Codesmith's Unofficial/Reverse Engineered H2 2022 CIRR Report - NOTABLE OPINIONS: concerning increase in number of ghosters on salaries (that still counted as job obtainers !!), 180 day placement rate of 63% (a little higher than expected)

Codesmith's Unofficial/Reverse Engineered H2 2022 CIRR Report - NOTABLE OPINIONS: concerning increase in number of ghosters on salaries (that still counted as job obtainers !!), 180 day placement rate of 63% (a little higher than expected) CIRR finally published 2022 outcomes! They aren't as bad as expected at first glance, but I'm not a fan of the change to 360 day reporting period. Three schools reported, one of them had only 15 graduates in all of 2022, another published H2 2022 outcomes instead of full year 2022 outcomes. So I reversed engineered some of the the H2 2022 outcomes for Codesmith. DISCLAIMERS: 1. See Methodology for how to reproduce what I did yourself. 2. This may contain errors or misunderstandings, please check the numbers yourself and point out corrections and I will update anything incorrect. 3. These are illustrative examples based on the **reports and the methodology below, they are not official numbers from Codesmith** METHODOLOGY: 1. Using the [H1 2022 CIRR report](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hKzDQtZpNuhw0nPNRBpAlTguwzsg9ks_/view?usp=sharing&__hstc=109711322.0e322342ee14294aff502ad66630cdf2.1651003824655.1711405406049.1711408282093.431&__hssc=109711322.2.1711408282093&__hsfp=901331684&hsutk=0e322342ee14294aff502ad66630cdf2&contentType=standard-page) for Full Time Remote, with 301 graduates in the report, I converted the %s to absolute numbers. 2. I then repeated that on the [FY 2022 CIRR report](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1v8Inb1xS_ExbOjTAKwP08lFisifHofHi/view?usp=drive_link), with 732 graduates in the report, again converting %s to absolute numbers 3. I then subtracted the H1 from FY to get the absolute number of H2 2022 graduates of 431, and absolute numbers of placements and other fields 4. I converted those absolute numbers into percentages by dividing by 431. # RESULTS: **H2 2022 - REVERSE ENGINEERED ESTIMATES** **Number of Graduates: 431** **Employed in Field (90 Days/180 Days): 30.5% / 63.1%** **Could not Contact (90 Days/180 Days): 9.3% / 9.3%** **Percentage reported salaries (90 Days/180 Days): 85% / 81 %** Salaries - CANNOT BE DETERMINED FROM THE REPORTING. H1 2022 Comparison (official numbers): Number of Graduates: 301 Employed in Field (90 Days/180 Days): 48.2% / 80.1% Could not Contact (90 Days/180 Days): 0% / 0% Percentage reported salaries (90 Days/180 Days): 99.3% / 94.2% # COMMENTARY 1. H2 2022 at 63% placed in 180 days is pretty good compared to the market. Based on anecdotal guesses from 30% to 75%, this is somewhere in the higher end of the range. 2. A spike in people that could not be contacted or included from 0 to 9.3% - these are ghosters that went of the grid. 9.3% is a substantial amount of people who disappeared post graduation compared to almost 0 in H1 2022. 3. **Percentage of people reporting salaries tanked from 99% -> 85% and 94% -> 81%. These are MASSIVE drops in people not responding to placement surveys but being included as placements. If 10% of the placements were ghosters, where LinkedIn or a text message to an instructor, showed the people had jobs, that would be really concerning.**

+1 it can go both ways for sure and I didn't comment on salaries at all. That said, there are always people who ghost salaries every half, and it's generally a smaller number, but it REALLY tanked this half and I think something else is going on. Like combining all of this, 25% of people are ghosting in some way in H2 versus hardly anyone in H1 and the market only got worse in the rest of 2023 for H1 2023 grads. It should be zero surprise that sentiment on this sub is bad and that enrollment tanked 70% in end of 2023 and it's certainly not me pointing this stuff out that's causing it. Smart engineers making $130K salaries can figure this out by talking to these alumni and hearing about this stuff from them. Now I have inside info here that end of last year, Instructors were asked to text and reach out to alumni to try to get placement info out of them via whatever means they could to try to boost CIRR numbers. So instructors would reach out saying "hi" or socially how things are going via text or LinkedIn, with the goal of extracting CIRR information to count people as placements because the CIRR numbers were too low. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, but clearly the ghosting and placement rates have been an issue on Codesmith's mind and it hasn't been talked about at all officially. Launch School is completely transparent about ghosting rates cohort to cohort and it's not something that needs to be defended, Codesmith just needs to be transparent and explain it and I know a ton of concerned people that will be happy. All the alumni's attitudes today have been to coordinate responses, deflect, and attack me because my company doesn't participate in CIRR, and someone tell those Codesmith alumni they are playing the wrong game here.

No drama when people are boringly transparent and don't have a single thing to read between the lines: [https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/1blhhh0/launch\_schools\_2023\_capstone\_outcomes\_commentary/](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/1blhhh0/launch_schools_2023_capstone_outcomes_commentary/) If Codesmith's CEO just says straight up like Launch School's founder did, people had low morale and started ghosting from Codesmith and it was devastating blow to Codesmith's culture and one of the reasons they shrunk down 70% (est. 1000 alumni in 2023 vs on pace for 300 in 2024) so they can re-focus on a tighter and more supportive group of residents, then that's FANTASTIC. All of the alumni from BEFORE this "ghost era" who had that great culture should cheer on that kind of change instead of misleading prospective students that everything is still fine because Codesmith had a great culture 2 years ago. Without any official commentary, the data shows that Codesmith did have a great culture, then took a ding from 25% ghosting, and is trying to reset to a great culture again now. Reasonable, no drama. Instead the attitude is 'Codesmith changed my life, how dare you criticize the culture, you are bias and a hypocrite trying to steal Codesmith students with sleazy marketing'... unnecessary drama that's just fabricated and not following facts. Facts and facts and upvotes and downvotes don't change facts and facts shouldn't have drama. Note: if you didn't know that leadership asked instructors to help boost CIRR outcomes by reaching out to students socially, then you probably don't know about the efforts to influence online narrative/Reddit that are going on either. It's a small number of people who are very close with leadership, not random Redditors being recruited.

"In this day and age, LinkedIn is almost as gospel as anything else" Which is fine with me, if people just know this and understand that in interpreting CIRR results, but this obviously introduces weaknesses if people are exaggerating or optimizing their narrative on LinkedIn. OFFER LETTERS are gospel, not LinkedIn and an auditor speaking with a board member of CIRR, and Codesmith advisor, all agreeing on LinkedIn being gospel... gives me a darn good right to call that out so people are aware, no? You can argue if you agree or disagree, but calling that out shouldn't warrant attacks and defensiveness. Like I said, I think LinkedIn should be used but want to discuss the documentation mechanisms and details on how so that it's transparent.

I completely agree and support correcting the time windows for CIRR and also observe a lot of people mistaking them, but it's also true that this period is for the very last graduate on Dec 31st, 2022. The first graduate who started Codesmith in Sept 2021, graduated in Jan 2022 and wrapped up the job search by Dec 2022 took 1.25 years to show up in public data here. Rithm School criticized this this morning as well, that the annual reporting cycle causes a 6+ month delay in getting that data from earlier people, even the 360 day data, not just the 6 month one! And they don't like that and do their own standard as a result.

Sorry, I agree devastating blow is my characterization of shrinking from 4 full time cohorts to 1 and laying off 1/3 to 1/2 the staff. I think that's a reasonable characterization but it's indeed an opinion and not fact.

Yeah and I appreciate calling that out reasonably and we can talk about it!

Well CIRR's specification allows any text message sent from a graduate, without any kind of verification, as long as it has the start date, that it was accepted, and the job type (i.e. full time, part time, permanent, contract) to be used as the "gold standard". There is ZERO specification for how to verify salaries, ZERO. The only rule is the salary has to be base salary and correspond to the job used for the start date, but absolutely ZERO rules for how it has to be collected or verified and auditing doesn't have to verify salaries either.

Yeah sorry, I'm replying for everyone who reads this, I got a lot of rando accounts all over my comments on this CIRR stuff and don't know who is who. It's why my responses are so long and repetitive, but I feel it's what I need to do. If you want to chat 1-1 DM me and I'm way different way of writing lol

Yeah +1 to that the reason I heard about this was that instructors felt overloaded already, they hardly EVER write code but though they were signing up as "software engineers" for Codesmith, and they get forced to do this as well. The complaints were about work load and being forced to do it without it feeling "optional" to help out if they wanted to on their own time.

CIRR changed the standard to go from 180 day reporting to 360 day reporting. So there are H1 2022 numbers published from the old standard and full year 2022 numbers from the new standard. I did the simple math to estimate H2 2022 numbers based on those two reports. The fact that they tanked in H2 and we had to wait 6 months longer than usual to get the results is my biggest complaint about the process. That and Codesmith said a couple times now they had an H2 2022 report six months ago they didn't share because of these last minute changes. It's marketing.

No definitely not. They have good intentions and they try. I've read every word of the standard document five times and it's just not robust. I could spend a day rewriting it to fix numerous ambiguities and gaps. They just updated it too and didn't fix any of this stuff. Like if you read the G.R.A.D standard document from Galvanize it reads like a properly written legal specification. The CIRR spec reads like a marketing brief. No numbers sections, no clear definition of terms, ambiguities in the worksheets that don't match the spec. Many people with good intentions don't do a good job executing and this is one of these cases.