u/michaelnovati replied · · edited ★ FEATURED
I'm not affiliated with any bootcamps but I work with a lot of people who have gone to bootcamps in the past. I was also an E7 level principal engineer at Facebook, where I worked from 2009 to 2017, and interviewed hundreds of people. I run coaching and training for experienced engineers to help them level, but I've heard a lot of problems with bootcamps from people I work with and started hangout in this subreddit.
I can give my assessment of Codesmith, the good, the bad, the warnings. Overall, for a bootcamp it's think it's a solid consideration, just look for this level of detail in any bootcamps you consider.
GOOD:
1. Instructors are good teachers and care a lot about teaching. They publish a lot of videos and run a lot of free sessions, and they get really great feedback.
2. They've scaled pretty well. Like most bootcamps, recent grads immediately teach the current students, but unlike most bootcamps, those grads have 3 month contracts and typically don't suddenly leave when they get jobs.
3. They have an excellent community. Every Codesmith grad I've worked with and talked to works hard, and is driven. This is why there is so much positive support in this sub. They rely on that strong community to grow and it works.
4. Codesmith grads have salaries on the higher end of the spectrum. I believe their median salary in 2020 was $120K in New York city and this was an audited number. A minor thing I won't put under bad, but I've never heard Codesmith talk about equity, which is one of the most important factors of a top tier offer, and if these offers are really top tier I would want to hear about their total compensation, and not just their salaries.
BAD:
1. They have a prep program that filters out people who are they don't think will succeed and you have to pass that to get into their real program. There might be a way to skip this, not sure. But this makes their graduation percentage higher in CIRR reports than other places. EDIT: two people corrected this that you can apply directly for the full program! Someone estimated 25% of people did do prep first. So this might still help them keep graduation rates s tad higher, but also being more selective, which is a GOOD.
2. The community is really strong, but they also turn really hard on people who criticize Codesmith or say negative things. I wouldn't be surprised if this post gets downvoted a lot.
3. They don't have the presence of truly top tier industry engineers in their instruction or training yet they claim best in industry results. They don't really have anyone with deep top tier company knowledge in their ranks and they state a strong desire to hire former Codesmith grads as instructors and mentors rather than super senior engineers (EDIT: most bootcamps don't either so comparing bootcamps, this is not a huge deal, but if you are holding them to the "S Tier" bar, I think it's important). The Co-Founder is one of the more Senior Engineers and he left and is sporadically involved. My team at Formation.dev for example has 6 people with 8+ years at Facebook, an advisor to Mark Zuckerberg who reported directly to the CTO, 3 people who trained interviewers at Facebook, a 10 year FB recruiter who ran the internship program there, and those are our staff. Our dozens of mentors are equally impressive. Like I said, different ballgame, but there is a room for a tier above Codesmith in the training space in my opinion.
WARNINGS:
1. I audited a few hundred Codesmith grads LinkedIns and Github histories, and the vast majority claim to have 6 months to 1.5 years of software engineering experience at companies. But if you look deeper the companies are not real jobs but open source projects. In addition, the people's actual commit histories offer evidence that they only work on the projects for 2 to 6 weeks, no where near 6+ months. This is kind of a 'fake it til you make it' situation as Grads tend to do well, but there it's a little sketchy as literally hundreds of grads do this and they seem to get past background checks. To counter this, many Codesmith people I've talked to explain in person after some questions that these projects are not real companies and they are unpaid projects, so it might be a technique used to get through resume screens and get more opportunities.
2. Their claims of graduating mid-level and senior-level engineers are debatable. Like I said above about my qualifications, not a single graduate without real, paid engineering experience is at a mid-level Facebook bar because by definition it's impossible. So unless they are lying on background checks and deceiving top tier engineers during interviews, which I doubt, or they are using a different scale than is used at all the top companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon, Snap, Dropbox, Asana, etc... (EDIT: similar to Bad.3 above, relative to other bootcamps, I think their grads get above average jobs)