Checking in on Codesmith a year later. After recommending Codesmith for 2 years I stopped recommending them a year ago because of massive staff loss, program cutbacks, and tanking outcomes. A year later, things are even worse 😭.

Checking in on Codesmith a year later. After recommending Codesmith for 2 years I stopped recommending them a year ago because of massive staff loss, program cutbacks, and tanking outcomes. A year later, things are even worse 😭. I'll try to summarize some history briefly and then get into the updates. I've been following Codesmith (and a handful of other programs) very closely for years now. I've spoken to dozens of students, staff, alumni, their CEO and have a very good idea what's going on. Codesmith doesn't like me. I've offered to help them, I've reviewed their students projects, I've pointed out security flaws, etc... but they see me as a "jealous competitor". I'm the founder of an interview-prep platform that has nothing to do with Codesmith and works with a bunch of Codesmith ALUMNI in the FUTURE job searches - all of whom thing we are very complementary. But nonetheless, I have to disclose that Codesmith doesn't like me one bit. For such a positive and supportive community, I've never been blocked and yelled at by so many people from one place who pride themselves on their positivity. Anyways, the updates: 1. In February 2024 they cutback their program offerings by about 2/3 and 1/3 to 1/2 their staff 'departed'. They promised co-working spaces, frequent in-person events, increase support. I paused my endorsement then to see how did. About a year ago, I withdrew my endorsement when they didn't deliver on any promises other than adding 2 weeks of AI to the program with a mediocre curriculum. 2. All of their directors have depaerted and they are down to about 10 full time staff + instructors, down from 25 or so a year ago. They are down from 50 to 100 mentors and support engineers to like 20. They pay they mentors (who are supposed to be senior engineers) barely over minimum wage. They still have 1 full time and 1 part time cohort but instead of being full at 35 people, reports of a "single digit" (or close to?) enrollment part time cohort, people withdrawing or "deferring". Things are not good at all. Some of their most loyal people were laid off. 3. They lost access to their web infrastructure for 21+ days recently, including their domain, email, etc... because of numerous cascading examples of incompetence in maintaining their accounts. They never explained transparently what happened since. 4. They were fined $5,000 because no one was at their office or answered their phone on a random check. They submitted an incorrect report to the government that required correction and the numbers still don't add up and they ignored me when I asked about them. All of the staff members in their Official Course Catalog no longer work at Codesmith (except Eric?) and that's probably another issue for them. 5. Their CIRR outcomes have tanked from about 80% placed in 6 months (2021) to 70%(2022) in 6 months to 40% in 6 months (2023). Salaries have dropped from about $130K to $120K to $110K in that timeframe and there was a double digit spike in "people not reporting salaries" in those numbers. They know their 2024 preliminary 6 month numbers on their spreadsheets and should be transparent about how bad they are, but we won't see them until April 2026. 6. Finally, they have made almost zero changes in a year. The materials all are reported to be the same. A former employee said on Reddit that 90% of the frontend materials and examples were copied a popular book. The AI materials have allegedly barely been updated since launching 9 months ago. 7. Their Codesmith sub-Reddit is dead and full of ads with no engagement. Codesmith repeatedly denied being involved with the sub but they are A MODERATOR OF THE SUB according to Reddit data and almost all the posts have Codesmith branded visuals. 8. Future Code - the program they are running with the city of New York. A $1M contract to train 40 people. The staff for it was laid off and the current staff is a patchwork of people with minimal experience. Mentors paid $25 an hour = which is $55K a year, which is less than the jobs that the program is required to produce? Apparently only a couple of people got jobs since graduating 5 months ago. 9. Their marketing is going off a cliff. They've repeatedly typo'd their founder's name in marketing and visuals. They published an AI Blog Post in AUGUST 2025 telling people to use ChatGPT 3.5 (deprecated) and Davinci (no longer exists for 2 years). A recent Blind employee review said "Business model is failing leading to questionable decisions and marketing tactics". 10. Students reported chaotic environment of wrong Zoom links and material links, slow responses and no explanation for staff departures or the infrastructure going down for 3 weeks. 11. Their founder and chief "AI officer" has spent a month+ working on "JavaScript the Hard Parts V3" which introduced topics of 'cohesion' and new 'OOP concepts' and had ZERO AI in it. Put the energy into AI and helping graduates get jobs! My mind is boggled that he would spend so much time and effort in incrementally improving (and struggling through the OOP part) materials. 12. They had two main competitors in 2023/2024 that had a similar demographic and similar $100K+ outcomes: Rithm School and Launch School. Rithm School voluntarily shut down. Launch School has had a placement hit as well, but is hanging on through weekly changes to materials and offerings, such as internships and open source mentorships on Firefox. This is all just making me sad because Codesmith could have either shut down or improved and instead they are like a deflated balloon. To the alumni that went there in the past and it changed your lives, there is absolutely nothing taking away from that and this decline is sad. We should memorialize Codesmith and remember the good times instead of grasping for straws and clutching to sand and fighting criticism. Codesmith changed your life in 2022 and Codesmith is falling apart in 2025 can both be true.

I can't disclose exact things nor do I proactively reach out to people about it. From what people told me the numbers aren't good. They removed all their highest paid employees and pay very low now. They fired the most expensive people and hired people in their place and paid them a lot less for the same job. Codesmith is $22,500 so if you have 10 people every 8 weeks, thats $225,000 or about $100,000 a month. Their staff right now: 1 instructor: $10,000 (they are paid a lot less now) 3 mentors/combined fellow: $30,000 (fellow is multiple people part time) 1 coordinator: $6,000 1 admissions: $6,000 1 outcomes: $6,000 Marketing/Career Support: $6,000 Overhead = 20% $13,000 Total: is like $80,000 or so? I think this is why they are clinging to life, they convince loyal alumni to work for a fraction of what they should be paid... like those MLMs that run off of the labor of the leaf nodes.

Do you agree that I recommended people go there or are you calling me a liar? Critical yes, but I recommended a lot of people go there. II typically analyze the heck out of things I buy and know their strengths and weaknesses precisely and still buy the things??

Well async and self paced instruction has the problem of completion rates. Springboard's numbers are in their government reports for CA and are like single digits on time completion in some cases.

Maybe Codemsith brainwashed you to think otherwise but it's the truth. If Codemsith was a good fit for people I recommended they go there and a number of people went. Some check in with me later. With all the layoffs and cutbacks I couldn't in good conscience recommend them anymore because people were upset and I lose my credibility recommending a program that was falling apart. Hence the pause to wist and see. You can clearly see my Reddit posts from both early 2024 when I paused and later 2024 when I stopped.

I feel like I'm transparent about it, but I will summarize here my arguments that have been consistent for a period of time. I'm extremely transparent about these reasons, so either people think I'm lying or they think that there's some like secret motivation. I don't know. Codesmith thinks I have all kinds of motivations that they are just incorrect about, and believing them is only harming them even more and making their situation worse. So I don't really know why they're doing that, but it might make them feel better than accepting the truth. I have been consistently clear that Codesmith was one of the top bootcamps, that their number one strength was in helping ambitious and driven people build self-confidence in their programming abilities, and that they had three things that I didn't like. 1. They were consistently marketing placements as mid-level and Senior roles, and in my opinion, misleading people with the language. In the tech industry, your level is based on a meritocracy, but at the same time, there are experience requirements along with it, and by definition, you cannot be anything but an entry-level engineer when you have zero experience. 2. Their open-source projects were marketed as Important tools embraced by the tech industry, equivalent to senior-level projects. I've looked through a lot of the tools and they have completely abnormal commit patterns. They were fishing for stars by begging the community to vote for them. They don't have any maintenance or processes that open-source projects have. And worst of all, they're full of bugs, inconsistencies, security problems, etc., and they don't fix them when these are pointed out. So I found it offensive that they were talking about their projects this way. 3. The vast majority of graduates consistently market their 3 to 4-week project as months to years of software engineering work on their resumes on LinkedIn. They position this work beside other placeholder projects that they did simultaneously to make it up. They then Codesmith signs letters of reference for the time, claiming that the people claim they worked on their projects, which is almost always far more than the 3 to 4 weeks that they did. I think this is unethical. I think they misuse a registered charity to do this, which is also a moral issue. It harms the entire industry by celebrating job placements for people who did this, but not being transparent about how and instead celebrating the "zero to one" magical journey. Now these are completely valid criticisms that don't take away from the good things that they've done, but I think they need to be discussed transparently because Codesmith gaslighted people who bring this up and get very angry. One staff member got so upset when asked about number three during our live session that they had to pause the session to cool down. The only personal part began in the summer of 2024 when they paid someone to post marketing posts on Reddit, and that same person tried to lie and create fake reports to try to get me banned from Reddit, which made me very upset. Dozens of accounts posting cosmic supportive stuff were permanently suspended from Reddit around this time, and I was very upset that they didn't try to stop this behavior and they just denied being involved. Their founder was telling people on LinkedIn that I had some kind of personal vendetta because my brother didn't get hired at Netflix because a Codesmith grad got hired instead and they have absolutely no idea what he's talking about. I don't know that my brother ever interviewed at Netflix. it's just really sad how they're completely imploding and delusional, and the inability to acknowledge reality is just destroying the company and it's really sad how they're taking some very strong engineers with them. who will hopefully see in a couple of years what happened to them and get some good mental health support.

Yes look at my account history please. Are you delusional? I had three different independent AI engines analyze my entire account history for the substance I talk about and it's all aligned with my representation of myself. Some Codesmith people are so brainwashed they only see Codesmith stuff and these 100 comment back and forth threads that I refuse to back down on, and completely miss the substance of what I talk about that actually gets VIEW COUNTS. Codesmith people, go "under the hood" instead of being so superficial. Like i said in the other comment, entrenching on the Codesmith side without talking to me just makes me shake my head. You'll see in the future when you wake up. Many alumni have and it's one of the reasons their community has completely and utterly fallen apart. The only Codesmith people I hear from now are on payroll in some capacity. Your alumni are gone because they've seen the truth. In 2022 when I called out how various problems will weaken the company, those people were extremely defensive. That's fine. In the face of collapse, those people have judged how Codesmith has handled it and have changed sides completely on their own volition. They see how I was long-sighted the whole time and they were short-sighted and high on their own life changing placement.

Codesmith staff tell people to "snuggle the struggle" when they express stress and anxiety from the pacing. If you fall too far behind you get isolated into 1-1 tutoring to isolate your 'struggle' from others and get a pep talk so that you stay positive.

That was a marketing trick :( Codesmith doesn't spend money on marketing because they instead put money into paying staff to run free courses and run the pre courses at a loss. The goal of these programs is to get you bought into the Codesmith ecosystem for free or minimal cost and once you do it, if the Codesmith way of thinking works for you then you'll pay $22K for the bootcamp. Codesmith wasn't "hard to get into", rather it was extremely selective for the "type of person" they were looking for: a smart, ambitious, good communicator with low self confidence in their coding ability. If you were that they thye want you to fail a few times to confirm you have low self confidence and high grit so that when you are let in you are ALL IN on Codesmith. If you didn't get accepted it was becaue you weren't a good fit. Some brilliant people who saw through this wouldn't get let in no matter how good they were and failing 3 times made it seem harder to get into. Once you talk to instructors you start to see how the sausage is made and it's very different than the public perception and a story that you need to know before being manipulated by marketing.

Oh oops, I was talking about Codesmith, my bad

Hi, thanks for sharing a well thought out argument. \- Lying on the resume is a tough topic and some blame goes with with the people hiring. The snowball of "6 YOE for entry level jobs" is kind of the result of both sides. Hire a bootcamp grad with no YOE for a job needing 0 to 2 YOE, get burned, list 2YOE+ next time, bootcamp grad lies more, increase again to 4YOE, etc... They are getting burned because the hiring process inherently is flawed and requires some amount of honesty, but there cost of mis-hiring is you fire the person and move on and it's a rational market. If it was too costly to fire someone, they would spend more vetting the people. So the way I see it - both sides are optimizing for their market conditions and Codesmith grads lying just enough to get through and doing just good enough on the jobs to not trigger the snowball is the market trying to balance everything out... and in this market there isn't any amount of lying that's working. \- VS Other Bootcamps - fair point, There are a lot of bootcamps with problems and more financial motives/pressures than Codesmith. I focus on Codesmith for three reasons: 1. they literally market themselves as an alternative to an "elite masters program" so I hold them to a different bar. 2. they market zero to senior on their website, which I think is a problem, and no other bootcamp does that. 3. their materials internally are no better than other bootcamps and their instructors aren't either. Instructors told me stories of copy paste code reviews, copying content from 3rd parties, rubber stamping people who weren't qualified, etc.... and the main thing they do well is they communicate well and make it sound different when behind the scenes it's been described in "scam" language. I'm not sure if you worked there. \- My company works with a lot of Codesmith grads, but it's not number 1 for bootcamps. First off about 1/3 of people or so did bootcamps and of that group the top 3 last I checked were Fullstack, Codesmith, Hack Reactor, and there is a long tail: Turing, Launch School, Hackbright, General Assembly, 42 School, Lambda School, Flatiron, Tech Elevator, etc... So based on that argument I should be going after all of these. And I do connect with grads from all these schools on LinkedIn while Codesmith staff call me a "creep" for connecting with Codesmith alumni in that very large group. No other program calls me a creep and instead then DM me to work with them win-win. I think if anything my frustration is being flabbergasted that they haven't ACCEPTED a SINGLE piece of feedback. They can't even spell Will Sentance's name right in a bunch of recent posts and graphics or his role right. They posted an AI article a month ago telling people to use ChatGPT 3.5 turbo and "davinci" and when I called it out they deleted my comment and their CEO "liked" the bad post. Icing on the cake was Will Sentance losing the phone number for their AWS account from incompetence and when challenged, he said that 'all two factor methods have problems and phone number is just as good as passkeys' indicating defensiveness and ZERO idea of how to properly secure AWS: Will it's not about a single two factor method, but it's about having a rock solid and robust credential management system. His reaction to being challenged was to lash out like a baby wining for doing something wrong and trying to distract you from it. I don't think they know how much I know about Reddit and LinkedIn and they should be ashamed of themselves, there are some flat out liars and the new CEO Alina should remove them from anything to do with Codesmith.

You found "The Order"? Yes, my wife made a donation to a local film group that teaches filmmaking to people from diverse backgrounds and they showed us the filmmaking process for a few hours in making that short. It's a fun group activity for a good cause that I would recommend.

I'm not backing down from anonymous accounts personally criticizing me using the same language and tone. That's for sure personal at least. Codesmith doesn't have to shut down to make me happy. The other option is for Will and Eric to leave the company entirely and let Alina try to fix it without being stuck between a rock and a hard place. Will tries to approach things from first principles... the way he thinks it should be is the only way and is not distracted by or listening to others to change his mind. The problem is that when called out for getting something wrong, he seems completely incapable of acknowledging it (at least in public) and instead either ignores it, or defends against it instead of addressing it. Some of the best builders have this attitude but it only works when you are actually right at the right time. Will has been wrong about too many things now and the company collapsed down to a deflated shell of its former self and people still come to Reddit to tell me it's my fault and not his. Alumni, former staff, etc... are no longer supporting him and while they might not like me for my tone and personality they understand why I'm doing this and get it. You might not be there yet but I'm happy to DM with you to talk about it. If it's personal, try to figure out why. Will says I do this because my brother interviewed at Netflix and lost a job to a Codesmith grad. I'm not aware of my brother ever interviewing at Netflix so that one is wrong. So maybe try again? If you can't figure out why it's personal then maybe it's not.