Second best bootcamp?

There is no best or second best bootcamps objectively. You should talk to people at the bootcamps to figure out what is the best fit for you and how people of similar backgrounds do. 1. Codesmith. Great for ambitious people who work hard. People come in at a high bar. Alumni network is strong and supportive. 2. Rithm. Great intimate experience where the founders and leadership strongly believe in directly teaching students rather than scaling and growing. 3. Launch School. Self paced month to month and aiming to get into the Capstone path, which is more intense with strong outcomes. 4. Hack Reactor. Strong all around. Very strong alumni network of people a few years down the road. 5. Hackbright and Ada Academy: these focus on specific demographics. Tech is fairly male-dominated and some people might learn better in a more diverse environment. Now separate topic, CIRR results because it's bound to come up here 😁 and I love this topic, this is usually a controversial. First off, to clarify one thing, CIRR is registered as a business league (i.e. lobbying group or trade organization) and is not an unbiased source. It's like only trusting dental advice from the American Dental Association and not trusting any other source of information about dental hygiene. I sure do trust the ADA but I'm open minded to other ways of looking at things. So anyone that says to only trust CIRR please just look into things. It can be trusted and there is nothing wrong with it, but that doesn't mean there is not other points of view. PROS: 1. Standard questions and data format so you can compare results easily. Require auditing and bookkeeping for consistency. This makes it easy to reliably see who has better outcomes and if the marketing a company is telling you aligns with their CIRR reports. 2. You can extrapolate how many people start a program, graduate, and what their time frames are to get a sense of how many people actually get jobs who start. 3. You can get a breakdown of the ranges of salary outcomes instead of a single number, so you can look for patterns and trends on your own more so that one number. CONS: 1. CIRR includes base salaries only so they don't factor in stock and bonuses (Codesmith people this actually makes your results appear lower than they actually are) 2. They don't factor in experience levels. This is a big problem with Codesmith, for example, as 20% of people make under $110K and 20% over $140K. Because people with prior bootcamps and work experience go there, you can't get a good breakdown. At Formation (disclosure: I am co-founder) we just updated our numbers and we show averages by years of experience, so the average 0 year experience is $116K base, $134K TC and the average 1-2 years experience is $137K base, $181K TC. Average 3+ year is $155K base $204K TC (all of these exclude private stock and options). So there is a huge difference based on years of experience. If we just published our overall base salary average of $135K that would be super misleading to someone with 0 years of experience. Sure the top offer for 0 years was like well in the $200Ks and you CAN make that much, it's just not useful. 3. It's pretty hard to tell "of the people who started what are their outcomes". For example people can be excluded ([this thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/wap6a4/comment/ii48t7e/?context=3) is about Codesmith excluding people for not passing tests and I've heard things like this from other bootcamps). When you factor in graduation rate, and different drop off rates. It takes a lot of digging to figure this out. BloomTech for example has about a 50% shot at getting a job within 6 months of graduating for all the people starting, according to their latest report, but it takes some math to figure that out. 4. In the engineering field, your long term compensation will be much higher if you end up in the right place. For example, if you get a $90K apprenticeship at Dropbox out of bootcamp, sure your salary is lower for a year. But in 3-4 years you might be making $300K TC. If that's your goal, that would be much better than making $120K at an agency or 3rd tier company out of a bootcamp. (Please don't attack me ❤️ 👋 😃, I love discussing this topic by diving into published hard data and results, and I don't love anecdotal comebacks and personal insults, I just find the topic of outcomes interesting)

hey! so this gets way too complicated to comment on Reddit, you can pull things out of context but this is like the topic of a multi hour long seminary or something. Let me throw a couple of things in here: 1. Having a good fit in your job and being at a very strong company will have more impact on your career than getting paid more in your first job. If you are choosing between a 2nd tier and 3rd tier job and one pays more, that difference in company is less important than going to a top tier company. 2. So once people are in a job there's a lot more going on that can impact trajectory, more training, more programs, more friends, etc.... so you can get the data, but it doesn't mean much. I haven't seen career tracking data other than Codesmith published a report of "where are they now" that has salary data from like 60 or something people from 3 to 5 years ago. The methodology didn't follow CIRR and didn't explain how they value private stock and options - other than saying they include them. But they showed good career progression for most alumni. It was a much slower than the typically new grad at Facebook trajectory though. At Facebook you move from entry level to mid level in up to 2 years max or you get fired. And mid level FB was much higher than what that report showed people making in 3 to 5 years. Like let's say you went to multiple bootcamps and then five years later are making $200K. Who gets "credit" for that, both bootcamps? It's hard to say. 3. [Levels.fyi](https://Levels.fyi) is decent but it doesn't capture everything, I use it a lot for relative levels at different companies. But it doesn't show the ranges well for each level. At Facebook the top 1% performers are making 5 to 10X the averages with bonus stock and stuff. 4. I lot of the older bootcamps like Hack Reactor, App Academy, even Hackbright have a lot more people going to apprenticeships via partnerships and stuff, and on LinkedIn they have alumni that are all over the top tier companies several years later. Similar to 2. it's hard to say how important the school was versus that first top tier experience. I'll add more if I have more thoughts, have to run to dinner!

Hi! Sorry which figures are you referring to? The numbers I mentioned above are for Formation, which isn't a bootcamp and is a personal trainer/career accelerator (in the same bucket as Interview Kickstart, Outco, Pathrise, Scalar). But it was meant as an example to show how much experience matters. So I can speak for Formation that we work with people aiming for truly top tier companies that compensate very highly. [Levels.fyi](https://Levels.fyi) has some examples, and most people we work with are at the E3/E4/E5 level for FB/Google ([https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Facebook&track=Software%20Engineer](https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Facebook&track=Software%20Engineer)). I don't think that's a complete answer necessarily but happy to explain more! The numbers I mentioned for Codesmith are available here: https://cirr.org/data Specifically: https://static.spacecrafted.com/b13328575ece40d8853472b9e0cf2047/r/d0fbf8d161f5421b8878295d84625dd0/1/Codesmith%20Los%20Angeles%20Full-Stack%20Software%20Development%20H1%202021.pdf https://static.spacecrafted.com/b13328575ece40d8853472b9e0cf2047/r/b95fdb9a67574dd5ae05641a9a2a0f79/1/Codesmith%20New%20York%20City%20Full-Stack%20Software%20Development%20H1%202021.pdf https://static.spacecrafted.com/b13328575ece40d8853472b9e0cf2047/r/b81c7587b9264856b5a7a7511906022c/1/Codesmith%20Part-Time%20Remote%20Full-Stack%20Software%20Development%20H1%202021.pdf

I feel like they are fairly similar to Hack Reactor and was trying to show a breadth of styles of bootcamps that might be good for different people. I would also look into them too along with the above.