What is the job searching portion of Codesmith like?

I wrote about this here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/18cpq98/analysis\_of\_52\_most\_recent\_codesmith\_offers/](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/18cpq98/analysis_of_52_most_recent_codesmith_offers/) I got a lot of attacks after posting that so I want to triple emphasize this is not trying to send a message to go or not go to Codesmith, it's simply pointing out a pattern to help people get a sense of how alumni are getting placed right now.

Codesmith doesn't have a major "job searching portion". There is a week or two of lectures going over resume, job hunt strategies etc... They walk you through writing your resume with worksheets and then during after Codesmith you have access to resume reviewers and career support engineers (all are former students who have jobs now). There's a major focus on overcoming "imposter syndrome" because a key part to people's success is building self-confidence that you can do it and are just as good as any other engineer - and it's one of the reasons people can walk into these $120K job interviews and get by. They also give very good advice on reaching out, like the "Codesmith double down" and such. Codesmith very strongly tells people not to lie on their resumes, but we tend to see [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/18cpq98/analysis_of_52_most_recent_codesmith_offers/) As well as this recent video [published this week](https://youtu.be/MB0T7iEcyEY?si=aTEaaxHaaekkQxEi&t=2882) (at this specific time stamp): >"the positions we all have listed are usually our OSP positions so we kind of list that like a software engineer position because that's like our fully like job experience so we want to so it's not a paid position but it's just we put our OSP on our LinkedIn usually" I have lots of opinions on this strategy I won't share now because I share them often, but that's a neutral presentation of it. It's a really well structured and consistent portion of the program and produces really consistent, solid resumes, and the advice and process work.

Do you have more stats on that btw? I have good data on offers/outcomes but not on placement rates. I do see a number of those offers are peopl way more than 6 months out, and as you saw in my illustrative analysis, people who take longer and longer tend to have their OSP's appearing as more and more "experience" the longer they wait, which would help with getting interviews in this climate.

Interesting, yeah I would like to see more data on placement times. Codesmith has provided a whole blog post on salaries in 2023, and published a bunch of aggregated data in info sessions, like schools people went to and industries people got jobs in. So it should be trivial to publish the length of time it took people in those placements, since they do that for CIRR already. Maybe prospective students should push them on that. Slower placement times don't mean anything bad about Codesmith, but it's critical to know about if you are planning your life and savings.

I've worked with a couple dozen Codesmith people later on who have paid for Formation for their second, third, fourth job transitions and many still get advice from Codesmith at the same time. The main problem is those support engineers are like your PEERS at Formation and the mentors are actual FAANG-level recruiters and engineers who give better perspective for how top tier companies. For example, someone's Codesmith mock interviewers told them to "practice their buzzwords more" and they have two mock interviews who focus on DS&A - who could be peers at Formation, versus dozens of FAANG-tier senior, mid, staff, manager level engineers you can choose from to do mocks with at Formation. These alums have found the Codesmith network useful for referrals because people tend to stay connected for years after graduating. If you get an offer on your own, free negotiation help from Eric K is great, but again, not as useful for complex top tier offers in my opinion from what I've seen because of no internal experience in compensation at top tier companies and focuses more on salary based non-tech/traditional compensation. I'm sure he would disagree with this statement but it's my opinion in comparing advice he's given people to advice a 20 year FAANG recruiter gave, side by side. Just doesn't have that perspective. Sorry I talked about Formation too much here, and Formation has downsides too, but the whole point was to show that the lifetime career support at Codesmith is accurate and true but it's not as useful as you progress to top tier companies.

Since you seem to have a lot of info too, can you ask your friends how long all those people are taking to get jobs and not just that they are getting placed? I would also expect about 70% of job seeking grads get jobs in a year. But it used to be over 80% in SIX MONTHS and I want to push Codesmith to be more transparent about that so that people know going in that it's going to be 4 months of CSX plus 3 months of Codemsith plus up to 12 months of job searching, and if it happens to be a 70% chance it will take 19 months to get a job, that's insanely different than 85% chance in 13 months for people who have savings, families and kids and medical considerations and all kinds of things. Like people need to know to plan the timing properly, and won't be scared away from Codesmith, and Codemsith has these numbers, they have internal reporting on this from my understanding.

At Formation we also believe in the value of peer mock interviews and do those too, but imagine having unlimited mock interviews with actual senior FAANG engineers who run them like the real deal... just a different level of prep for a different target role. Again, just illustrating the difference and this is with my Formation, biased, hat on because my team has received some nasty emails from Codemsith grads like 'Never email me again, Codesmith gives us all we need forever' and such so clearing that up is self serving for me but I feel compelled in this context. I've seen people get a little help with mocks and negotiation from Codesmith for future job transitions and not use any paid service, so I'm absolutely not saying anyone needs or doesn't need this, it's ultimately a personal choice, but just want the options out there as clear as possible so people can decide on their own.

I've interviewed Codesmith grads and my background is having done over 400 interviews at Facebook. This is entirely my personal opinion, but these were some of the most awkward interviews I've ever had yeah. This is the summary of one, not a direct quote but a summary of the conversation. NOTE: the job I reference was the 3 week long Codesmith project presented as 8 months of experience on resume. Me: "So what is this recent job you've had for 8 months and why did you leave before a year" "I worked on X, it's a scalable developer tool to visualize and debug Y" Me: "So why did you leave" "The team kind of wound down" Me: "How big was the team" "Its like a startup sized of 5 people" Me: "So what non engineers did you work with, like designers, PMs, marketing, etc... "The team was only engineers, it's a developer tool for improving developer efficiency" Me: "Interesting, so how did they get funding and pay you, like what is the business model" "Oh this was incubated by OSLabs" Me: "What was the business model though, like how did it work" "Oh it's a developer tool, it wasn't making any money" Me: "I don't follow, like what was the eventual business model, or business idea to eventually make money" "I can talk about a challenge we had, we migrated the entire codebase to Y" Me; "Wow, Y came out like only a year ago and isn't super well adopted yet, why did you decide to migrate the whole codebase" "The team lead decided" Me: "But why? That's very risky, you often want to use more stable tech with a strong ecosystem because you can move quickly and have more support for things. "Y is a very useful tool because it reduces overhead of doing Z and we expect everyone to be using it soon, it's going to replace A" Me: "Wow that's really confident but just some feedback that this startup experience isn't going to be that useful for your job hunt right now because it sounds like a group project for school or something, like we are looking for real engineering work experience" "Oh I'm so sorry, this was a bootcamp project at Codesmith and they told us not to say anything and I'm sorry for wasting your time" Me: "Sorry too because you clearly have strong drive but this role requires experience working on very large codebases for thousands to millions of users, and experience working on teams with designers, PMs, user experience researchers, marketers, support, and proven ability to work across those functions and it doesn't sound like your project had that breadth of collaboration. I'm sure you can ramp up fast but this is a mid-level role that needs someone to have that experience already." ---- But it seems to work at non top tier companies, and people get very good outcomes and salaries following this. But I completely agree this would never get through a calibrated top tier tech company if framed like this.

They removed central time as part of cutbacks (officially paused indefinitely). Each timezones has cohorts starting every 6 or 7 weeks because the seniors mentor the juniors and it has to be in sync But between timezones they tend to stagger them but not as meticulously.

Getting placed means getting any job, and getting a SWE job is getting a legit software engineering job that you thought you would be getting going in. For example, if you went back to your old job as an IT technician you might count as a placement.