Timeline

This question has been coming up a lot more often recently. I would suggest looking into interview prep and career accelerators instead of bootcamps. I'm the co-founder of Formation (.dev), which is one option, and other things to look into are Interview Kickstart, Outco, Pathrise, Scalar, Exponent, Coachable....a lot of very different options here! Specifically at Formation, 11% of engineers who got jobs in 2022 were CS grads with no experience, so it's a smaller case for us but a reasonable option. The idea is to work on bringing your fundamental skills to the top tier tech bar through adaptive practice, benchmarking, several sessions a week with senior engineers and tons of feedback, and mock interviews. All of these programs cost the same as a bootcamp but are much more useful IMO than doing a bootcamp. I work with all kinds of people from all kinds of backgrounds, many who did…

Hi, this sub is extremely Codesmith heavy, and there are several Codesmith students, alumni, and employees, who are extremely active on here, so it comes up a lot. That said, I know many bootcamp founders, talk to some regularly, and I've worked/work with hundreds of bootcamp alumni, mostly from top bootcamps, so I have a unique view of many programs. I have extensive knowledge of BloomTech/Lambda School as well and have a similar depth of understanding of their program but it's rarely talked about! I'm like the only person who read their trademark lawsuit legal documents in real time and discovered that they acquired a company in Florida to use that's company's trademark to bolster their claims - no journalist even reported on this. I aim to be middle of the road on everything, which doesn't mean neutral, but it means talking about the pros and cons. Codesmith alumni in particular a…

I'm a bit sour from someone who was claiming I was trying to steal Codesmith students and that Codesmith offers the same thing Formation does and then blocked me and the person has quite a good reputation on Reddit (not a fake account). But that kind of job hunt support is nowhere near what we offer. We continue technical training indefinitely until you get a job, 2 to 6 sessions a week with mentors, continuous practice tasks and benchmarks, ongoing mock interviews with senior engineers and recruiters. A team of 3 non-technical people and a private channel to talk with them about your strategy and progress, and they keep on top of your work if you are slipping.... all until you get a job, as long as you don't proactively stop doing your part. Anyways... unrelated haha, thanks for the context as always!

Sharing a post from CSCareerQuestions that shows why your first job matters! DISCLAIMER: I do not endorse any bootcamps and can't tell you which are "good" or "bad" and think every program should be looked at from all angles. I'm sharing this post as an example of why the day to day of your first job matters so much more than the title or numbers that come along with it. Additionally, I'm the co-founder of Formation (.dev) in case that could have any biases. Link: https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/zwocj0/my_revature_horror_story/

What is Codesmith doing about the 50% of people disappearing? I have a few notes about this from my CIRR analysis: 1. In 2021 some cohorts had a fairly high percentage of people placed who did not report salaries. This was explained as people that auditors can confirm are employed by LinkedIn but who ghosted and won't report salaries to Codesmith. The reason this is important is that if the hardest working and most ambitious people hang around and get super high salaries to make the medians higher and then the overall placement rate appears high because of this LinkedIn loophole, if can look like more people are placed and making high salaries, when it's not the case. 2. I know Codesmith doesn't offer a job guarantee and is transparent about that, but it feels kind of crappy to shoot you with a firehose and then just leave you be with minimal check in. Leaves people dazed and confus…

I heard from someone that they talked about hooks very briefly after finishing the class component approach. When questioned why, the response was, paraphrased, 'the Codesmith leadership have developed this curriculum minute by minute to perfect it and you have to trust it. most code in the industry is class components so you need to be prepared for real code you will work with and hooks are not used widely yet'. This is a decent argument for why class components, other than the arrogant first part haha, should be taught. But my opinion is that a really strong engineer could switch between them with minimal effort because they understand how things work under the hood. They would naturally absorb the relationship between component mounting callbacks and useEffect by understanding the underlying role both play in the component lifecycle. If someone could teach the abstract part and nat…

Thanks for helping the community by sharing your experiences. One word of caution is that everyone changing careers has a different path and there isn't just one way to get there. For example, I work with a few people that feel scammed by Revature. They were overqualified and interviewed there thinking it was a dream job, only to find out it's a bootcamp that is free but that you pay back indirectly by being placed in a job where you are being underpaid by about $40K per year for a 2 year contract (and leaving early means you have to pay a $30k penalty), while Revature makes a ton of profit on your contract. However, for someone with no training, and a lot of hustle, putting in 2 years, aiming to get bought out earlier, at a legit job isn't so bad! Heck Codesmith has like a 3 month wait time, you have to study for 3 months before then, program takes 3 months, being a fellow adds 3 mo…

Lots of people here with no industry experience and bootcamp grads with very little industry experience.... after working with hundreds of people from bootcamp backgrounds and from top tier CS backgrounds, and from conducting hundreds of interviews myself I feel like I have a valuable perspective to share in this sub. I spend anywhere from 5 mins to 30 mins a day on Reddit, mostly commenting on push notifications I get while on the go, so I don't "live here" 🤣 Also, while 11% of people at Formation graduated a bootcamp and hadn't found a job that way, more than half of the people have a non-CS degree background, so I also want to connect with people who might come to Formation years in the future. Finally, we are a for-profit technology company, and some day we're going to expand and offer more options for more people and it's useful to keep a pulse on the bootcamp community in genera…

We have this guide that collects resources for different topics and was curated by three engineers on our team (myself included) with over 40 years of top tier industry experience running interviews at Facebook, Microsoft, Nextdoor, etc... https://formation.dev/guide/ Disclosure: Formation is not a bootcamp but we work people to level up their careers later on. Only 11% of people we worked with who got a job in the past year we're bootcamp grads without a job so I want to make it clear that I'm sharing this to help and not to solicit you to look into the training, as you sound a bit too early in your career. And yes they are fairly common at larger companies. As companies become larger they want to standardize their interview processes which means having really consistent topics and types of interviews. Data structures and algorithms interviews are about as general problems as you can…

+1 official title doesn't mean anything. at large companies your level might mean something as people know how to pattern match to levels at their company. +1 use software engineer over "developer" on a resume even if it's not your on paper job title as long as it's reasonable to do so and the job duties are analogous to other software engineer jobs. A resume is a tool to communicate your background in seconds to a recruiter or hiring manager. If you misrepresent yourself though it will catch up with you and optimizing your resume is understandably a challenge. It's important though and often needs help from experienced advisors. Codesmith has a head of careers with a "silver tongue" who really works those resumes to tell whatever story you want without explicitly lying. On a background check or a formal curriculum vitae you need to list everything as it is on paper because these tools…

The enforced time commitment for both HR 12 week and Codesmith is one of the reasons both are not super diverse. You have to have both the life circumstances to work on this without any source of income for 3 or more months AND you have to have the life circumstances to commit 11 hours a day to a program. Not everyone has the savings or the ability to do this and it tends to bias to non parents with enough savings to live off of for months. These programs though are optimizing for the outcomes of such people though and they don't pretending to be trying to help make the industry more diverse and inclusive. Nothing wrong with this, but it's counter intuitive that the most intense bootcamps with the best outcomes are the least diverse at the same time. Lack of diversity in the industry is the biggest problem with big tech right now in my opinion and I'm committed to working on this prob…

I'm the co-founder of Formation.dev and I would strongly suggest looking into it as an option, alongside other career accelerator type programs, rather than bootcamps. For example, Interview Kickstart, Pathrise and Outco, maybe Scalar and Coachable.dev. All of these don't start at the beginning and rather are focused on getting you interview ready and finding a good job. Most are part time as well. At Formation, we don't teach anything lecture style, it's purely practice, benchmarking, small group problem solving sessions with mentors, feedback from a wide range of senior industry engineering mentors, mock interviews. Every Friday, all your practice tasks and sessions for the next week are selected based on how you've been doing so far and based on your schedule and availability for the next week. A lot of these programs will support you until you get a new job in some fashion as well.…

Zooming out here, most people's goal is to become a strong software engineer and make an impact on the world. For others, it's to build a better life and do more interesting work day to day to get there. All I'm warning against here is tunnel vision that only Codesmith can provide this outcome and you must do months and months of Codesmith prep to prove you are worthy. There are many paths for many people and for a lot of people Codemsith might be the best path, but don't lock yourself in until you know that for yourself.

I don't love this answer with my outsider hat on. On the one hand, you shouldn't have to study Codesmith-proprietary techniques and learn things the Codesmith way to get into Codesmith.... it's a little brainwashy BUT, on the other hand, it's also good confirmation that IF the Codesmith way of learning works for you then Codesmith is also a good fit for you and adds additional confidence in choosing it. I just think if you do things all the Codesmith way and don't get it, it's probably a good sign Codesmith isn't for you, and not a reflection on your abilities as an engineer. Two sides to every story :D

I've chatted briefly somewhere around 8 people in the past two to three months and there are a group of people who didn't get OOP at all and got accepted and most chose Codesmith, and another group of people that got OOP, some of whom were accepted and some rejected with somewhat blunt feedback like that. I don't know if the bar is variable depending on your background? I didn't get any kind of complete and useful data here, but just anecdotally people did not all get the same difficulty of questions. And surprisingly the people who didn't get OOP had more "imposter syndrome" about thinking they weren't good enough. And the people that were more like "I studied every last detail and did well on OOP and they rejected me" were more like confident. I've also seen the unofficial places people share all the hard questions and try to study them all before applying. I guess it's not unlike any…

Depends on the misdemeanor but if it shows up on background checks it could be a problem yeah. You can try a few paths. One is freelancing and contracting. The other is try to find programs for people with records that are kind of like apprenticeship-type programs and have partners who are willing to hire. It really depends on the conviction though and what you did since then. For example, was it a drug related crime that you had rehab for and have long since forgotten. Was it something related to your life circumstances that you have since received counseling for? Was it as DUI and you have been volunteering for years to rectify your wrongs? All of those things matter and can make a difference. But it's definitely an uphill battle as some companies might just pull back offers without asking questions. You don't HAVE to legally but if the above apply, you can try disclosing EARLY in th…

What ethical boundaries did I overstep? Please tell everyone publicly. I signed up for your website with a temporary email address and looked at how many people were enrolled and paid for that course which was directly in the UI for checking out. I told you several times how you let everyone sign up and your website forum is full of scam ads for drugs and casinos. You didn't remove them. Your Data Mastery website and Build-A-Dev website reference each other and its not what I would expect from leading developers and I hope you can teach people how to be better engineers than this. When I signed up, it clearly said 31 people had signed up for the $1,000 365 day program. If the number was lower you really should double check your systems aren't compromised. It's offensive to me that you are questioning my behavior here for signing up for your website like anyone else can.

I'm sure you've seen me around in here but [Formation.dev](https://Formation.dev) might be a good number 3. We were running the numbers for an upcoming outcomes thing, and about 2/3 of people have work experience already but about 1 in 10 people have come from bootcamps with no full time SWE experience yet. So it could be an option and is almost exactly like what you said in #3 above. It's very expensive though so I wouldn't consider it lightly unless it's the right thing for you. EDIT: I'm getting downvoted a lot in one of those weird situations where the count keep changing wildly and the comment is ranked high for something with downvotes (which is usually from people who spam downvote and their votes stop counting), so let me know why in the comments. I feel like this is a very reasonable answer to the question and wouldn't be offended if a leader at a competitor said the same thing…

I think Codesmith's results will continue to be better on paper than most bootcamps even though they will be lower than the 2021 outcomes. We won't know until at least June 2023. I expect H1 2022 to be fairly strong, especially in terms of compensation with so many people going to Capital One and Amazon... two companies that compensate mostly in cash compared to other high comp companies. Several people have noticed that they seem to have 6 fellows per cohort now (BootcampBen disputed, but I'm going off the 56 fellows on their website) and that might help slow the drop in placement percentages as well. I also think if their results tanked it wouldn't change much about how people feel about them. It's not like they can control the market and are failing at it. The only thing that would change that is if they had a loophole that only works in good markets and not bad and people turn on t…

The head of outcomes at Codesmith says almost quote unquote in Codesmith job hunting lectures that Codesmith has proven to be better than Harvard and Stanford. I'm assuming he's referring to a biased survey (from Switchup - which is sponsored by bootcamps) from several years ago regarding placement rates. Stuff like that doesn't help anyone in the industry on how bootcamps are perceived.

I think if you sign up via Course Report you can save more than $750. https://www.coursereport.com/schools/springboard "Scholarships" tab They are one of the sponsors of Course Report, like Code Fellows, Codesmith, and others and they pay Course Report money to promote their programs with social media and videos.

Yeah it's [Formation.dev](https://Formation.dev). If you think you are a good fit, you can checkout the study guide, apply and do the assessment, read the blog, and try to ping some people with backgrounds like yourself that you can find. Note that most experienced people don't list that they went to Formation on their LinkedIn because they already have jobs and want to be discrete... so you can also ping people from out network tab on our website (which people that opted in to being listed on the site). There are also some sample schedules on the "How it Works" tab to show what a typical week could end up looking like. Sorry, lots of info, but we're still fairly small, and the day to day is pretty unique compared to anything else so trying to throw it all out there for you haha.

So Formation isn't a school or bootcamp because we don't have a curriculum, we don't teach anything like lectures/presentation or tutorial style, and it's kind of a more unique type of training. It's all practice based from day 1. The sessions with senior engineer mentors are 3-6 people and highly collaborative around going through a problem together. You are given problems to work on and then various resources to help unblock. There are infinite problems to solve and really you could train for anything on Formation in theory, but it's currently focused people with work experience (and in some cases, people with prior education but no formal work experience yet). So if you don't have any work experience, you have to be able to have some decent understanding of fundamentals, like arrays, strings and be able to solve "LeetCode Easy" level problems as a benchmark and maybe dabble in hard…

I'm not sure about bootcamps specifically, but at Formation we have seen more people than expected interested all across the spectrum in the past month. I think it makes sense that people who are more experienced and nervous about their job, or were laid off, or are trying to get a leg up in the super competitive market would come... that one's easy. But we're also seeing more people who are already at a LeetCode "Easy" level of DS&A problems, asking about Formation INSTEAD of going to a bootcamp (i.e. forgoing our 'we work with you until you get a job' promise and paying much less than a top tier bootcamp in return).... it's something we are pondering. We are WAY TOO SMALL to generalize from, but I do think a lot of people just really like programming and didn't realize it until later in their careers, and if they have the passion, stick with it, they will get jobs eventually. Life's a…

This is an example of how they are biased. Either this is a sponsored post for Codesmith that is paid and not disclosing the conflict of interest, or CourseReport is voluntarily promoting a bootcamp and choosing sides - since they aren't promoting all bootcamps! https://twitter.com/CourseReport/status/1600868291039428609?s=20&t=OILWA0bMTg-KsiWJePyDOQ

Thanks for adding more examples, I said it was not that reliable so would love to hear more examples yeah or more cases that they haven't increased that number. I also heard there are flex fellows who are not assigned to a specific cohort, but it might be a confusion of terms. EDIT: they currently have 4 locations running at once with 2 simultaneous cohorts = 8 cohorts and on their website they have 56 current fellows (excluding instructors etc... JUST fellows). Which is about 7 per cohort. Lets be conservative and add in 2 part time remote with the same number of fellows and bring cohort count to 10. That's 5 to 6 fellows per cohort. So maybe you only see 3-4 but there are some fellows on the books doing other things, like interviews and career support, etc... (/u/bootcampben) Yeah fellows don't show up on CIRR at all, they are basically students in a 12 week + 3 months program who "…

We're not a bootcamp and yeah I should have disclosed that in that comment because of the bias. But we survey people regularly and most people want them for various reasons, and they work well if your program works with people until they get a new job.... because you train them, they get a job, then they pay you. I agree it's a little different if you don't get a job like at many bootcamps. Or what else specifically is predatory about them?

I'm working on Formation and there are endless things that are interesting about what I'm working on. I was thinking about this for a few minutes after I got the notification about this post and I could comment on so many interesting engineering challenges that I'm trying to work on and solve with my team, but I actually think the most interesting part is a lot more ambitious. So I believe that everyone learns at a different pace and in different ways. And a lot of us don't know how we learn best or with who? but a lot of us want to learn and improve our lives and have a positive impact on everyone else's life. I'm working on building out a platform where people get the right mentorship at the right time on the right topic that they need to work on. And I don't think there's anything else in the world that exists like this right now. It's really hard. every week we're scheduling hund…

My non-data-backed hunch based on anecdotal reporting is it's around 50% within six months for recent cohorts. Every 3 fellows hired per cohort could boost that by \~10% and the way they describe fellows as being hired is completely invisible to CIRR (based on their explanation in their blog post about CIRR) Their salary stats could be much higher if only experienced people are getting placed at high salaries. Salary stats are only based on people hired and don't account for all the $0s from people not hired. You could have a 1% graduatio rate if 1 out of 100 people graduates and a 100% placement rate if the person is placed and a $500,000 median salary if that was the person's base salary. EDIT: I have no problem with CIRR or Codesmith using CIRR. But I'm very concerned when people tout it as a "gold standard", "only trustworthy source", "independent audit" or other statements on Redd…

I feel like a lot of people don't read CIRRs actual spec word for word. CIRR doesn't require audited results before reporting. They required you to audit your reports once a year after they are submitted. I assume most people audit them before, but let's not throw the word "audit" out there like it's a gold standard. FTX was "audited" as well. The CIRR spec also makes you promise to only use specific numbers in marketing, and those numbers are maneuvered to look in the best light possible, like the placement rate within 180 days of graduating. BloomTech has a 90% placement rate, but around a 50% graduation rate. One of those numbers is in giant letters all over the place - but it's manipulatable. (EDIT: BloomTech is not in CIRR, but I'm stating an analogous point based on their audited results. And it's not in giant letters, but it's in their main banner on their homepage.) Codesmith u…

We just went through a period of time where some companies with extremely high cash-compensation and low equity and performance bonus compensation (i.e. Amazon and Capital One) were hiring people left right and center if they had a pulse, no criminal record, and could solve Leetcode Medium problems under pressure. Codesmith got a lot of credit for their 2021 outcomes on Reddit, based on how well they optimize the job hunting strategy for those companies above. And I suspect they will also be hit very hard in their outcomes with the 2nd half of 2022 and be overly blamed on Reddit as "Codesmith falling apart". It will be a whole year from now before we'll see those results though! which is far too long IMO. As I learned at Facebook: when there is good press about you, things are never as good as people say, and when there is bad press things are never usually that bad. Codesmith as a sc…

\+1 to this. We're working on some form of outcomes reporting at Formation. It's so hard to try to communicate outcomes. Not just trying to showoff big numbers to win some imaginary contest, but to show numbers that help a prospective engineer figure out if the program is right for them or not, like outcomes by incoming engineer experience levels, and outcomes by location. CIRR assumed everyone in a bootcamp would have no experience and so it doesn't differentiate people at different experience levels. And CIRR standards were last updated before COVID played out and a lot of jobs moved to remote.

This is really hard question to answer. The majority of engineers I've seen grow form zero to N over their careers haven't grown linearly... they grow exponentially. So what you perceive as mind bogglingly hard during a bootcamp, will come across as trivial later on. But what you perceive as mind bogglingly hard as a junior engineer, will come across as trivial when you are senior. Now how you "feel" is a lot about you. The work ethic to succeed in a top bootcamp like Codesmith, HackReactor, Rithm, etc... is higher than most jobs, and even FAANG jobs would need to meet expectations. If you want to coast as a junior engineer for a long time then you might even find the work "intellectually" easier. If you want to always grow, learn, and improve, then you will always feel like everything is hard. Over time those things might shift to "people skills" rather than just raw coding skil…

CIRR has ways to be manipulated. For example, Codesmith hires back a small number of their students for a fixed 3-month contract and they have publicly stated that they push back the graduation date for those people but don't count them as placements. So what that does is it lets them hire back whatever number of people they want to push back those people's graduation dates and give them three more months of job hunting while they're doing this contract. The less sketchy way that CIRR itself makes numbers look better than they are is that the only absolute numbers are the number of graduates included in the report, and then everything else is a percentage. So first the percentage of people that graduate on time, but without having the total number of people who enrolled. Then the percentage of people who graduated on time who got jobs within time frames. But the percentage of people who…

There is often philosophical discussion amongst bootcamp founders about their pedagogies. Bootcamps exist that are aligned with your thinking! But along the lines of what you said, they tend to be very small and no one knows about them, because it's 1 to 3 experienced developer + educator backgrounds teaching tiny classes. You might want to talk to the Rithm School people as they are fairly aligned with the idea of have small classes taught by experienced educators and aren't that small either. I don't know enough about your background but I'm the founder of [Formation.dev](https://Formation.dev) and you can checkout our mentor listing to see if you are qualified and interested in mentoring to see how we approach things. We're not a bootcamp or school and we don't teach anything! We run small sessions with 3 to 6 engineers and a mentor, solving a focused problem as a group (on one of man…

Yeah I should clarify that I’m the co-founder of a program for experienced engineers called Formation and not looking to attend a bootcamp. I worked at Facebook for 8 years as an E7 engineer and have interviewed hundreds of people and trained interviewers as well. I just keep a very close eye on many bootcamps because I work with a lot of people who did them in the past. I hang around here to try to give perspective when I can as most people here have no industry experience.