I've been extremely middle road in trying to examine Codesmith outcomes for a while now (I know I have personal opinions about the framing of OSPs and mid level and senior projects but on the outcomes I try to follow the facts). I am often attacked here on different sides because this is a controversial topic, but please try to have a fact based discussion, no one off anecdotes.
I think it's important to get more data on placement rates because Codesmith is presenting marketing that everything is going great, and we only have anecdotal and napkin math estimates for placement rates.
This is what Codemsith has said so far about 2023 publicly:
1. They had 600 offers (CEO in public talk)
2. There were 68 offers between October 15th 2023 to November 30th
3. There.is a blog post showing average salaries dipped to $110K medium but have been going back up.
4. Last week, the most recent 10 offers had a larger breadth of salaries with half the people under 100K and a couple people over 150K.
5. A senior admissions member said that graduated in 2023 are getting jobs faster than in 2022 "the average time to get a job actually decreased in 2023" (she didn't give any numbers or context and said this at an info session with no follow up or explanation) - I'm skeptical of this one but that's what she said!
My data shows about 1 offer a day in average, and this https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/18cpq98/analysis_of_52_most_recent_codesmith_offers/ shows that many of those people got offers and graduated from 2022 and we're job hunting so long, their OSP started looking like a year of experience.
About 20% of people getting offers in six months seems reasonable (the CIRR rate is probably higher when you factor in non job hunting people, people who placed but ghosted, and all the fellows get their clocks paused while doing that job.
CIRR is changing its guidelines so that the time window is a year now. So it's possible in the next report that Codemsith will have a CIRR placement rate much higher than you think.
Any other Codesmith grads have opinions or thoughts here?
u/Relevant_Tip7757 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Some have, doesn’t seem to have helped much.
To be clear, this is not specifically a Codesmith bashing—it’s a reality check, and likely the norm for many bootcamps at this moment in time.
u/michaelnovatireplied·
Can you elaborate on why the people who have chosen to do that and if Codemsith is aware, or if it was a rogue thing some alumni are doing?
u/sheriffderek wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
They cool thing about async communication like this - is that you can be a part of the discussion any time. You could come back a week from now. So, if you’re interested in discussing it - you know where it is.
u/michaelnovatireplied·
I talk to someone every week in detail and try to summarize in my commentary :)
u/Relevant_Tip7757 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
I don’t have anything to back this up, but I’m guessing that in these discussions they sometimes include offers for alumni who have already had their first job. They do extend “lifetime” career support, so they’re helping people who have been laid off, etc.
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
Yeah my feeling was they were just going off reported offers, which could be from anyone at any time via a Google Form. And past alumni sometimes go back for negotiation help.
Seems disingenuous for them to say that though if they know placement rates are lower and have shared all this other data and numbers except for those.
They have an internal 2023 report that the CEO leaked in one of his talks so I know THEY know the data internally at least haha.
u/breake wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
What's exactly on their curriculum? I looked at what was on the site and it seemed to cover really basic things.
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
Their curriculum is no different than anyone else. and it's almost always criticized as one of the weaknesses.
But It's actually somewhat intentional from what their CEO says publicly and there's a reason for it. The bar to get in is so high that people will generally have decent technical skills coming in and they actually have to work on the rest of their non-coding skills. so they're really focused on trying to get you to overcome imposter syndrome and communicate on a team and the language to use to describe engineering work and building open source projects to build your resume and those kinds of things. and I think that they do all of this in a very unique way. not necessarily unique good but just unique.
u/Otherwise-Flight7858 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
I can answer this question. I attended Codesmith. Lying on the resume was one of the things that worried me the most before the program. Now that I have completed the program, I can assure you that Codesmith does not endorse lying. It's a personal decision on the part of students
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
Yeah I'm sure you've seen my post about this and it really seems like people overstating their experience are almost table stakes for getting a job.
I know that a lot of these people think that by adding one line to their work experience that the experience was " partnership with OS Labs" absolve them of any claims of exaggeration but in my personal opinion that's not valid. More importantly, the time window is not backed by GitHub commit data.
u/awp_throwaway wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
I don't think any boot camps are in a hurry to release their 2023 "outcomes" at this point, quite frankly...
u/michaelnovatireplied·
They well but with the new CIRR guidelines. it won't be till January 2025 that we see the full picture cuz of the new 1-year window for the last graduate to get a chance to get placed
u/Relevant_Tip7757 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
To be fair, the job support is very extensive and seems unlimited, if you ask for the help. It’s just not making a difference for most people rn.
u/michaelnovatireplied·
Yeah there's also a graduate who said that they love the unlimited support and that they have a resume review scheduled for a month from now and I asked why and they said it was the first time that someone was available on their schedule.
u/sheriffderek wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Can we have a more in-depth discussion about this? There might be disappointment in not having a job yet, the market, the marketing promises, - but I think the most proactive and helpful thing for the community would be to break it down.
What jobs are people applying to? Only ‘
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
The solution is really hard because They have been advertising for 7 years that they create mid-level and senior engineers but they are like a grad school boot camp.
It's extremely hard in this market to actually place people with no or little experience in mid-level and senior roles, enough people did during the boom times that it carried the reputation of the program.
The ideal strategy right now is to place people in internships and apprenticeships and other entry level roles that are designed for people with no experience and will very quickly ramp them up into mid-level and Senior engineers. but if Codemsith doesn't drop that stance then there's not much they can do except what they've been doing.
u/Otherwise-Flight7858 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Their GitHub does indeed show that they have no more than 3 months of experience, but it seems that employers don't check GitHub, as these people manage to get hired for six-figure salaries.
u/michaelnovatireplied·· edited★ FEATURED
They are being hired at companies like Mavis Tire random agencies like I can go through the list of placements. There are edge case top tier placements like someone on LinkedIn last week who didn't seem to have any particular experience. Someone got a mid-level job at Octa. each of these better placements has a different reason, One important factor is how people present their past work experience and frame it as engineering adjacent or flutter engineering work
One person in a public talk recently said that they had no relevant experience before the program and got a job pretty quickly after and their LinkedIn said that they had 19 years of experience as a web developer/software engineer.
u/donmiguel666 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Late 2022 is completely different from 2023, though.
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
There are dozens of people being placed who graduated in 2023, and you'll find a lot who did. You'll also find cohort to cohort variances in both directions.
Unless Codesmith publishes all of their data, or you do an analysis based on GitHub projects in OSLabs, or LinkedIn, or various lists and info Codesmith has shared, there isn't going to be one answer.
A said B cohort which graduated in C and had a D placement rate. And collecting those statements, with no single one-liner answer overall.
u/dak78 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Lol, you admit you don't even have contact with your entire cohort but want to post hard numbers like facts while stonewalling productive conversation.
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
In both directions, Reddit threads don't capture reality.
Like Codesmith is a 11 hour a day crazy intense program (for full time) for 13 weeks and then you graduate and sit there in your room, day in day out, applying to jobs, month 1, month 2, month 3, month 4, month 5, month 6, month 7, month 8, month 9, month 10, month 11, month 12.
Like Month 12 is wildly different from month 6. Full time is wildly different from part time!
The feelings and emotional journey of of people in 2023 is really hard to capture in Reddit comments.
I make an effort to meet with groups of people in person in real life (which is hard because I'm fairly socially anxious), I'm meeting some people in Denver next week.
When you talk to people as humans face to face it's just a really different vibe and story than I what I see on Reddit
In good ways and bad ways, but to me that's "real".
u/MundaneValuable7 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
That is a massive exaggeration. 1-2 years of experience is enough to get hired even in today's market. It won't be easy but they'll find something. We just hired someone with less than a year of experience.
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
This is correct, I say 2+ YOE myself but maybe it's the definition of "difficult".
It's absolutely more competitive. I know Formation is working with a number of CURRENT OR FORMER FAANG ENGINEERS who are rusty and want to give interviews their best to stand out.
I'm super bias so I would argue that any current engineers benefit from mentorship to various degrees, but I am seeing it more competitive to get the offer.
People doing a great job on interviews but getting rejected is more common than in the past.
But if you have 2+ YOE, eepecially at FAANG, you'll get interviews for sure and you shouldn't have that difficult of a time. If you are come talk to me about Formation, Interview Kickstart, Pathrise, etc... because you might benefit from extra mentorship. If you worked at FAANG for 3-6 years, $5-$10K won't be a huge cost from your savings to save a ton of "difficulty" if that's what you are experiencing.
u/awp_throwaway wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
CIRR imo is mostly smoke and mirrors (I'm a boot camper, for reference), it's basically "police policing themselves"; it's not really a third-party, objective reporting mechanism. Case-in-point: I have yet to see a "scathing" CIRR report for any boot camp, that in itself is telli
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
I think their director is a reasonable person trying to make CIRR better, but there are hardly any schools left and Codesmith is the elephant in the room.
I mean I expect they will have to show 3 month, 6 month AND 1 year placement rates, and hopefully it will be clear people are taking a lot longer to find jobs.
I'm not anti CIRR or anti bootcmap, I'm just a perosn who believes in the win-win-win - student wins by being in the right place, bootcamp wins by making money, company wins by hiring the right person for the right job.
u/dak78 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
[https://layoffs.fyi/](https://layoffs.fyi/)
​
You mean it was worse?
The holidays of late 2022 entering Jan 2023 were the worst period. 2022 - late 2022 was cataclysmic as evidenced by raw data.
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
[Layoffs.fyi](https://Layoffs.fyi) doesn't capture everything.
First SWEs versus non-SWE.
Second, layoffs for layoff reasons versus performance removals wrapped into layoffs. Performance removals were backfilled, real layoffs weren't
And third, big companies move slowly, so it's a rollercoaster ride.
For example, there was a small bump in Jan/Feb 2023 from layoff backfilling, for those performance based cuts within the layoffs.
People who are "laid off" don't generally know, or admit, when it was performance based so you get all kinds of narratives floating around.
Ask a manager or director (at a big tech SWE company) about layoffs and 100% will say that performance plays a factor in choosing who to layoff.
u/metalreflectslime wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
> This is what Codemsith has said so far about 2023 publicly: 1. They had 600 offers (CEO in public talk)
Are these offers for Codesmith graduates where they have never worked a paid SWE job ever in their life before or are these offers for Codesmith students in Codesmith's ent
u/michaelnovatireplied·
I'm literally just saying a one liner their CEO said two weeks ago haha, "600 offers in 2023", and to be fair he said 500 a few weeks earlier, so this might just be a ballpark number from him. But I also have many questions about those offers and my data shows a much lower number.
u/eneka wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
One thing I found intereseting is that when you try to lookup Codesmith alumni on Linked in, it shows 664. While Hackreactor shows 8,000.
CIRR report show they had 301 Codesmith graduates from 1/2022-6/2022 which basically shows that they encourge grads not to list Codesmith in
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
They claim to have between 3,500 (their recent info session info) to 5,000 (recent job posting as of 1/19/2024) alumni of the immersive program total.
Most people who work there as TAs put that under "CS Engineering" and not Codesmith.
But yeah the vast majority do not list.
However every resident does an OSP and you can get a list of students from their GitHub repos and most have LinkedIns checkin to the repos too.
u/Relevant_Tip7757 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
It’s an extreme and conspiracy-theory version of the truth.
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
Yeah there's two sides to every coin. I try to present a balanced view but it's notable to me how polarizing Codesmith is compared to other programs. Like people who feel this negatively towards BloomTech even don't talk about the 'behavioral techniques' that they observe at Codesmith.
I'm making this vague to not out the person but someone related to a Codesmith student who overheard their Zoom calls while working from home, was so concerned about this they contacted me. The person was trained in psychology and said they observed concerning techniques being used.
I'm not a psychologist, I don't know who this person is in real life, could all be made up, but they did convince me at that they overheard the sessions and lectures at least.
And I really have never had anything like this from other programs.
It's an unsolved problem I asked a lot of people on the inside about, because I genuinely want to know more about where this comes from. Like are these techniques consciously taught to people or just extremely effective teaching mechanisms that the leaders discovered and use with good intention? I've heard arguments on both sides and don't have any actual evidence either way.
u/Relevant_Tip7757 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
No, but most of them have contact with most others as well. And those others have contact with most. Logic says… most are likely to be included in the stat.
A couple have had to take jobs in food service or their previous career and have stopped even trying. So yes, we have lost
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
\+1 here. You got what you expected and going to Codesmith was probably the right call for you and has nothing to do with the 20% placement rate you observed. If you are looking at quitting your job and joining right now though, even if Codesmith will deliver the day to day that you expect, it's important to be real about the market and how long it will actually take to get a job.
u/CoastLongjumping6491 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
I’m fairly early on, ie not in the hiring/resume portion at all, but they’ve been quite explicit not to lie on our resumes, while also saying that when we finish the program we’ll have accumulated 5-7 years of functional experience. On Codesmith’s side, this is almost certainly j
u/michaelnovatireplied·
Saying you accumulate 5-7 years of experience is lying. Don't lie, just tell everyone the truth that you are 8 feet tall!
u/CoastLongjumping6491 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
I would also dispute the idea that the curriculum is weak. It is generally pretty high level, but they are extremely explicit about the fact that they’re giving you a starting point and they expect that you’ll continually supplement on your own and with your cohort mates by parsi
u/michaelnovatireplied·
Yeah I agree they are pretty open about the curriculum!
u/Blaster0096 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Seen so many of these posts these days. I mean at this point, applicants to bootcamps should have a realistic view of their prospects of getting a software engineering job. Bootcamps are always going to paint a rosier picture. Gone are the days where you could land a top FAANG jo
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
One part of the polarization with Codesmith is that a handful of people do land FAANG jobs, even in 2023. Context matters. Someone got a job at Netflix, but it was a non-SWE job and it was in the field that the person had 8 YOE... which 100% CODESMITH HELPED THE PERSON, but this was not an outcome that anyone should EXPECT, it was a unique situation.
Someone got a job at LinkedIn recently, but the FAANG placements are really rare, because FAANG isn't interviewing bootcamp grads with no experience right now. If someone has experience then you might get a FAANG job.
\+1 to getting a good job at another company, they have a couple placements at Mavis Tire making in the mid six figures.
We (Formation) have formal and informal pipelines with FAANG companies and recruiters, and they are extremely picky about who they interview and I wish they would interview everyone, but they won't in this market.
If they reject someone we send them with 1 YOE at Walmart for a mid level role due to lack of experience, then they won't accept a Codesmith grad with 0 YOE for a mid level role. It's just the way the market is and has been for 2023.
u/HorrorEquivalent3261 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
2 weeks is still pretty bad
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
Yeah I mean at Formation people pay us explicitly for interview prep mentorship so you can get resume reviews and mock interviews on demand (when you need them or ask for them), usually within a day, often same day, definitely same week, almost a 24/7 clock of availability across dozens of mentors across a dozen+ interview types. Occasionally people cancel mocks, or resume reviews take longer on rounds of feedback, but that's the bar for "career support" that people should expect if they are being promised career support.
The Codesmith career support is:
1. A handbook with a ton of very good resources, including the 'Codesmith Style Resume' and 'Codesmith Style Application' walkthroughs
2. 8 alumni you can book 1-1 sessions with who have varied schedules, some available in days, some in weeks, some never.
3. 2 alumni you can book for technical algo mock interviews who also have only a couple of hours of availability listed on Calendly.
4. Weekly office hours and application support sessions
5. Optional peer support groups to help
6. Negotiation and offer support
Compared to other bootcamps these are all fantastic career support aspects, arguably the best.
But the best of bootcamps alone isn't enough in this market.