CodeSmith Grads/Applicants: Did you do CS prep and if so was it worth it?

I know the founder of Rithm and they are very focused on quality of education because of negative experiences at other bootcamps. They run very small cohorts with lots of face time. They care a ton about the quality of curriculum and education. I haven't talked to them since they went remote though. We have a few Rithm alumni who we worked with a Formation.dev and they were a pleasure to work with. I can't reply to RobSteinsVoice, a current Codesmith student, because they blocked me. But I'll add some notes here. If you go to Codesmith's website about page, and look at the LinkedIn for all the instructors (junior, mid, senior, lead), they all went to Codesmith. They either graduated and stayed on for sometimes many years, or they worked somewhere and teach part time. I'm not sure if this is what was meant above about hiring back students. From what I understand "Fellows" are hired on as full time employees after Codesmith ends and work like 12 hour days doing a lot of the behind the scenes work. Some Fellows stay on as instructors/"software engineers", and some of those people who have worked at Codesmith for a few years become lead instructors. There are some external instructors who are Codesmith grads who come back to give lectures, mock interviews, etc... Codesmith's outcomes are very strong in general. The main reasons: 1. Bar is high to get in 2. Attracts people who work 9am to 8pm + saturdays and hence generally are go-getters who are truly committed 3. A lot of people list their open source project work as "software engineer" work at real companies (I audited 200 people) and this helps get interviews for companies that don't dig deeper. 4. Codesmith is very very very focused on getting jobs and making your profile appear as strong as possible. In addition to #3, people do public talks with Single Sprout that are largely copy paste/not properly sourcing info, etc... but thrown together to add say you "were invited to do a tech talk" on their resume. Hyper focus on the "codesmith way" of preparing for the job hunt and it works! I highly recommend Codesmith to many people for whom this approach is a good fit. Rithm is focused more on authenticity, intimacy, learning and is a better fit if that's your thing. It's more expensive because of that intimacy.

At the end of the day, no school will get you a job, you are the one that gets the job and if you are driven, smart, things will work out. Maybe your FIRST job will be better or worse depending on the school, but you'll be on a good long term trajectory and you sound like you are on the right track.

Both Codesmith and Rithm care a lot about their curriculum and their instruction in general. So even though Codesmith has like a hierarchy of former students teaching, they do a good job and have a high bar for sure. Both teams have employees with lots of instruction years of experience and comparatively little industry years of experience. They both prioritize the learning experience. Codesmith wins handsdown on the job profile preparation. Codesmith grads usually don't list Codesmith on their resume, they post about their projects, their talks, and come across as accomplished industry engineers, etc... Rithm grads post graduation messages proudly stating they graduated from Rithm and are on the job hunt. Very different approaches that show the difference in approaches.