Thanks for sharing openly how you feel. I receive a lot of similar messages from people who don't have the courage to post (they are typically in the program or more recent grads and concerned about retaliation or being shunned)
Opinion words aside like "not very skilled" and "scam" the factual statements you make are extremely consistent with what I hear and I try really hard to present on here in my comments as fact-based and transparent as possible.
I get attacked, I'm sure this comment will get attacked too, but all I'm doing is repeating the very clear patterns I'm being told/sent/shown/seeing with my own eyes.
u/SignificantBullfrog5 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
OP, keep In perspective that 2022 has been one of the toughest year in terms of placement . The market is so competitive that people with 2+ years of experience are having a hard time landing a jobs.
u/michaelnovatireplied·
This is a great point but also needs to be applied the other direction too. If someone says 'wow Codesmith is incredible and I got an amazing job in the hot market', you don't see as many people saying 'keep in mind, it's a hot market, not Codesmith' (except me hahahaha)
u/metalreflectslime wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
>The market is so competitive that people with 2+ years of experience are having a hard time landing a jobs.
I know a person who has a BS and MS in CS from Stanford University.
She worked at Meta for 10 years.
As soon as she updated that her job at Meta ended in June 2023, sh
u/michaelnovatireplied·
I'm connected with thousands of ex-Meta members and most people in this bucket are intentionally waiting for their perfect oppotunities. 10 years at Meta === a wild adventure, and you get to be selective about what you want to do next.
u/SignificantBullfrog5 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
I don’t know how codesmith is - what OP brought to light definitely sounds day-2 company and they can do better to make better engineers . Will that help them land jobs - in the mid to long run yes , in the short run NO .
They did just enough to land someone in a hot market (a
u/michaelnovatireplied·
They have good unit economics so they'll just shrink instead of shutting down They already laid off 18% of staff and shutdown a cohort.
I'm super concerned about some upcoming stuff they have floated in 2024 though that might break those good unit economics if not done well.
u/xcicee wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
I was surprised to see they raised their tuition for 2024 from 2023 given the market
u/michaelnovatireplied·· edited★ FEATURED
I mean the way staff have framed this to me is that the leaders genuinely think Codesmith is the best and is a very special place (which I would also describe as a special place and one of the better bootcamps) but that has resulted in what some people perceive as arrogance. The wild success they've had and lack of outside investors, no growth mindset, and the fact that all their technical people went to Codesmith themselves results in decisions being made completely blindly to how most companies do things.
They have this Senior Advisor that the CEO can't stop racing about who I dug into and has some inconsistencies about his past company's claimed acquisition. Yet the CEO might be completely blind to what this stuff means because he doesn't have anyone around him that can advise on this.
This is an advantage when things go well and it will be a major disadvantage when they don't.
u/deadlock197 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
To be fair, I dropped out of a Masters program from a major state university when I realized that campus had a curriculum mostly taught by instructors without industry experience that were alumni. Weak education programs are a risk everywhere, not just bootcamps.
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
+1. I know my main college classes were taught by legit professors but a lot of tutorials and stuff were TAs who were PhD students.
I think the difference is that at Codesmith even the lead instructors went to Codesmith and haven't been SWEs yet.
I mean alumni who are working in industry to the career support stuff. They just aren't super super senior engineers who have had strong trajectories and track records hiring and helping people grow, so their words are taken disproportionately.
Someone I know closely was told to "practice their buzzwords" by one of the mock interviewers.
u/metalreflectslime wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
What day, month, year did you graduate from Codesmith?
How many people did you cohort start with?
How many people graduated?
How many people were able to find a paid SWE job within 6 months from graduation?
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
The OP made accurate points that can't be refuted so I think the strategy is downvote and ignore because commenting things like "I went to Codesmith, it changed my life" can't refute these points about HOW it actually works, no one should be doubting their solid outcomes compared to other bootcamps. But commenting will just snowball the post and cause it garner more eyeballs.
u/metalreflectslime wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
What day, month, year did you graduate from Codesmith?
How many people did you cohort start with?
How many people graduated?
How many people were able to find a paid SWE job within 6 months from graduation?
u/michaelnovatireplied·
It's heating up, the comment voting is wild. You can see when highly voted comments are ranked lower than others that there is intense downvoting going on. The OP's post is actually going DOWN.
u/Ok_Faithlessness3565 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
what is an example of a well-regarded bootcamp program?
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
So there are a number of bootcamps well regarded:
Codesmith, Rithm, Launch School, are a few I know.
The problem is one thing: **you have to know HOW THEY WORK and which is the RIGHT ONE FOR YOU.** I know a number of people going into Codesmith who know what they are in for and know all the OPs points and that's what they want to do, and they get good jobs.
Codesmith is NOT the program for a random person finding this subreddit and seeing $120K and 👀👀👀 💰💰💰 sign me up type mentality.
While that's a bit of hyperbole, it's also not for people who are woo'd by the feel-good and welcoming aspect of the staff they work with pre-acceptance who don't really know how this thing works but have "good vibes". You need to know how it works regardless of how much you like the people.
u/Swami218 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Yours is the real measured take here. IMO OP earns the downvote just for the disparity between the headline and the content of the post. These are pretty much all criticisms of the nature of boot camps. It might as well be:
Do not order Domino’s. They show you pepperoni in the c
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
Yeah good point, the angle I'm coming from is about people just understanding where they are at and not being misled into believing something that's not right.
I do have two personal opinions about Codesmith that are my opinions (and while backed by others I do personally state):
1. The majority of grads lie on their resumes about their OSP projects and Codesmith's sister non profit signs letters of reference to back that up. I think that harms people who don't lie.
2. They make people believe they are mid level and senior engineers by the end of Codesmith and I don't believe this is accurate at the top tier company bar. I don't deny people get 2nd level engineering roles and good salaries, but I think the portrayal as "mid level and senior" is the wrong narrative, and that people should be getting appropriate junior roles AT TOP COMPANIES with the right setup, support and structure to succeed, rather than push people to squeeze into roles that aren't aligned properly.
u/just_a_post_to_help wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
I don't want to single out Phil because he is one of the best public speakers I have seen, he is great at communicating and I would have rather watched videos of him solving algorithms, going over the curriculum and having him answer questions compared previous students. He seem
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
I've heard far more complaints from staff members than students/alumni have complained. A lot of students/alumni have found him motivational because he's given them the confidence to lie on resume and feel entitled to do so and it all came from his lectures about OSLabs and imposter syndrome. Staff seeing those lectures feel very cringy now and it's one of the reasons there is so much churn in instruction yet no one feels capable of giving him that feedback.
u/corrosivewater wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
I graduated earlier this year and this is 100% how I felt about every aspect of the program. I definitely ate up a lot of what they were saying to us up until the end of our OSP, when the career support weeks started and I realized what was going on then.
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
This is why I've been here for almost two years now trying to tell people HOW IT IS. A lot of people have gone there knowing this and done well and I've helped them decide to go there, but you need to know what you are signing up for or you feel scammed and that's why Codesmith is so polarizing.... it attracts people who have no idea what they are in for but are ambitious and want the best outcomes, but it's not everyone's cup of tea.
u/parachute50 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
You sound to be bipolar in your opinion about Codesmith. While you acknowledge the criticisms you still label it as "one of the best bootcamps".
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
I worked at Facebook for a long time and know about fake news so I try really hard to look at things from different angles and present things fairly. I'm open about my personal opinions about two aspects of Codesmith that I think are wrong, but I also look at everything else impartially.
RE: that comment. It's true but it's like being a 5th grader playing soccer with 1st graders... that person is probably the best at soccer, but if you are a grown up, you probably shouldn't be judging your soccer skills against kids, you want to find adult games to play. i.e being one of the best of a lot of not-good options doesn't necessarily mean much, but it is true.
u/bigTonyTheHungryPony wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Yeah I’m sure he’s actually a great guy in real but that character spiel just seemed so hollow it felt equal parts arrogance and performance.
u/michaelnovatireplied·· edited★ FEATURED
I saw him do a lecture where he makes a mistake on purpose. I saw someone else do the same lecture. Both people acted like it was just a mistake they did by accident, and was EXTREMELY performative.
Comments to me have ranges from: 'he's rusty himself but he's good teacher' to 'he just one of the first codesmith grads and he can't code at all himself at this point but fakes it for lectures'
u/corrosivewater wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
This was the biggest shock to me. I knew the fellows/TAs there were hired after their respective cohort, that's fine as I saw them more as assisting students one on one but I honestly thought the lead instructors came from SWE roles in the past to teach. Perhaps it was me not doi
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
Since I've been mentioning this publicly they have stated in info sessions that they are proud that all their instructors are alumni who stay to teach.
I just watched this documentary called "Escaping Twin Flames" on Netflix and they had similar vibes... two people started it and then hired some of their first students, who then hired more students, and then became leaders in a hierarchy of members. Paying customers -> teachers and coaches. And similarly that program has extremely polarizing views about it.
u/Invest0rnoob1 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Paying 20k for jackshit sounds horrible.
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
I mean I want to have a productive discourse about it, the Codesmith people are downvoting this thing to oblivion just like I thought they would and not saying anything because it will only attract more attention to the post.
It would be great to talk about what you are paying for and where the money goes. Businesses can be for profit and still be incentive aligned, so I would love to have a discussion about where the money is going and what you are actually paying for.
They had layoffs a month or so ago so clearly the money is going somewhere and I genuinely believe that they would rather not take profits off the table to avoid those layoffs, so if the content is not great and instructors are being held back and overloaded, like where is the money going and is it being spent effectively.
u/noa_karn wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Totally true! Also who is Michael Novati?
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
Me, I'm a non-anonymous member who has been here for 2 years and comment a lot.
My background is I worked at Meta from 2009 to 2017, grew from new grad to E7 principal engineer, did 400+ interviews of all shapes and sizes, participated in calibrations and interview offer panels, and was the number one code committer at the company when I left.
After I took a break, I joined my partners company which helps engineers with experience level up their careers. We work with a lot of bootcamp grads later on in their careers so I know about and hear about just about everything with bootcamps.
Codesmith caught my interest about 2 years ago when I was interviewing people to join Formation for leveling up and they had these really weird jobs at "OSLabs" that made no sense, and were being nervously vague about them in the interviews. I then went down the rabbit hole and found out that OSLabs was (at the time) just an unregistered name under Codesmith and that over 2/3 of grads were doing this strategy of making their 3 week long project look like months of work experience.
I'm non-anonymous because this industry is full of miscommunication and I see so many people easily swayed one way or the other without solid reasoning or evidence. So I'm hear completely authentically, with one Reddit account, to give my 2 cents on things in here and try to help people get going on the right foot.
People ask why I care so much and how I can be so all over the place in here without "living on Reddit 24/7" and I'm equally transparent about all of that:
1. I work with a lot of bootcamp grads in their 2nd, 3rd, 4th job hunts, so it's good for my company if I gave people truly valuable and thoughtful advice years ago and they remember me down the road when they might need more help.
2. I'm extremely responsive and fast. I hardly spend any time on Reddit, I spend at most 5 mins and usually 1-3 mins on comments, often full of typos from my phone responding to push notifications.
3. I started working at my company to help people, I haven't got a salary for the first 4 years and still don't, and I see a lot of "low hanging fruit" to help people here with seconds or minutes of my time asynchronously and I feel it's a net positive in doing so.
u/Chanceawrapper wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
I also went to codesmith and think some of what you said is fair, some is not. Maybe my experience was different, but it sounds like you are just stretching the truth. Instructors not being available, I didn't have that experience at all. The classes were not taught by the fellow
u/michaelnovatireplied·· edited★ FEATURED
\- Instructors (all but one) are former students -> Fellows -> hired as "Mentors" -> hired as "Instructor" -> hired as "Lead Instructor", and almost none have SWE industry experience
\- The instructors I know are overworked and told to let people do "hard learning" instead of helping them too much - but they love to help when they can and are allowed. Several people have independently told me this.
\- Did you put your OSP as 3-4+ months of work while double counting all your Codesmith projects as well? Did you put in the Project or Open Source section or did you put it under experience? Did OSLabs have to do a reference call to confirm your time there?
\- I know people hired as seniors who are paranoid they'll get fired when they realize more junior people are outperforming them. I advise a number of these people because they can't talk to anyone about it without getting found out and Codesmith sure doesn't advise them on how to get by on your job you got by stretching the truth.
\- It is indeed a fact that their hiring rates and outcomes are higher than almost all or all other programs. It's also a fact (from leaked data) that the median starting salary BEFORE someone goes to Codesmith is around $70K (in July/Aug 2023 of 70 people), which is also higher than the OUTCOMES of most other programs.
\- Interviewing is not 90% bullshit and that's something Codesmith taught you. If you want to get to a top tier company and do well there and have a fulfilling top tier company career you'll eventually realize that. I've done 400+ interviews at Facebook and it's not bullshit in any way and I talk for maybe 20 hours about the process.
u/Chanceawrapper wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
If you are a person that needs a lot of hands-on instruction, I agree Codesmith is not the place. I found it totally adequate and I generally think doing it yourself is a better way to learn.
Sounds about right, probably put the project as open source 3 months or something like
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
So something a lot of people don't realize is that Open Source !== free/unpaid work. Look at this resume: [https://www.linkedin.com/in/feross](https://www.linkedin.com/in/feross)
People who contribute legit open source work often work at companies who pay them to do it, or they have some kind of grants/support to do it.
People who do one off contributions here or there, or on the side, do not list that as "work experience" and they do not list it for 4X longer time then they spent on it. So you lied on your resume and you might not even realize you did.
Amazon is the most gamable FAANG but you are doing it wrong by trying to game the interviews. My entire life now is teaching people how to be better engineers and helping them pass interviews by investing in becoming better engineers instead of investing in gamifying the interview.
I know all the Codesmith alums at Amazon and Capital One basically cheat their way through the interview by sharing questions with each other and it can work, but your just wasting your time. You could spend that same time becoming a better engineer and passing everyones interview and performing better on the job, but Codesmith doesn't know how to do that, so you get taught to do LC practice all day long without feedback on your thought process.
u/Chanceawrapper wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Everybody lies on their resume. It's all a matter of degree. I have looked through hundreds of resumes applying to my company. You think they really all have work-experience in every technology listed on their resume, nope. I know some companies pay people to do open-source work
u/michaelnovatireplied·
It sounds like Codesmith was the right choice then for you and if I talked to you before I would have recommended you go. And for others reading this, this is what you need to do to be successful in it.
u/Chanceawrapper wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
I'm not trying to attack you, I think your post is almost fair except the title and a few details. Stretching your resume to get an interview is totally fine and yeah everybody does it. If you are straight up lying in the interview saying your open source project was a paying job
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
That's a Codesmith line and the lies continue to the interview.
The policy is to not proactively bring up that it's unpaid and only explain that if explicitly asked. I've interviewed a number of Codesmith people who dance around this and come across incompetent in the first 10 mins until the truth finally comes out and makes the previous 10 mins feel like lies.
So you practice and practice how to talk about the project to both: 1. not get caught in the first place while not saying it was paid work, and 2. if you do get called out, how to handle that smoothly to clarify instead of the interview falling apart.
Presumably the people I talk to need more help because I wouldn't talk to them otherwise, but they all said that's how Codesmith mock interviewers told them to do it.
u/Chanceawrapper wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Everybody stretches their resume is what I said, and yeah they do. Mostly its listing technologies they are barely proficient in. If not its at least making what you did sound as important as you can.
You practice talking about your project because you are practicing interviewin
u/michaelnovatireplied·· edited★ FEATURED
I interviewed someone who said his "manager was Philip Troutman" and he was "selected to work on this by his acquaintance and didn't have to interview for the position" and that "he hasn't gotten any performance reviews yet" and that it was a "not a W2 full time relationship"
That's what you call not lying?
u/Chanceawrapper wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
No? That's obviously lying and I never said I did anything like that. That's obviously well beyond "stretching a resume", so either you are responding to the wrong person or your being intentionally misleading as to my position.
u/michaelnovatireplied·
Yeah that's probably why were not on the same page here, that's what I see far too often and you might have been talking about something else this whole time.
u/Chanceawrapper wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
I'm not sure about the letter of rec. I don't remember them mentioning anything about that. OSLabs did exist but I think was pretty new at the time. They were very clear at mine that it was totally up to us whether we had Codesmith on our resume (they advised against it though) a
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
Feel free to DM me and I'll send you over the forms used for that, it's absolutely happening. I can't talk about what current employees said, but it was shared that they will confirm whatever you put in the form. So many people "keep working on their OSP" ;) ;) and put that on the forms and then get it confirmed. One person changed ONE word in a Readme file 7 months later and said they worked on it for an 11 month period.
u/AnimeYou wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
I mean most professors have no industry exp
In Chem, they go from undergrad to grad to postdoc at maybe industry for 1 year but most likely another university... then they start teaching as a prof lol
That's just how academia is run... there's always an industry vs academia thi
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
- Most schools want people to move around and not stay at the same school for the whole thing
- Most PhD students do internships at top companies because industry has way more resources.
I was supposed to do my PhD and was offered a research job at Intel before I even started the program to do in conjunction with the program and cross publish research.
A number of papers have cross company/academic publication in the CS space
u/OutsideSignal4194 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
I don't understand - how do you think Codesmith is reputable when in later threads you clearly point out they encourage lying on their resumes?
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
I take a journalist approach of collecting information and trying to be objective. Just like journalists, everyone is biased, but I've built a reputation on here for being rational and look at things from multiple sides.
I would rather Codesmith replace most of their leaders and change, rather than burn it to the ground. If I wanted to do that I would be sharing way crazier things people have shared with me so I hope my commentary does come across balanced.
u/Jerund wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
IMO if you are going the journalist approach, whatever crazy stories you hear, you should still report it after verifying it did happen. What’s the point of hiding the bad news or really good news if they are true to be more “balanced.” If I’m getting it right, it seems like the
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
The main difference is I'm not a journalist and I don't want people getting sued. There's a whole set of ethics around journalism I'm not trained in so I take a cautious route and I think that has resulted in more people feeling very comfortable sending me things. I never reach out to anyone who works/worked there because this isn't my job to dig into, and all of this is inbound.
At the end of the day, everyone has biases and that's why I am non-anonymous, so people can easily get to know me and decide how they feel about my commentary. I'm not some kind of perfect robot (and even the robots have biases haha)!
I gladly accept feedback on my tone, balance and how I can be more useful to the community.
u/pork_chop2812 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
I'm sure you have heard this question a lot already. Especially when you voice your opinion on certain bootcamps like CS.
So if not this bootcamp then which bootcamp?
Or there's just simply none, and the right way should be the traditional way (bachelor degree and such)?
I am w
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
It really depends on you and your timeframe. If you have a longer timeframe, I would consider first self teaching, then doing a more intense self-paced online program/course, and then doing open source contributions or starting a company/building a product from scratch. You can put that 20K into hiring some freelancers and registering an LLC and building something for real.
There is simply no program that will get you there.
There's a saying going around that if you can get accepted by Codesmith on the first interview, run for the hills and save your $20K because that means you are pretty much ready to go and just need a little connecting of the dots to get there.
Happy to chat more if you want to share more personal background for more specific advice, it's hard to generalize.
u/Yohezey wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Some context before I make a comment, I am sure that some people from Codesmith will recognize my username, but this is my experience (and opinions) with Codesmith. I also graduated from Codesmith's main program back in April of 2023 and have sent over 2 thousand job applications
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
Hey, thanks for sharing your experience with everyone, two follow up questions in bold below. There's a lot of common stuff I hear about career support at Codesmith (in terms of response times and the idea that they don't really care if you give up after a year because it won't impact CIRR numbers anymore). Additionally, people often report that alumni mentors tend to regurgitate the lectures, repeating the same solutions and people who get it, do well and people who don't just get told they are "hard learning" and to figure it out.
**I have a follow up question, which is how many people in your cohort do you think were in a similar boat, i.e. what was your approximate placement rate within 6 months?**
Codesmith aggressively markets that their alumni are mid-level and senior engineers and bluntly, I saw [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/18cpq98/analysis_of_52_most_recent_codesmith_offers/) that the people who were getting jobs tended to exaggerate their resumes significantly in landing potential "mid level" jobs. **Do you think going the honest "entry level" route could be what's causing the lack of success?**