How long does codesmith work with you until you get a job?

I haven't done Codesmith but can answer the question from working with Codesmith alumni. With Codesmith you get lifelong support in their community. After you officially graduate, you get continued check-ins, practice, access to the community for support and referrals, and ongoing lectures for interviewing and negotiation. While normal Codesmith is 9am to 8pm every day, this phase is way more hands off and on your own. I cant answer when it ends. Around 90% of people get a job within 6 months of graduating. The 10% that don't, someone else can hopefully answer. From what I've observed, most Codesmith people are ambitious and hard working and a lot of people find jobs. At Formation we've worked with a range of alumni from those who need extra help to find any job to those who are really solid but need extra support to achieve top tier jobs. One downside of the job hunt support is that almost all the instruction at Codesmith is from current and former students and they really really push the Codesmith way of doing things for resume and such. It does work for most of their graduates but it I've heard people saying that they are encouraged to follow this way because it "worked for others" and leave it at that and there are some grey area things around the projects and tech talks I don't love, that people do because it "worked for others".

Hey, it's Formation.dev We do mentorship and training for people from non traditional and underrepresented backgrounds with experience to help them level up to top tier roles. Strong bootcamps grads are the most junior starting point to work with us and most people have 1 - 3 years of experience already. But we have a lot of people who have done bootcamps in the past and I know a decent amount about some of the top ones.

Codesmith is really focused on efficiently doing things to build up a resume that appears really good on the surface. They also do a good job teaching, but I just mean the priority is to make it all look good to help people get jobs, i.e. getting resumes past screens. One thing is the open source projects that a lot of people ambiguously label as Software Engineer jobs at companies. The projects have websites and all the Codesmith people like and promote each other's projects to build momentum. Not bad stuff, just very focused on making it look good. The actual projects don't have outside people working on them and are like really really good college class group projects that got portrayed a little more like company like engineering work. And there is a playbook for every project that is the same flow. The Codesmith way. Another thing is these tech talks that people do. They prepare for a tech talk on a generic subject for about 2 days, they record the talk publish it through Single Sprout which is a recruiting hiring agency, and then list that they were invited to give a tech talk on their resumes. Again, not bad stuff, but the focus is on stuff for your resume rather than the depth of the subject matter in my opinion, they might disagree but I'm giving my opinion with 10+ years FAANG. Overall compared to a lot of bootcamps these things really do stand out and are much stronger, the downside is that it's like a playbook implemented by alumni, alumni teachers, and alumni mentors and they all push the exact same playbook.

Yeah totally, when I bring this up people think I'm like calling them out and I'm really very much in the middle. Their work is a lot better than what a lot of bootcamps do. Their alumni are relatively successful. So I hope it doesn't sound like I'm making a judgment call for everyonI'm just trying to answer the question from my perspective as someone with a ton of industry experience who works with a lot of people who went to bootcamps in the past.

I wish there was a simple answer to this because I get asked a lot. It really depends on you. How do you learn (e.g. by reading, by doing, with people, alone)? What are your starting skills and how much programming have you done? What kind of job do you want? Where do you want to work? For a high school student who has the opportunity to go to a top 10/20 CS/engineering schools, I would almost always recommend going the college route and doing top tier internships each summer. 1. you get to try working at different places and find the BEST job for you and not just A job. 2. you meet a lot of other people who will go one to other top companies and in other areas as well. If you are going to go to a less well respected college just to get a degree on paper, I don't know if it's always worth it over other things, like bootcamps. This is where it becomes more personal. Codesmith is 9am to 8pm 5 days a week and 6 hours on Saturdays. It's not for everyone, but it self selects out people who are driven and successful. HackReactor is a super intense, but less intense program that has very solid outcomes. If you look at HackReactor alumni years down the road, a lot are at very good companies and they get there much faster than doing a full CS degree first. My overall recommendation with bootcamps is to focus on getting at least a decent job quickly to get the ball rolling and then focus on the dream job down the road. I have to disclose that I'm the co-founder of Formation.dev and we work with people with typically 1-3 years software engineering work experience level up to top tier companies, so I'm biased about this approach, because we help people make that second step. Again, DEPENDS ON YOU. Some people want to get a top tier job right out of a bootcamp, which is hard, but for the right people can be done with a little extra time and prep.

So there are paths for bootcamp grads, like top-tier apprenticeships (Dropbox, Asana, Twilio, etc...) but it is hard. The top bootcamps after widdling down people who actually graduate, have 70 to 90% placement within six more months. I don't know about the outcomes of a short degree from WGU. Having a legitimate degree can help your resume get past screens. But a few years down the road, I'm not sure. If you have a natural propensity for coding, are super ambitious and hard working, I think a bootcamp can accelerate things.

I left out the community support in my post below/above, I also hear that often about Codesmith. So most bootcamps have alumni slack/discord/etc... where people talk about jobs, referrals, etc... But Codesmith alumni are really bonded with the bootcamp and come back to do mock interviews and give advice. Like I heard about several attempts at creating advanced DS&A courses for alumni that were driven by alumni just wanting to help out and contribute.

From what people have told me there is a paid one (that is 75% off for alumni) and there is a like self service guide an alumni made (which I've read). There is A LOT of content, guides, opinions out there (some paid, some free) to get ready for DS&A interviews and these are honestly are fairly similar on par. Obviously I'm bias, but we (Formation) have people who live and breathe 24/7 how to train people on DS&A, SD, etc..., thousands of tasks, hundreds of assessments, dozens of mock interviews with senior+ engineers people who have done hundreds of interviews, all the stuff is living and breathing and changing daily. So I have a high bar for DS&A courses because we are creating something magical here.... but we're very expensive and it takes everyone a different amount of time. Most of these courses above are a few weeks and static.

Hey, the applications go into a tracking tool, and a team member will reach it out probably sometime this week if you just applied. Depending on your background and how well you did on the assessment they will either give advice to improve and try again later, or do a call to see if you are a good fit for the program. If you DM me personal information I can also double check on the backend that everything is moving along smoothly.

Always reach out to people who did the program and ask for specific details of day to day and specific anecdotal outcomes for people with a similar background to you. Humans are humans and the adjectives we use to describe things are relative to our experiences. So rather than just "this was amazing" you want to know examples of why it's amazing. Programing is not magic and an array is an array. So what makes one program better. Why are Codesmith's CIRR outcomes actually better? with examples. Not just "we teach people depth and how to think". Like what is it objectively that makes those outcomes happen. For example, this is more specific ''We test and oberseve what job hunt strategies work for alumni to get jobs and we double down on them and adapt, so we are always teaching people the job hunting strategies that are working and guide students on how to implement fhem' Sorry for the rant, bootcamps use too fluffy inflated language.

I'm sorry you feel that way. I understand and acknowledge that there's a reason/"agenda" for me to be active on this sub. My life's mission is to help software engineers from non-traditional and underrepresented engineering backgrounds break into the top tier impactful roles. I was at Facebook for 8 years, from 2009 to 2017 and saw such hard working people were building products for billions of people but lacking a more diverse set of voices in doing so. This is an industry wide issue. Sophie first created a free bootcamp called Buildschool to help people get their first jobs. In getting to know bootcamps and meeting their founders, she realized that the broader bootcamp industry has already helped tens of thousands of brand new engineers, from diverse backgrounds, get started in their careers with their first jobs, but most lacked fundamentals, rigorous practice, and interaction with top tier engineers that their peers from Stanford and Harvard had to grow quickly in their careers. So I joined to create Formation to help level the playing field for slightly more experienced engineers. Being able to work directly with senior/staff/principal engineers who have accomplished careers is a challenge, so our team is building products from the ground up to make this happen. By eliminating a fixed length, fixed curriculum and breaking down everything you do into tiny pieces, we train each person on a unique path that adapts to their growth and progress. And this includes sessions with super senior mentors, several times a week, at the right time and for the right reasons. So helping people out with advising early in their careers, and years down the road with Formation, is part of my agenda. Regarding "a former fellow". We aren't perfect and we debrief any negative feedback with the team to improve or see what happened. We pride ourselves on working with people (who keep putting in the work) indefinitely until they get a job they are happy with. In general, for people that take longer in the job hunt, we keep iterating and training until there is a happy outcome, and sometimes it goes off the beaten path. The outcome is the priority. "Predatory practice and inflate their numbers" however is defamatory and false. We don't publish many numbers because we stand behind the ones we do, and Fellows certainly don't have access to anyone else's compensation information. As long as people keep doing the work, we work with you as hard as it takes until you get a job, even if we're losing money doing so, because it's our promise.

Just to clarify for other people reading this. Codesmith vs Formation is not a choice for most people. The vast majority of people are Formation are working as engineers and doing it part time, or have worked for 1 - 3 years and taking a pause). We have one person I currently know of that felt Formation was a better fit than Codesmith, and 10+ Codesmith alumni at various points in their careers. Most of these alumni come in at a middle of the road junior DS&A skill bar, slightly above the minimum we are confident working with but still clearly in the middle junior bucket and that is our lowest experience bucket. So the vast majority of people before Codesmith aren't choosing between the two. I recommend Codesmith to a lot of people who have no experience a couple times a week in DMs. I do believe there are a very small number of people at Codesmith (I heard recently one or two in each cohort) who are experienced and those people absolutely should be considering Formation and looking at which program is the right fit specifically for them. EDIT: I've mentioned this before, but we consider our competitors Pathrise, Interview Kickstart, Outco, Scalar, Exponent, and to some extent Interviewing.io

This got downvoted and I'm not sure why. But I ran some numbers this evening as we are trying to figure out how to explain our numbers and one stat stood out showing the differences more: 25% of placed Formation Fellows accepted jobs at LITERALLY the five FAANG companies - Facebook/Apple/Amazon/Netflix/Google (this doesn't include Microsoft, which is another chunk, and doesn't include some additional people who got FAANG offers and turned them down, or all the people at top-tier/FAANG-level companies as well). Just for anyone else reading this because my first stab might not have hit the mark on the difference in audience.

There just happens to be a lot of talk about Codesmith in this sub. There is almost zero talk about Hackbright, BloomTech/Lambda School (who I know several former execs and is one of the largest bootcamps in the world), Springboard, all of which I'm fairly familiar with as well. There's a little bit of talk about Rithm, with whom I'm talking to the founder next week to catch up, and I talk about on here very neutrally no different than anyone else. I know a decent amount about CIRR and the early bootcamp founders. We're early stage, we're relatively new, as the Codesmith alumni chug along through and share their experiences I hope you can have an open mind to figuring out what we are, the painting is not done yet and I am a small part of Formation. We have a crazy awesome team of people working their hardest to help each Fellow achieve and exceed their goals. Sophie (founder) used to run a bootcamp called Buildschool that exists no more and that's where Formation came from. There was a really large need to help ambitious non-traditional engineers after their first jobs to get their second, third, forth jobs (we have Fellows who have come back already a second time to Formation) and we developed a ton of technology to excel at doing what we do. The Codesmith ethos that I've seen with our Fellows from Codesmith is one of respect, hard work, discipline, professionalism and I enjoy working with those Fellows and following their journeys at Formation. I hope Codesmith continues to grow and scale, they have done a great job scaling so far and helped a lot of people transition into tech - much better than most bootcamps. That earns tremendous respect.

The ones I mentioned are all similar in that they tend to work with people who have jobs (or are "employable" already) and help them get better jobs. Whether it is needed or not is a personal decision based on your goals and motivations and what works for you. For many it's not needed. I don't know Scalar specifically and how they work internally, so maybe it's not as good as Formation, but I feel like Formation is very valuable if you need the services we offer. I use the "personal trainer" analogy a lot for fitness and getting in shape. For some people it's useful and some it's not. At Formation, we're building out a platform and methodology that we think will work for a very wide range of people, and eventually different price points. If we can't deliver value to people, our company shouldn't exist.

We are not focused on TC and don't really care about it as a primary driver. But we did update our stats this week if you want to see TC results, our AVERAGE person with 1-2 years experiences has an AVERAGE TC of $180K (which even excludes private stock and options which we do estimate in individual offers to help people make decisions but not in our published stats so they can be bulletproof). If TC is your driver and you are making 150TC it might still be useful to level up to above the average in the $200K/$300Ks but it depends on your and your goals. We are primarily focused on getting peoples skills up to a top tier bar and helping them find the right companies for them that launch and accelerate their careers. We don't really care what your TC is now, because if you find the right place your impact on the company will be crazy and your TC will just happen to be astronomical as a result. We work with all kinds of people, for example some people making in the $200Ks to start and aiming for $500Ks, like you are paying us to help you achieve your goals, not to hand you a new job, if that makes sense.

People can and do study on their own yeah, there isn't one solution for everyone. So I can only speak for Formation which is even unique amongst those competitors. But the reasons it adds value are: 1. Every week we create a schedule of 3-5 person or 1-1 sessions and tasks (pulled from thousands we have created) that is all based on your progress and what you need to work on that week. We asses you with tests, mentor feedback, self-reporting, etc... and create a new plan every week. Most of our people who get jobs at Google don't cram LC and study very efficiently. 2. Extremely strong mentors. You get to work directly several times a week, in 3-5 sessions or 1-1 sessions with staff engineers at Airbnb, principal engineers at Reddit, and dozens of people like this. Most of the competitors have recorded videos and sessions with 150 people that are not intimate at all. 3. Network, referrals, pathways. It's not just about getting a job at Amazon, but it's about finding the right team for your success and talking to maybe five teams at Amazon. We have extensive connections and experience to find the right teams. 4. We work with you for as long as it takes, week to week, continuously working on your skills, until you get the job you are happy with. So it's not like a 10 week course that charges $20K and then just has people around in case you need them. 5. More practical point, but negotiation. We have expert negotiation to pay for the program itself.

We don't have a curriculum but you get personal weekly training from us until you start your new job (or sign the offer to start that job). Afterwards you get access to chat, your past activity, and invited to some future one-off events. If you want to get another job in the future, you have to start again from scratch based on your new goals and new starting point. You can apply if you authorized to work in the USA, Canada, Australia currently, including H1B and OPT (if you have 2+ years left). If you don't have an H1B we can't support you at this time.

>As the husband of a current CodeSmith student, and a lead engineer, I agree with this description of the program. The tactics can be very surface-level. A tech talk and an open source project (that is made to look like a company on LinkedIn) can make a candidate appear much more senior than they actually are, on the surface, and give someone with no production engineering experience the false impression that they have more experience than they really do. And that is the secret sauce of CodeSmith. The problem is: Everything is taught so quickly that it's impossible for most students to absorb it, and there is very variable quality beneath the sauce. (For example, a whole semester worth of data structures in an undergraduate course is taught in 2 days during the first week of the program). There's no possible way to do that deeply and well. Furthermore, classes are taught on powerpoint slides by recent graduates of the program, none of whom have real world coding experience. All they know is the Codesmith way, and they don't actually understand what it means to solve deeper problems than the formulaic projects at CodeSmith. Meanwhile, the program tells students it's okay if they have impostor syndrome and only understand 20% of the material, while doing 20% of the work. One issue I have with this model is that a lot of students actually don't retain or understand deeply what they drank from the Codesmith "firehose." The very underprepared students manage somehow to get by anyway, and with stellar resumes based on other people's work, that can get hired at good companies. At CodeSmith, every student is paired in groups of 4 for most of the projects, so if you have at least one student who had done prior software engineering work or is more advanced in some ways, it's possible to have a good final project, as long as all the weaker students are distributed evenly in the groups with stronger students. But at the end of the course, there are still many students who are left floundering, without a strong enough foundation in any of the basic materials to be able to do high-quality engineering work. The CodeSmith resumes are also a little bit ridiculous. It's supposed to look more "technical" to recruiters, but they advise residents to write a bunch of fluff in which students spell out in excruciating detail the the buzzwordiest definitions of basic technologies like React and PostgreSQL onto their resume, while deleting actual prior job experience... It actually reads like the Google searches of a very amateur total newbie programmer. The resumes are wordy and meaningless, and they waste everyone's time. They're extremely easy to spot. (Yet Codemith somehow manage to get alumni into mid-to-senior level jobs with these tactics. Not sure how.) As an engineering manager with interviewing and hiring responsibilities, I would never touch anyone with a resume that looks like that. I let my wife know she should change her resume after she gets out of CodeSmith because she will be repelling so many potential employers with a suspicious and dumb-looking resume like that. If Formation can do as it advertises, which is to cover the gap of technical skill between what even the top bootcamps like CodeSmith teach and what is actually expected in a real production codebase -- then it would be worth the price tag. Formation advertises that the program pairs junior engineers with senior mentors at top companies, with extensive code reviews to make sure their code is production quality. If this is true, then it is fulfilling a really worthwhile (and dire) need. In that case, the focus should not be only on winning the game of FAANG interview prep, especially now that all the FAANG companies have imposed a hiring freeze. Instead, the focus should be on real software craftsmanship, and mentorship to write excellent production code, in the style of whatever company they are interviewing for. The code base at Google looks different than the style at Meta and Amazon -- it would be extremely valuable to get direct mentorship from engineers at those companies, to learn better professional engineering practices, and simply become better engineers. That would be more substantive than putting on a superficial costume of a resume, learned at a top bootcamp. And more importantly, it would make hiring people from non-traditional backgrounds, like such bootcamps, less of a risk for companies. Hello! Thanks for adding so much well-written details. Agreed on the resumes, we often do rework Codesmith alumni's resumes and (sorry if this embarrasses any of my friends) but they have pushed back on our changes because Codesmith really pushed their requirements hard and it's made people a tad uncomfortable making changes. At the end of the day people come to Formation to improve their outcomes, so we don't care which resume you use and our job is to help you build the underlying engineering and problem solving skills to crush your interviews, be confident in finding the right company and team for you, and do well there. You said a lot of nice things about Formation so I'll list some of the challenges that arise with this model. The biggest one is that our mentors are genuinely senior/staff/principal engineers at top companies.... their time is valuable, not just financially, but in terms of the wisdom they can theoretically impart on Fellows in a fixed time. So a lot of what we do behind the scenes is crunching through everyone's schedules, then figuring out what skills they need to work on the most, and creating hundreds of 3-5 person interactive intimate sessions on very specific topics every week with mentors. Each Fellow gets \~2 to 5 of these sessions a week, dynamically created every week. This is almost comically hard. People have work emergencies, people are all working on different skills, mentors have bad days, people have mentor preferences. It works but it's kind of the "secret sauce" that makes it possible to leverage that mentorship in a way that is valuable to Fellows and fulfilling and sustainable to the mentor. The stronger we get at this the better and better people's schedules are every week and the more and more efficiently they can develop. RE: mid and senior. I've had a few intense discussions on this, and what I've concluded is that Codesmith evaluates these based on compensation and not on actual FAANG-equivalent-levels. If you are competing with bootcamps where people get $50K super junior roles, then calling a $120K solid entry level job in NYC "entry level" is a marketing-disservice to their outcomes. That said, we worked with a Codesmith alumni at Formation with zero experience in between who genuinely got a mid level job at a not-FAANG but solid tech company and this person very transparently said they went to a bootcamp, but I would be embarrassed to say "Formation got you a mid level job" because it's utterly irrelevant and we want to make sure people are in the right job at the right company at the right time to accelerate their careers.

Hi, I don't like quoting one-off results as proof or evidence because everyone has a unique job hunt with different goals. Like maybe that person's goals were different and that was the 2nd best outcome even if their compensation sounds impressive on paper. Overall 81% of placements are at top tier companies (FAANG, big tech, top tier startups, decacorns, etc...). We also don't have enough "direct from bootcamp" results to be significant either, but I can give some general common groups of people that have bootcamp backgrounds: 1. Bootcamp, foot in the door job (or better) for anywhere from six months to a few years, Formation, job. This is the most common case, vast majority, and people generally have good practical skills and need to work on fundamental CS concepts like data structures and algorithms. 2. No bootcamp, self study, direct to Formation. The average base salary is definitely on the lower side from the overall average (which is around $134.5K base salary) and it's around $116K I think and TC around $135K, with the range of like $70K to $250K - which is why it's so depending on your individual goals and target skill level. 3. Direct from bootcamp immediately after, this is a highly ambitious person gunning for a top tier company rather than a foot in the door job for a year and then doing Formation or transitioning. Target is entry level top tier, or top tier apprenticeship. 4. Direct from bootcamp, gap of a few months of unsuccessful job hunting. This is a person who has kept working on projects and is a little more open minded to non-top-of-the-top companies, and might be aiming for a solid job at a tech-focused big company, or a top tier company.

Expecting less from Reddit... like when someone has a preconceived notion of something because they don't like you and they look for any piece information, even if it's provably false, from anonymous sources, and use it out of context to validate their beliefs and say something defamatory like "A former fellow from Formation.dev felt the urge and reached out to me to essentially said it is a predatory practice and inflate their numbers." You should read all of my comments on Reddit across the board instead of this tunnel vision on Codesmith with a combative win-lose attitude. I'm not here to battle, I'm here to try to give people helpful advice and read all of my comments history to see that.

Yes but when people search for Formation on Reddit they find your top level comment and ask me what your problem is with Formation. The comment is so utterly false and damaging to the company, and hence defamatory. You might not see the damage from calling a company "predatory" but it's why I have to continuously comment on this thread when it comes up. It's not personal, I would love to help give you personally advice in your job hunt and you seem like a nice person, but I also have to defend the company from trolling and anonymous baseless attacks and those two things are separate.

I don't know anyone's ages and the resumes tend to exclude all past experience and education unless it's relevant to programming. So the entire resume is often just Codesmith projects, tech talks, and skills and it's very hard to tell. I would estimate amongst the people that I work with that most have 3 to 10 years of experience post college in another field.