I'm very familiar with this topic and have seen the full spectrum as well as seen most of the data round this. I time box my answers and might edit this later with more details:
1. Short answer yes some people do,
2. Codesmith judges level based on both titles and salaries when they say "senior" so it's not a canonical "top tier level" senior bar. By Codesmith's bar it's about 15%
3. The people who get these jobs fall into three buckets
1. Non-SWE roles, but adjacent, e.g. "senior solutions engineer"
2. People who have experience already as SWE's or adjacent roles
3. People who fake it and lie about their experience to squeeze through at smaller companies, startups, and non-tech companies
4. The average ENTRY LEVEL FAANG engineer has a $150K base salary, so even though the outcomes are high at a median of $127K, these are clearly not top tier senior roles. Codesmith grads that get entry level FAANG roles get bucketed into "senior".
5. I interviewed 400+ people at Facebook and was on hiring panels. People with 5 years at Microsoft were often not even leveled as Senior if they haven't worked on systems and products with MILLIONS OF USERS and been exposed to extremely complex user problems and system problems that you cannot be exposed to outside of top tier companies.
6. It's not all rosy after the job starts, people get fired, leave their companies pretty quickly, fail to get even mid level jobs at FAANG afterwards, or work 24/7 and hide their hours to get by through shear will.
7. **It is not possible to go from zero experience to senior level top-tier company engineer no matter how good anything is, you need real experience working on products with extremely complex system problems and extremely complex product problems.**
u/illustrious_feijoa wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Great post, especially point 8. I wish someone told me that earlier in my career.
u/michaelnovatireplied·
Yeah I firmly believe most Codesmith grads would be SUPERSTARs doing this approach and be much better off, but that's just my 2cents.
u/EcstaticAssignment wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
>Codesmith grads that get entry level FAANG roles get bucketed into "senior".
LOL okay that's just bizarre. (Ofc you know this and I'm preaching to the choir but) entry level FAANG developers are not performing the job function of a senior developer at a less selective company.
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
That's what I say but they defend this to the core internally. The staff I've spoken too think it's part of the effort to build people's self confidence in overcoming imposter syndrome and if they kind dropped this narrative then people might not have the confidence to get those jobs anymore and if they don't have $125K CIRR numbers, people won't join anymore.
u/CodedCoder wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
You are saying 15 percent get senior roles? thats a super high percentage and not sure I believe that if so lol.
u/michaelnovatireplied·
That's what their senior advisor Eric K says. Their last CIRR report shows something like 7% have "senior" in the title.
u/CodedCoder wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
So what we know for sure is they lie lol.
u/michaelnovatireplied·
I mean the person who says that keeps saying his last company was acquired by Disney, yet I can't find evidence of that on paper, and have other pieces of evidence that it wasn't.
u/CodedCoder wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
I have been asking this, I know they do it but I am not sure how they get away with it.
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
So there's two aspects to this, civil and criminal.
Civil, it would be more about a company suing an employee for lying and causing "damage" to the company. This is pretty rare, people just get fired for lying rather than sued. If Codesmith did something criminally wrong, there might be a case for students to sue Codesmith as well.
Criminally, there has to be some kind of bad intentions by individuals to intentionally deceive people for their person gain or in a way that harms others. So you would have to both prove that these actions harmed people or that individuals gained financially from it AND that individuals did this on purpose. If there is no evidence that someone intentionally said something like 'we need to fake these OSPs and figure out how to get people to lie on their resumes' then it would be really hard to prove criminally. Like It's possible the leaders genuinely believe OSPs prepare people to be senior engineers.
Given that the outcomes are solid on paper and can be used to justify these beliefs, you would need bulletproof evidence showing bad intent.
u/Orangie_Goldfish wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Do you have nothing better to do than bash codesmith on Reddit every day
u/michaelnovatireplied·
I certainly do: [https://github.com/mnovati](https://github.com/mnovati)
"4,505 contributions in 2023"
u/parachute50 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Anything you see that's pro-codesmith on this subreddit you should know it's from a troll or a bot because those posts/comments get the highest votes and engagement.
u/michaelnovatireplied·
Amazing how this post has 47 upvotes and that negative post is at like 0... 🤔
u/Orangie_Goldfish wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
I would think you post here so much you’d be a mod but you literally have nothing more fun in your life to be doing than share your fixation with Codesmith’s on Reddit all day every day with some git commits in between. Bravo!
u/michaelnovatireplied·· edited★ FEATURED
I also watch a lot of documentaries: highly recommend [https://www.netflix.com/title/81615919?source=35](https://www.netflix.com/title/81615919?source=35) on Netflix.
It's about two people that start a coaching company and eventually grow it super large by hiring all their students as coaches and leveling up to higher titles, and their status is largely based on recruiting new people and publicly spreading word of the organization.
It's really good!
u/EcstaticAssignment wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
I mean, good for them if that's the case. To be frank these "large financial institutions" must have pretty terrible tech teams or else just never fire false positives if fresh bootcamp grads are succeeding in senior positions.
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
1. They do fire them, I do think most survive but I know peopoe fired too
2..There is a range here. Capital One hired like 50 Codesmith grads in the boom. Senior Associate is like below FAANG entry level and Senior Engineer is like FAANG entry level. They comp all cash so that Senior Associate pays like 140K ish total and that Senior Engineer 160K ish.
In some ways so many people going to Capital One messed up the stats because of the title inflation and all cash compensation. And the interview process that asks the same 4 questions for one of the interviews that all the Codemsith people shared and practiced with each other.
u/super_grover765 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
I've been following this sub for a while because I just enjoy the drama but I do really enjoy your advice.
I almost did a bootcamp 7 years ago but I decided I just wanted to go the conventional route and got a cs degree. Now I'm doing my PhD because I enjoyed school so much.
I'd
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
FWIW, PhD grads at Meta entered at the "mid level"/E4 and I think still do. assuming you did a number of legit internships or published research throughout.
It's hard to tell, but a large amount is in the interview process and asking THEM the right questions. But ultimately companies are companies and things change and there's a bit of luck involved.
It's much easier to decide between FAANG for example that have well known patterns and publicly communicate their cultures. Each FAANG is SOOOOO DIFFERENT, it's massively important to choose the right one if one were given that opportunity (which is obviously not common), but if you dont' have that opportunity, at least understanding the culture enough to know the areas you should focus on and the areas you'll be weak at.
For example, Meta values getting work done over overthinking things. So if you overthink things, you can try to change your behavioral a bit to do well there.
u/IncomeGlittering319 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
FWIW: only one from my cohort went to cap1 and is a principal assoc by their levels aka a senior see. I'd also be careful about insinuating "all" people do a thing. There is some truth to what I see you are wanting to communicate but I don't think making it seem like it's such a
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
Fair point, I shouldn't say "all" there, it's more of a "most" or "almost all"
The people I work with/talk to made it seem like it was a unofficial pipeline of alumni referring grads and helping them prep for the interviews and I wanted that to come across clearly.
It's certainly not easy and the people who get these jobs are very strong and well rounded, and great overall.
u/Asleep-Telephone4844 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
i graduated codesmith in february and got placed in what i consider a mid level position within 3 months (i worked my ASS off during the job search doing interview prep as well as supplemental studying) i was really proud because i was part of the first wave of grads in my cohort
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
The biggest misconception that Codesmith teaches is that mid level and senior are based on 'how ambiguous and novel a problem you can solve on your own' and that's just like entirely made up by Codesmith leaders. Will keeps referring to some LinkedIn post from a Facebook engineer about this as the justification and it's just not true. I'm a former Facebook employee who was deeply involved in hiring, performance, and leveling and I'm telling you it's not true. There are dozens of "traits" senior engineers have that include being able to solve larger scope problems, but that's not the defining trait of a senior engineer.
u/Chanceawrapper wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
I know for a fact someone from my cohort was hired midlevel at amazon and promoted to senior within 3 months. Some people are just really good.
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
What role was this? Was it SDE I, SDE II, SDE III, or was it a tangential role? a contractor role, a frontend role, a solutions role?
Amazon's promotion cycle doesn't allow stuff like that so this would have to be some kind of special case signed off by a director or VP to correct for a hiring error.
The number of times I've seen this EVER for super legit reasons, I can count on one hand, and those people quickly became industry renowned engineers.
So even if this happened where someone went from SDE II to SDE III in 3 months it would be absurdly rare and not representative of any program.
I asked a couple of Senior Managers at Amazon and no one thinks this is possible on their teams, so it's definitely a very weird case.
Every statement like this that I've looked into has been some kind of caveat or weird case that was not as people believed it to be.
For example, the $400K Netflix offer Eric K talks about was not a SWE role and was a role the person had 8 years of senior/staff experience doing already... they probably should have gotten a much better offer and going to Codesmith was probably a non optimal decisions.
u/EcstaticAssignment wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
You have more experience than I do so you might know this better - am I just overestimating what "senior" means outside of faang-adjacent tech companies?
To me, "senior" connotes a level of wherewithal and independence that's difficult to immediately have even if you're extremel
u/michaelnovatireplied·· edited★ FEATURED
I mean at the end of the day it's very irrelevant to most people and it's you can call yourself whatever you want. There's a Codesmith grad who is a "Vice President Software Engineer" at a bank!!!
It comes into play on here, and I feel strongly about it, because you DO need to define your terms to compare apples to apples and apples to oranges.
Codesmith's overall point is that Codesmith thinks their grads are "better" (their outcomes advisor says "Codesmith is the best" a lot) than everyone else. There was a panel where the CEO sitting (in person) beside Hack Reactor and other CEOs and said straight up that Codesmith was better because it's grads get "mid level and senior roles". They want to emphasize that Codesmith is not a "bootcamp" per-se and if they used canonical terms, they might get compared to the other programs.
So I think that's reasonable in that comparison. But the downside is that their grads also for MONTHS AND MONTHS were attacking me saying that Formation was trying to "steal Codesmith students" as if it was a competitor or comparable because "Codesmith graduates mid level and senior engineers" and it's like a completely different world. The top 10% of students might overlap with the least experienced 10% at Formation, but every Codesmith alumni and staff member that has come to Formation says it's very complementary. One even thinks we should partner with each other!
u/SmoothAmbassador8 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
What the fack. No.
What gets people senior roles is spending 3-5 years in a role grinding, learning, developing.
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy
cc Codesmith CEO
u/americancontrol wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
We have a younger dev on our team that will commit every 15 minutes, regardless of what their changes really are. They'll commit shit that isn't even working. They're a really sincere, genuinely good person, so I don't think they're doing this to cheese github stats.
Commits
u/michaelnovatireplied·
My point isn't how much I'm doing here, my point is that I'm not spending all my time on Reddit as this person thinks.
Sounds, like that dev on your team working is working hard all day long continously!
u/americancontrol wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Yeah I feel like it would be wildly easier to sneak by and hang on in FAANG than at a startup with serious founders.
The only way to fake it at a startup would be with first time founders, who knows nothing about building products, or what realistic progress should even loo
u/michaelnovatireplied·· edited★ FEATURED
So if the startup doesn't have scale and doesn't have process, a person can get by easier through sheer will compared to a FAANG. At FAANG, performance is calibrated and our performers are aggressively PIPed and fired. At a startup, lots of hustle might carry you, even if you are clearly operating at a lower level but adding value.
I actually hired a Codesmith grad as an entry level engineer (I think Codesmith called it mid-level in their stats, which was very clearly entry level but compensated against top tier benchmark) and this is the level all the Codesmith grads I work with are at immediately after Codesmith... should be going for entry level top tier jobs.
Many people tell me about how their outcomes advisor pushed people away from that roles and says they are grunteork roles that set your career back... but that's extremely inconsistent with what I've seen.... people who take mid level roles are worse companies come to my program to level up you to top tier and often get entry level top tier roles and are ecstatic... so much so they want to be on our blog and tell their stories, because it takes a lot of deprogramming of Codesmith grads around this.
u/RuinAdventurous1931 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
How did he put 2 years of experience from a 3-month bootcamp?
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
Just by lying. For example
Software Engineer, Kronos 2022- present
People who do this don't even say they are lying! They say it's true just missing the months they were there and the last line of a 6 bullet point write up says, "product accelerated by OSLabs" and they think that is transparent disclosure that it was not paid..... but at the same time have this under experience placed right beside another section called "Open Source" with their personal projects which clearly makes that look like experience..m if it was open source why would it not be in the Open Source section?
u/RuinAdventurous1931 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Yikes. Yeah, I’ve looked at some of the projects, and they don’t even have open issues or a way to contribute. Doesn’t take much digging if you know what’s going on.
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
Yeah their lead instructor tells people no one looks at the projects.
I did and posted on Reddit about some many security issues like secrets checked in, sql injection, and no auth on a delete endpoint, and the response internally was people assuring themselves their code is at the mid level bar and that I was being an asshole.