Coraline gave an amazing answer above/below as well.
People learn differently and at different paces. Bootcamps give you a fixed curriculum "firehose"-style on their accelerated schedule. So it's really not reasonable to expect yourself to absorb everything.
I also agree with Coraline that you (and anyone reading this) should expect to take some time after graduating to fill in gaps, continue projects, find your areas of passion to double down on, etc...
Launch School is one program that calls themselves the "slow way" to learn. The completely opposite of bootcamps is "mastery based learning", where you do the same topic over and over until you "master" it, and then move on, and then you finish the curriculum at your own pace. BloomTech is also moving in this direction of mastery based learning at your pace. Formation (disclosure: co-founder) isn't a bootcamp but we have a hybrid of…
I don't have a list no because it highly depends on a person, their goals, and what type of day to day learning works for them.
I wouldn't give a green light to even the best bootcamps for some people.
In fact, a bootcamp like Codesmith with a super high bar, is actually a very BAD CHOICE for someone who is genuinely not at the bar. If you aren't at the bar, you shouldn't be trying to get in at all costs, because it just won't work.
Pair programming is key. The interview is basically live coding with someone and you have no idea how different things feel when coding with other people hovering around. On the job for real, you don't often do live coding like this, but doing it forces you to confront topics you THINK you understand but you don't actually understand in a way that you can explain to other people haha.,
Why do you think people fail to get in?
Also for that question, if they expect you to pass in an index to an array recursively that doesn't show a strong understanding of recursion and how it would be used to solve complex problems in the future, like DP. So I would barely call that testing recursion. That is just "can you write a for loop recursively".
I hope they properly teach recursion in Codesmith afterwards and hwo to use it to solve complex problems. At Formation, recursion alone is something most people spend two to four or more weeks of intense practice to truly understanding and weild as a powerful tool to solve problems with.
There are a group of people saying that recursion and OOP are.now always tested to get in. We work with Codesmith alumni who still need recursion practice after graduating so that seems like a high bar to me.
If anyone has info on the consistency of the bar, please comment. Does everyone get the same questions/topics?
I can give you the Formation analogy now haha. We put you in the shallow end without floaties (we don't lecture) and stand behind you and continuously push you towards the deep end. How hard we push you keeps changing depending on how much you push back each step of the way and then eventually you are in the deep end all alone. Each person has a completely unique pushing needs/pattern.
I don't know. So the underlying math and practice data sets can be for the right people, but it's hard to simulate the sheer amounts of data people have at top companies. But the way Codemsith students exaggerate a 6 week OSP project into legit work experience, if they are banking on doing the same thing and turning a 6 week project using a public data set into a work like experience well see how it works. I think it's easier to fake it with full stack engineering where there are ten of thousands of stacks people work on. You can't fake PHD level math.
I think there is a lot of value in this model for people that are already strong to make them better, so it's not a waste for these people but it might limit the ultimate breadth of skill levels of people Codesmith can support long term, which might be totally fine. They are expanding to machine learning so if they can just cherry pick the best people in more and more disciplines that can scale too... it just changes the goal from "I want to get into Codemith so they can develop my skills to be successful" to "I want to get into Codemith because it validates I have the traits needed to be successful based on similar people". Both can work.
Surprisingly for all I know about Codesmith, I don't know much about the actual lecture contents... but this sounds really bad. It sounds like it relies on the raw abilities of the people both technically and communication wise with peers to learn.
If someone was really far behind, even with 1-1 peer time via a fellow, how could they possibly catch up with this model?
Sure, so people are reporting the entrance bar getting more selective. For example, basic recursion is required, and OOP is required.
So there are a fixed number of slots, and presumably more applicants than can fit, so they are choosing stronger and stronger applicants.
They have added an in person cohort and have 4 cohorts now on a 7 week cycle. So they have been adding capacity, but presumably not as fast to server everyone.
So what this means is the incoming people will be more experienced and stronger than in the past, and will get better outcomes - both speed to outcome and compensation.
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.
I agree that I should be more precise and appreciate the pushback and I did a deeper dive. A larger problem is most big tech do not allow you to have another W2 job in the tech field because their contracts cover all your IP created in the tech space and the OTHER W2 job usually has a similar contract and hence the conflict.
Agree on 52 Fellows, 3 months W-2 @ $1K per week.
17 prep instructors who have full time jobs elsewhere (I don't know the compensation, it's not gift cards but I don't what it is and I would somewhat expect it to be something hourly yeah, I shouldn't bucket them into the 50K a year - I just don't know but I didn't think it was equivalent to the full time instructors and have ZERO basis to believe it's lower, just guess)
15 engineering mentors who have full time jobs elsewhere (these are the people who I thought were not paid W-2 but paid with gift cards - or equiv…
I'm including alumni who do part time instruction in there too, and alumni who do mock interviews for free or gift cards (that number might be much higher actually)
Going off the about page. But there are also several people on LinkedIn who claim to work at Codesmith not on the about page so no idea how large this number is.
I think it's very unlikely they will sell. They have a good thing going and are printing money right now because it's 100% upfront. They have about 80 former students on staff who are paid like 50K a year or with gift cards and have scaled that very well.
I think the only risk is if they scale too large or too broad.
They benefit from being very selective and their weaker students don't have as much success. So they will either have a cap on how many people meet their bar, or they will have to invest in training people beforehand to get them to the bar.
I also think it's a risk that someone catches on to the exaggerated work experience issue. I haven't talked to one non Codesmith industry person who thinks that's ok and if they get large enough and people catch on it may not work anymore. I know this is controversial.
They are experimenting with a machine learning cohort and we'll se…
CIRR's "percentage employed in 180 days" is accepted offers / graduated, correct. And is 100% misleading not accounting for people who don't graduate.
As I said above, "Percentage of job obtainers who reported salaries" also lets you remove people from the salary counts, which still including them as placed. Why would this happen? I'm not accusing Codesmith of this, but Tech Elevator is 100% and I don't know why Codesmith is missing salaries for people counted as placements. My theory is people who ghost but can be confirmed as employed from trustworthy data.
Ah yes, the CIRR ambiguity and you have to do some math on your own.
So the only hard number is "Number of graduates included in the report: 91"
The rest of the numbers are all percentages and honestly the numerators and denominators aren't specified super clearly in the reports. Even the CIRR spec isn't 100% clear.
"Graduates included in report" in their worksheet is based on a column "Included in placement data?" which is an AND formula of 1. intended to get new job within 3 days of starting program and 2. has work authorization 3. "effective" graduation date was within the six months window of the report. So I'm interpreting that this actually means someone graduating late, might be included in a later report.
So my formulas above are estimating when someone signs a contract what percentage graduated on time and then getting a job within the expected 180 days. Basically trying to…
It means that a lower percentage of people were placed within 180 days compared to last half. It's more reflective of the job market I think than Codesmith because it's not that much different.
What it does mean is the salaries are of the people getting placed only. So higher salaries across a smaller number of people.
NY H12021: 94.7% graduation -> 89.4% placed in 180 days = 84.6% people starting getting placed
NY H22021: 92.8% graduation -> 83.6% placed in 180 days = 77.5% people starting getting placed
LA H12021: 94.8% graduation -> 85.2% placed in 180 days = 80.8% people starting getting placed
LA H22021: 91.9% graduation -> 80.9% placed in 180 days = 74.3% people starting getting placed
More CIRR H2 2021 results out! Codesmith included - with a lot to unpack! Overall lower placement rates and much higher salaries of those placed, and a few more fun things!
Where to begin, so much interesting stuff in the part 2 CIRR results, focusing on Codesmith as it's the most interesting to this subreddit.
Overall interesting notes (incomplete but tried to select a few things I found interesting):
* By far the most interesting thing in East Coast (EC, formerly NY), salary growths were super large. Median is up to a WHOPPING $140K but more interestingly in H1: 18% of people had salary $140K+ and now \~52% of East Coast grads made $140K+, that's a massive shift! And similar to FTRI there is a dip to almost zero in $150 to $160K with \~20% in the $140K to $150K bucket and \~20% in the $160K+ bucket. So my hypothesis on this adding in my industry knowledge is that \~10 to 20 people g…
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…
Codesmith is somewhat split on outcomes. There's one contingent of engineers who have experience, don't really need the curriculum and benefit from mentoring others, the accountability, and the network. This group is aiming for top tier jobs. I believe this represents about the under 40% of people who make salaries over $130K.
Then there is another contingent who end up making under $110K which is about 20% plus I would include the people who don't get jobs in 6 months (another 10%) and then the people who don't graduate (5%) (all this based on 2021 CIRR reports). I'm making a BIG ASSUMPTION that the people who don't graduate and don't get jobs are on the less experienced side but I'm sure there are people for whom this isn't the case.
Anyways, that means APPROXIMATELY BASED ON CIRR 35% of people who are weaker or have no experience get jobs under $110K or no jobs within 6 months of g…
These are our last \~30 offers accepted in order (excluded declined offers obviously): Square, Flatiron Health, Amazon, Amazon, Lockheed Martin, WePay, Amazon, Visa, Doordash, Virgin Orbit, <top startup redacted>, UIPath, American Express, <mid size not top tier redacted> Amazon, Square, <top startup redacted>, Amazon, American Express, Zapier, Edelman, Klaviyo, <top startup redacted>, Dialexa, Amazon, Google, Plaid, Sense, <not top tier startup redacted>, <top startup redacted>, Figma, Google.
I think this list demonstrates both consistent top tier placements, as well as the breadth of placements on an individual basis. We still don't have more salary data to give because we don't want to give anything out that we feel doesn't communicate what we're doing.
As stated before, the methodology for the data is in the fine print of that dialog on the website and it's very clear how we compu…
Yeah I totally think the percentages are very clear and the 20% under $110K and 20% over $140K is a lot more interesting than the median in the middle but I meet a lot of people who almost always say "but Codesmith grads make $125K" and the data, which is very different from all other programs that report, looks more to me like people with experience have made $140K+ (which is actually market rate a mid-tier companies for people with experience) and people with no experience tend to make under $110K. Most people in this Reddit have no experience, but they believe they will make $125K. I wish they had data for experienced and non-experienced people but that's not part of CIRR.
You are straight up wrong about CIRR. The median salaries are of people who reported salaries and got jobs only and exclude everyone else. So drop off 1 is the graduation percentage. People who don't graduate are not included in the median salary calculation. Then there's people that don't get jobs. They are not included in the median salary calculation. And then outside sources can be used to confirm employment for percentage employed but without a salary to include the median calculation. You said you do a lot of research so read the CIRR and it's very clear in the Excel worksheets they provide... complete with examples showing exactly this
This is exactly what I'm talking about how CIRR has built in vagueness to make this happen and help paint programs in the best light.
I tried to give some reasons above but I don't even like what we have now on the site, because the outcomes vary so so so much by goal and we have to very carefully decide which numbers best represent what we do - which we haven't done yet - so we encourage people to talk to whatever random Formation person they can find with similar backgrounds and chat with them. Like we literally have had 10+ offers over $300K TC in October for whom that is the market rate and we help the people choose between offers. The uniqueness of those situations for those people are not captured in an average salary metric because and we want people to know they are getting a bespoke experience aimed at helping the accomplish their goals.
I've said this before but some of Codesmith's alumni get stock and bonuses as well, excluded from CIRR, and CIRR does not paint an accurate picture of their outcomes as well.…
You’re asking to compare people that get jobs within 90 days of starting so you can compare it with people who get jobs within 90 days of FINISHING. Makes no sense. You are asking to compare people that do 50 hours a week to 10 hours a week. Makes no sense. You are asking to compare people with a goal of getting a job in 8 months with those who want one ASAP. Not everyone wants a job ASAP at Formation. People often get several offers and keep training until they get one they like. All of this makes adds to why it makes no sense to give those CIRR numbers.
I agree with your ask though. I would love to provide better data that can help people estimate how long it might take to get a job given their unique circumstances across over 5 dimensions. So far it hasn’t been a big ask and people talk to current Fellows to get an idea of how it works. Quite frankly we are doing ourselves a disserv…
I keep saying the same things but everyone comes in at different skills. We have someone with literally zero experience who got a job af Amazon entry level and a staff engineer with 6 years of experience. Aggregate times don’t make sense. They make sense if everyone is starting at the same point like a bootcamp or school. They take you from A to the best B possible. We take you based on your B goal and if we think we can get you there from wherever your A is. It’s seriously nothing like a bootcamp or anything remotely similar.
Im here to give people advice because I work with so many past bootcamp grads and see a lot of misunderstandings. I’m sorry if my involvement here is confusing but I would ask you try not to read into it.
Again, not a school, no graduates, no end of program, no curriculum and we can’t be compared to a bootcamp head to head. All good questions to ask and also exactly why we can’t possibly report CIRR like metrics.
I think you have a big misunderstanding about what Formation is and it might be helpful to research more instead of trying to make us for your mold for what you think we are.
I feel personally attacked because I repeatedly tell you we don't have a school and we are running something different, and you repeatedly call Formation a school or a bootcamp and repeatedly ask for data the schools and bootcamps offer. You seem so fixed on the fact that you believe we are a school and I've offered at least once to do a call with you to explain what we are. Yet you keep saying it and the I have to keep correcting it.
Oh so all your projects are under one section? Like a single top level item “Open Source” with your OSP and your all projects all as equal sub bullets? That’s my recommendation as well yeah. Very curious to see why the majority of resumes end up with OSP as a separate item! Let me know if you get any insight why.
Always appreciate good discussion Ben and Triathlete!
So this might sound very subtle. So assume that no one will read the bullet points and the key trick is having the following
OSP:
-bullets
Open Source Projects:
1. solo
2. refine
3. enhance
By putting your other projects under a single "open source" bucket it tricks someone into thinking the OSP is likely work experience (even if it says open source somewhere.... people don't read it)
Yeah actually I do. The world is very large. These companies are very large. People see hundred and hundreds of resumes.
1. Several times a week people on my team mislabel Codesmith alumni as industry experienced based on their LinkedIns. Recruiters spend seconds looking at your resume and they don't read bullet point 15 that says "product incubated under oslabs" and when they do, they aren't pondering what that is and if it's open source
2. I asked some people the other day about this with some examples, industry experienced people and two said expletive laced sentences about this practice.
You can blame it on the recruiters or the companies but things are the way they are because the vast majority of people have integrity in their resumes and don't do this and companies don't build teams of recruiters who are trained and focused only on this tiny edge case.
The problem here is tha…
So there is such a size-able Codesmith contingent at Capital One, they have their own Slack channel and they can refer people to a variety of teams.
Capital One has a variety of positions, but the one most people are getting is "Software Eng - Senior Associate" which pays around $150K a year base salary and total comp. A FAANG entry level is about $200K+ total comp based on performance for comparison.
Reasons how this works.
1. They only have one level lower than this that is very entry level "Associate Software Eng" and it's meant for new grads and kind of like a mini internship. So anyone with any experience would be considered for "senior associate"+.
2. Some of these people at Codesmith have experience already and don't do anything special to be considered.
3. Some of these people at Codesmith list their group projects as "work experience" and mislead the company into thinking t…
Yeah it has solid cash compensation too, I think it's a great first job for someone with no experience.
Oh one followup: "Senior Associate" there is like "Early Career L3" at Google. and "Master Engineer" or "Lead Engineer" is what Google calls Senior Engineer... just showing the level names being meaningless as it's a good example of that.
From my knowledge working with a wide variety of Codesmith alumni I disagree that "they don't teach anything". I see two buckets of people: first are the 2/3 of people with zero experience who self taught enough to get in, and they learn a tremendous amount of practical skills; second are the 1/3 of people with experience who do say things along those lines, and it's likely true because Codesmith's is a bootcamp aimed at helping people with no to little experience. The 1/3 of experienced people probably shouldn't go to Codesmith to learn skills but the 2/3 of not experienced people do find it incredibly valuable.
At Formation (disclosure: co-founder, not a bootcamp, work with experienced engineers) we have seen a slightly increased demand from bootcamp grads who can't find jobs, and our outcomes remain very strong, but we are targeting top tier companies and it's not for everyone. There…
Oh yeah the average time is somewhere 6ish months from starting (?). And the range is anywhere from 1 month to 12 months. I never said it's fast and depends on a lot of factors. Another major one is part time vs full time. Some people spend 50 hours a week on Formation and some 10 hours a week. People can also usually pause depending on their life. It's really drastically different from a bootcamp and much more like a personal trainer analogy.
I don't think anyone here is an idiot, no.
Remember all those sports card price magazines and pokemon card price magazines and beanie baby price magazines, that are all gone... they only survive if the underlying thing survives, and many of them have been accused of inflating the value of the cards and of the beanie babies to keep the hype going.
According to Crunchbase (I can't disclose confidential non-public info): Rithm is backed by Slow Ventures and Codesmith is backed by a serial entrepreneur, film producer, and investor Chad Troutwine.
We publish some salary data of outcomes on our website and have for a while.
Happy to try to answer these questions, they are extremely reasonable questions:
“average percentage of students that finds a job within 3-6 months of program”
\- I'm not sure what this means. Of STARTING Formation or of when? Everyone starts Formation at a different…
First, SwitchUp's "data" intake form hasn't been updated since 2020 according to [archive.org](https://archive.org) ([https://web.archive.org/web/\*/https://www.switchup.org/write-review](https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.switchup.org/write-review)) and still promises a chance to win a $500 / $100 gift card for submitting a review. Who got those and when and how do you have a chance to win them? The Additional Survey they rely on for data hasn't been updated since 2020/2021: [https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/YMTFNWK](https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/YMTFNWK). Their latest major report is from 2018: [https://www.switchup.org/rankings/coding-bootcamp-survey](https://www.switchup.org/rankings/coding-bootcamp-survey)
I never once criticized the validity of the content on these sites. I'm saying the sites themselves are biased... you mention VC funding repeatedly... both of these sites…
BloomTech is formerly Lambda School and changed names as a result of a trademark lawsuit. Their founder, Austen, is a natural marketer and grew the school way too fast. I have thoughts here but they are just opinions and not relevant. BloomTech in its current form is nothing like Lambda School so the past reviews and bad press are somewhat irrelevant.
CourseReport is a supporting member of CIRR and accepts payments from bootcamps to promote them. Switch Up makes money by referring people to specific bootcamps. Career Karma also pays fees to refer people to specific bootcamps. So all three are biased as their success depends on the bootcamp industries success and you have at their content through that lens.
CIRR is another irrelevant source nowadays because no one is in them. If a bootcamp takes part in CIRR you can trust the numbers they report to CIRR. But CIRR's most recent standard…
Formation isn’t a bootcamp with lessons and instructors. Our Fellows do 2 to 6 hours long sessions a week in groups of 3 to 6 people (or 1-1 mocks) and those are led my industry mentors who are mostly independent senior, staff, and principal engineers from top tier companies like Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, over 100 mentors likes this. The sessions are scheduled every week just for you from scratch and on specific topics you need to work on, or 1-1 mock interviews run exactly like real interviews.
Our mentors are well respected engineers and most are doing it to help with our mission of helping people from non tradition and underrepresented backgrounds level up.
Their about page has a list of all employees. All engineering fellows are former students. All the full time, senior, and lead instructors went to Codesmith and never worked in industry. All the part time instructors are former students with full time jobs. They recently hired someone outside, who worked at Coding Dojo.
Don’t make assumptions and also don’t just trust what I say. Look through the employee list and look at their LinkedIns…
I think they are generally similar yeah in that the materials are similar and they move at similar paces, and you should look at the day to day. Codesmith has a very tight community of awesome people as it's a bit smaller than HR. HR has a fantastic alumni network as well and it's much larger than Codesmith's but I feel like Codesmith alumni really "stay in the family".... just look at how many alumni come back in some capacity to teach or help out... almost every instructor at Codesmith WENT to Codesmith. People aside, Codesmith has really figured out the resume/job hunt process that works and has scaled to like 150-200 simultaneous students or so. Launch School's Capstone is in my opinion stronger but they take like 30 people at a time.
When it comes to HR vs Codesmith I often ask people's timeframes and their goals because both are solid options. Codesmith is slightly better if you…
What are you using to judge that Codesmith is the clear #1? Have you looked into smaller programs like Rithm and Launch School Capstone. Rithm has very small class sizes directly taught by seasoned instructors. Launch School Captone projects are very similarly designed but blow Codesmith OSP out of the water in terms of time spent.
Depending on what you are looking for Codesmith is likely a contender for the top choice, but curious what "consensus" you are basing that statement off of. Reddit is full of anonymous people who come and go. Codesmith currently has 50+ previous students on staff as Fellows and many more as instructors, and how do you know a bunch of "alumni" on here aren't also on payroll and leave that out?
Starting a real open source project is honestly really hard. Almost all of the biggest ones were either made by large corporations, or have employees of large corporations as the primary contributors. It's vastly different from what it looks like at first glance.
Otherwise, the people who start new projects are generally very experienced engineers and they have a reason to do so, and they are doing them under a company name.
For example Apollo, Dagster... even Material UI for React. So the Material spec is a DESIGN spec from Google. Material UI is a React library implementing that spec inside React. 1. It's a for-profit company. 2. The founding team is experience engineers.
A real open source project is in many ways HARDER than building software for a company, because you have to have clearer code architecture built from the beginning with the intention of people working on top of thi…
I don't know the scope of the project, but work on something you are already passionate about. Here are some past examples I've seen:
1. A former wine buyer for a restaurant built a cellar tracking app for restaurants
2. A former professional musician built a machine learning sheet music generator
3. A college student built an iOS game like guitar hero but novel in a few weeks having never know iOS before
Some of the projects I built when self-teaching web development:
1. An "auto-voter" website for a reality TV show competition
2. An itinerary generator for Walt Disney World that told you which rides to go to when based on your group, intensity, ride characteristics and wait times, etc...
3. An internship review website
4. An app for assisting you to draft a minor league hockey team (I'm from Canada, this was common lol)
I also think Codesmith and Launch Schools projects of making a…
Formation hasn't worked with or talked to any Launch School Capstone grads because so I can't compare. They have very small cohorts and are less frequent.
Launch Schools projects though are way more in depth than the Codesmith OSPs (anyone from Codesmith check them out and don't trust me!) but mostly because they spend a long time on them.
\-This is an example: [https://tailslide-io.github.io/#landing](https://tailslide-io.github.io/#landing)
\-Note the pages and pages of proper documentation
\-An entire GitHub company for the project with 10 repos.
\-An extremely thorough case study with pages and pages of well organized write up!
I agree with your response that people make their own resumes and each person does what they want to do. But there are many projects that don't disclose this that are brand new. The more mature a project gets, the more obvious it seems to get and I think this is the students decision, not Codesmith telling them to do it.
Out of the newest \~8 projects, these alone don't say a thing about open source affiliation to Codesmith directly (10/17/202 9:18am PST)
[https://www.linkedin.com/company/devdux-extension/](https://www.linkedin.com/company/devdux-extension/)
[https://www.linkedin.com/company/jesterapp/](https://www.linkedin.com/company/jesterapp/)
[https://www.linkedin.com/company/zurau-kafka/](https://www.linkedin.com/company/zurau-kafka/)
This one says "Product developed under tech accelerator OSLabs" which again, you can Google OSLabs, but it sounds like it's a real "product":
[…
Hi, the ISA is based on eligibility to work yeah so I don't know if/when that would change, but our mission is to have training that works for everyone just no timeframe I can give.
We don't rely on special relationships necessarily for jobs. We help you find the best path we can for companies to meet your goals. Sometimes that is referrals and sometimes we just help people apply to the right places. But we don't have specific pipelines that you automatically get placed in with specific companies. Referrals also don't guarantee interviews always, and referrals come in many shapes and sizes as well. Targeting most companies in Canada that have a presence or connections to the USA (which is a lot of the top companies) is reasonable. We are less connected with Canadian specific companies.
Yeah for all those who criticize my comments about Codesmith, I'm honest to god just capturing this sentiment from many alumni who feel this way too but don't talk about it often because of the fear of being ostracized from the Codesmith network. And if you see how some people attack my (in my intention) neutral pros and cons comments about this, you can see why those people feel that way.
I agree with most of what you are saying about how your skill and impact drive your trajectory once you get a job (and also the strong Codesmith alumni network who stay involved) - and I also add that many people can accelerate their careers by seeking outside training to increase that skill.
One key thing I disagree on, which is that the blatant exaggeration harms those with similar experience who don't exaggerate. I gave the example before, but I did a four month long entire semester college thesis project that involved hours and hours of running around Toronto doing scientifically correct user research, building a prototype, repeating, launching a product, hundreds of pages of writing. If I don't create a facade to make this look like this was a company and work experience to boost my resume, I'm being harmed by those people that are doing that for less significant projects.
At the…
Yeah so my understanding is that Phil confirms the information you provide him about the specifics of what you told the company, and doesn't openly add additional context about Codesmith and what it is etc... or correct the dates/role you claimed.
When I do reference calls for Fellows, which is rare, I always explain what Formation is and people find a lot of value in me comparing someone to the hundreds and thousands of people I've worked with across my career and they don't care at all if the person has a specific number of years of work experience.
Like if a Formation Fellow was like "Michael, I told ABC that I did this OSP for 3 months from Jan to March and I was the lead", and the person worked on this OSP for 6 weeks but I confirmed that... it would be unethical to me and I would never do that. Even if the information was correct, I would feel a duty to check the information firs…
Good question, this is what I'm talking about discussing sources and quality of information in questioning conclusions so that the overall body of knowledge gets better and better.
I can't give more info about the sources without DOXing (which as someone pointed out, is against Reddit ToS and also against my personal ethics), which limits the credibility... like an article based on off-the-record sources only.
The information provided was that at some point in time Phil did/does reference calls for people and confirms the information you provide him when giving a heads up that you need a reference call (there is a process for requesting a reference call that I also don't want to go into in case it would DOX people involved). What I don't know is if anyone checks that self-provided information's accuracy or not.
I don't have any idea whatsoever what the people say on these calls, and I…