is an oversupply of new grads so even if there are some left over slots from this fall after the dust settles they will just go to a second round of people who fell through the cracks at these top schools in the fall. But if headcount suddenly increased, then they might be scrambling to get new grads in for spring start dates and maybe some bootcamp grads can squeeze in. Sorry, a bit rambly, but just giving some insights into how this works so it's less of a mystery.

I don't have any universal data so I should make it clear that Codesmith claims 100% of alumni get promoted within 5 years (it's based on 120 grads who decided to reply to the survey and from a long time ago, vs the 3000 grads they claim they have, so I don't entirely believe this - and know counter examples that were probably not in the 120 people, but that's the most zoomed out data we have). Anecdotally, four buckets: 1. People who get by but change companies within a year or around that time, or they get a contract job they don't do super well on and just don't get the contract extended and then switch to a similar or slightly better company after a year, and then do this a few times. And soon enough they have the 2-3+ YOE for real to make a bigger jump to a top tier company. Worked with a few of these people at Formation. So they kind of show up, give it a huge amount of hustle but have a lot of gaps, but before their performance is truly evaluated before they make a job, or they make up for their gaps long with hustle long enough to voluntarily find their next job. 2. People who get solid six figure "mid level" jobs at not very strong or non-tech companies and do pretty well - hustle and work ethic are most important and challenge and scale of the work is pretty small. People might work on teams of 5 people, might be the only engineer, might not have frequent code review, might be building things for clients or other small things that aren't being build for hundreds of millions of users. The people might stay here for a while and they think their job is too easy and boring and they then work on a level up jump in 3 years. I think this is probably one of the more common buckets and these salary are the bread and butter "$120K mid level job". I really think bucket 3 is waaaaaay better to me in every way, but this bucket is the one that keeps the lights on at Codesmith and also the job I actually think Codesmith prepares people best for. 3. People get entry level jobs at good tech companies (e.g. Google, PayPal, like legit tech companies) and stay there for years (because they are appropriately leveled). Many are still at those companies today! And I would say that a number of these people are also the ones who are hired back as instructors and stay heavily involved. Codesmith calls their jobs "mid level" or "senior" because of the high compensation, but these are entry level jobs with great ramp up support. A few people do get non-entry level top tier jobs but that's a huge 4. People who don't make it. I've seen a number of people get laid off within a year. Typically it's the result of being overlevelled and hiding it, so they are not getting the support. A common anecdote from Capital One: 'I'm a senior engineer with no experience and we hired a mid level with 3 years of real experience and I feel like they are years ahead of me so I'm going to plan to get fired in the back of my mind'. People do make it, like bucket 1, 2, but a number of people don't. Some will switch companies before being laid off and use the months/1 year at this job to help get interviews for the next one, before being laid off.