How legit are Codesmith's stat

Stats are real but there's more to the stats. For example, CIRR doesn't include equity and bonuses which means the numbers are actually only equal to or HIGHER than in the reports. The key thing here is "median", i.e. the 50th percentile. 20% of people make under $110K and 20% of people make over $140K. An “average" is most useful when you have a normal distribution and this data certainly is not. A “median”, which is used often for data sets to remove the influence of outliers, is, but it loses a lot of information in the calculating. Let’s say one bootcamp has 3 alumni with salaries 0, 100, 200, and the other 100, 100, 100. Same median, same average, completely different stories. Which is why you have have to look at the outcomes for people who are starting with a background like yourself. It's very likely that people with zero experience and a few months of CSX before joining are in the < $110K bucket. And it's very likely people with years of tangential engineering experience, CS degrees, and maybe even real experience are in the $140K bucket. Would be nice if they broke that up but they haven't been as transparent about that when asked as they are about their CIRR results.

Yeah if someone starts, as long as they have the intention of job hunting after, they are included in the report and impact the graduation rate. The placements rates and medians are all based on the number GRADUATED and not the original number who started. Finally, if someone is unresponsive to CIRR requests but they can confirm they got a job, they person is included in the "placed" count but not in the salary counts. So the way CIRR is designed is it tries really hard to make sure the salary stats are only counting successful people and have the highest medians possible. This doesn't change the fact that Codesmith has very strong outcomes, but their outcomes don't include equity and bonuses and hence are somewhat meaningless, other than as a marketing tool. They are well aware how important equity is in outcomes and would make their outcomes even better but they support and promote CIRR because marketing wise it makes them look the best compared to their competitors. This is smart marketing and not a complaint, but I really don't like how people blindly follow marketing instead of applying critical thinking... especially people that aspire to make six figures applying that critical thinking. Watch this to see how the base salary is largely irrelevant for offers if your placements are at top tier companies: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rceUVaiXQgU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rceUVaiXQgU)