CIRR results for 2021 up!

I'm going to write up my free flow thoughts as I'm reading through it. I'll focus on Codesmith because it's the most talked about bootcamp on here and I don't have much time. 5 minute recap!! 1. CIRR is basically dead. Only four schools in the USA reported. Only one school in SF/NY reported. 2. Codesmith's numbers don't including an auditing report. I'm assuming they were audited. 3. Codesmith LA: 1. Similar graduation and placement rates 2. Solid increase in median compensation 3. They changed the buckets but it looks like a $10K increase in salaries across the board. 4. Increased number of graduates by 40 is almost 40% and maintained strong numbers, which is a good sign 4. Codesmith NY: 1. Similar number of graduates from previous report, no growth 2. Large jump in percentage placed within 6 months from 80 to 90% 3. Kept same salary buckets, easier to compare trends 4. While the breakdown between 130-140K and 140+ changed, the total people in those two buckets combined stayed the same, but the number of really high earners went down. 5. Otherwise increase in lower paying Fellows 6. Fairly large increase in number of people being hired back by the school. 5% of of people in this report WORK AT CODESMITH. In LA a much smaller amount of people were hired by Codesmith itself and the program is larger 🤔. 7. I suspect the AVERAGE salary might have dropped in NY or been flat (we don't know what it was before) Overall thoughts: 1. Great progress in LA overall - they are doing something right there in the data! 2. It's strange that NY was basically flat, while LA say great increases in compensation across the board as well as they grew a ton and improved results. 3. Would love to hear from Codesmith students/alum the difference between LA and NY during COVID when everything is remote. 4. It's possible the LA results rising to the same as NY are people working remotely in big cities. 5. Does anyone know where all the remote cohorts are??? Is the data included in these or not? I can't imagine Codesmith only graduating 230 students in H1 2021. 6. I'll drop this in there, but it looks like the fake-it-til-you make it work experience is still working as the results are holding strong and improving. I always keep a close eye on this because when companies do catch on, they have gotten quite angry, but it's clearly not slowing down their results. 🚨 CIRR is on Life Support 🚨: 1. This is the most important finding which is that CIRR is not in great shape. ONLY THE BOARD MEMBERS OF CIRR COMPLETED THE REPORTS + CODESMITH. 2. HackReactor and Bloomtech already publish their own audited outcomes using their own criteria on their own cadence, so CIRR's format of reporting is not really relevant .

Oh sorry I've been talking about this elsewhere over time. SUMMARY: I audited over 200 Codesmith alumni, documenting LinkedIn and GitHub commits, and noting the number of years of "work experience" as a "software engineer" that was claimed at the open source groups projects Codesmith runs, like Reactime and Spearmint. I have a large spreadsheet, but the majority of people claimed 6 to 18 months of "work experience" but commited 2-6 commits over 1-3 weeks on the projects (my understanding is this project is a 6 week unit in the course). The most extreme being someone that claimed 6 months of work experience and their only commits to the project were changing an image file and updating a README. In addition, these projects have no activity outside of Codesmith, no issues or feature requests from outside Codesmith, and it's not clear any of the tools or projects are used outside of Codesmith. Don't get me wrong. The projects are great ideas, building tools is a great idea. It's just the way they are portrayed is a little grey area.

Looks the Fellow program remains selective for strong people and it's more of a rounding thing. Thanks for adding the information about the work experience. It's great that they officially warn people about it. While it was the majority, many people did not do this and got good jobs, agreed.

Thanks additional info about Fellow Program, that clarified a lot and much appreciated. Yeah by CIRR being on life support, absolutely not a criticism of Codesmith in any way, it actually could free them to publish more information faster! Their results are great, I'm sure they should want this to be published sooner!

I agree that if the people perform well, which they are, then you could argue that it doesn't matter. At Formation, before we hired dedicated ex-FB recruiters, I used to interview every Fellow. We handful of Codemith people, the ones with industry experience didn't even talk about it because they already had a job, and the ones that did not have industry experience were quite covering up the fact that it was open source but not lying, and it very quickly unraveled that it was not real work experience. We hired a Codemith alumni went through our own program so it's really not meant to be a criticism of the program, so I don't mean that it necessarily reflected poorly either.

‼️ CIRR is audited but it's far from unbiased. The board of directors and founders are all affiliated with bootcamps. It's not a 501 3c non profit because that's a conflict of interest. It's registered as a "business league/lobbying organization". Now I'm super middle of the road person, and don't judge those groups, but lobbying groups are not unbiased. I wrote a long post about Formation's data will paste here because believe it or not I spend most of my time helping Fellows and making Formation great. **We are not a school or bootcamp. We compete with things like Pathrise, Interview Kickstart, and Outco.** Talk to any current Fellow or alumni. We are not perfect, but care about every single outcome, we have by far the most experienced team, we work with people with full technical training as long as it takes to get there, and it works really well. We are a mission driven organization Sophie started several years ago to increase diversity in tech by helping people from non traditional and underrepresented background get a seat at the table. Myself and Sophie, or any affiliate, have made $0 of salary, income, or profit from Formation over the entire time. We instead pay our employees benchmarked with FAANG so we can have the most talented team possible, and we have run at a loss every month this far. We are doing this out of passion to change the industry. ---------------- Hi! We just have some base comp + stock averages we computed last year on our website and no other statistics. We've been discussing how to publish outcomes though and if you have suggestions on numbers, would love to hear! To reiterate our purpose: we work with you as long as it takes, full force, until you hit your goal and are happy with the outcome. Period. So at the end of the day, if you sign up, put in the work and you have the time, you will get an outcome you are happy with. We won't accept people that have goals too narrow or who we don't think we can help achieve their goals in a reasonable amount of time. If we were to invest in making a robust report of statistics and outcomes we have a lot to think about. The guiding principles are: 1. We want to be fair and unbiased in reporting outcomes. Far too many programs throw around cherry picked numbers. 2. We want to ensure the identity of Formation Fellows is not revealed by outcomes. Privacy is important and respected. So some of our thoughts, being very transparent here, so it's a bit long: 1. Everyone at Formation is here for a different length of time, does different combinations of things, has different goals, so it's very hard to publish top level numbers without more context. Our current big number on our website is trying to focus on the increase in compensation for people that had an existing job, to try to capture the relative nature of the outcomes. To gives some examples of the "context", someone might get $300K+ offers after 2 months at Formation, tripling their income, at their 2nd choice FAANG companies but they are extremely satisfied with the outcome, would recommend Formation to everyone. Or someone else might have struggled to get a job from a bootcamp for 2 years, they wanted to make $80K as a goal, after 6 months at Formation, we helped them get an offer at great company after negotiation of $115K base + stock. Person is thrilled with this outcome and would recommend to everyone. It's really hard to capture these stories in high level 2. The last 20 accepted offers in order are: Google (pending), Amazon, Amazon, <startup, fin-tech>, Bill.com, Microsoft, Amazon, Bloomberg, <startup, fin-tech>, Front, Workday, Neato, Microsoft, <startup, crypto>, Jelly Fish, GitHub, Microsoft. (Startups are < 100 employees so masked to protect identity). We are thinking about potentially publishing the list of companies people are getting hired at unfiltered because we think that presents a fair raw log that protects identities and shows the actual places people are going, instead of people thinking we are cherry picking results. Another similar example of context being important though is we might have someone from an agency -> Workday, and someone else go from Workday -> Amazon. Both being fantastic outcomes for the people individually. 3. Compensation and salaries are quite complicated because our Fellows are receiving equity with varying vesting times, signing bonuses possibly with weird timing, and performance bonuses with ranges. I know people on Blind throw around TC numbers all over the place for specific companies, but it's very hard to summarize that for all companies at once. For example, a typical E4 Meta offer might have a $170K base, $200K of stock vesting equally over four years, $75K signing bonus, and 15% bonus target. You can crunch the numbers to get to $320K TC for first year. Now that signing bonus is just one year, and your annual bonus can be anywhere from 0 to 45% depending on performance. Now an Amazon SDEII offer might look like $180K base, $100K of stock (weird unequal vesting with most vesting in year 3/4), $100K signing bonus in year 1 and $75K signing bonus in year 2. So this has about a $290K Tc for first year. But you can't compare that to the Facebook offer without looking at the specifics here side by side, making a spreadsheet, etc... So to try and summarize all the offers from all companies and properly capture them is a challenge we have to spend some time on. 4. Satisfaction. A way to capture a bunch of complexities is higher lever satisfaction ratings, or if people would recommend Formation to a friend. All of this said if you have any specific asks I can try to see if we can quickly compute the statistic AND if won't reveal anyone's personal identity or information.

We have a lot of people go to Formation right AFTER going to Codesmith, not INSTEAD of. People who WORK at Codesmith come to Formation. For the large majority of people starting Codesmith, they do not qualify for Formation or meet the bar. AFTER Codesmith, most people are right at the middle or low-middle bar for our full program track. I love working with Codesmith alumni! No throwaway accounts people, have a real discussion without baseless angry accusations!

Hi Crafts :D Thanks for adding the info again, appreciate civil conversations haha. I totally agree with understanding who is posting information and understanding where they are coming from. Reddit is a tough place because everyone is anonymous (and it's easy to attack people anonymously) and I insist on using my real identity, have an open mind, stand behind my statements, and engage in good discussion. Now for the expected reply hahaha: I disagree about competing with Codesmith. If someone at Codesmith told you this it means they are probably concerned about us competing with them but not the other way around. I don't think I've interacting with anyone who said "I'm choosing between Formation and Codesmith", whereas I've interacted with many people who have done Formation AFTER Codesmith (either right after or a few years later), or who wanted to talk about if it was the right thing for them or not. Some comments triggered something somewhere because there are suddently a lot of people coming out saying Codesmith is full of experienced engineers now. Experienced engineers who pass our technical assessment definitely would compete with Codesmith. I did look into this more and people assured me that this was a very small number of people. But I still haven't talked to anyone choosing between the two. The programs themselves are entirely different models that aren't remotely comparable. We have some sample weeks here and you can read more about the stuff: [https://formation.dev/program#week](https://formation.dev/program#week). They are so absurdly different logistically, goals-wise, mentorship-wise, everything. If someone is comparing them directly, let me know so I can explain to them how they are not remotely the same at all, and likely one or the other is the objective right choice and help them figure that out. Would love to answer more about this because I have no idea where this narrative is coming from. P.S. +1 on reaching out to people. We hired someone who went through Codesmith on our team. I've chattend with a dozen or so Codesmith alumni over a few years who attended Formation or wanted to attend. And I know a lot of people do the same with Formation alumni, and highly recommend anyone do the same to understand more!

Finnigan, I'm sorry but you don't understand whatsoever what Formation does and if you look into it, I'm happy to answer questions rather than respond do your factually incorrect statements. Our purpose is not to get people mid or senior level jobs at FAANG but to help people with their own career goals. We have helped people go from FAANG -> startup. One person from Agency -> X and at the exact same time time someone went from X -> FAANG. One person's goal might be another person's starting point. We're playing different games here.

Why do you have access to all of Codesmith's numbers? Do you work there?

This is kind of proving my point. All of the 10+ year experience people we work with are talking to recruiters BEFORE starting Formation and they need help navigating the market and making sure they get the best job for them out of all the options. So a Codesmith alumni who gets contacted days after graduation could be a great person to then go to Formation to talk to people with years and years of FAANG industry experience to help them make the next best steps.

You have a throwaway account that's 2 months old with 10 comments, 6 of which are on this thread. This is either a giant troll or you are grossly misinformed about the industry. We have an assessment process to help figure out people's starting point at Formation to get the ball rolling. Our team has more experience than anyone else with this stuff and obviously we don't know everything, but every team member is passionate about sharing their experience with people from non traditional backgrounds to help them get top tier jobs and achieve their goals. Like these are some highlights of our full time team: \- 3 engineers who have not only conducted countless interviewers but trained hundreds of interviewers at Facebook \- 3 principal level engineers from Facebook, one of whom who reported directly to the CTO. \- 1 staff level Nextdoor engineer, who did extensive interviewing and created a unique onboarding program \- 1 10-year Facebook university recruiter who ran the internship program for thousands of interns \- 2 other ex-FB recruiters.

I've been warned about engaging fake trolls, and I've said this several times but will repeat. Our goal is you help you get a job at a top tier company that is the best fit for your career. That often accompanies very large salaries, but that is not the main goal (unless it's the Fellow's goal). People take lower salary offers all the time if the company is setting them up for success long term.

I will mention it more often, I absolutely don't want to hide any affiliation, I'm here with my real name and photo for everyone to see! See around down the road Crafts!

Hi, I appreciate the non-crazy tone, but I have some corrections and other responses: 1. I'm not the CEO of Formation. Sophie is the founder and CEO and the true driver of the mission. I'm here because I have a personal interest in helping people early in their careers after doing so for many years and seeing what impact it can have on people. 2. Formation is not a bootcamp no matter how you frame it. We relentlessly provide technical training until you get a new job you are happy with, no matter how long it takes, I think the average is around 6 months (not sure). We refuse to work with people looking for a quick bootcamp to whip them into shape for an upcoming interview, for example. 3. Codesmith is not our competition. I lose sleep over Interview Kickstart, Outco, Pathrise, Scalar, Exponent, etc... and not about Codesmith. 4. The day to day is nothing like a bootcamp or any kind of fixed program. We generate schedules every week that contain completely new things to work on and small group sessions to attend. You can ramp up or down your commitment for what works for you. 5. I'm very familiar with many different programs all over the spectrum. I have a lot to say about Bloomtech as well for example and a lot of data points on them similar to Codesmith. You are just seeing Codesmith stuff because there are so many Codesmith people who hang around this subreddit and talk about it and I add my 2 cents.

Thanks for sharing. Yeah we lose a lot of context on Reddit and my writing might come across more mean than it's meant. I love that Codemsith has helped so many people and had a major impact on people's lives. We need way more people working to make tech a better place. Thanks for writing this out and I'll be more cognizant of this in the future. 100% compared to other bootcamps, there are so many bad apples out there that are genuinely not great intentioned. Sophie, the founder of Formation was a mentor at different programs and wanted to do better, which is why she started Buildschool all by herself - a free iOS bootcamp. That evolved into Formation when I joined on and we realized we needed to raise funding to hire top tier engineers in the industry (mostly from Facebook, so we can debate that haha) to help scale out truly one-of-a-kind approach to training. I think we need more people who really do want to make the industry better and we shouldn't be debating. I talk a lot about practical things, but Sophie inspires me every day to give my 24/7 to helping Fellows and improving our product. I'm definitely aware people talk about Formation in Codesmith channels. But I swear to blank I don't know anyone that has said "I was thinking of going to Codesmith and I went to Formation", maybe it's just because we are so much smaller. And like I said, people with experience who have decent DS&A skills might be competitive and I would definitely get into a debate about that. I can't give out personal information that's not public, but \[Chris G\]([https://www.linkedin.com/in/christopherguizzetti/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/christopherguizzetti/)) is someone public on our webpage who did Codesmith, did a 9 month contract, ended, came to Formation, has an incredible full blown SWE job at Snap on AR. This is a very typical outcome for people with this profile and this is our standard ideal Fellow that we think our program is for right now. To say we are competitive is saying that Chris G could have gone back to Codesmith from scratch again? Or that the Codesmith alumni network could have gotten him that job without Formation? Again, I can't give personal information, but someone like this wouldn't just do DS&A cramming for the interview, we fill in system design gaps with senior and staff engineers from Reddit, Oracle, Facebook, Uber, and we work on technical behavioral and telling your story with directors from Lyft, Facebook, and senior hiring managers. There's a lot that goes into it from our side and it's all driven by our technology behind the scenes... crunching what people need to do week to week, scheduling hundreds of micro-sessions every week that work for all the different people's schedules. It's just like not remotely similar to Codesmith at all.

I do think down the road we will compete head on but still disagree we do now. Our technology right now works for taking a range of A to a range of B outcomes in C time (which is the variable). We have a few hundred different micro sessions, and a few thousands different tasks, a few hundred assessments, a few dozens types of mock interviews. And every week we pull out a set of things that fit your schedule that you need to work on to improve that week. This is all the stuff to get from "1-3 years industry experience at decent company" to high performance top tier company. But if we expand this library of tasks and sessions we can really support a much wider range of transitions. I'm happy to go over more details about what we do specifically or maybe chat with Chris G or another person you can find that went through the full gamut. Maybe on paper these words sound similar but our bar is very very high. I don't mean this to be condescending towards Codesmith. Our team has spent spent years and years and years (cumulatively well over 100 years) amongst very senior high performing top engineers at not just Facebook but all the top companies and we hold people to a very high standard with nothing in between. This isn't meant to discount Codesmith's outcomes whatsoever, or the fact that some people have gone to FAANG companies from Codesmith. Codesmith doesn't have a single extremely staff/principal engineers+ on staff and Will Sentance explicitly wants to hire back Codesmith alumni to teach and explicitly not hire these aforementioned people. If Codesmith alumni go to Google and come back and teach part time a year later, that's fantastic (we have two or three similar cases at Formation) but our typical bar is people who have been at Google/Top Tier for 5+ years (preferable 10 to 20 years) and done hundreds or thousands of interviews. We had to fundraise from investors to be able to pay 5-6 engineers like $150K to $200K salaries a year to work for us and those are still massive pay cuts because they want to support Sophie's vision. Additionally you'll do mock interviews on system design with a principal engineer at Reddit, for example, one of the highest ranking roles in the industries. You'll do technical behavioral with people like Philip Su. A typical person will do real mock interviews with (I pulled up the list for someone recent): a staff II engineer at Uber, a senior engineer at Amazon, a senior engineer at Google, a staff engineer at Meta, a staff engineer at Airbnb. Like people who have done hundreds of interviews really identifying what you need to work on and we will help you practice in those areas and iterate every week. More junior FAANG interviewERS make a lot of mistakes actually and we are taking on the really senior engineers to do really incredible interviews. We basically call Formation a "personal trainer". We aren't a 9 to 5 school to get into shape following a program and helping you through it. We are your personal trainer that is hyper focusing on getting you personally into shape. Some people don't need that, some people do and everyone's body and life is different and they need different things. (Edited to reword discussion are "the bar")

I chatted with someone about System Design and can use that as an example, please CORRECT ME IF THIS HAS CHANGED AND WILL EDIT IT &#x200B; **Codesmith's System Design** * 1 week long, fixed classes * 2 hour lecture from Codesmith staff (not necessarily with industry experience) (entire cohort, 35 people) * 3 hour working sessions working through problems and materials (unknown size) * reading materials **Formation System Design** * Variable length until you passing system design mock interviews w/ senior/staff/principal level engineers (typically 4 to 6 weeks) * Specific topics for the following depending on what you need to work on from the previous week, collecting feedback for all for next week: * 1-2 weekly 1 hour workouts with a senior industry engineer working through a specific problem with 3-5 other Fellows * 1 weekly 1 hour session reviewing a topic in more depth with a senior industry engineer * 1 pair session working through a specific problem with another Fellow * 1 weekly assessment to gather some additional benchmarking based on the areas you were working on * practice and reading materials So to clarify a typical person will do approximately: * 4 to 12 1 hour problem workouts with a senior+ industry engineers with 3-5 Fellows * 4 to 6 1 hour in depth topic sessions with 3-5 Fellows * 4 to 6 1 hour pair sessions working through a problem with another Fellow * 4 to 6 assessments * 2 to 3 real mock interviews with senior+ industry engineer * 40 hours of reading, videos, self practice

It depends on what you need to work on. We have hundreds of small group session types, thousands of tasks, hundreds of assessments and assignments, and you do what you need to do :). We bundle them up into these different "challenges" so you work on one (or sometimes two or three) larger area(s) of stuff at a time. In terms of practical work, we forked a production codebase (in the tens of thousands of lines of code) and people work on bugs and tasks in there, get mocks, code reviews from mentors and our team, follow an engineering process that simulate real work. You might do 20 to 40 of these tasks and bugs if you really need more experience. People will put this on their resume as project work if they are lacking, but any kind of real work experience (or volunteer experience) will be better on a resume. The goal of it is not a big shiny project to show off, but to develop your engineering skills with real bugs, tasks, and a real process. Your personal story and resume review development process is completely separate and takes a couple of weeks usually. External mentors and career coaches will review your resumes with fresh eyes. So they aren't really biased by the project work at Formation, or at Codesmith, or anything, and they give impartial feedback that we can iterate on. That said, a lot of Codesmith people start with their Codesmith resume and sometimes add Formation. It depends if they want to make their Codesmith project super highlighted and the star of the show or not. Some people add Formation to projects or "experience" (not Work Experience) in addition. At the end of the day when we hit your job hunt we are hyper focused on your unique strategy and finding the right paths based on your goals. For some people that is referrals, and the resume doesn't matter much. For others, it's an apprenticeship, and it also doesn't matter much since no one has experience. For others, they are gunning for entry level FAANG roles where they need to pull out a certain amount of experience on paper to get in the door, even via referral. For people at mid level and senior FAANG roles (Codesmith's definition of mid level and senior is not consistent with FAANG), we will focus on pulling out all of the stuff we as experienced hiring managers and interviewers would want to see to justify a higher level at FAANG. We give advice based on our experience, try stuff, iterate, keep going until you get a job you are happy with. Let me know if you have more questions.

Formation doesn't have public any "reports". We don't aggregate a lot of numbers either internally. We are focused on meeting or exceeding each person's individual goal. I'm more than happy to try to answer questions you might have. Some notes about why. The summary is that since we aren't bootcamp, course, or anything like that, it's very nuanced to summarize numbers and we would need to invest a lot of time and energy in figuring things out: 1. Bootcamps have a consistent A starting point and a report is a way to measure how well they develop people from starting point A. Formation is focused on someones goals, so our outcomes are relative to that. For example have Senior Microsoft engineers who want to go to top tier smaller companies. We have new grads who want to go to FAANG. We have self taught people looking for apprenticeship. Our most common Fellow will have 1-3 years of experience at a decent company, did a bootcamp or CS degree originally, and land at top tier companies. 2. Compensation and salaries require individual examination. Our Fellows are getting top tier jobs with base salary, signing bonuses (sometimes over multiple years), performance bonuses, stock grants (with complex vesting cycles). It's hard to properly communicate outcomes by just aggregating this into big numbers. [Levels.FYI](https://Levels.FYI) and a lot of people on Blind do this for individual offers, but combining them all into one signal overall "median" or "average" doesn't make much sense. One metric we currently use is the additional annual compensation increase. This is better than absolute numbers. But it only works for people who have jobs already - which is most people, and for people that don't, it's a misleading to use "$0" as the original salary so we exclude those from the number. We haven't updated this in a while and the current numbers are significantly higher. Our median base salary in quite high but that's meaningless on it's own and I refuse to want any one to join because of this number alone, it means nothing. The last 20 offers signed in order is another thing I post around places. I think publishing just a list of all offers might help too. You lose the compensation and you lose the titles and levels, as well as starting points, but it gives you an idea of where people end up: Figma, Google, <startup>, Amazon, Amazon, <startup, fin-tech>, Bill.com, Microsoft, Amazon, Bloomberg, <startup, fin-tech>, Front, Workday, Neato, Microsoft, <startup, crypto>, Jelly Fish, GitHub, Microsoft. (startups that are small are excluded to protect privacy, but are all top tier vetted startups that meet our recommendations of 1. top investors. 2. top tier founding team. 3. strong funding)

Adding this for future reference as well to show how drastically different we are. Codesmith posted a blog announcing their CIRR results that explains the job hunt differences quite well The TLDR: this reinforces how Codesmith is a bootcamp program to teach people using structured lectures and curriculum and Formation is a program to give you unique "personal trainer"-like development and mentoring. THIS IS AN ENTIRE QUOTE FROM SOURCE BELOW WITH INLINE COMMENTS IN BOLD MARKED "FORMATION" TO HIGHLIGHT DIFFERENCES During Codesmith’s **Hiring Program**, you can expect: * Tailored Resume Guidance and Feedback * Residents attend lectures covering resume best practices and are pushed to craft their experiences in a way that is both technically sound and authentic to them. Residents receive three revisions with specific feedback from an engineering fellow to ensure the content and quality of their resume is top notch, before going to a final sign off with an engineer working in the field. After the program, graduates are able to continually book one on one support sessions with a Career Support Engineer to make adjustments to their resume as needed. * **FORMATION: We have no lectures covering these topics. You work though various components of your narrative and resume in 1-1 and 3-5 person interactive sessions that are adapted to your needs and continue until your resume is working. People who have great resumes will almost skip the process and not waste time, and people with less experience might go through numerous sessions, coaching and practice to get to the bar. These continue in the job hunt if your resume is having trouble getting traction even after sign off.** * Building a High Quality Online Presence * The Codesmith Career Support Team walks residents through best practices for online job platforms like LinkedIn, AngelList, Hired, Triplebyte, and BuiltIn. Career Support Specialists review each resident’s LinkedIn profile to ensure residents are representing themselves and their experiences in a way that will make them stand out in the job market. Many residents receive numerous inbound leads from potential employers before even leaving the program! * **FORMATION: We currently spend almost no time other than a LinkedIn review because people tend to have a lot of experience and have inbound leads BEFORE starting Formation. Again, reinforcing the difference in audience.** * Interviewing Skills and Resources * Residents attend multiple lectures to review interviewing best practices and to instill a growth mindset around self-improvement in the job search. Each resident is also paired with an alumni working in the field for a mock interview to prepare for the job search prior to leaving the program. * **FORMATION: We have no lectures on these topics. Fellows will do unlimited real mock interviews of a few dozen types with senior engineers who have done hundreds of interviews, hiring managers, and recruiters, until the person is performing at their target level. They will also do a few dozen peer mock interviews with other Fellows, and since most people have experience, a "peer" might be a senior engineer at Microsoft already.** * Networking Events * Residents attend “Networking Days” - where they are given the opportunity to interview with multiple alumni who are working for companies that are actively hiring. Residents also attend Alumni Panels to learn more about the experiences of multiple different alumni as they navigated the job search after finishing Codesmith. * **FORMATION: see previous about mock interviews. We have a lot of Codesmith alumni at Formation, so our PEER mock interviews are similar quality to the "industry mock interviews" at Codesmith (this is consistent with feedback from these alumni as well). Our real mock interviews are like several notches more nuanced and advanced. Again showing the big differences in the program goals and types of people each work with.** **Upon graduation**, the Career Support services you can expect: * Community, Alumni, Building Connections * Codesmith is proud to foster a supportive and active community both during and after the program. Alumni actively support one another through mock interviews, referrals, and support groups. Many alumni obtain their roles through networking with other graduates. * **FORMATION: alumni are welcome to participate in chat, and public events. If alumni return to Formation for training, they have to start over again as they have new goals and a new starting point, and will have a completely different experience. Several people have returned to Formation actually down the road for their next job transition.** * Continual Career Support * After the program ends, residents have the incredibly valuable opportunity to schedule one-on-one support sessions with our Career Support Engineers (Codesmith grads who are now working as engineers and involved in hiring at their companies). Grads can schedule sessions to go over resumes, applications, narrative practice, mock technical interviews, etc. Apart from one-on-one support, all grads are able to join Codesmith’s Career Support Workshop series, which includes topics like “how to submit a successful application” and “Job Search Office Hours”. * **FORMATION: our support doesn't start on end "when the program ends", there is only one phase at Formation: start until the first day of your new job. And you get all of our support described above during that time.** * Constant Communication * The Career Support team holds regular check-ins with graduates to stay up to date on their progress. Each graduate has a dedicated Slack channel with their Career Support Team where they can ask questions and get quick responses about any aspect of their job search. Career Support team members check in with grads on a regular basis to encourage accountability and self-reflection. * **FORMATION: similar to previous answer, from day one Fellows have a private chat channel with career support, negotiation, engineers, and whoever you need is brought in. So the main difference is that this support is starting from day 1 at Formation and not when you end the program since there is no program end date. Again, Formation kind of picks up where Codesmith leaves off.** * Salary Negotiation Training * Codesmith holds weekly workshops to support grads who are preparing to negotiate their salaries. The workshops - led by an expert in the field - cover topics such as how to approach conversations around negotiations, and understanding all aspects of engineering compensation, such as stock options and sign-on bonuses. * **FORMATION**: **we don't have workshops or lectures on negotiation, instead we have an army of people working with a Fellow in their job hunt to come up with a unique strategy for them. You have a dedicated negotiation mentor in your channel who responds in real time to all your offers and gives you personal advice for what you need, how to respond, etc...** Source: [https://www.codesmith.io/blog/codesmith-immersive-outcomes-2021](https://www.codesmith.io/blog/codesmith-immersive-outcomes-2021)

80K is the average INCREASE in compensation for people that had jobs prior. Not the average compensation. I think that's kind of proving the point, we are not competing with them and there's nothing to be put to rest. A bunch of people have messaged me here about bootcamps and I've recommended they go to Codesmith given their situation, it's not either or. Others have messaged me about Formation. No one has said "I'm choosing between Codesmith and Formation" Again, people typically talk to us about Outco, Interview Kickstart, Scalar, Exponent, and Pathrise - some of whom don't have pricing on their websites, let alone outcomes, but have had thousands and thousands of engineers go through their programs nonetheless. We're playing different games here and I'm sorry if my involvement in this subreddit is causing this confusion. This is the best I got for raw outcomes: last 50 offers accepted unedited in order (anonymized startups all offered FAANG-competitive comp and were chosen over big tech). Figma, Google, <startup>, <startup>, Amazon, Amazon, <startup>, Bill.com, Microsoft, Amazon, Bloomberg, <startup>, Front, Workday, <startup>, Microsoft, BitGo, Amazon, Jelly Fish, GitHub, Microsoft, Toast, Quantcast, Meta, CloudTrucks, Plaid, 1Password, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Google, Snap, Akasa, Atlassian, Pandora, Atlassian, Amazon, <startup>, Square, Capital One, Facebook, Amazon, Bloomberg, Intel, Microsoft, <startup>, Pinterest, Amazon, Apple. I'm not joking when I saw that most of the people have giant spreadsheets to compare their personal offers under different circumstances and outcomes and it's just impossible to capture that in CIRR-like numbers that capture the outcomes. We are exploring different ways at looking at the comp increase change (like the number on our website) as well as raw lists of companies. People tend to find the raw list of companies effective at demonstrating the range of outcomes.

1. Yes for that specific person, without knowing their skill level, they should look into Formation. If their skills are at our bar, it would be a better choice than a bootcamp. For reference, the comment thread: [https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/viw3bd/switching\_from\_civil\_engineering\_to\_swe/idhm08u/?context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/viw3bd/switching_from_civil_engineering_to_swe/idhm08u/?context=3) 2. 80K is the increase in total compensation over people's previous job engineering, not the compensation itself (and we exclude people who don't have a previous job from the calculation as it would be very unfair). I've been trying to crunch more recent numbers and my rough calculations for median base salary is $138K for salaries submitted (not job start dates but when people submitted a form with the info) Sept 30th 2021 to May 29th, 2022 (75th percentile was $150K base and 25th percentile was $120K base). NOTE THESE ARE NOT AUDITED and quick calculations. 3. More importantly though, the numbers in 2 are really meaningless because It's hard to value stock and sign on bonuses (and these are BASE salary only) that these numbers are misleading on their own. It's very common for someone to have two offers: say 150K base 200K of stock and 170K base and 100K of stock. If both are stable public companies, 150K offer is better but might lower base salary stats hiding the fact that the person got a better offer. I was an E7 at FB where stock is VERY important: [https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Facebook&track=Software%20Engineer](https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Facebook&track=Software%20Engineer) 4. These numbers don't capture relative outcomes: like someone going from $60K to $100K is a great outcome. Someone going from $100K to $300K is a great outcome. They look different on paper but it's all relative to the person. 5. We are not a bootcamp. I've spent far too much time trying to explain this over and over and over again. I spent like 30 minutes doing that side by side to show the differences. I want to know what I'm missing here so I can correct it. EDIT: I've been editing to try to fully clarify how I did the calculation and I originally had months instead of exact days, and wanted to clarify form submission dates, as it wasn't clear if the dates were offer signed date, info submitted to us dates, job start date, etc... I chose a somewhat random recent window of time manually collecting data scrolling through ordered form responses.