Where to find CIRR Data

CIRR essentially collapsed and one of the board members took over and is trying to reboot CIRR. I have no idea why all the historical data is gone but it's expected for CIRR results from 2022 to come out in February (i.e. this month). The new results will look at a 12 month placement window in addition to 3 and 6 months, which is the cause for the delay. The new director of CIRR is super reasonable but I disagree with almost all of this and I get the feeling like CIRR collapsed and lose it's members and the director has great intentions of rebooting it, but it's going to take a lot of time. That said, the new Director just started a full time job and it's questionable how much time and effort their going to spend on CIRR. Anyways, **there is absolutely no reason why schools didn't publish 6 month 2022 CIRR data and then re-publish the 12 month data under the new standard.** At the end of the day, I really do respect the new director of CIRR, but it just doesn't have the drive and dedication that y'all need and it's the end of CIRR. Unless someone wants to donate a few million dollars to CIRR to hire full time staff to make it what it needs to be, it's not going to realize it's mission. Who's going to do that? There are 4 members left and they all have had struggles in the past year. Codesmith should spend a few million dollars on their own curriculum instead of helping CIRR achieve it's potential so it's just not practical. Rant done - it's midnight on Friday and I'm in the middle of a huge launch I'm launching on Monday and I'm flying to Asia in 7 hours haha.

The latest CIRR reports were for graduates from Jan 2022 to June 2022. Jan is over 2 years ago, and June is 1 year 8 months, which rounds to 2 years too. So if someone graduates now 2024, that would be like receiving data about them in 2026. Codesmith for example said they were ready to publish their old format H2 2022 CIRR report and (before the change in specification) said to my recollection that it was coming out 'any day' - which it never did after CIRR changed the specification. So the data is there and wasn't' released and I think people have a right to claim that published CIRR data is out of date for that reason alone.

I don't think Tech Elevator is a particpate anymore. They merged operations with Galvanize (which has their own reporting system) and have let go of a number of long time staff. It's still running great and a solid option, especially if you are in their in-person cities, but I doubt they will participate in CIRR anymore. CodeUp shutdown so they are probably no longer a participant either. So from the CIRR website that leaves: Turing - an accredited school Code Platoon - a school focusing on veterans Hacktiv8 - a bootcamp in Indonesia Codesmith - a full stack immersive bootcamp in the USA Launch Academy - a full stack immersive focusing on Boston These are so different it doesn't seem useful really I highly encourage schools to make their own standards, have them vetted and audited and then publish their own data on their own time. Using CIRR for branding doesn't seem to have the impact it used to and it's not something to spread widely, it's not 2021 anymore....

No one has a right to any data, but they have a right to say CIRR's data is outdated, sorry if that wasn't clear. I don't think I'm pedantic about why we don't report CIRR results or other reporting standards, I'll try to explain again very bluntly and directly. Formation is a mentorship and benchmarking platform and not a program or school so we don't publish CIRR-like outcomes data. We really want to publish more data but when we sit down and look at it, it's just almost impossible. We had two $500K+ seniors Meta offers in the past three weeks - for people with a many years of experience and we recently had someone with a few months of experience get a role paying much less at a startup that they are thrilled with. It's super meaningless to publish CIRR-like data that doesn't take background into consideration. Sounds easy, publish data by experience level right? Now because we work with people from non traditional backgrounds, there's a huge difference between someone self taught with 5 years of contracting experience vs someone who worked at Amazon for five years and wants a new job. So the number of years of experience also doesn't tell the right story. We've been focusing on increase in compensation because it shows that people that come to Formation and get a new job, increase their first year total compensation by about $80K (see the site for the latest). This approach kind of combines experience, skill, background into your previous salary number and then shows that if you spend $7500 at Formation and get a new job at the end, you'll on average be paying for that several times over in your first year. That's convenient for us for marketing that people who successfully place on average increase their income but that's the whole point - you make an investment in yourself, you can make a return on the investment, and if we make money too, that sounds like a good win-win-win business model. I think one thing we can try explain more is people who leave Formation early before getting a job, or the time it takes to get a job. It's again hard to bucket, because most people are currently employed and doing Formation part time so they go at their own pace. But to me estimating the amount of time for a specific individual factoring in all of the person's circumstances that it might take to get a new job would really help people plan is the biggest missing piece I would like to communicate and we have no intention of publishing more CIRR-like results.

Yeah I totally get where you are coming from and we can and want to share more. The hesitation is that people truly do have unique journeys at Formation. They do entirely different things at different paces and it's something noted by many people who go through, and it also makes it hard to review as no one else will have the experience you did again. You can go on leave and there is no expected timing. Some people have really demanding jobs already and need to ramp up and down completely unexpectedly... this is surprisingly common and I don't think I've ever seen a Fellow who hasn't adjusted their involvement because of unexpected things. So we have to be super careful that people don't get misled by making assumptions about their experience or their self assessment of their skills or how fast they think they can do stuff, and we really want to give more personalized data and estimates if possible. The breadth of people at Formation is far more than Codesmith. If you are familiar with Codesmith ask their alumni that have gone to Formation how they would describe the breadth of experience and goals amongst Fellows they encountered. We have a hard time explaining what we are because it's quite a unique platform. For example, a number of people choose month to month, we have partnerships with Netflix and Waymo to train college interns. It's really just not comparable to any kind of bootcamp and we want to avoid any kind of representation that could be confusing to people about what Formation is, which makes this all even harder haha.

I think the 12 month placement might be higher than 60% but we'll see. We know placements have been a lot slower, but it's hard to tell whose getting the jobs. If I had more time or cared about this more I repeat my 52 person audit and cross reference their cohorts from some other data. Part of the reason the average time on OSPs was 12 months was becasue people tended to be job hunting longer and just had like June 2022 - present, listed for their OSP. But when you do all the accounting I don't have a strong sense of where this lands but I highly suspect 6 month placements rates of 50 to 60% are reasonable. My nightmare that everyone should prepare for is if CIRR comes out and Codesmith has a 12 month placement of 78% or something, and touts that as not much different than the H1 2022 SIX MONTH rate of 83% (or whatever it is close to that) then I think that would be bad.

Codesmith's CEO explicitly said publicly several times that Codesmith's application to offer rate is 1 offer for every 50 Codesmith style applications. And he said the main factor in people not getting jobs is that it's hard to do these kind of applications (that involve personal messaging and a ton of reach out). He presents this as a funnel from application to recruiter screen to technical interview to offer and if you do the math it implies 1 offer for every 50 applications. Do you agree or disagree with that? I know Codesmith is soliciting feedback from students over the past few days because of a kerfuffle of some kind that people have told me about but I don't know all the details of. So if you disagree it would be good to tell him that.

Codesmith has posted twice in their CSX that someone is posting negative comment in multiple channels, anonymously. I have no idea what the comments entail but a number of people have shared different side conversations around this that I won’t get into. We’re launching a FAANG partnership publicly and I haven’t been paying much attention but asked about my name being thrown around to see why.