Analysis of 52 most recent Codesmith offers LinkedIns and trends on who is getting a job right now and why. Summary: an average of 11.7 months of experience claimed for 3 week long projects (lacking evidence of additional time spent). Majority claimed to have prior SWE-adjacent experience.

Analysis of 52 most recent Codesmith offers LinkedIns and trends on who is getting a job right now and why. Summary: an average of 11.7 months of experience claimed for 3 week long projects (lacking evidence of additional time spent). Majority claimed to have prior SWE-adjacent experience. Hi all, I was recently made aware of the 52 most recent reported Codesmith placements (not saying when this was provided to protect identities, but it's from a window within the past couple months) and did a summary of how those people present themselves on LinkedIn. Please note that this is an UNOFFICIAL ANALYSIS based on an ordered list of placements during a 2 month time window. I won't be DOXing anyone on the list, and because this is just my personal analysis and not an official study, you should use this information for illustrative purposes only. There are numerous ways you can try to reproduce this analysis to get close, but the list was presented as a complete list. **CONTEXT** Before beginning, I want to state that all of the Codesmith alumni that I've actually talked to myself, interviewed, worked with, HIRED MYSELF, are all amazing people that I know are going to succeed (or can tell why they've succeeded so far). This post is in no way an attack on those people. I've been in the trenches working on alumni resumes and see and support all sides of this situation. That said, there is a pattern here that people should know about in considering Codesmith because it appears to be a critical part of the success. I'm also not making any comments on the Codesmith curriculum or effectiveness of the education. Nor am I discussing the outcomes. This analysis has nothing to do with outcomes numbers. I time-boxed my analysis to focus on just looking at how people presented their background experience and spent 37 mins and 55 seconds making a spreadsheet (additional GitHub checking in the spreadsheet was done later on sporadically and not included in this time). I of course might have small human errors in my work but it was done diligently and consistently. In Codesmith, your capstone project is a 3 week long group project (for full time) called an "OSP" (Open Source Product) and almost everyone (without prior SWE experience) frames it as their standout work on their resume as per Codesmith instruction. Codesmith however tells people not to lie about the amount of time spent on it. Sadly the 3 week project was presented as **12 months** of experience on average, so something weird is going on and the data shows it's not people working on their projects after Codesmith. **RESULTS** **In my analysis, 48 out of 52 put this project under "experience" as a "software engineer" and the average amount of time claimed to be spent on them was 11.7 months (25th percentile was 7.8, median was 11, 75th percentile was 13). The lowest was 4 months, specified by only 4 people, and all 44 others were higher. About 20% of people did not disclose that this was a "open source" role or that their work was related to "OSLabs" and it appeared as work experience. Note that almost all of these people completely separately listed all of their OTHER Codesmith projects as "Open Source" contributions over many months and the 11.7 month average was for the 3 week long OSP project ALONE, NOT those other items.** Is this just because alumni are working on their projects after Codesmith? It's very important to note that alumni can keep working on their projects and that might stretch out these dates beyond the 3 weeks and this is a common reason given by Codesmith staff for this data. I analyzed the GitHub profiles and only a handful had any activity beyond the 3 week project and that activity was trivial, like changing a package or README file. From my analysis, 13 people made any contribution beyond the approx 1 month period of the OSP, 5 of which were updating README FILES. The rest of the people merged a couple of PRs around one point in time each, a few months in the future, and in the most extreme case one person seemed to have commits over a 5 month period - and they claimed 13 months of experience on LinkedIn. **33 out of 52 claimed to have some amount of relevant past work experience.** This one is hard to aggregate and more subjective because it's a large range so I'll try to present some summary of these claims. For example, someone claimed to have 2.5 years of experience as a "software engineer" at an unlisted company that I can't find. Many claimed numerous technical skills exercised under these jobs, like programming languages, scrum, SQL, etc... For example, someone claimed to be a "technical lead" at a design company (which is also unlisted and cannot find) doing "systems architecture". Another person claimed to be an "operations engineer" prior to Codesmith for over a year, doing JavaScript, after graduating from college with a psychology degree. **I'm in no way accusing people of lying about these things**, my strong hunch is they are real jobs that were "wordsmithed" (pardon the pun) to sound more technical in nature then they were and maybe you can't fault people for trying to put their best foot forward, that's up for you to judge for yourself and not me. About 10 to 20% of people claimed to have some kind of software engineer, software developer experience. Overall though, about half of the people reporting experience were systems analyst, system engineering, data analyst, performance engineer, mobile engineer, product manager, founder, quality assurance, mechanical engineer, operations engineer, or similar roles. And there was a smaller group that had research/academic backgrounds that were framed technically. Finally, about 15% also worked at Codesmith itself for an average of 8.9 months each (also in addition to the OSP work) **SUMMARY** When looking at the recent 52 placements, and adding up the 12 month average of OSP experience, Codesmith fellowship experience and often multiple years of past tangential experience, the people being placed recently **on paper** look like experienced engineers. When looking into the details, the OSP is only 3 weeks and if people are exaggerating similarly about their tangential experience, it's entirely possible these engineers have no real experience at all, but look like mid-level engineers on paper. I see numerous alumni on Reddit say they had no prior experience at all and got a $120K job. There are indeed a handful of people who didn't claim to have any experience at all, but they tend to have Codesmith fellowship experience, or exaggerated OSP experience. Or people that don't list their OSP, but tend to have prior work experience listed that may be presented as 'engineering-adjacent' on LinkedIn but when on Reddit it's presented differently in reviews. There have been about 52 placements in the past two months-ish and on those people's resumes, the 3 week long project turned into a whopping 12 months of experience on average. Codesmith leaders adamantly deny that Codesmith tells people to lie about their experience (and this is consistent with the documents I've seen) yet the pattern is overwhelmingly clear and I found reviews on Course Report from 2018 claiming similar issues with the representation of Codesmith resumes, as well as in [this post from 2019](https://www.reddit.com/r/TechLA/comments/b7xl98/codesmith_coding_bootcamp_scam_beware/). **CONSIDERATIONS** If anyone at Codesmith tells you that I'm lying or spreading misinformation just look at the data and don't listen to dismissive language and things like 'jealous of the best', 'doesn't know what he's talking about', 'crazy person trying to destroy the great things we've built'. If they are dismissive about me or the problem, push back. I'm not special and I'm assuming many other people could do this same analysis with the data too. I measured down to the second how much time I spent on this above and I don't spend all day on Reddit, nor am I a troll - I'm using my real name and identity openly. I would reiterate that Codesmith staffs reasoning for longer timeframes are that people keep contributing to their OSP projects beyond the 3 week project. Examining GitHub profiles shows that only a handful had any kind of activity beyond 3-4 weeks and that activity was extremely minimal, like updating a package once, or changing a README file, with only a few cases of people contributing meaningfully, and those contributions were sporadic/one off and no where near the stated amount of work. As with a lot of my posts, I expect this to get downvoted a lot initially, Codesmith has a [job](https://codesmith.applytojob.com/apply/8cJdwgcb9g/Brand-Architect-And-Content-Lead) for someone to "influence the narrative around Codesmith" and "leverag\[ing\] advocates to amplify the brand message" so I expect this will get downvoted a lot, but it's really just a thorough dump of data and I think it's worth reading and I hope you found it useful. **DISCLOSURES** \- I have been digging into Codesmith data for a while after encountering the persistent exaggeration of project experience almost 2 years ago, and not much has changed since. \- Number of "months of experience" is taken by entering the number of years + months specified on the LinkedIn entry converting years to months and adding the total number of months to a spreadsheet. This means that if someone said something like 2023 - present, and LinkedIn says "1 year" as the length of experience, I would enter 12 months into the spreadsheet. If it had specific months range (which is most people) then I would use the number of months LinkedIn reported to the side of that range. \- I'm the co-founder of an interview prep mentorship platform that works with people later on in their careers who have worked for 1+ years as SWEs. We do not compete directly with Codesmith, but based on the analysis above, about 10% to 15% of the placements would qualify for my company's services so there is a small amount of overlap on the most experienced end of Codesmith and the least experienced end of Formation. Assuming that the most experienced people are the ones placed, the actual overlap is likely under 10%, or 2-3 people per Codesmith Cohort of 36. **- KEEP DISCUSSION CIVILIZED - I'm not here to take down Codesmith, I'm here to help y'all figure out the right paths for you. I know a number of people who enthusiastically pursue the above path and are great fits for Codesmith - and Codesmith is doing well in finding those people. If that's you, join. If it's not you, then don't.**

I mean the community is amazing, the people are just really well spoken, great and interesting people. There are a lot of reasons to go there! If you are cruising Reddit late at night pondering a career switch and stumble upon Codesmith and see $120K placements and think "sign me up!", definitely slow down and learn about how it works and see if it's what you want first - same goes for any program!! And you'll find a lot of more legit reasons to go there, or not go there, depending on what you want.

Yeah I see to varying degrees as well in other programs and it's most pronounced in Codesmith but I see all kinds of things with non traditional engineers and am very open minded 1-1 to helping people find their path. The reason to call it out is because Codesmith is the only one claiming over and over that it produces "mid level and senior engineers" and signs letters of reference for their open source projects via their "sister charity" OSLabs to back up this open source work for background checks.

Sadly Codemsith has a "sister company" charity called OSLabs that signs letters of reference and does reference check calls. I have evidence that they sign off on 4 months plus any additional time you claimed to have worked on the project (example letters of reference, and an employee confirming this publicly) A grad claimed 10 months on LinkedIn and said it was because "people have the option of continuing to work on their projects" yet the project was untouched after the initial development window of about a month. I do not have evidence if Codesmith would sign off on 10 months of experience but this person seems to think they did 10 months and if they told Codesmith this, would they sign off on it?

Those people have a really hard time, but they often do eventually get jobs by some way that seems to be unique for each one, or they give up and end up in the 20% of I graduated or unplaced people. Like Codesmith is just 13 weeks and you can do a heck of a lot in the 6 months to 12 months afterwards that your job hunting to keep developing and growing, heck, you could start your own company! Codesmith does not really support these people though to be very blunt and I talk to a number of them or work with them. But those who don't give up eventually get jobs. It's definitely a let down for some because they expected a six-figure job and they are definitely some of the more unhappy people and maybe I'm biased because I talked to a number of these people but yeah don't know what else to say, very case by case. But it's one of the motivations for calling this out so often, many are misled here on Reddit because of success posts lacking context.

I don't know what "support" means but.I can list out what I've seen people do. Codemsith adamantly claims to not help people lie so I assume they'd re not helping with most of this but it's possible they are and that is "support" 1. Stretch things, turning fast food-like jobs into technical jobs 2. Go back to school 3. Work at Codemsith itself, either as an instructor or another role 4. Be a fellow and stretch the length of time on that 5. Do unpaid internships or contracts that aren't documented as placements I told they can neither convert or get another job 6. Work on projects independent of Codemsith 7. Do another paid program afterwards, like an interview prep or career accelerator 8. Follow Codemsith networking advice Codemsith will help any time with career support conversations so they offer those to all these people, but there isn't anything tangible that they do specifically for people with zero work experience. I mean I don't expect them to hand you a job so this isn't meant as criticism, I'm just making the argument they don't have any magic way of helping people with truly zero work experience that's different from what anyone else gets.

Thanks for sharing. I agree to some extent that showing what others in the industry do would be useful to know in general but I also think the analysis is very clear on how it should be used, and lack of this doesn't cancel out the value. There are two reasons I focused on Codesmith: 1. Codesmith very publicly considers itself in a league of it's own. They claim to be the only non-traditional program to take people from zero to mid-level/senior and compare themselves to "elite grad schools". I therefore hold them to the bar they are presenting for themselves and don't think they should be compared to others. 2. As I said in the disclaimers, I have been following their placements passively for almost two years now and my friends and colleagues in industry (specifically engineers and recruiters) feel that Codesmith grads representation is anecdotally far more exaggerated than the rest. My peers are particularly unhappy about the background checks and letters of reference done to confirm exaggerations which has not been reported elsewhere. I'm very friendly with Launch School and Rithm - other top programs - and we get along great. Sophie has met with and spoken to Launch School grads. We've both met Rithm's founder several times in person. We could get along amicably with Codesmith and support each other and what we do and push for a better ecosystem.

I've so far appreciated your tone and would like to continue a normal discussion. \- I have active conversations with dozens of prospective, current, former residents, staff, and former staff, it's not 3. I take the feedback to maybe back off a bit, things have definitely snowballed behind the scenes because they allegedly had layoffs of 18% of the staff and a lot of people were thrown off recently by the leadership response and feeling like every week something new is happening, lack of claritiy, and a lack of stability. I had a number of intense conversations that have continued and I think I that might be rubbing off on my tone as I keep everything there strictly confidential. I apologize and that's not how I intend to come across and hear that feedback. \- If it means anything I circulated drafts with a number of people, some didn't respond, some demanded I post, some gave feedback and i was trying to make sure that the analysis was perceived as accurate by a range of people and if people would be upset by it and everyone who replied thought it was good information to post. \- Anecdotally means every colleague I've show an example standard Codesmith grad resume and asked how many years of work experience you think they have and their response is not positive. We had to train our staff to identify Codesmith resumes because they were being miscategorized. I'm very bias because these are all tech industry people, but if you have job try repeating that your co-workers and let me know how it goes and if it's the same or not. \- It's hard for me to be around here publicly too. I get a lot of weird messages, comments too but I think it's important to stand for thoughtful and reasonable discourse - even when we disagree. If I learned anything from Facebook, it's how "fake news" spreads and how bad that can be, and I do not want that to happen, maybe overly so. \- "we" is Sophie and me, we are married and co-founders, and we meet a lot of people together because I have major social anxiety. \- Finally, I remind all that I often recommend people go to Codesmith, and hopefully one of like two dozen people in the past few months will see this and back me up. **My primary goal day to day is to help people find good programs for them and be successful.** I ask anyone I've talked to in 1-1 convos about those goals who feels otherwise to call me out.

Hi, you are touching on the more real aspect of this that I didn't go into at all and have a strong appreciation of. I work with a ton of people.sho struggle with similar problems. First off, I wouldn't worry individual about doing this because no one really cares on am individual basis. Fraud requires harm to be done so if you got a job and didn't perform, that would be s problem. The tiny amount of harm you cause on society by getting a leg up is heard to measure too. More practically what you see is companies raise the requirements bar for everyone and completely dismiss all open source work and bootcamps. One motivation for this post is I'm working with someone who has about 10 significant commits to a very large open source project, several parts of a sizable feature, and they are struggling to get noticed because they otherwise have no experience and their resume looks less legit than the typical Codesmith one that has carefully constructed bullet points making things like adding a test case sound like groundbreaking work. They don't want to stretch the truth of what they did because it was part of a legit project with a developer community and norms. It's very discouraging for this person and feels unfair and this kind of thing drives people to embellish to even get noticed. What should you do? Well this is fundamentals the market and lack of entry level roles and you can't make up those jobs. Most bootcamps are struggling as a result and Codesmith is too (based on both enrollment trends and outcomes over 2022 to 2023). My biggest advice is consistency and patience. Give yourself a ton of time and give every job application a solid chance (ping engineers there and recruiters) and eventually something will work, it just might take a long time.

I'm sorry you feel that way but respect your opinion. I've been here day in day out, giving people advice on all kinds of things and I'm sorry if you feel my tone has changed, but when I was first around - I had some way more intense conversations with some Codesmith alumni who claimed I was "stealing here with the secret motivation of stealing studetns to Formation". I am here to provide a unique lens of industry perspective + bootcamp perspective (having worked with hundreds of bootcamp grads from many programs but also interviewed 450 people at Facebook, built interview programs, observer of hiring committees, work on peformance review tooling,, etc...) Quick story. There was a period of time when I had a goal of connecting with 10 grads a day from 20 different bootcamps on LinkedIn and I was accused of "Tracking down Codesmith students and trying to steal them to go to Formation". That wasn't remotely the truth but someone believed it so much they went on tirades personally attacking me, my physical appearance, and all kinds of things. The person got suspended it was so bad. Time will tell and my consistent posting and commentary and help (both publicly but primarily 1-1) will hopefully make it clear who I am and what I stand for. I've made it clear time after time that all my commentary on Codesmith is aiming to be objective. That doesn't mean positive or negative, it just means laying things out the way they are. For example, their outcomes advisor's polarizing reputation. On the one hand he is lying about his background that his company Fanzter Inc. was acquired by Disney (which I have off-the-record direct evidence and on-the-record supporting evidence that it wasn't formally acquired by them). And on the other hand, people say he is the best part of Codesmith and makes it worth every penny. This polarizing, but showing both sides of a story and that's my goal. The original post here just doesn't have another side that I can see. I might be wrong! But I hope you believe that I'm trying to have a fair lens on this and this is how I see it, instead of having ulterior motives and secret missions in my post and since it sounds like you don't, I take that as feedback to improve.

Objective meaning I collected court records, secretary of state records, spoke with Disney and ESPN PR, requested comment from executives at the time that I know.You are wrong. ESPN, Disney, or any affiliated entities did not legally/actual acquire the company Fanzter Inc.

Thanks for sharing, if comfortable to you mind sharing when you graduated (or approximately). A year ago or two so I would here this kind of thing more often, and I interviewed a number of Codesmith grads that were very uncomfortable with how they presented their projects and we spent the interview more therapy-like about why they were doing this and trying to explain they didn't have to do it that way. Someone said a mock interviewer at Codesmith told them their problem was practicing their buzzwords and their first response when I told them I wanted to pause the interview to chat about something, was 'sorry, my buzzwords are not up to par yet'. Needless to say, these very unique situations over the years absolutely brought Codesmith onto my radar, and aren't representative of all cases but happened two or three times. I was interviewing people that needed extra support so presumably weren't the people getting jobs yet. I haven't interviewed grads since they so I'm curious if it's the same now.

Hi again, I can't tell you what to do and my advice is general specific to certain companies or types of companies. If you don't have any degree, and no experience, then you need to invest in growing your skills, not focusing on how to optimally fake your resume. For example: 1. Do REAL open source, not fake open source projects for your resume, but spend a year working on a large open source project 2. Turn a project into a real company and learn how to run a company RE: Dates, 2023 - present can be fine if you actually did stuff the entire time and if your intentions are good - that you are trying to represent the work you did/are doing. If you've only done a 3 week project - why are you more qualified than the ten thousand other bootcamp grads with 3 week projects. If you think you are just better than everyone else then you might justify lying to get your chance and prove that you are. If you aren't better than anyone else, then lying isn't going to work.

If you want to redo the deep dive I did, look at court records, secretary of state records, and contact the people involved in the deal. It costs a lot of money to get those records, I spent about $100 doing so because this is a very serious claim that's core to Eric's identity so if it's not true I need irrefutable evidence of what happened because making sure a claim. I'm happy to chat over DM about more about the process I did. People can make official "off the record" comments and statements so there is some things I can't talk about ethically, but I can go over the process I used if you wanted to try to repeat it. The summary of the story is that the company wasn't doing well, Aaron left in 2013 to go back to ESPN (and is now the CTO of Disney's online services) and was down to two engineers in 2014. They got sued in early 2014 for copyright infringement and shortly after those two engineers were hired by Disney and a couple of the "products" that Fanzter made were bought by Disney but they had no interest in Fanzter or Coolspotters (the flagship app that Eric highlights all the time). While Eric might have been involved with the sale, he was removed from Fanzter's website way earlier in 2011 and didn't seem to be really involved in the Company as much after then. I have a bunch of details to fill in here so I wasn't going to present this yet, but you seem to be curious and I'm being transparent that it's lacking some details. I have a day job and this is more of a side thing to figure out, so if you want to join in and help, please do!

I'm sorry for speaking so bluntly on here and I realize I didn't say this the most friendly way. At the end of the day, it is the way it is. On the plus side, if you don't give up you will get a job, it might just take a super long time, and if you love coding that's what you should do.

The only change I've seen is the background check process used to 'text this number and tell them what you told the company and we'll confirm it' to a more legit "background check request" process that still includesquestions about how long you told the company you worked on the project and how you framed OS Labs to the company. Like a legit process wouldn't ask you what you told the company - they would independently figure out what dates you worked at OS Labs and the whole point is that should match what the company expected. If they are just confirming what you told the company that explains how people get through background checks.

New info: \- One of the final employees at Fanzter who was involved in the deal didn't know who Eric was and had to look him up. \- This employee said that Disney had no interest in purchasing Fanzter or Coolspotters and that the purpose of the deal was to pay back the investors in Fanzter as a guesture as the talent was being hired by ESPN to work there and Fanzter was shutting down. Whatever you call that, it's not something I would show off as the way I introduce myself.

Yeah it has contributed to the YOE bar for entry level roles going up and companies dismissing all bootcamp resumes without a deeper look. But it's clearly for these 52 people this is working though and they are choosing their own paths over all of their peers from other programs, and no one is doing anything about it so 🤷‍♂️. There was [a post](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/17m0fis/codesmith_graduate_2023_experiences_job_offer/) where someone said >Students who hustled like crazy, pushed themselves to the limit, and embraced the resume/interview tactics. This is hard to do. It is admittedly pretty shady, but any Career Coach or resume course is gonna have you embellish pretty hard. So I don't think Codesmith's hiring portion is necessarily worse or different than any other field's... but it definitely is ethically uncomfortable if you've never done it before. It just is what it is. And it has FIVE HUNDRED UPVOTES. So clearly many people think this behavior is fine too.

Yeah I haven't seen anyone else do that. I don't know if it's just because no one has, or because people think it's wrong so they wouldn't even think of doing something like this.

Yeah sure!

/u/Swami218 I'm not trying to harp on this too much but I saw this today and it reminded me of Fanzter. [https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/21/24011448/hyperloop-one-shut-down-layoff-closing-elon-musk](https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/21/24011448/hyperloop-one-shut-down-layoff-closing-elon-musk) "The company is selling off its assets, closing down its offices, and laying off employees. It will formally close at the end of the year, at which point all of its intellectual property will shift to its majority stakeholder, major Dubai port operator DP World" This is fairly similar to what happened at Fanzter, company shut down, staff left and got normal offers at ESPN, Fanzter Inc, Coolspotters all essentially stopped. Sold off some IP to make investors whole. The typical person characterizes this as a "shut down" and not a "sale".

# UPDATE JAN 9, 2024 This is a recent follow up with non-anonymous grads that further perpetuates the observations in the original post. Codesmith recently posted this video of recent alumni who got jobs: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaeK77HL2Kw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaeK77HL2Kw) All 3 were asked if their past experience helped them get a job. Without doxing anyone (you can watch the video), these were the response versus LinkedIn **ENGINEER 1: Senior Software Engineer** Response: "the company that I'm currently working for there's a lot of overlap in what my previous company was doing", "I understood their business a little bit better um so that aspect really helped me", "but yeah for from a technical standpoint I'd say Codemmith will will get your back" **LinkedIn: 10 years+ at robotics company, 7+ years as "director of implementation" using the skills: " Python (Programming Language) · C++ · C# · Java"** **ENGINEER 2: Software Engineer (Ed-Tech)** Response: "I had literally nothing else cuz I had just spent all my previous professional life teaching um and that was not you know I couldn't find anything particularly relevant about that" **LinkedIn: Graduated from ivy league undergrad school, and was a teacher (got a job in ed-tech!), Listed OSP as 1 year 3 months, marked as "OS Labs" without explanation this wasn't a job. Listed part time TA job at Codesmith properly as part-time.** **ENGINEER 3: Senior Software Engineer** Response: "I'll just like super briefly echo what \[ENGINEER 2\] said before coming from education you kind of you learn how to be a whole human and interact with other humans and so that is so invaluable and uh in the job search and uh yeah and in working with other people so um yeah don't discount that that experience" **LinkedIn: over 19 years as a "Web Developer, Full Stack Engineer". Director of Operations at a graduate school with coding skills: HTML, CSS, and Open Source CMS (PHP, MySQL).**

I posted an update here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/18cpq98/comment/kh5ujfs/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/18cpq98/comment/kh5ujfs/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) Probably not much new to you but if you are curious.

Two reasons. 1. Setting proper expectations The reason I think it's important is that I've seen info sessions where employees straight up tell people that you don't need a degree or any relevant experience to get a job, followed by reading out 10 offers ranging from 80K to 170K, making it feel like anyone on Reddit reading reviews from these people can also get the same outcome. I'm showing my observations that there's a lot more to it than just a line cook at Applebees who was good at math becoming a senior SWE in 4 months making $150K. That people who are successful might not be aware of how background and their representation of their background massively impacts the outcomes, as the people exaggerating the most present live on camera that they aren't exaggerating or aren't benefit from their backgrounds. The unique thing about Codesmith is that the grads who this works for, don't seem super aware of what they are doing, they are so bought into the Codesmith way of doing things, going to "family dinners" and being ingrained in the community, that all of these behaviors get normalized, making it a lot more triggering whenever people talk about it. 2. Setting people up for good careers Codesmith claims to have "hundreds of people at Google, Amazon and Microsoft and top tier companies" and graduates talk about how a lot of people get FAANG offers. We'll some people who have direct access to raw offer and outcomes data find these comments inaccurate and have shared with me contradictory numbers - showing under 100 people out of well over a thousand reporting offers at canonical FAANG directly out of Codesmith. The majority of people instead are getting random (but arguably very good or high paying) SWE jobs at non-tech or tech-adjacent companies and then they get lost in their next career steps if they want to be in the tech industry at top tier companies. The same could be said probably about most bootcamp grads, but most other bootcamps don't make the claims that their graduates place at top tier companies and are "architects of the future" (direct quote). Codesmith tells people they help you for life. I've worked with people who have WORKED AT CODESMITH OR WORK THERE NOW who disagree with the effectiveness of that help and they need a lot of external help in approaching their next career steps. I've also talked to people that adamantly insist Codesmith gives them all they need for life and they are close minded to even considering external advice or help (which is separately bad for one's career in my opinion to be so closed off). Codesmith tells people they know how to navigate complex "FAANG" offers. Well I work with people that have gotten simultaneous advice from us and them (using their lifetime services) and I personally disagree with that statement based on my opinion and experience with FAANG offers. \---- So maybe it is actually more personal and I focus on it way more than I should because of my day to day experience with this is so much stronger than other programs. Thanks for the therapy session Derek haha.

Yeah I agree with a lot of that and why for a number of people 1-1 I recommend Codemsith for their situation. There's a lot of good things for the right people with the right expectations. I don't think they are being open and transparent with candidates though. Having seen a number of info sessions and/or people who go and message me quotes or questions. And I see people in the audience get hyped up by statements that are borderline. Like imagine an alumni said straight up, I have no experience and I got a 120K job, you can do it by following the Codesmith way. Then you look up the LinkedIn and see 19 years of web developer experience listed. Then you look up the LinkedIn of the person who asked the question. Some have gold backgrounds for Codemsith, but some do not, yet they still things along the lines that he speaker and say how their reply gives them hope and they feel so much less anxious now.