Codesmith: My experience

META COMMENTS: There's been a lot of suspicious posts regarding Codesmith over the past few days (all over the spectrum, good and bad, and from a lot of brand new accounts, people have gotten banned) This post is from a brand new account that seems created to write about Codesmith, which is a bit suspicious too. That said, the factual content about the logistics of Codesmith all reads accurate. I don't work there and haven't gone there, so maybe I shouldn't be the judge of that, but I've seen the entire curriculum, and have private been told of certain little details around "family dinners", the clapping stuff, etc... that either someone is training a on all my public commentary about Codesmith, or this person - if not actually a resident - is pretty close to Codesmith. OVERALL: It sounds like you probably shouldn't have chose to go into Codesmith to begin with because your style doesn't seem to fit. I'm in the camp that feels some things are a little over the top for me perosnally, but there are a lot of people who feel like these things 'brought them out of their shells' and 'changed their lives'. Good for them, but you should go to Codesmith if the vibe is right for you. COMMENTS ON THE POST: 1. So there isn't too much new stuff in here, a lot of this is straight up logistics for how things work, which is actually good to share, Codesmith shares a little if you go to sessions, or get their syllabus, but this is a pretty good summary, almost like a Chat GPT summary haha but removing the opinion statements, I think it's a good overview of what happens. 2. Admissions: I don't have a wide enough lens to comment on all of admissions. What I can say is one person told me that during the boom times they had added OOP and Recursion to some people's admissions requirements to 'raise the bar' because demand was so high. Now that demand has lowered, there are people who have been trying for months and months and months and never made it in, getting in through attitude and effort primarily. I would keep an eye on how some of those people do because if they weren't actually ready yet, or they struggle getting jobs, they might turn from super fans to super not-fans. 3. OSP Code Quality: agree this is weak, the comments almost echo what I say often, almost suspiciously closely, but yeah lots of good ideas, lots of good explanations, lots of effort in the code, and the code is decent for a 4 week project, but it's not mid-level or senior engineer work. It COULD be, but it's at 80% of the way there, and the last 20% is 80% of the work - non linear and spending another 4 weeks working on it doesn't fill that, spending maybe 6 months with the right mentorship could get in the ballpark. I'm really torn on this because compared to bootcamps I would be singing PRAISES for the projects. Compared to mid-level and senior engineers they are embarrassing :( and Codesmith branding is very very entrenched in that mid-level and senior narrative. 4. +1 on the Imposter Syndrome comments. It's not binary. It's not an assumption you have all the skills and it's just you believe it or you don't. You genuinely can't possibly fill in ALL your gaps in 12/13 weeks, but you can fill in SOME. Rather than focus on understanding imposter syndrome through the lens of: look you have new abilities A, B, C! Double down on those, but acknowledge you don't have D, E, F, G, H, I. Instead it's you have A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I and you never realized it this whole time, it's a miracle - run with it! And it just confuses graduates when they have to find their bearings on the job and then make the next career move. It might just be a pedagogy disagreement I have so it is what it is, but that's where I stand. 5. Finally, +1 on go to learn. I would debate how/what/when you learn/etc.... but don't go to Codesmith to get a job, go there to learn. If you are on the fence and you are promised a $150K offer because of your 'unique' background, don't go. If you are on the fence, but you just love the community and want to be around the people, go. Just don't plan your life around getting a job. CHANGES: Codesmith has made a ton of changes last week. Between 1/3 and 1/2 of the instructors were laid off, as well as numerous other staff. Others have resigned on their own. A bunch of exciting new changes were announced but that haven't been implemented yet (i.e. there's no coworking spaces in NYC and SF available just yet, but they are 'coming soon') so my overall recommendation is a pause and wait and see. I feel bad saying that because I'm very much aware enrollment is way down and I don't know how much they have in the bank to buy time to make these changes, and encouraging people to wait for the changes is a bit of a chicken and egg. They need money to make the changes and they need students to bring in the money. I'm not their CFO, so they can figure it out, but for students, I have to recommend to wait and see. Like there could be increased thrash as instructors shuffle around with cohorts ending, there could be more people who leave voluntarily for new opportunities. Like Codesmith 6 months ago was stable, consistent and you'll get +/-5% of what you thought you would get. Right now it's more like it could be +/-20% of what you think you'll get.

A really important part of what I'm saying that I haven't people comment on is the relative expectations. If you are comparing yourself to the best in the world, these projects are far below the bar of junior work. The Medium articles and resumes dont match the work. Someone says "integrated test suite and achieved 95% unit test coverage" and then the code has jest with example strings in it still copy pasted from stack overflow in it and there are like 20 tests for the backend only that don't actually test properly. This type of thing is the norm and not the exception. It doesn't come across like it's an MVP but it's a slapped together code to check off boxes to expand resume bullets. WHICH IS FINE FOR A BOOTAMP!!!!

Yes. Codemsith grads with no prior experience are by definition entry level SWEs and I think can compete with CS grads who don't have internships under their belt. I can go more into why if this is challenged, but that's my opinion. Codesmith levels people by capabilities and not skills when talking about levels, which is the main source of disconnect. My stance, CAPABILITIES GET YOU PROMOTED FROM JUNIOR TO MID IN 8 MONTHS, BUT NOT MID AS THE FIRST JOB. Again, can do into why but very strong opinion based on 8 years a Meta seeing it grow from 200 eng to 10K eng and observing a lot of growth of poele and hiring systems.

I mean like I said, a lot of people like the vibe, and it was a whopping 11 hours a day and 6 days a week. It's not like it's extroverted activities for 11 hours a day straight. I saw a session recording once that someone described as an example of what they meant. It's a vibe that you are present and active. You acknowledge you are present with positive emoji reactions to every post. The more concerning example of toxic positively was if someone had a negative attitude there was a process for instructors and coordinators to correct it and go to phrases like "snuggle the struggle". Being negative was seen as a problem to correct versus a person to debug. The theories people have said are more around that the people doing the debugging have no SWE experience and just know the Codemsith way so they are going to these tools as all they know to try to help people. Someone sticking with it, graduating, and getting a job is validation to these people that this correction worked. People who have more skepticism seem to push back on being corrected and probably aren't good fits in the first place. It's not like this is brainwashing and causing harm, but it does cause this intense self reinforcing cycle that is disconnected from how industry SWEs might deal with a junior engineer who is struggling on the team. Maybe an overly analytical view of something that feels a lot more casual in practice but I'm trying to figure out where this polarization comes from!

Yesh same for Rithm and Launch School. The main difference in grads is how they present themselves and not in their skill sets or experience levels. I tend to see a little more adjacent tech experience at Codesmith but not enough to target higher level jobs. That experience though could maybe explain why Codesmith grads who really frame that adjacent experience as technical coding experience, can get $130K jobs at less tech focused companies. But no reason a Rithm grad could do the same strategy.

Sadly, +1 to this in the current market, you need 2 YOE in general to have a "standard job hunt" pipeline and under that is a bit of unreproducible wild west. It's one of the reasons I jump on anyone posting a success story right now and framing it like anyone can do it. Anyone CAN IN THEORY do it, but there's no reproducible path to getting through with under 2 YOE right now. I think really tiny bootcamps with a single cohort under 30 people that all get personalized help might be able to increase the odds of finding your edge case path, but again not scalable, not reproducible, a lot of 1-1 strategizing and a bit of luck.

So Codesmith doesn't just hire fellows/TAs, but there is a pipeline - which is extremely disrupted by the recent changes and could very well change Resident (student) -> fellow 3 month @$50K salary -> lead fellow 3 more months -> mentor (full time paid $80K - $120K depending) -> instructor ($120K to $150K) -> lead instructor ($150K to $180K) At Codesmith the ENTIRE instruction hierarchy is this except for: 1. One person who was hired as instructor who went to another bootcamp and taught there for two years 2. Two instructors I know of were SWEs in industry and came back to teach. Both of those people are no longer instructors and didn't last long after coming back from industry. There are a lot of pros and cons to this approach, but just laying out there in this comment for starters, can discuss more.

+1, agree on a lot here. I do actually agree that the scope of the products could be mid-level and senior, the only missing piece is the SCALE - building a product for a larger number of actual users is important in being a mid-level and senior. Building a tool that solves a vague problem is an important part - actually working through benign day to day problems actual users have and prioritizing and making judgement calls along the way is a missing piece that's just hard to get anywhere. Even the most successful and long running OSPs don't have any real usage I can find (e.g. ReacType is a headliner that as far as I can tell no one uses, and no one seems to care about the security issue I reported that lets anyone wipe out their marketplace thing, and clearly no one is using that feature anyways) But yeah agreed on scope actually haha. "storytelling" to me is where the strategy part goes off track - people I have interviewed come across that they spent more time practicing how to talk about the unit tests they added than they actually spent adding the unit tests Quite frankly, this is a good strategy for quickly getting a job, but it actively slows down the process of actually getting the experience needed to be mid-level day to day. I commented separately but I THINK it comes down to Will's views on capabilities vs skills. If you are 100% you COULD do something, then you don't need to demonstrate you can do it. And I'm built from the Meta philosophy of you have to frickin prove, not just demonstrate, you can do something for 6 months BEFORE getting promoted to that level on paper.

By building a jetpack so you can fly above them all. Joking aside, it's an analogy. You have to do something different, and there three approaches (I got this framework from a friend who was an amazon warehouse worker and an OpenAI Principal Engineer and many things in between and he shares this a lot privately): 1. Do something smarter than anyone else. If you are naturally smarter than 99% of people, you can find some way to show that. 2. Get luckier than anyone else. Maybe you can make your luck by being in a tech city and going to bars every night to "bump into" software engineers, but you can just sit there and hop to get luckier. 3. Work harder than anyone else. This is the only one in your control. But you actually have to do it. The person said he would sleep at the office in a hammock under his desk every day for a month at a time for example. Like you really just have to do the work of 4 people EVERY SINGLE DAY CONSISTENTLY to outwork anyone. So many bootcamp grads want jobs, so you won't stand out without standing out! Under this framework you can see how in this forum even when you see a success story, what bucket does it fall under. 1 and 2 aren't reproducible and their stories might be interesting to learn about, but if they are a 1 and you aren't, useless. If they are 2 and you are doing 2, then recommendations about "making your own luck" might help. And then if they are a 3 and they make it sound easy to do that much work, and you aren't a 3, again useless, you're going to start and stop for months and months and burn the rubber without going anywhere. If you aren't any of these, then find another field to go into.

yeah I've never shared this before but if it's useful I can try to share more broadly

Yeah I agree with this but I'm really bias because of Formation so this is obviously a skewed position that I have. Like I personally worked with someone to increase an initial offer by $200K first year TC and how much is that worth? It's a really odd industry compared to most because the amounts of money thrown around a "typical" FAANG senior, staff, etc... engineer is not just like 8% per year compounded, but like 5X a junior engineer. The amount of work on my side it takes to help that super senior person negotiate is less time, but a lot more extremely nuanced expertise that took years of exposure and observation to build. It's a lot more natural to try to associate the cost with "what services am I getting, how many sessions, how many projects", etc... **It's a lot harder to think of paying as an investment that will hopefully offer a return. Increasing comp by $200K first year TC is not remotely common, but for a person that "invested" $10K and got back $200K in 6 months, that's like investing in Facebook at the IPO and waiting 10 years to make that much.** Like you can't go back and imagine an alternate future where you did something else instead to compare to so it's hard to even know what you would have done, but it was at least financially positive choice.

Codesmith has weekly "family dinners" where you eat and socialize with others and I think sometimes there are announcements there. I've heard of different rituals during lectures, I don't know if they are set by cohort or by section, I've heard of the powerclap at the end, snapping, various zoom background stuff. A lot of "family" references. Like in CSX Slack, people sometimes address people as "family". When you spend 11 hours+ a day with people 6 days a week, it makes sense people feel like family.

Yeah you got it regarding that project, change a cookie and delete everything :(. I told them about it weeks ago and was offered to be paid to fix it myself :(

Don the Developer discussed this post for 40 mins here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xz75K6fSSP8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xz75K6fSSP8) He strongly disliked the powerclap hahaha Note: I was present in that live feed and answered some of his questions.

What you said here to me is that the people attending Codesmith are awesome. The people graduating are self-organizing to run standups and encouraging each other in the job hunt. That's all fantastic stuff but is it what you are paying $21K for? Imagine a random person added all those same people to a Discord and they all had self studied and were supporting each other just the same. Similar arguments are made about going to Harvard Business School - you go to meet the people, not to learn anything special, so it quite frankly might be worth the cost. I talk to a lot of alumni, and the lowest ballpark I've heard is 30% placed in a year, and the highest is what you just said at 75%. Given that they had about 1000 students START in 2022, and 550ish offers in 2023, that sounds like a 50ish% placement rate within a year - maybe higher on CIRR because they reduce the number of people in the denominator as much as possible. But that's a heck of a lot lower than 80ish percent in 6 months like 2021/ealier in 2022 And whatever Codesmith does it can't change the market, and unless you HAVE to go to a bootcamp RIGHT NOW, then it's completely rational for people to wait. Codesmith aside, they claim to have submitted CIRR reports like a month or longer ago, CIRR is dropping the ball and falling apart, and Codesmith keeps telling us they will publish them soon, so clearly the bootcamp industry is falling apart too and encouraging people to go to the best option of a sinking industry because it's the best, isn't great advice.