>As the husband of a current CodeSmith student, and a lead engineer, I agree with this description of the program. The tactics can be very surface-level. A tech talk and an open source project (that is made to look like a company on LinkedIn) can make a candidate appear much more senior than they actually are, on the surface, and give someone with no production engineering experience the false impression that they have more experience than they really do. And that is the secret sauce of CodeSmith.
The problem is: Everything is taught so quickly that it's impossible for most students to absorb it, and there is very variable quality beneath the sauce. (For example, a whole semester worth of data structures in an undergraduate course is taught in 2 days during the first week of the program). There's no possible way to do that deeply and well. Furthermore, classes are taught on powerpoint…
Interesting, thanks! Yeah I do know one person who also felt Codesmith was too slow as well and joined Formation (disclosure for anyone that doesn't know, I'm a co-founder and want to be transparent) after meeting the bar and being a better fit. I suspect anyone with work experience already or who is at a "leetcode medium" level Formation is probably better depending on their goals. But I honestly thought this was a small number of people... if it's a larger number this is really useful and explain some of the negative personal comments Codesmith employees and alumni have made about me haha.
I'm glad to hear they are trying hard to support someone falling behind. Despite these personal attacks I wish we could work better together and I think they really do have good intentions and care about each student. We have some fantastic Codesmith alumni at Formation who are highly motivated and…
Hi, we typically work with people with 1 - 3 years of work experience. We aren't a bootcamp or school and don't "teach" like a school does, but rather more like having a personal trainer to get your skills into shape for interviews and everyone needs different things to work on. If you don't have any experience you'll have to have self-taught fairly strong data structures and algorithms for our training to be effective.
You can try a couple of things:
1. Study Guide for interviews. You need to be able to get through maybe the first few sections: [https://formation.dev/join/](https://formation.dev/join/)
2. Benchmark assessment. You can try this to see how "FAANG-ready" your DS&A skills are at: [https://formation.dev/join/assessment](https://formation.dev/join/assessment)
3. 21 day coding challenge. If you want a problem a day to work on and see comfortable you feel. [https://formation.…
Codesmith opened up applications today for their in-person NYC Cohort in October. I would check that out! A lot of the people here who are current or recent Codesmith alums weren't around when it was in-person... and it was much smaller back then, but a lot of the tight community and "family feeling" that it has came from that time.
Very curious to see how this rebounds. Spending 11 hours a day M-F and 6 hours S with the same people feels super weird post COVID haha. And I wonder if the staff will still want to go in for those hours, or if they will want to be remote. Like a lot of staff live all over the country now and Fellows (which is a relatively new concept) are also all over the country.
Anyways, I would check it out!
Hey, the job market is changing a bit right now yeah. For top tier big tech, Facebook is frozen but for the past few months Randstad recruiters on behalf of Google have been talking to thousands of bootcamp grads and they were really ramping up. Amazon was also very approachable for bootcamp grads and their compensation increased significantly since end of last year. Google has a temp hiring freeze to "readjust priorities" and Amazon is slowing down hiring on some teams, but still chugging along.
A degree won't matter that much if you can get your foot in the door for an interview.
A lot of Codesmith alumni get their first jobs at a smaller company, or agencies, or banks, a very wide range out of options. They have an engaged network of alumni to help refer you to different places. And even if the economy gets worse, they will be around to help until you get a job.
The only time a deg…