Yeah you are borderline and I agree you could use either higher starting DS&A skills or more extensive project work to have a higher chance of success with our training. Note: for anyone else who might read this, if you are not at our current overall bar, our training is less effective so we want to make sure you are there before joining, or that we have adapted our training enough to support you (we have people who really want to do Formation, but it's too early in their journey and I don't want them to read your specific case and generalize). When we work with someone it's until the very end, so we have to accept the right people.
So two approaches for you specifically:
1. Keep practicing DS&A. Great growth so far so keep going down that path to get through a good number of LC easy problems.
2. I think a standalone project that's not a personal website is great. Ideally something whe…
That’s not bad. It’s not linear, so even though 1400+ means you are pretty close to ready for the stop tier interview raw skill bar (obviously you need to practice) 700ish is borderline ready for Formation to get there, obviously the low end but depending on your goals it could be sufficient. So you should look into it and see if it could be a good fit for you. The goal would be an entry level job top tier job or apprenticeship and you’re probably looking at 6 to 8 months. It’s very different from a bootcamp but you can weight your options between self teaching more, bootcamp, and Formation.
I can give my thoughts on this. I'm the co-founder of Formation.dev and I want to be very upfront that I do not think Formation is a good fit for you yet (we work with experienced engineers to get top-tier roles), but I do have extensive experience with mentoring as a result of Formation and can highlight the pros and cons in my opinion.
**Personal Mentoring**
PROS:
* Goes at your pace
* Focused on your strengths and weaknesses
* Content can change and adapt as you go
* Always have a helping hand
CONS:
* Only get one person's point of view. If you hire an army of mentors it will cost you a fortune.
* Relying on one person's teaching style working all the time
* Different people are good at teaching different things, you are overpaying for some things for worse quality
* It's hard to find a good mentor and hard to judge if they are good, when you don't know what you don't know
**Str…
So they get FLOODED with applications. Which is why that Google recruiter was brave to post the other day haha.
Most of them send out some essay style questions in the application and more importantly a hackerrank or codesignal test. The tests I've seen (second hand through Fellows) are classic DS&A/leetcode and medium-hardish. The problem is because there are so many applications, you basically have to be perfect or very close to perfect to not get filtered out. I've heard of some people cheating (and they detect that too) and trying to really "pass the test" mentality... which is actually the opposite of what these apprenticeships want.... there are just so many applications it's the best they can do to filter.
You can try a sample test we offer at Formation: [https://formation.dev/join/assessment](https://formation.dev/join/assessment)
You'll get your score after completing. Since…
1. Thanks. Yeah just want to help give my perspective on things. It's just one perspective, but so many people in the sub are in bootcamps or choosing bootcamps and it's missing the experienced perspective so I try to comment often.
2. It depends on your goals. You can get an entry level job directly from a bootcamp that is decent. Doing any kind of internship or volunteer work will help. If I were doing a bootcamp I would try to get an apprenticeship at a top tier company. Even the apprenticeships are super competitive right now, but I would try to be a top student and get one of those (e.g. Asana, Dropbox, Twitter).
1. Formation is called a Fellowship, but it's really like having a personal trainer for your technical and career skills and it's not an internship or apprenticeship. Doing something like Formation takes time. Like I said, MOST people at Formation have work experience al…
So I think the actual quality of the work is probably similar. But Codesmith resumes APPEAR much farther along. I've been told 1000 times that Codesmith doesn't tell you to do this, but the vast majority of people I've surveyed (out of 200 graduates) list that open source contribution as "Software Engineer" experience at a real "Company". This gives them a huge leg up with smaller companies that don't check these things well and care more about what you do than what your resume says.
I've audited their flagship projects and almost no one uses them. No one reports bugs. No one reports feature requests. No one outside Codesmith contributes to them. They are group projects that are marketed as big open source tools.
Sorry if this sounds negative, not meant to be. It's a brilliant strategy and it's working to help their alumni get the most out of their experience.
I think both are strong. Neither will prepare you for a strong chance at passing Google though. Both have a handful of alumni ever that go to Google right out of the program in their first job.
At Formation for example, we work with bootcamp grads, and the vast majority of our Fellows get top tier jobs. With many at Google alone, and many TURNING DOWN Google.
So I've seen the transformation needed for most people post bootcamp to be at that level. I would like to clarify that most people we work with have work experience already post bootcamp, so the number that come directly from a bootcamp is smaller, but I'm including all of these people in one bucket, because presumably people who graduated and worked are farther ahead anyways than new grads.
I might get some comments on here saying that all Codesmith alumni are Google-ready because people get jobs at Google, so I want to emphasiz…
Sorry I should have clarified "soon". I think it was a Codesmith employee in a talk that said something like 'they had plans to go back in person', but I didn't feel like it was in the next 6 months or so, maybe early next year.
I have a lot of Youtube and podcasts and stuff running in the background and I don't remember exactly where. Maybe ask them directly!. I'll edit that comment for clarity to not mislead anyone.
Codesmith is a solid choice in NYC, but isn't cheap, but probably worth it. I heard they are going back in person in NYC ~~soon~~ (edit: by "soon" I meant I heard they were forming plans, but with no specific date)
EDIT #2: App Academy is back in person in NYC now, would also consider
EDIT: sorry, first time for some reason I thought you wanted in person and there aren't many choices right now. Some more questions u/helpmegetrichpls, how much time do do you have? will you be full-time or part-time? What is your starting point? Are you coding already and trying to improve, or are you learning how to code?
Hi all, I've gotten a lot of DMs about my comments asking for more advice. I work with a lot of bootcamp grads a bit down the road in their journeys to achieve roles at the top companies including Google. I probably don't have as many messages as Mike has thought ;) but I'll share some thoughts on here.
1. Google is one of the top companies in the world and has one of the hardest hiring processes and highest bars for data structures and algorithms. This post isn't about a special program for bootcamp grads. This is an opportunity to connect with a recruiter who is supporting the "Early Career" (a.k.a. "New Grad") L3 pipeline. The bar hasn't changed and remains very high.
2. The interview process is the normal L3/Early Career process. You'll do 1 technical screen covering 1-2 medium to hard data structures and algorithms problems, not much talking. Sometimes you'll do a second one if th…
I don't want to give specifics for privacy but several Formation Fellows have Google L3 offers with first year TC over $200K (most people have 1-3 years work experience already). You can see a good breakdown here of many other offers: [https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google&track=Software%20Engineer](https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google&track=Software%20Engineer)
Straight from a bootcamp with no experience, you'll be on the lowest end of the spectrum, unless you have competing offers to negotiate with.
Also to clarify for Codemsith grads (Codesmith advertises that it prepares you for mid-level and senior jobs) you will not be considered for mid-level (L4) and senior (L5) jobs at Google out of Codesmith with no prior work experience regardless of your interview performance. You can take a shot at early career (L3).
(Again, do not work at Google, making these statements from extensive industry experience and extensive experience supporting people whose dream company is Google)
Disclosure: I'm co-founder of [Formation.dev](https://Formation.dev), and we've worked with a few people in similar buckets - it's not our most common case of Fellow, but you can look into it and see if it's a good fit on your own. We have a high bar for entry skills, particular with data structures and algorithms, and people's goals are to get top tier jobs (like truly top/FAANG-tier companies), rather than any job. We are like a personal trainer, so there's no fixed length, but I would ball park 6 months to get a job.
Another bootcamp could be an option is if you are really rusty and a lot hasn't stuck from 3 years ago.
Finally, you can try doing some serious project work, like Hack4LA (volunteering) and see if that helps go somewhere.
My hunch is you would benefit from some help or some structure, and also with resume and job hunting etc...
100%! Not that you have a 100% chance, but you can absolutely get a decent job with just a coding bootcamp. The top bootcamps typically need you to qualify by having some minimal coding skills first.
The differences I've observed are more in attitude and perspective comparing the top CS students (MIT, Stanford, CMU, Berkeley, etc...) and the top bootcamps (Codesmith, Hack Reactor, etc...):
CS DEGREE: Has dedicated 4+ years to programming and have a longer term point of view. They are thinking 10 years down the road - pre-FAANG, post-FAANG, a lot want to start companies, a lot are looking beyond FAANG to the next best things. They are typically super passionate about the underlying technologies and have the time to have gone on tangents pursuing random things. Likely has done 3-4 internships already before graduating.
BOOTCAMP: People want a job and prioritize making themselves look as…
The Codesmith tech talks they arrange for each student with "Single Sprout" are copy / paste. I watched 5 videos, all of the people plagiarized from sources and read them word for word or with minimal changes without properly sourcing them. I just googled 10 or so sentences and found the original posts where sentences and paragraphs were pulled word for word. If a college student was caught doing that they could be suspended or expelled.
Don't get me wrong, as people will attest, I often recommend looking into Codesmith as a strong option in DMs. This is just a tiny portion of the process to check off a box on your resume.
I don't want to call anyone out specifically but you can reproduce by watching some Codesmith Single Sprout tech talks, and google sentences here and there.
u/SlowestTriathlete do you know anything more about this? I might be completely wrong, just something I noti…
RE: paying for content - this is a tangent and not CS prep specific. You can get great Udemy courses for very cheap (e.g. Colt Steele). You can get a lot for free even on Youtube. Springboard licenses content from other people for example and it's the same content you can get elsewhere. Nucamp is another example of a program that is very affordable, relies heavily on somewhat generic content, and the reason you are paying four figures is for access to instructors to help you and give you feedback. People pay to have accountability and to have instructors give you feedback and answer questions and my understanding is think that's the goal of CS Prep (and there is a lot of problem solving and feedback), but generally I advise people to never spend more than \~$100 for one-way fixed curriculum content.
1. Yes for that specific person, without knowing their skill level, they should look into Formation. If their skills are at our bar, it would be a better choice than a bootcamp. For reference, the comment thread: [https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/viw3bd/switching\_from\_civil\_engineering\_to\_swe/idhm08u/?context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/viw3bd/switching_from_civil_engineering_to_swe/idhm08u/?context=3)
2. 80K is the increase in total compensation over people's previous job engineering, not the compensation itself (and we exclude people who don't have a previous job from the calculation as it would be very unfair). I've been trying to crunch more recent numbers and my rough calculations for median base salary is $138K for salaries submitted (not job start dates but when people submitted a form with the info) Sept 30th 2021 to May 29th, 2022 (…
80K is the average INCREASE in compensation for people that had jobs prior. Not the average compensation.
I think that's kind of proving the point, we are not competing with them and there's nothing to be put to rest. A bunch of people have messaged me here about bootcamps and I've recommended they go to Codesmith given their situation, it's not either or. Others have messaged me about Formation. No one has said "I'm choosing between Codesmith and Formation"
Again, people typically talk to us about Outco, Interview Kickstart, Scalar, Exponent, and Pathrise - some of whom don't have pricing on their websites, let alone outcomes, but have had thousands and thousands of engineers go through their programs nonetheless. We're playing different games here and I'm sorry if my involvement in this subreddit is causing this confusion.
This is the best I got for raw outcomes: last 50 offers acce…
RE: career change. How much experience do you have already coding? We have a civil engineer at Formation.dev right now with a similar background but who has been self studying for some time now and crushing it. It could be a good path to consider if you are already at our bar and I can ask them if they would talk to you to give you advice. If you already have your plans set then ignore me and keep going.
RE: job market. I can comment on what we've seen at Formation. We have seen zero offers rescinded or layoffs. We have seen a very small number (under 10) of cancelled interviews (specifically at the headline companies that have rescinded offers/hiring freezes). On the other hand we've seen a lot of companies aggressively hiring and compensation has been increasing. If anything we've seen a pickup in hiring. We've had more people got to Google, Amazon, Microsoft than ever.... 15 out of t…
I'm very familiar with this process in the United States at least. It's called "team matching".
So if you do well on the onsite, the recruiter will send your packet to the hiring committee review. If that committee "recommends hiring", you passed the interviews! You will go into a big pool of people who passed to get matched with teams and the recruiter can also help you match.
During team match, the goal is for a team to see if you are a good fit for their needs and then if they want you, you will get an offer officially with numbers shortly after.
This process will vary depending on you and the teams. An earlier career candidate might have an easy time because the teams they are marching with are looking for someone junior who seems good to work with.
If you are very senior, the team might be more selective about who will join because you will be a leader with more influence and…
Adding this for future reference as well to show how drastically different we are. Codesmith posted a blog announcing their CIRR results that explains the job hunt differences quite well
The TLDR: this reinforces how Codesmith is a bootcamp program to teach people using structured lectures and curriculum and Formation is a program to give you unique "personal trainer"-like development and mentoring.
THIS IS AN ENTIRE QUOTE FROM SOURCE BELOW WITH INLINE COMMENTS IN BOLD MARKED "FORMATION" TO HIGHLIGHT DIFFERENCES
During Codesmith’s **Hiring Program**, you can expect:
* Tailored Resume Guidance and Feedback
* Residents attend lectures covering resume best practices and are pushed to craft their experiences in a way that is both technically sound and authentic to them. Residents receive three revisions with specific feedback from an engineering fellow to ensure the content and quali…
I’m actually not from the USA either originally and visa scenarios are very personal and very complex. So we are not equipped to help people navigate them right now. We focus on the training and mentoring being extremely effective as the priority. In the future we hope to have more resources to dedicate to visa support.
Apologies if this sounds like product placement but you should consider Formation.dev to see if it’s a good fit or not. You may or may not need it but we have worked with a couple of people in this bucket (one is on our formation.dev/network page in the top row) and had very strong results. Again, not meant to be salespitch, check it out on your own and do your research but you should know all your options. Some other programs that exist to help get interview ready are Outco and Interview Kickstart. They all cost about the same and Outco and Interview Kickstart have fairly similar fixed training models. At Formation, we work with you full force for however long it takes to get a top tier job and your training will adapt personally to you week to week to efficiently get you there, but it’s fairly intense (10 to 20 hours a week minimum up to full time 40 hours).
Companies have nothing to do with ISAs so I would be curious to know what’a really the problem. At Formation, we have ISAs for a different purpose - we aren’t a bootcamp, but we train and mentor people (many who went to bootcamps and are now working at their first job) until they get a new job and then they start paying back their ISA. Because we keep working with people until they get that job, no matter how long it takes, everyone has been happy with this model and not once have people been turned away from jobs because of this. People are going to Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Dropbox, Figma, and dozens more and not once has an ISA come up.
So I have some follow up questions:
1. Why is this even coming up in conversation, no one should know or care about how the person paid for their program?
2. Perhaps the person’s resume hides that they went to a bootcamp? and it’s the r…
Do you have any experience already? I agree with someone else below, reading about things will barely help you here as this interview is testing for your real world experience.
I highly recommend reading this to get a better sense of what these interviews are all about: https://formation.dev/blog/how-to-prepare-for-a-system-design-interview-and-pass-it/
I have a lot of thought on them and have been following for a while. They have audited outcomes that are really not great (something around 50% of people who start get a job within 6 months of graduating and the median salary is quite low compared to the national averages for engineers).
So this is a bit of secret but they use to have this webpage where they listed all of their new grads who were available to hire. I was monitoring that page month to month and something in the low dozens out of many hundreds were hired every month. Their CEOs tweets make it seem like a lot more people are graduating and getting top tier jobs.
I have a minor beef with them personally. One of their alumni came to Formation 2 years and 2 jobs after leaving Bloomtech. We helped them very briefly to interview and negotiate their top tier offer and then Bloomtech shouted out this offer as a success case for…
Hi Ilias, we currently support people in United States and a small number in Canada.
To be transparent, there are two challenges:
1. We work with people as long as it takes to get a really really good job so the job market in your country has to be similar to the USA so we can expect you to get that job in a reasonable amount of time. Similarly, we can’t typically support deferring based on your income (you can pay upfront) because the salaries have to be similar to here for the economics to work. If you are somewhere with a similar market to the USA it might be possible, otherwise we need to made some changes and offer a specially design program for specific countries. We currently don’t offer immigration or visa support if your plans are to move to the United States for a job. If you are authorized to work in the USA already, than this wouldn’t be a problem even if you are currently…
Ah my favorite topic haha. So one resource is CIRR. It's a business group started by bootcamps to develop standards for reporting audited outcomes that they all agree with.
Unfortunately it's down to only 5 bootcamps reporting in the recent results and has been on the decline each half. Quite frankly, the results other than Codesmith are not great so people have little incentive to keep publishing results as they will probably be used against the bootcamp.
HackReactor and BloomTech publish their own audited reports as well, but just following their own metrics rather than CIRRs.
I have a strong stance on metrics and don't love any of the above reports as they focus on medians and averages.
You want to know what someone with a similar background felt about the program. These numbers get juiced up by people with CS degrees and experience attending and getting high outcomes.
I would…
Formation doesn't have public any "reports". We don't aggregate a lot of numbers either internally. We are focused on meeting or exceeding each person's individual goal. I'm more than happy to try to answer questions you might have.
Some notes about why. The summary is that since we aren't bootcamp, course, or anything like that, it's very nuanced to summarize numbers and we would need to invest a lot of time and energy in figuring things out:
1. Bootcamps have a consistent A starting point and a report is a way to measure how well they develop people from starting point A. Formation is focused on someones goals, so our outcomes are relative to that. For example have Senior Microsoft engineers who want to go to top tier smaller companies. We have new grads who want to go to FAANG. We have self taught people looking for apprenticeship. Our most common Fellow will have 1-3 years of exper…
Hi, what are your job goals for your first job?
You can self teach backend. You can't really self teach scaling backends but you can make solid backend progress on your own.
I've worked with people who are self-taught/cheap courses (at Formation.dev, which is paid "personal training" and quite expensive, but not a bootcamp or course) and they have gotten top tier FAANG-level jobs with zero experience. If you have the raw skills and a strong alignment to the right company, then the right referral to the right person can get you in the door. It's extremely personal and nuanced but it's worked and I've seen it happen. Here's one of the best cases who is public on our website: [https://www.linkedin.com/in/mpay/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/mpay/) (this is a full blown SWE role and not a contractor or adjacent non-SWE role). Some of these people have had stronger outcomes than people who we…
It depends on what you need to work on. We have hundreds of small group session types, thousands of tasks, hundreds of assessments and assignments, and you do what you need to do :). We bundle them up into these different "challenges" so you work on one (or sometimes two or three) larger area(s) of stuff at a time.
In terms of practical work, we forked a production codebase (in the tens of thousands of lines of code) and people work on bugs and tasks in there, get mocks, code reviews from mentors and our team, follow an engineering process that simulate real work. You might do 20 to 40 of these tasks and bugs if you really need more experience.
People will put this on their resume as project work if they are lacking, but any kind of real work experience (or volunteer experience) will be better on a resume. The goal of it is not a big shiny project to show off, but to develop your engin…
My understanding is that there was a small cohort that was their "test" cohort for remote but that was back in 2020. I saw a video they did possibly on Course Report (I have YouTube running in the background almost all the time and consume a ton of stuff) where they discussed this test period.
But this is for people that started it H12021 which presumably would be a much larger number of people. Someone on good authority said cohorts have about 35 peopleso 25 is an odd number.
Would love someone that knows the answer to come in. Maybe more people dropped out and were fully refunded to be nice during COVID and we're excluded? Maybe the program indeed had only one or tiny cohorts and what not at capacity? I have no idea, but remote programs in general have much lower engagement and higher dropout rates in industry in general.
Does anyone know anything?
What do you mean by signing up for "hacker rank?" Are you talking about the platform for online tests. At Formation we send out thousands and thousands of CodeSignals and HackerRanks assessments we have developed, and there's nothing wrong with signing up and doing their practice materials, it's a very common legitimate service.
You can use their examples to practice and learn for free! They cover all kinds of topics.
I chatted with someone about System Design and can use that as an example, please CORRECT ME IF THIS HAS CHANGED AND WILL EDIT IT
​
**Codesmith's System Design**
* 1 week long, fixed classes
* 2 hour lecture from Codesmith staff (not necessarily with industry experience) (entire cohort, 35 people)
* 3 hour working sessions working through problems and materials (unknown size)
* reading materials
**Formation System Design**
* Variable length until you passing system design mock interviews w/ senior/staff/principal level engineers (typically 4 to 6 weeks)
* Specific topics for the following depending on what you need to work on from the previous week, collecting feedback for all for next week:
* 1-2 weekly 1 hour workouts with a senior industry engineer working through a specific problem with 3-5 other Fellows
* 1 weekly 1 hour session reviewing a topic in more depth with…
I do think down the road we will compete head on but still disagree we do now. Our technology right now works for taking a range of A to a range of B outcomes in C time (which is the variable). We have a few hundred different micro sessions, and a few thousands different tasks, a few hundred assessments, a few dozens types of mock interviews. And every week we pull out a set of things that fit your schedule that you need to work on to improve that week. This is all the stuff to get from "1-3 years industry experience at decent company" to high performance top tier company. But if we expand this library of tasks and sessions we can really support a much wider range of transitions.
I'm happy to go over more details about what we do specifically or maybe chat with Chris G or another person you can find that went through the full gamut.
Maybe on paper these words sound similar but our bar…
Codesmith just released their 2021 H1 data last night, and the percentage of people who got jobs within 3 months and 6 months improved (over already good previous numbers) and is quite good:
LA (130 people): 48% in 90 days, 85% in 180 days
NY (123 people): 51% in 90 days, 89% in 180 days
Remote PT (25 people): 71% in 90 days, 88% in 180 days.
There's some wiggle room that these are of the people who GRADUATED, which is 96+% so doesn't impact much right. And some people stopped reporting their data after 90 days, again very small number (0 to 7% stopped reporting after 90 days depending on the program).
Anyways, yeah you should try to find how long it took people with a similar background to yourself to get a job so giving a bit more info about your background could help others chime in anecdotally.
Thanks for sharing. Yeah we lose a lot of context on Reddit and my writing might come across more mean than it's meant. I love that Codemsith has helped so many people and had a major impact on people's lives. We need way more people working to make tech a better place. Thanks for writing this out and I'll be more cognizant of this in the future.
100% compared to other bootcamps, there are so many bad apples out there that are genuinely not great intentioned. Sophie, the founder of Formation was a mentor at different programs and wanted to do better, which is why she started Buildschool all by herself - a free iOS bootcamp. That evolved into Formation when I joined on and we realized we needed to raise funding to hire top tier engineers in the industry (mostly from Facebook, so we can debate that haha) to help scale out truly one-of-a-kind approach to training. I think we need more peop…
Hi, I appreciate the non-crazy tone, but I have some corrections and other responses:
1. I'm not the CEO of Formation. Sophie is the founder and CEO and the true driver of the mission. I'm here because I have a personal interest in helping people early in their careers after doing so for many years and seeing what impact it can have on people.
2. Formation is not a bootcamp no matter how you frame it. We relentlessly provide technical training until you get a new job you are happy with, no matter how long it takes, I think the average is around 6 months (not sure). We refuse to work with people looking for a quick bootcamp to whip them into shape for an upcoming interview, for example.
3. Codesmith is not our competition. I lose sleep over Interview Kickstart, Outco, Pathrise, Scalar, Exponent, etc... and not about Codesmith.
4. The day to day is nothing like a bootcamp or any kind of f…
You have a throwaway account that's 2 months old with 10 comments, 6 of which are on this thread.
This is either a giant troll or you are grossly misinformed about the industry.
We have an assessment process to help figure out people's starting point at Formation to get the ball rolling. Our team has more experience than anyone else with this stuff and obviously we don't know everything, but every team member is passionate about sharing their experience with people from non traditional backgrounds to help them get top tier jobs and achieve their goals. Like these are some highlights of our full time team:
\- 3 engineers who have not only conducted countless interviewers but trained hundreds of interviewers at Facebook
\- 3 principal level engineers from Facebook, one of whom who reported directly to the CTO.
\- 1 staff level Nextdoor engineer, who did extensive interviewing and cr…
This is kind of proving my point. All of the 10+ year experience people we work with are talking to recruiters BEFORE starting Formation and they need help navigating the market and making sure they get the best job for them out of all the options.
So a Codesmith alumni who gets contacted days after graduation could be a great person to then go to Formation to talk to people with years and years of FAANG industry experience to help them make the next best steps.
Finnigan, I'm sorry but you don't understand whatsoever what Formation does and if you look into it, I'm happy to answer questions rather than respond do your factually incorrect statements.
Our purpose is not to get people mid or senior level jobs at FAANG but to help people with their own career goals. We have helped people go from FAANG -> startup. One person from Agency -> X and at the exact same time time someone went from X -> FAANG. One person's goal might be another person's starting point.
We're playing different games here.
Hi Crafts :D Thanks for adding the info again, appreciate civil conversations haha.
I totally agree with understanding who is posting information and understanding where they are coming from. Reddit is a tough place because everyone is anonymous (and it's easy to attack people anonymously) and I insist on using my real identity, have an open mind, stand behind my statements, and engage in good discussion.
Now for the expected reply hahaha:
I disagree about competing with Codesmith. If someone at Codesmith told you this it means they are probably concerned about us competing with them but not the other way around. I don't think I've interacting with anyone who said "I'm choosing between Formation and Codesmith", whereas I've interacted with many people who have done Formation AFTER Codesmith (either right after or a few years later), or who wanted to talk about if it was the right thi…
We have a lot of people go to Formation right AFTER going to Codesmith, not INSTEAD of. People who WORK at Codesmith come to Formation. For the large majority of people starting Codesmith, they do not qualify for Formation or meet the bar. AFTER Codesmith, most people are right at the middle or low-middle bar for our full program track. I love working with Codesmith alumni!
No throwaway accounts people, have a real discussion without baseless angry accusations!
‼️ CIRR is audited but it's far from unbiased. The board of directors and founders are all affiliated with bootcamps. It's not a 501 3c non profit because that's a conflict of interest. It's registered as a "business league/lobbying organization". Now I'm super middle of the road person, and don't judge those groups, but lobbying groups are not unbiased.
I wrote a long post about Formation's data will paste here because believe it or not I spend most of my time helping Fellows and making Formation great. **We are not a school or bootcamp. We compete with things like Pathrise, Interview Kickstart, and Outco.** Talk to any current Fellow or alumni. We are not perfect, but care about every single outcome, we have by far the most experienced team, we work with people with full technical training as long as it takes to get there, and it works really well.
We are a mission driven organizatio…
I agree that if the people perform well, which they are, then you could argue that it doesn't matter.
At Formation, before we hired dedicated ex-FB recruiters, I used to interview every Fellow. We handful of Codemith people, the ones with industry experience didn't even talk about it because they already had a job, and the ones that did not have industry experience were quite covering up the fact that it was open source but not lying, and it very quickly unraveled that it was not real work experience. We hired a Codemith alumni went through our own program so it's really not meant to be a criticism of the program, so I don't mean that it necessarily reflected poorly either.
Thanks additional info about Fellow Program, that clarified a lot and much appreciated.
Yeah by CIRR being on life support, absolutely not a criticism of Codesmith in any way, it actually could free them to publish more information faster! Their results are great, I'm sure they should want this to be published sooner!
Oh sorry I've been talking about this elsewhere over time.
SUMMARY: I audited over 200 Codesmith alumni, documenting LinkedIn and GitHub commits, and noting the number of years of "work experience" as a "software engineer" that was claimed at the open source groups projects Codesmith runs, like Reactime and Spearmint. I have a large spreadsheet, but the majority of people claimed 6 to 18 months of "work experience" but commited 2-6 commits over 1-3 weeks on the projects (my understanding is this project is a 6 week unit in the course). The most extreme being someone that claimed 6 months of work experience and their only commits to the project were changing an image file and updating a README. In addition, these projects have no activity outside of Codesmith, no issues or feature requests from outside Codesmith, and it's not clear any of the tools or projects are used outside of Codesm…
I'm going to write up my free flow thoughts as I'm reading through it. I'll focus on Codesmith because it's the most talked about bootcamp on here and I don't have much time. 5 minute recap!!
1. CIRR is basically dead. Only four schools in the USA reported. Only one school in SF/NY reported.
2. Codesmith's numbers don't including an auditing report. I'm assuming they were audited.
3. Codesmith LA:
1. Similar graduation and placement rates
2. Solid increase in median compensation
3. They changed the buckets but it looks like a $10K increase in salaries across the board.
4. Increased number of graduates by 40 is almost 40% and maintained strong numbers, which is a good sign
4. Codesmith NY:
1. Similar number of graduates from previous report, no growth
2. Large jump in percentage placed within 6 months from 80 to 90%
3. Kept same salary buckets, easier to compare tren…
We aren't a bootcamp but we offer ISAs at Formation and reasons people can get rejected are:
1. Low credit score
2. Past loan defaults
3. Other existing ISAs, such that you will owe too high of a percentage of your income
4. Too high of a debt load
5. Other reasons: bankruptcies, educational loan problems
6. Failed identity check: wrong birthday or SSN
The program has the ability to override these criteria, but if they are selling off or financing your ISA, it won't be eligible to be financed.
So you might be able to try other bootcamps that might be willing to take a risk. To be completely honest the biggest problem with failing the above is not that they don't trust you, but that you might have creditors on your back higher up on the list and might not be able to pay the ISA back.
If your problem is something in the past that you have mostly resolved, you might be able to find a pr…
I would take it gauge your interested before spending a ton of money on a bootcamp. You can't use it to get a job after.
Completely going rogue here, unrelated analogy to the question entirely:
One of the challenges with learning programming is that the growth is exponential and once you get there, you lose perspective. It's like skiing. A black diamond seems impossible and terrifying at first. But by the time you do them, they seem fine. And those blue runs that previously looked terrifying as well are so easy you don't even break a sweat
The problem and confusion is that our words to describe things are flat. I've heard expert skiers say "oh that black diamond over there is an easy one to warm up today" or some beginner skiers say "getting down that steep blue will be the accomplishment of the day, it was so hard last time we fell constantly"
All bootcamps (including Codesmith and…