CodeSmith is still down lol

1. Agreed. And the fact that they can't recover through an ownership claim leads me to believe the account also isn't setup properly with proper ownership info and such. 2. Their email is also down which is even more crazy because that might be more critical than the website in terms of business impact 3. Someone send me a screenshot that they are telling their community how transparent they're being and what happened and they're absolutely not and I don't want to hear any freaking defense on this, there's an industry standard that top-tier tech companies have for disclosing technical incidents and they are not following that standard. and if you went to codesmith and you worked at a real company then you know this too. e.g.https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-1-1-1-1-incident-on-july-14-2025/

Downvote negativity to oblivion is the Codesmith way of dealing with this instead of being transparent.

Or they hired far too many of them?

I know the people that exaggerated their resume to enter as seniors had trouble there. Their titles are non standard but Associate is FAANG apprentice Senior Associate is FAANG entry level Senior Engineer/Principal Associate is FAANG mid level Lead Engineer is FAANg senior The people who had trouble were grads with zero experience who got Senior Engineer titles who should have been Senior Associates. I mean I audited dozens of Codesmith grads to see where there are later on a small majority still has jobs as SWE but a large number did not and many had changed jobs frequently. Napkin math, illustrative only. Of the 4000 grads, several hundred have been employed by Codesmith in some capacity and I'm excluding all of them. This analysis supported me writing a letter to Codesmith encouraging them to try to be the Stanford of Bootcamps that produces the top ENTRY LEVEL talent in the industry and university recruiters fight over them. Codesmith is fudging up people's careers by pushing them to take mid and senior jobs. The people are under so much pressure, we see them fudge resumes. Such incredibly high potential people are steered to the wrong jobs and it frustrated me a lot. It's one of my three core criticisms of Codesmith for years now.

I both agree and disagree. So first off, the highest performers are ALWAYS KEPT. Just think about it. You have a company. You spent a ton of time getting some amazing people. You have to layoff a team. You will keep these top people and move them ANYWHERE. It would be ridiculous to keep (or resume) hiring outside people who are probably worse performers than keeping your top talent. So people who are laid off might not be the worst but they generally are not the top 10% either. Now lets say you are a manager and you have to remove 2 engineers out of 10 on your team. Who do you choose? The lowest performers. Let's say they ask you to get your budget down to $X instead. You fire the people with the worst pay : performance ratio. Let's say the entire team is cut. You director/VP of the org will hand pick the top people and move them. Finally, the term "performance base layoff" is being used by Microsoft and Meta now and it's explicitly underperformance as the reason. So this is why it has a bad stigma even if you weren't a low performer. BUT!!!! I believe very strongly that performance isn't a fixed trait. My partner was fired from Meta for performance and then was one of the fastest entry -> staff at Nextdoor and talks about this a lot. There is a right company for everyone and a layoff doesn't mean you suck, but you do have to confront the situation with honesty and integrity to learn.

Oh so it's Meta then. Yeah Meta doesn't take bullshit, and maybe that's why I'm equally firm about calling out bullshit. Meta is particularly sensitive about levelling and people who are mis levelled are generally laid off instead of adjusted or supported. Also most of the people were contractors via 3rd party and those are throwaway at Meta and not a path to full time work. I wrote a letter to Codesmith about this because one student lied (he apparently APPARENTLY STARTED WORKING AT CODESMITH BEFORE HE EVEN WENT TO CODESMITH on his LinkedIn) and I suspected this was to meet the YOE requirement at Meta. Codesmith defended it and wrote a blog about him.

Codesmith's website is still down and recovery is not guaranteed. But the company claims to be operational and that they will be around forever. It's been 9-10+ days now and the situation is unacceptable. Since their reputation is built on engineering excellence and they teach people to be engineers, how can anyone trust anything they say if they can't take responsibility for what happened and be transparent. Like if the founder was like "I'm an idiot and I completely screwed this up. I let down the team, alumni, and everyone and I'm ashamed of myself. This doesn't reflect the contributions of hundreds of engineers and the great things we've done and we need to reflect on what went wrong, leave no stone unturned, and implement a comprehensive 3rd party audited set of changes to our infrastructure. We will let you know when those implementations are complete in two weeks." So far their founder has been deflecting and when challenged to take ownership of the problem, went on a series of misinformation and out of context LinkedIn posts and comments and sarcastic smiley face reactions. But I'm not one to assume people can't change. **It's like finding rats and insects infesting a restaurant's kitchen!** A lot of restaurants can't recover from something like that without a rebrand or a sale and reboot. Not only that but I'm like a restaurant critic who has been eating there every week for 3 years and telling them that their kitchen cleanliness is going to be problem over and over and they said it was fine. It looks really bad.