Codesmith: How long to Prep? Debating giving up on upcoming cohort.

One of them is employed by Codesmith itself as one of 50+ graduates who are also employeed by Codesmith after they finish, and the other was also employed by Codesmith in the past. /u/techrally: how do you feel about a conflict of interest if people reviewing a bootcamp are/were also W2 employees of said bootcamp? I'm kind of on the fence and don't necessarily think it's a problem but curious your thoughts or if you aware fellows are fully signed W2 employees and even just contractors?

Yeah +1, I think this is a really great system that is really win-win for Codesmith. It's a structured employment relationship so that the fellows don't just leave the second they get a job, which is a problem with other bootcamps that employ graduates. It's perceived as a program for solid students (like the solid ones that don't get outside jobs right away out of Codesmith) and something aspirational to do to beef up your resume before job hunting. The downsides are that it's paid very lowly, "around $52K a year" (was the last quote), and it extends your program by 3 months (like a 12 week bootcamp turns into a 7 month program).

Also I think you asked good questions around the OSP projects! I have one criticism of the OSPs that while they are well run group projects and are fantastically done, they are really just group projects where the team breaks up things into tasks themselves, runs scrums themselves, does all the code review themselves. However, Codesmith staff call these projects the 'equivalent industry experience of a mid-level or senior software engineer', and that statement is so mind-boggling wrong I feel the need to constantly correct. They are fantastic projects for what they are, like arguably the best of many bootcamps! P.S. I'm going to get super downvoted because I always talk about the OSPs this way and a group of Codesmith people follow me and downvote me when I do :(

Which sentiments are misleading are why? Sorry for pushing you so much, it's not personal, but just because someone yells loudly "this is misleading", "this is fake", "this is misinformation" it doesn't make it so, and yelling more and more loudly doesn't make that more and more true. It would be more useful for everyone to go through point by point, provide evidence, provide sources, challenge me and ask me what my sources are and why, etc... I'm very open to debating details of anything you think is misleading and we could have a great discussion about that on the thread. Sophie makes it a point to have investors and advisors that staunchly disagree with each other on our team at Formation because having productive debates and looking at things from different angles can help the team get to the best conclusions. I'm not just Googling and declaring my feelings on here... my sources in general are screenshots from leadership and talking to leadership of programs, public data directly from various programs and bootcamps, public review text from review sites, CIRR, Youtube videos with program leadership, employees/former employees, talking to students and aggregating their experiences, so clearly some sources are better than others and maybe together we can fill in some gaps. Re: Codesmith specifically, I've been here for a while now and Codesmith seems to still have long waitlists, so I stand by my statement that I tell a lot of people to go there. I'm much more interested in adding useful discourse on here for people to learn from. If you think Codesmith is perfect and has no downsides or problems that you are willing to talk about, then we probably won't be able to have that discussion.