Codesmith marketing campaign: "you’re not late to tech". Unfortunately you likely are, and this kind of thing is tone deaf and misleading. Instead of making changes in their program structure they are marketing a 10 year old program structure as if it still works and please don't fall for it.
Codesmith marketing campaign: "you’re not late to tech". Unfortunately you likely are, and this kind of thing is tone deaf and misleading. Instead of making changes in their program structure they are marketing a 10 year old program structure as if it still works and please don't fall for it.
Codesmith sent out a mass email campaign today that I found offensive.
>If you’ve been thinking, *“Is it still worth trying to break into tech right now?”,* you’re not alone… but we will let our latest data speak for itself.
Yes, let's the data speak for itself. For 2021 grads about 80% got jobs within 6 months of graduating, and for 2022 about 70% and for 2023 grads about 40%. We don't know what it is for 2024 grads but word on the street is it's about the same as 2023 grads or worse.
The trend is falling off a cliff so let's let the data speak for itself and run for the hills.
>Despite layoffs and market shifts, 70.1% of Full-Time Software Engineering Immersive grads landed in-field roles within 12 months. Moreover, those roles came with a $110K median starting salary. For Part-Time grads? A staggering $120K. This is what our outcomes look like. Transparent. Audited. Real.
These are people who GRADUATED in 2023 and did Codesmith end of 2022 through mid 2023. That's like **TWO YEARS AGO**. o3/Claude 4/Gemini 2.5pro JUST CAME OUT THIS YEAR! So the entire world is different now.
Codesmith's curriculum has been the same for YEARS but in Feb 2024 they added 5 lectures on AI (on topics that aren't really relevant like RAG, and well before reasoning models came out).
I call this "not changing" because the fundamental premise is the same. 12-14 weeks of the same structure they did 5 years ago. They might call this making changes, but it's not remotely fast enough.
But I guess they think it's enough to raise prices to $22,500 this year.
They have no technical full time staff left even remotely qualified to make more changes either - all engineers who graduated recently from Codesmith itself.
>And now? The bar is rising, with companies seeking engineers who can think critically, work with AI, and solve business challenges end-to-end. This is why we have designed our program to prepare technologists for the future.
Would you like to become one of them? You can start your journey here.
This is generic and meaningless fluff.
It's ironic that their new slogan is "become irreplacable" when they are instead making you replaceable out of the box. They are producing junior engineers (i.e. people with < 2 years of SWE work experience) in a market where junior engineers are being directly replaced by AI. In the past few weeks alone huge leaps were made with async agents that Cursor founders describe as 'replacing a new grad hire with a couple of days on the job' and its only getting better.
**Please don't fall for this kind of marketing from Codesmith or any other bootcamp. Now is not the time and their data proves that.**
u/jhkoenig wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
In related news, university enrollments in computer science have increased over 50% in less than 5 years, while the job market for computer science has actually contracted. Will employers choose a bootcamper over a BS grad? I'd like to meet that hiring manager (before they're let
u/michaelnovatireplied·· edited★ FEATURED
I'm seeing top 10 university grads getting internships and if they perform very well, getting jobs. I think that's the only path to a canonical entry level SWE job.
I think we're going to have a ton more tech-adjacent jobs coming up with AI but that's not what you pay $22,500 to go to a SWE bootcamp for.
u/jcasimir wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
I think scale is important to consider. If Codesmith were planning to train and graduate 25,000 software devs a year, yeah I would have concerns. But if it’s 250? 500?
It’s not that those folks have an easy path, but it is still very possible. I was just in a meeting where I wa
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
It's not about getting the role, it's about the next 5 years and what AI is going to do with that.
Codesmith's results were from people exaggerating resumes and Codesmith looked the other way.
AI will replace you if you were lying and getting by by sheer hustle. AI works 24/7. AI can parallelize 1000 tasks.
The only think AI can't beat yet is the taste that comes through SWE experience.
IMO, there is no alternative right now, just don't change careers and learn programming for free on the side slowly over a couple of years.
I'm very confident in the next 5 to 10 years
1. We'll know what all the new jobs AI created are
2. We'll be able to train people for those jobs quickly with bootcamps - but the demographics might look different than bootcamps today with smaller deltas each time around and people aren't becoming "programmers", they are Accountatns becoming like AI Accountants.
3. Because no juniors being hired now, when we need SWEs to help build tools for those AI Accountants, we'll need more SWEs in general and we won't have them, so we'll have talent wars for experienced AI-SWEs to build AI tools for all kinds of super-non-tech companies. And if AI is good enough, those AI-SWEs will meet the demand, if it's not, we'll need more SWE.
4. People that actually want to become SWEs will go to college and go through years and years of apprenticeships and rotations and learnings to build taste to actually work on SWE products and it won't be something bootcampable.
Finally - 250 individual stories is doable, Launch School is doing it because their founder is hustling hard and knows each student's name. Codesmith's founder is working on a new Frontend Masters course and writing a book about AI and gave up helping each and every graduate get a job. So it's maybe possible, but Codesmith is not the answer.
u/OllieTabooga wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Your thoughts about the future of Formation?
u/michaelnovatireplied·· edited★ FEATURED
Absolutely!
1. We spent literally 5 years building a platform from scratch where people can practice anything and do dynamically scheduled mentorships sessions on anything. So we're adapting in real time to AI. We've added a dozen new AI features in the past few months. We've increased the experience bar for people to work with. We're paying very very close attention to interview changes that are happening with AI out there.
2. We're introducing our first AI-specific tracks shortly and started offering one off sessions to iterate on those within our platform engine. The goal of this is to help people become more efficient engineers on the job and keep up with AI.
3. It's entirely possible that AI will crush a lot of SWE industry. It's not a guarantee but a possibility we have to prepare for. In that world, competition for the top SWEs is even more and we'll play a role helping those people prepare for lucractive senior+ engineering roles - it's what we already do, but probably more adaptive on the behaviorally prep. In the world where AI creates tons of new jobs that are SWE adjacent, our platform already supports things and we built this engine for five years, 500K lines of code, all devoted to topic-agnostic practice, and we'll be able to adjust to those new roles faster than anyone else can.
4. In the world where off the shelf AI does a better job than we can do at Formation and renders our product useless - we will cease to exist and shut down. We also have to prepare for that reality, just like bootcamps should have been preparing for the one they are in now and the ones that didn't are gone or soon gone.
Our rule of thumb when building AI is we have to ask ourselves "can I do this in ChatGPT" and if the answer is yes, then we don't ship it no matter what. We have to be delivering value to people or we don't deserve to exist. We deliver value in practice, mentor sessions, mock interviews, job hunt strategy, negotiation, accountability, and hyper personalization based on proprietary data on your interview-prep journey.
As long as one of these is value-add to the world we will exist in some form, but if AI replaces all of them and we can't do better than ChatGPT we won't be fighting for our existence like Codesmith is, we will shut down.
u/Ok-Chef2541 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Was this whole post just a sneaky ad
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy
No. I posted this because I got an email from Codesmith and was offended and wrote this off the cuff in 5 mins.
u/quantumpencil wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
AI isn't going to replace any devs in the next five-ten years, it isn't even close to being good enough to do that. The only people who believe this are technically illiterate/hype-men and generally lack an understanding of what engineering work is actually like. Time spent writi
u/michaelnovatireplied·
Read these two things and then let me know your thoughts:
1. [https://ai-2027.com/](https://ai-2027.com/)
2. [https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/](https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/)
u/quantumpencil wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
I'm familiar with the arguments, I work proximally to the development of many of the systems being referenced. I have been using cursor daily and internal code automation tools before most of the public was even aware of their existence.
It's not about code-style, it's actually
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
I would argue if we froze LLMs as they are today, using Claude 4 Opus/GTP o3/Gemini 2.5Pro I would be 2X more productive based on my person stats over the last few months.
That alone will change the industry and destroy the junior engineer market (other than top 10 CS grads who companies deem worthy of investing in) and destroy bootcamps.
If we go beyond that depends on model and tooling improvements. From what I hear from my close friends at Anthropic and OpenAI, there's more room to grow here.
u/Ok-Chef2541 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Was this whole post just a sneaky ad
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
I don't understand if you think I'm lying and a super sketchy person then you should join the club with Codesmith's leaders who think I'm out to get them to promote my company and steal all their students. I literally talked to one of Codesmith's leaders face to face and explained this and if they don't believe me it's on them, but it doesn't change reality.
u/CaptainKubernetes wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Hey, I help with the Codesmith AI/TL program. the current climate of this field moves quite fast which is why I'm consistently updating the lectures and making sure the topics maintain relevance. I also try to seek out feedback from the students to make sure the Codesmith course
u/michaelnovatireplied·· edited★ FEATURED
People who have done the course have chatted with me about their experience, but I haven't done it myself. I've fairly familiar with the content.
But for starters - you work at Microsoft full time and you are doing this as a side gig - which is a conflict of interest because your Microsoft contract probably owns your IP unless you got sign off for it.
Second, no offense, but you don't have much industry experience, a couple of contracts here and there and you are solely responsible for the curriculum for this program?
My frustration is that Codesmith is full of people with very little experience - even 5 years of experience if nothing if someone is going to portray themselves as a world expert on a topic.
The arrogance and attitude and confidend tone I've seen from people with very little experience is a massive disconnect.
I applaud and support the effort and I don't think it's intentional - but all the instructors need to know what you don't know.
Keep using the energy to improve and make things better but don't **my entire point is that it shouldn't be marketed as like Andrei Karpathy and Andrew Ng teaching you for $4600 for 4 weeks.**
If you market it for what it was, I would totally back off.
u/willbdb425 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
The second link was interesting. I have tried coding agents a bit so not a power user by any means but my opinion is very different from the author. I don't agree hallucinations are a "solved" problem, in fact I would call it an "unsolvable" problem if anything. The author does s
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
In the past month we started moving to async agents that run in GitHub etc... and they literally behavior like a junior engineer who is assigned tasks, ask questions in the comments, and sends PR. So the future is coming fast. You have to assume these tools are going to get 5X better in a year and plan for that because the delta is so much, if you aren't remotely ready, you might get left behind.
u/AdTypical3295 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
It appears all of their top talent is gone based on looking at their website. Layoffs again or did a bunch of people leave?
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
Both. They had a number of program cut backs that resulted in people being laid off formally with severance. But after several rounds of layoffs and when no one shows up to your info sessions that used to have 20 people a week showing up, the remaining staff get the hint and a number of people have also voluntarily departed since then. Even if the remaining staff, my knowledge is that most are open to work.
I don't mean this offensively at all but there isn't any engineering talent left. The instructors seem like fantastic communicators and eventually I expect to be superstars but they are sooooo early in their journeys the reality is they are not remotely there yet. And the pressure of being sold to the public as a super expert is a lot.
I commented on this elsewhere on here but I just don't understand why their founder - who is respected as a great lecturer - doesn't just teach things himself. Like I understand wanting to scale the business but with its massive decline, this is survival mode not scale mode, he's just giving up and maybe hasn't admitted it to himself.
u/Zestyclose-Level1871 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
>u/michaelnovati: ***They have no technical full time staff left even remotely qualified to make more changes either - all engineers who graduated recently from Codesmith itself.***
What? And if they're lacking FT tech staff does this include the instructors and/or TAs and TLs?
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
Based on their website as of 6/7/2025
Admin Team (8 people): no one on that list has a technical/engineering background.
Instruction & Engineers (15 people): more complex breakdown -
Lead Instructor (2 people): full time staff, both of whom graduate Codesmith roughly a year ago and have no real industry experience. One of them "works" for a Codesmith alumni's shell company/startup that Codesmith people use to beef up their resumes.
Engineering Mentor (2 people): full time staff, a stepping stone to the Instructor title. These are Fellows who stay on full time - kind of like Full Time Fellows.
Faculty Lecturer (1 person): James Laff was the head of curriculum and seems to have left, and this role is kind of like the more junior stepping stone to that role. This person graduate Codesmith end of 2024 and has never worked in industry.
Engineering Fellow (5 people): these are hourly TAs who just graduated Codesmith and stay around
Prep Program Instructor (4 people): these are part time people that teach the couple week $50 CS Prep/JSB courses and they aren't part of the immersive.
Mentors and Contributors (many people): these are hourly/ad-hoc part time people who do like resume reviews, sales calls, code review, etc... they are not full time staff
\----------
So of the full time instruction staff - 5 people - none have really worked in industry and all graduated Codesmith recently.
And in all of this the founder doesn't teach anything himself, review any work.
Some lectures were created 4 years ago without updates and the people teaching them are training in how to PERFORM LIKE THEY UNDERSTAND and many do not even understand the concepts themselves (according to conversations with those people).
u/Zestyclose-Level1871 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Jeezus. Seeing they already have a lean/MVP staff on FT basis then (regardless of their genuine industry experience or not) why can't they do the UoP model and go 100% online? Relocate those MVP staff to cheaper, more affordable COLA areas? Why the obssession with physically livi
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
They are 100% online already, and they pay their instructors approximately market rate as engineers because if they don't pay them what they claim they would make as engineers in the industry they are admitting the people aren't ready to be engineers. E.g. if they claim an instructor is qualified to be an engineer making $150K they have to pay them $150K or their entire product is a scam.
The CEO puts pressure on the team to improve things but they aren't qualified to so very few changes have been made over the years.
The CEO claims the pedagogy is based on Oxford's teaching methods and has nothing to do with any specific skills or topics - "learn how to learn" so he uses that to justify the fact that nothing has substantially changed in the past number of years.
The CEO training materials for instructors are very performative. Like how to ask people questions to engage them, how to handle things you don't know while making it seem like you do (turn the question into a question back on the asker)
I've seen some info sessions/recordings where two diferent instructors fake their way through the exact same session and make the same "mistakes" "accidentally" and it's like they are performing.
Codesmith has two actors on staff and an actor turned engineer helped build the first training programs.
Lots of acting and not a lot of substance.
This is why they don't have outside people come in because when they've hired back former students who worked in industry as instructors those people haven't had a good time and end up as 'problem cases' to deal with - they don't just follow along and they question things and gets them into trouble... at Codesmith you have to follow the Codesmith way or get out.
Employers don't care if people can do the jobs. But what employers don't realize is grads who have crazy work ethics and hustle will fake their way through the job. I know an employer who was aware of all this and didn't care if the people can do the job and one of the Codesmith grads they hired was amazing - and two years later the person is on a 'career break to take some time away from engineering'.... maybe they burned out? not sure.
u/No_Departure_1878 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
i have 10 yoe and a phd and cannot land a job. What on Earth makes you believe that 6 months at a bootcamp would do anything? I cannot believe bootcamps still exist.
u/michaelnovatireplied·
Well this one does it by capitalizing on people with low self confidence or self esteem and building them up emotionally.
In all seriousness, self confidence is hard to build so building it for $22K is maybe worth it?