Will Sentence, the founder, is more opinionated about pedagogy I believe (never talked to him directly) and is a really smart person who puts a lot of effort into teaching effectively.
But I agree that CSX is pretty weak. It's intended as a "top of funnel" to Codesmith and many bootcamps follow this approach. They want you to join CSX and work with some peers on Slack. Then like it enough to sign up for a few hundred dollar prep course, taught by alumni. Then like that enough to join the immersive.
Most bootcamps have a similar approach to this. CSX isn't really intended to teach people anything as a standalone tool. Most of the people I know who got into Codesmith used many tools including Leetcode "easy problems" to get in. They want you to attend free seminars and pair programming sessions where they can build a relationship and help the right people make their way to immersive and they invest time into those. CSX itself is very far off from being a viable standalone platform. EDIT: "viable" might sound too critical but I'm just saying that their team also published paid courses on Udemy and Thinkific - which are platforms entirely built around education and they didn't publish them on CSX. Building your own platform from scratch with a staff of alumni from your own program, is highly unlikely to result in a platform to compete with those with entire teams of experienced people building them. If they hired up a team to work on CSX my view might change.
u/ZealousidealAct9665 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Glad we agree it isn’t meant to be standealone.
Therein lies the problem.
3 years ago I tried csx thinking it was standealone because it’s “top of the funnel” and “for beginners”. I thought coding wasn’t for me and dropped out.
Without the encouragement of my peers I would’
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
That's an interesting perspective, thanks for sharing. I didn't realize that would push people away from the industry.
Codesmith has a bit of a cult-like following and branding (that is also pushed internally constantly - always told the curriculum is perfectly optimized, the resume process is perfectly fine tuned, etc...) and I guess that comes across on the outside too - 'this CSX course is perfectly prepared for beginners and do it to get into codesmith and since codesmith is the best, then....'
It's definitely not that the best. Their content team is working on a story about people who do CSX and get "junior roles" immediately without doing Codesmith, as opposed to the "mid level and senior" roles you get at Codesmith. So I think they internally think highly of CSX if they think CSX is equivalent of 'other bootcamps'. Watch out for that blog post haha.