Timeline

This is not me \^\^. I only post from my real account with my name on it. I have access to Formation's account for ads, and I have one throwaway account to follow people who troll me and then block me (hence I can't see their posts) so I can identify patterns in their posts but I don't post from it. I've also said this many times and if you were around here for long enough you would believe me. I've seen at Facebook what happens when people jump to conclusions and yell loudly about their unsubstantiated beliefs as if they are facts and it was not great around the last elections and with COVID misinformation (which was after I left but was the same patterns). We need a world where people give sources, evidence, and actual examples so that other people can then discuss the interpretation of the sources if they disagree with the statements, instead of pointless back and forth yelling pers…

Hi! It depends a lot on your experience and two paths: One option is the career accelerator bucket of programs. Like Formation, Outco, Interview Kickstart, Pathrise. Disclosure: I'm the co-founder of Formation. At Formation, most people we work with have work experience but have some people with CS degrees (or are graduating soon) who are DS&A heavy and aiming for new grad FAANG roles, and I think it's a good fit for that. Although you should be starting to apply and interview very soon because it's the new grad hiring cycle right now! Formation doesn't have any veteran benefits so it might not be a good fit, but check out these programs. If you don't have any internships and are not aiming for a FAANG/top-tier company that is CS-fundamentals heavy then I would recommend looking at a bootcamp. A lot of bootcamps start from scratch, so veteran benefits or not, I would consider a program…

I already offered to do a call with you, and suggested you do real research about Formation before defaming me and the company. Instead you are making up things you believe to be true with no evidence whatsoever and yelling more and more loudly about them to make them feel more and more true. Just like this subreddit is a bubble around bootcamps, thought bubbles exist and no one is immune, not me, not you. What evidence do you have the user was banned from Reddit? I have a spreadsheet and documentation of 200 alumns and it's pretty clear. Whether they are told to lie or not is seperate, but the raw data is clear. I suggest you do the same exercise before refuting this point. RE: FAANG I agree there is a problem with inclusivity and that's why Formation's mission is to fix that. FAANG prioritize consistency and calibration. So they are pattern matching you against others to make sure…

Every Codesmith alumni I've worked with at Formation (15+) has been a really fantastic person. Hard working, professional, well rounded, collaborative. I've spoken to a lot of people and only a handful of loud people on here believe the mid-level senior level thing. They all understand that there is a difference between like mid-level Google vs mid-level Capital One (I think a senior at Capital One is an entry level at Google, and a "Master Engineer" is senior at Google). They are running through a playbook of "how you create an OSP project", which templates you use for Medium, website, slack posts... everyone knows the "Sponsored talks from Single Sprout" are kind of a joke, but they do what they are supposed to do because they see it work for previous alumni. Some of the loud people on here are actually just trolls or employees, there are also a small number of people with multiple…

Big thread in CSC sub with range of opinions on framing your bootcamp as "experience" on resumes. CSC is a lot angrier than this sub in tone, but I think it's good to read all sides of this. (Link in body) While this calls out Codesmith, this discussion is more broadly about people's views on what "lying" means on your resume, as well as comparing CS degrees to bootcamp grads. I think it will shed some light from people in industry on why it's so hard for some bootcamp grads to even get interviews. Just try to be patient with the tone, some people have pretty aggressive statements on both sides. [https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/y1klt4/experience/](https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/y1klt4/experience/)

I have zero affiliation with Codesmith but I know a lot about them and have done a deep dive into 200 alumni profiles. I posted a similar comment in the coding bootcamp sub reddit recently and am reposting here. My story: I worked at Facebook in California from 2009 to 2017, straight out of school from Canada all the way to E7 principal engineer in 5 years. Company grew from about 200 engineers to 10,000 engineers and I did a ton of interviews, helped grow people's careers and really saw pretty much people of every background imaginable at/interview at Facebook... so after leaving, took a break and started coaching and training (potential bias disclosure: this is paid training) to help people from non-traditional backgrounds... so I work with a lot of bootcamp grads and learned a lot about how the top bootcamps work. **Codesmith:** I do know a little more than most programs.... fun sto…

There is or was someone at Codemsith at a very high level that does background check calls to back up people's experience and a process for doing these checks. Source: someone inside Codesmith EDIT BASED ON FEEDBACK: "to back up people's experience" does not mean to confirm lies or anything specific. I'm unaware of what happens in the calls and can't comment either way. My comment is that there is a process for doing background checks where someone backups the information you provide them. From my discussions, IN GENERAL people don't disclose it's not work, unless asked, but will never say that it WAS work. So presumably a background check call would not involve confirming it was "real work" but rather it was some other relationship. Ultimately, I don't know, but I want to make sure it doesn't come across that I was implying that the former.

Yeah CIRR does two things: 1. Sets a standard and set of rules and definitions everyone agrees to follow 2. Requires reports to get audited CIRR is a business league, founded by SkillsFund (now Ascend) and supported by a Course Report. The results themselves are meant to have high integrity and I trust the numbers. BUT it doesn't mean the whole process and the rules don't have biases in them. CIRR represents the bootcamp industry, it's a business league with the charter of supporting the industry the members are in. So it's in CIRR's interest for bootcamps to succeed, it's in Ascend's interest for bootcamps to succeed and for students to get loans from them. It's in Course Reports interest for bootcamps to succeed and get page views on their review website and higher valued sponsorships, it's bootcamps interest because more enrollments = more business. People reading my comments: C…

No bootcamp teaches the level of fundamentals above and I can go into extensive detail how no bootcamp I know of (including Codesmith) teaches these concepts from a fundamentals approach despite what they might say. There is one kind of bootcamp-like program for senior engineers that actually does have like 4 week units on these topics taught but industry legends in those areas but I don't know if they are still operating. Most bootcamps teach the "what" and some bootcamps go deeper to the "how" (e.g. HOW does the event loop work in Javascript). The CS fundamentals above are on the "why" - why is the abstract theoretical patterns/reasoning that get applied to real situations. For example. A bootcamp might teach you what SQL is and the basic syntax of some queries. Going one level deeper, one might teach you how relational databases work in general. Fundamentals approach teach you set…

You can look at [Formation.dev](https://Formation.dev) (disclosure, I'm a co-founder). We aren't a bootcamp and we don't explicitly teach classes... we're more like a personal trainer to work with you on your fundamentals and get you in good shape. We have a pretty strict/high bar to make sure people are ready to work on the fundamentals as a pathway to a top tier job and aren't there for the wrong reasons. And yes, we pay our engineers FAANG-level/top tier compensation and try to attract the top talent mentors in the industry, so that's a good point about having good mentorship and it does cost a lot.

I have zero affiliation with Codesmith. This subreddit is really Codesmith heavy so the topic comes up on a daily basis disproportionately more than any program for it's size. As one of the top program, this makes sense I think. I'll explain the context for why I know so much about Codesmith in particular after given broader context for others reading... how I know so much about Codesmith is an interesting story though! My story: I worked at Facebook in California from 2009 to 2017, straight out of school from Canada all the way to E7 principal engineer in 5 years. Company grew from about 200 engineers to 10,000 engineers and I did a ton of interviews, helped grow people's careers and really saw pretty much people of every background imaginable at/interview at Facebook... so after leaving, took a break and then helped start Formation ([formation.dev](https://formation.dev)) to help peop…

I think the OP is referring to the fact that if you lookup students by those projects to "find them on LinkedIn" (because otherwise it would be hard to find them) that a significant amount of people have no new job after the open source projects. I've also found this the time a few months ago when I audited 200 graduates and the percentage with jobs was low (it's REALLY hard to get start dates for people because people tend to ambiguously list the start as "2021" or "2022" rather than the exact months so I assume most of the people I looked at that appeared to have 6+ months of experience were current students). I've also seen some people entirely scrub their LinkedIn after getting a job and removing all those projects so that makes it further harder. I think the answer to this is to look at CIRR and trust the graduations rates and placement rates! Look carefully at what the numbers mea…

Sorry to hear about your experiences. I wanted to add some thoughts at the industry level, not to support or attack the post or to defend app academy but just some thoughts comparing them to the industry because I feel like several complaints are industry wide complaints as well. - The gender ratio in tech sucks. At FAANG it's about 25% female and non-binary. - Top bootcamps with super long hours make this so much worse and are really non inclusive. HR and Codesmith have 11 hour days. How can a parent not find that intimidating? How can someone living paycheck to paycheck afford to not have any other time to work? They appeal to unattached, ambitious people who have the savings to do them, or people who otherwise have the supportive life circumstances to do it. And this unfortunately is not a represetative bunch of our society. - A lot of bootcamps that are operated as schools seem to h…

I have worked with several fellows post Codesmith. Corrections are more than welcome! Some notes: - The pay is $1K per week as of a few months ago. - It's a W2 job direct with the company and not a 1099 contractor role. They have fellows in many states, so not sure if all are W2. - It's 3 months long but some people extend and stay on full time as an instructor and get paid a median engineer salary. - You can leave if you get a job, but most people expect to stay for the full 3 months. - You do a lot day to day. Some people have been surprised by the large workload, others have said it's not that large of a workload. The most extreme was "you barely have time to sleep" and the least extreme was "it's a lot of work but you have a lot of down time to apply for jobs and take care of yourself". - You do: grading, 1-1 tutoring, mock interviews, interviews with prospectives, live support. M…

Yeah it's a good point that with COVID we've forgotten the intensity of the commute in addition to already long hours. Their in-person cohort had applications opened beyond the deadline so I suspect many people feel this way too. I'm concerned the staff will want to go in person too. I help run Formation and it's been a blessing we can hire some incredibly talented people across the country to help make Formation awesome. And if we were limited to just San Francisco, it would be very hard to find such amazing people in a smaller pool who also wants to commute every day. Very curious if they end of going hybrid with their staff, while requiring students to be in the office 11 hours a a day. At the end of the day the staff are key... you aren't paying $20K to work with some friends through some online materials. But they leased a nice office in Manhattan (the most expensive real estate…

Ping alumni and ask! You ideally want to learn about the experiences of people who had a similar background to you and how they felt about the program. It's really hard to trust any kind of "ratings" overall. Course Report is a supporting member of CIRR and accepts sponsorships from bootcamps. SwitchUp has a disclosure that they get paid by bootcamps that they send people to. Career Karma gets paid by bootcamps to send people there and has sponsorships. CIRR itself is founded by a bootcamp loan company and supported by a bootcamp review company (Course Report). Reddit is full of anecdotal experiences from anonymous people without much context. And bootcamps do all kinds of tactics to encourage positive reviews and discourage negative ones. In fact all businesses do.... like I saw at a bank even: "If we weren't a 10, talk to a manager first to work out any issues you had with your…

I've seen you around a lot, do you have any corrections on any of the things I've said? Or in the future, let me know too. I've had a few people (3) message me about halfway through Codesmith telling me that my analysis is shockingly accurate and that I seem to understand the workings of the program at a deeper level. Not saying this to brag, but to say that I really do take pride in trying to be accurate in what I say, so appreciate any corrections!

Yeah! There are a TON of interesting ed-tech companies, Guild, MasterClass, Coursera, Duolingo, just immediately come to mind. I would look for paths there. Also, roles at bigger companies leveraging that experience. Like Facebook has a team working on employee education software internally. You might be good for that team. At Facebook you interview generically, so this doesn't work there, but at many companies, finding the right team to approach can help.

Some companies are freezing, but at Formation we're seeing people get hired and interviewing at dozens of top tier companies, so while some of the bigger names are frozen, most are not. There is more of a shift to experienced engineers, and less risk taking with no-experience people (I've heard from students that are recent grads from Codesmith for example that they are having a harder time getting interviews than students in the past for those with no experience, but the people with experience are getting interviews and strong offers still). At Formation, we are also seeing a bit of a shift. For example, a company might interview someone for senior and they didn't meet the bar, but in the past they would down level to mid-level and now they are just not making an offer at all. So a slight "tightening" rather than full blown freezes. On the no-experience side, at Formation we're surp…

I don't know them personally, I can't remember if Sophie did back when. So Bradfield is basically two qualified, solid engineers who teach people and they are very small (which is likely a good thing). I think it's only once or twice a year so if you are going to plan your life around their timeline, I would talk to one of the two instructors now and see if it's good for you, and then make that plan. You'll want to have a good rapport with them to move forward. One minor thing I noted in the past and has not changed, is their website is a little sketchy, in that they call themselves a "School of Computer Science" but don't even have a terms of service or privacy policy, address, any kind of little details that most legit services have. This isn't a giant flag though because I feel like it's just two really solid engineers teaching people out of a passion, so don't get distracted by the…

I agree with most of this, but one additional point is that people who are doing 100Devs are likely on the lower experience end of the spectrum so comparing them to the zero experience Codesmith outcomes would be more fair in the thought experiment. If someone makes $105K and it takes them 6 months to get a job and they had to wait 3 months to start Codesmith (which seems to be the time you have to apply), i.e. 12 months total.

I would say the fair comparison would be 100Devs to CSX if CSX were to have a full bootcamp curriculum, but they are still very different. I've been following 100Devs since fairly early on and haven't talked about them much because it's a quite unique offering. Disclaimer: personal opinions based on observations. I don't know Will Sentance or Leon personally to know their long term ambitions with their programs and am commenting on what I see today. SIMILARITIES: * Like any teaching style, Leon has a unique teaching style and it works for a lot of people. Will Sentance has a unique style that works for a lot of people. You can't argue objectively what is better and I don't want to start an academic argument about pedagogy. Objectively, 100Devs is certainly at least comparable to another complete online web-dev course and could be better depending on you. * Very loyal community. Both c…

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…

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 :(

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).

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?