Hey! The YOE is years of software engineering work experience. So in this bucket people still typically have a related degree + experience, or a bootcamp, or self taught for \~2 years, it's not zero-zero.
We have a handful of people who truly have zero experience and are only self taught and we decided to accept them in lieu of a bootcamp... this person specifically was looking at Codesmith and went to Formation instead: [https://formation.dev/blog/fellow-spotlight-brian-do/](https://formation.dev/blog/fellow-spotlight-brian-do/) and then this person did Formation AFTER Codesmith: [https://formation.dev/blog/fellow-spotlight-chris-guizzetti/](https://formation.dev/blog/fellow-spotlight-chris-guizzetti/)
I would almost always recommend doing a bootcamp first and you are on the right track... like I said, everyone is unique and we treat you that way.
Hi, I'm sorry you feel that way and hopefully we can continue talking productively and positively. Sophie's life mission is to increase diversity in big tech because for products to work for everyone that have to be represented by everyone and Formation prides itself in having roughly 2/3 of Fellows from backgrounds underrepresented in tech.
I'm more than happy to talk about the reasons for the concerns you brought up, not to counter them, but to add more detail for those reading. Sophie, myself, and our team work constantly on making Formation the best it can be, endless conversations dissecting every detail from the ground up. So when you say we are "hawking a glorified interview prep company" you are personally insulting the thousands of hours we put into our work without a very thoughtful discussion of the pros and cons of Formation.
I'm sorry if my tone was miscommunicated but no…
No worries! I would practice the interviews themselves.
PRAAMP, some Discord channels, are a way to do some free mocks that are not super great, since they are peers and not senior engineers.
[Interviewing.io](https://Interviewing.io) you can pay to do mock interviews a la carte. Definitely not cheap, but cheaper than a more intense program.
Career accelerators like Formation (disclosure, that's me!), Interview Kickstart, Outco, Pathrise, Scalar, are focused on getting interview ready as well and building skills needed to interview - both technical and not.
We are raising venture capital to hire the best people in the industry to help us build the best training platform in the world. We are building something incredibly unique and complex and I would love to share more about as we grow, but it's not easy or cheap and takes large investment with long term returns.
We have several engineers with \~10 years FAANG experience. All of our recruiters are 5+ year ex-FAANG and our head of recruiting was 10 years at FB running the internship program. Our director of career services ran career services at Triplebyte and several bootcamps.
We pay these people competitively and also with stock that will grow in value over time as they build and contribute value to Formation.
When you start from scratch, raising VC funding is a great way to seed the funding needed to accomplish this, and if you are going to raise funding, why not aim for the best inve…
I wholeheartedly agree with you and spend my time every day helping people find the best companies for their personal goals and situations. This above is general advice for most people that I haven't met and I'm always happy to chat through options with people!
I'm happy to talk about Formation and briefly answer the questions, it's off topic.
You are new here (your account is 2.5 weeks old) so quick introduction, Hi 👋, I'm one of the more frequent contributors to this sub and try to give people the perspective of someone with 8 years at FB, E7 level principal engineer, done 450+ interviews at FB - from interns to directors, was the top contributor of all time when leaving and they created an senior engineer archetype for me, and now I help run a training platform aiming to help increase diversity in tech by leveling the field for people from non traditional backgrounds and have worke…
Yeah Codesmith's negotiation advice is to come in with a high ask "Just always ask them for $150K" as a way to also set the stage that you are a more senior engineer than you appear on paper... combined with exaggerating OSPs as work experience, is one of the ways SOME (not ALL) people get higher starting salaries at less strong non-tech companies.
It's very effective though and not judging. Like this is a great outcome compared to almost every other bootcamp!
Salaries and compensation will vary wildly based on: location, experience, how people do the math for their offers (trust me... people use different math for stock, bonuses, and benefits and it can be all over the place), and of course: a splash of luck.
I've said this many times now but your salary out of a bootcamp means nothing about your career in tech. The canonical example I give is that a $100K Dropbox Ignite apprenticeship is much better than a mid level job at an agency or bank, and possibly even an entry level job at a top tier company (I would still take entry level FAANG for the highly motivated people).
Let's say you have no experience. An apprenticeship at Dropbox, or another FAANG, will teach you very strong fundamental skills for how to work day to day as an engineer. Then you can apply all your hustle to crushing it, converting full time and loving your job and feeling…
Can you define "strong presence at FAANG"? I look at HR alumni in LinkedIn and see pages and pages of FAANG employees a few years down the road. I've found maybe two dozen Codesmith alumni at full time FAANG SWE positions.
Regarding salaries, not making this point about Codesmith or HR, but advice generally for those listening. If you want to make more money, your first salary out of bootcamp is very irrelevant in terms of you career income in tech. 90K apprenticeships at FAANG are infinitely better than a 120K job at a 100 person atartup with a team of 10 engineers. You'll be making way more money in just a couple of years. So judging just based on that the immediate salary alone is missing the forest for the trees.
Engineers at Facebook are not ranked by salary, and compensation varies by performance. A new grad with a $130K base salary will make between $140K and $300K based on th…
Hi! You can sign up for Formation Day as well if you want, it does legitimately have limited availability and there are already thousands of applicants so there's no guarantees there. It's a unique day of some larger sessions, and some 1-1 pair sessions with feedback and you'll get to use our tools and platform in a much more limited/introductory way. So overall, I would say it's a fairly independent event from day-to-day normal Formation.
Hi thanks for sharing!
Question: did you get professional code review from engineers in the industry or do you feel like this project was done at industry standards? And what improvements would you plan on making if you were to keep working on it?
P.S. some links on the website are broken and go to Next.js documentation
I work with many ex-FAANG recruiters directly on my team and many more in the industry. I also did 400+ interviews at Facebook, and work with colleagues that have thousands. So I can give my view, which is obviously biased by that background, but is hopefully useful for that perspective.
1. Many recruiters do immediately ignore bootcamp grads. But the reason is the same as why they ignore a lot of COMP SCI GRADS resumes. They all look the same and they can't figure out how to differentiate them. We would go to a recruiting fair at a college and we would get 300 internship resumes, having to choose 20 people for interviews then next week. All the resumes have the SAME projects, SAME courses, so what do you do? How would you differentiate. There's no time to go through everyone's portfolios. So you look for referrals, look for past internship experience, look for grades sometimes when all…
Thanks for civilly discussing too, like very much appreciate talking about this from different angles!
Yeah my response above was the two things I didn't feel middle of the road on, but I very much appreciate the hustle mentality as well. I don't sit with the "CS degree snobs" that a degree is strictly better than anything.
I also strongly agree with the argument about performance but that Codesmith grads are performing well at what Stanford/Harvard grads would call 2nd or 3rd tier companies. If Codesmith advertised itself as "Get the outcomes of 2nd tier CS school, paying the price of a 3rd tier school and in only 12 weeks!" I think that would still be appealing to MANY people.
Instead Codesmith advertises "Codesmith is a team dedicated to democratizing higher education for a new era - with graduate outcomes of an elite grad school but online and for 1/10th of the cost" [Link](https:…
As usual I am somewhere on the middle haha but two VERY STRONG stances
1) My entire mission is about helping fix systemic inequalities in tech and the way to do that is by fixing inequalities in SKILLS primarily and not leveling the playing field through deception. There are systematic biases that need to be addressed for sure, but the biggest problem is that a 12 week stint at the best bootcamp in the world is no where near the skill level of a top 4 engineering school undergrad. Don't call yourself the equivalent of an elite masters program if you are not. I think the gap can be filled much faster than 3.75 years but you are being delusional if you think you get close. I AM NOT TALKING ABOUT POTENTIAL, just raw skills. In my undergrad (which as only half CS and half other eng), I studied operating systems, built a computer processor, human computer interaction, distributed systems, ga…
It's in their CIRR report. 20% of graduates who get jobs make over $140K and 20% who get jobs make under $110K or so, and not including all the poeple who don't get jobs make zero.
Their admissions contract can't me shared but if you singed one or have an offer, they are obligated to disclosure certain numbers and outcomes and the numbers don't add up to CIRR without further explanation.
Don't get scared about this but if you get an offer... spend 20 minutes doing the math between CIRR and the contract your are signing.
Triathelete's comment got downvoted but I think it's VERY important to separate asking people for positive reviews and making it part of a course to say good things about the course (which could be fraud) versus asking people to promote projects they are excited about (which Codesmith students do). I haven't seen any evidence whatsoever that Codesmith systematically does the former and I think shouldn't get downvoted to point that out and make it clear.
RE projects used by other developers. There are a tiny handful that are. Codesmith has been supporting the Svelte community a lot recently and a few projects have been acknowledged by engineers. But I've audited the GitHubs and that's the edge case. The vast majority have spikes of brief activity every 7 weeks as a cohort moves in, and then crickets - no issues, no discussions, no PRs from the outside, etc....
I LOVE OPEN SOURCE PROJECT…
Trying to grow a project from nothing is a skill on its own, "growth hacking". You have to be extremely talented at growth hacking to remain ethical but be successful at growing a project. I think Codesmith teaching people how to be good growth hackers would be much more effective then giving the templates and scripts to do it and just telling them to do because that's what you do at Codesmith and it's what everyone does.
Like of all the growth hacking stuff I've seen in my career, asking people to write fake comments to hype your projects and embellish their usage of it, is middle of the road borderline sketchiness. Giving them a script to instantly clap 50 times is also kind of middle of the road sketchiness. Don't think this is necessarily across the line for most people. People in industry I've asked haven't really found this to cross the line.
If anything I would think it's a litt…
Are all these companies smaller companies? The top tier companies are still very DS&A focused and Codesmith does hack hours daily to keep preparing for those DS&A interviews but is there even a point if most people aren't going to those companies?
Would you recommend Codesmith for someone trying to break into a top tier company only?
A lot of top tier entry level recruiters are familiar with Codesmith's OSPs as well and they just read it as bootcamp grads. I work with a bunch of FAANG recruiters and it's not the greatest reputation wise because they perceive this as deceitful, fall for it once, and then warn all the others to watch out for it.
I think excluding it for smaller and more remote companies out side of Silicon Valley would work very well.
So +1 to having two resumes. Don't hide anything with top tier companies, much better off being yourself and telling your story.... Codesmith is very intense and it's more impressive you went through it than the 4 weeks you spent on your OSP.
Codesmith students when launching their OSPs post everywhere and then "stars and clap" each other's projects. They have a script to instantly clap 50 times on Medium and they comment on each other's project posts comments like how awesome and useful the tool is etc... Then they talk in their marketing about how many GitHub stars the projects have as a sign that the projects are very important and impactful in the community.
They used to officially have a week where people spent all their time hyping each other's projects but it's been reported that they stopped this long ago so I don't think this is what you are referring to. It's also very student driven and more of a tradition to "celebrate" OSPs being done.
Codesmith isn’t a cut above the rest, but it is one of the top bootcamps. One of the reasons why their outcomes are higher is because about a third of people have some amount of relevant experience before going in, and those peoples outcomes skew the distribution higher. Codesmith doesn’t publish outcomes for people who had no relevant experience going in but there are plenty of people making under $100,000 from there and they tend to lean to the inexperienced people. The CIRR results put this in the 20% of people making under like 110K. I believe their application contract you signed, had some legal disclosure that has more of a breakdown with the people at the lower buckets.
Hi! Thanks so much for doing a public AMA! Hopefully these aren't duplicates, I just read through the others quick!
1. What was it in the 14 other "Phone Screenings" that held you back from proceeding to the next rounds?
2. This is a tough question but did you go the route of really boosting your OSP project on your resume and in interviews? Or did the company fully know in interviews it was an OSP project and not a real job and was supportive of that?
3. Did you get a midlevel or senior role? I noticed Codesmith ramping down their language about 95% of people getting midlevel and senior jobs.
4. Would you consider your new company a FAANG company, or do you see it as a starter job?
The Codesmith in person cohort in October looks really interesting. I have ZERO inside info on how it's coming together but if in-person works for you, this might be a great option.
I've also heard about how hard it is for people with zero experience in this recent 2-3 cohorts(?, like the last 2-3 months) to get jobs.
I have many years of industry experience and a deep network across the top companies, and we've been through quite the rollercoaster right now. The end of 2021 and the beginning of 2022 were somewhat crazy times where it was fairly easy to get a job and I expect those outcomes to be very high from Codesmith and others. Lots of people talking about how amazing program X or Y was and how everyone got jobs, etc... and then all of those who read these posts and signed up, are not having the same luck.
Right now we are returning to a more normal market with some changes. This…
Bootcamp Alumni: we are doing the first ever free 🎉 Formation Day open house on October 1st and I wanted to invite you all to join!
Hi everyone, I've gotten to know some awesome people on here over the past six months and it's cool to see them already finishing up bootcamps I recommended to them way back when!
I wanted to invite bootcamp alumni to join Formation Day on Saturday, October 1st at 9am PST! It's a **FREE** jam-packed day of FAANG-level interview prep. Our team is putting a lot of work into creating a really useful day for people and we hope you can attend and get a lot of value out of it!
This event is generally targeted at people who are working already and exploring changing jobs, or are bootcamp or computer science graduates who have been interviewing actively. It is unfortunately not meant for people looking to get into bootcamps, but as always, I'm happy to give my 2…
HackReactor you build a lot of projects too, might be an option
Springboard’s job gaurantee only applies if you follow their strict rules, like proving you apply for certain number of jobs and documenting and stuff. So the way it works is it forces to not make excuses and be very very aggressive in your job hunt, which helps you get a job :)
There are a lot of benefits to this too though, I just want to make it clear I'm not judging this but just pointing it out so you can find a style that works for you.
Springboard for example, has all outside mentors, and they have a lot of weaknesses with that approach too because if the content is a bit dated, and the mentors are not senior enough or experienced enough teaching, it doesn't work great.
Rithm caps classes at 18 because the leaders want to directly teach students personally, but they aren't as aggressive as Codesmith on the job hunting part.
So one of the downsides to Codesmith is that most of the day to day teachers are senior students, Fellows, alumni hired as full time instructions, and none of them have worked in industry yet. What Codesmith does well though is they propogate their "way of doing things" through the staff very well and consistently. So it's a little like "just trust the Codesmith way and do it our way" vibe.... and it works pretty well, but there ARE other ways of doing things haha and if their way doesn't work for you then go to a different program that does and don't feel bad about ruining your application streak :D
You don't have to pseudo necessarily, are they telling you that?
This is the Formation method. (disclosure: I'm the co-founder there but I am not soliciting you to join or anything, we work with people much farther along in their journeys - after bootcamps and after working, just a relevant resource to help you)
[https://formation.dev/blog/the-engineering-method/](https://formation.dev/blog/the-engineering-method/)
We don't have the word pseudo code anywhere in there, but we also don't suggest to start writing final code until later in the process.
This ^^^
The advice to talk more though isn’t enough on its own though. Talking more about your ideas is a good starting point to go from zero to not zero but if you want to get to 1 you need to approach algorithms problems with a solid mental framework. We (Formation) have one called “The Engineering Method” and there are many others, but following a pattern can help you tremendously instead of whack a mole talking, debugging, and pseudo coding.
They are softening the language around mid level and senior roles. They used to say 70% of alumni receive mid level roles and 25% receive senior roles, but recently removed it from their LinkedIn because it’s subjective to say the least. I worked at Facebook for 8 years and have an extensive network at top tier companies and people found that claim somewhat infuriating as people with no related experience cannot get mid level FAANG roles (rare exceptions and edge cases but not 95% of Codesmith alumni) and the roles they are calling mid level and a senior are somewhat made up. People with prior work experience can get mid level roles and people can get job titles with inflated language (some contractors call everyone a “senior engineer”) but at the truly top tier bar, no.
So I would encourage you to look at Codesmith if you have no experience and you’ll be just fine if you have the raw…
There are too many cases to go over all of them but some factors to evaluate for each offer before being able to compare are:
1. Company's engineering reputation
2. What team you will be on/department/team matching process
3. Who will be your manager, if it's known
4. Career trajectory paths at the company. e.g. Microsoft requires like 2-3 promotions for every 1 promotion at Google. e.g. Can you progress as an IC in your career or will you be "forced" into management to grow as the only option.
5. Base salary
6. Signing bonuses
7. Performance bonus targets
8. Equity, type, amount, and vesting schedule (equity is most complex to understand usually)
9. Other benefits/perks that are impactful for you
10. Startups: need to be evaluated on
11. Leadership has 5+ years of FAANG-level strong career experience
12. Investors are "top 10"/"top tier"
13. Understand the funding stage and how much fu…
Hi! u/lemonpotatoes thanks for spending the time to write up a great response! So one thing I haven't sorted out yet with Codesmith is that Will Sentance is EXTREMELY FOCUSED on teaching. Like he is a brilliant person and cares a lot about teaching quality.
However, most Codesmith people I talk to:
1. Find the material like a firehose and feel always behind. They are told that the point is to learn how to learn and most people absorb 20% of the materials.
2. All of their teachers, TAs, and leads were all Codesmith alumni themselves and haven't worked in the industry.
Do you have your own thoughts on this? It seems like a big disconnect from Will's intentions to build the best approach to teaching.
I think a DSA course is probably ideal as a one off course. If you are doing s full CS degree then yes, it helps. My discrete math courses were super theoretical and didn't help me that much because half the time was learning the symbols and terminology the theories were communicated in. Like Sets and summations have some pretty unique symbology, but you do gain a respect for rigorously looking at problems down to every single aspect.
Yeah I'm also everywhere at Formation too, I just have no life :P
I worked at Facebook for 8 years and saw a lot of fake news stuff and I believe in transparency and empowering people to have the information needed to judge their sources, so I use my real name yeah. Same name on LinkedIn :D
1. It's unique to you. So like for some/most people a $100K apprenticeship at Dropbox is better than a $130K job at a marketing agency. If you are coming in at zero, don't pretend you are at a mid or senior level. Be the best darn junior engineer you can be and in the right environment you will accelerate your skills quickly and in a supported way. I always want people to ideally align the role with their passions. If you love gaming, try working at your favorite gaming company. If you love photography, maybe on Google Photos, or Pinterest. It will help make your work more fulfilling and your intuit…
Hey, fewer than Codesmith, can't generalize any patterns other than they have all been similarly hard working, professional, collaborative people and their outcomes at Formation were no different (not statistically significant, but qualitatively).
I actually spend like 5 to 10 mins a day connecting with \~20 bootcamp grads on LinkedIn from all different programs, as my network is super Facebook-heavy and I want to connect more with junior devs and see what they talk/care about (also why I'm here haha). Despite Codesmith's reputation, HackReactor has quite a plethora of alumni who down the road end up a top tier companies. Granted they are larger than others, but many more than Codesmith. I have a strong stance that if you have the life circumstances to do so, you want the RIGHT job out of a bootcamp to kickstart your career in the right direction, not the HIGHEST PAYING job, so you shou…
Absolutely possible! Codesmith is an interesting one because they are very proud of results and their bar to entry, but it's not as high as it sounds (don't get me wrong, it's high!) but if you start from 0, study really hard and have a little bit of natural inclination towards the concepts, you can get in and do well.
I would try to reach out to some of the Codesmith alumni on LinkedIn too that maybe have similar background to yourself. Reddit is a bit of a crazy place and real people via LinkedIn are fairly approachable!
So I think education-wise Hackbright's teaching and curriculum as it stands today in 2022, isn't that great, it's fine, but not one of the best of the best. However, the tech industry remains fairly man-dominated (75% - 25%) and some people who have done Hackbright have found it easier to learn in a more gender-supportive environment. The industry is changing and I absolutely don't want to stereotype, but from my experienced I can totally understand this perspective for many people as a big reason to join a program despite the quality of education.
Another option to consider if I was considering Hackbright, would be Ada Academy, which has been building more momentum lately. They have a guaranteed internship at the end which can help you get a job more effectively. Hackbright alumni have done well as they've progressed in their careers and the network is also strong and supportive, but A…
I have the same questions and the distributions based on experience, but I can give objective answers to some of those other questions.
1. 120K is the median, not the average, so it doesn't mean you are likely to get this salary. It means of all the people who join there is a 50/50 shot making over 120K and a 50/50 shot making under 120K. But it's more important to narrow it down by people of a certain background. Like I know at Formation, the average first year TC for people with 0 experience is $134K and for 1 - 2 years is $181K, so I have to hypothesize that people with less experience are on the lower end, but need data to test that.
2. The Codesmith numbers in CIRR do not include any kind of options, bonuses, etc... they are just base salary. This is a criticism of CIRR, but it's also very hard to compute TC fairly. At Formation, we EXCLUDE all TC that is not objectively measurabl…
I personally talk about Formation all the time on here and also agree with your points that people can just choose to ignore the top level post if they want and don't think the post itself is a problem IMO. As long as the rules are the same for everyone I don't have any problems.
I think there's a maybe a slight problem if ~~a member of the~~ EDIT: an employee of school is a moderator of the forum as is the case. I also find it crazy that everyone talks about Codesmith and Rithm here and like 10% of current Codesmith students are on Reddit talking about it haha and it comes across like there are no other options out there. But if you are close to your next cohort deadline and the moderator ~~starts shutting down Codesmith threads~~ (EDIT: mod explained they were trying to help and not shut down conversation) ( [https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/x7sx97/lets\_hear\_it\_fro…
One of the problems with imposter syndrome is that some people actually aren’t skilled enough because they are genuinely in over their heads and use it as an excuse for their performance. Don’t get me wrong, many people have real imposter syndrome but a program shouldn’t be telling all of its students they have it and that’s why they feel stressed. People learn at different paces and in different ways and you shouldn’t use it as an excuse for a program that isn’t teaching you the most effectively for you.
Hey, you mentioned "most people entering had little to minimal experience ever making a website or using an ide"
I was under the impression that "a third" of Codesmith students have past experience, a CS degree, or relevant tangential experience, as Philip Troutman said in a video on Course Report's YouTube channel.
Would you agree with the rough "a third"? If I had work experience and was working alongside people who had never used an IDE, that doesn't seem like the right fit.
Based on their info sessions, they want you to take the prep courses to see what Codesmith is like and if it's a good fit for you. Knowing you aren't a good fit at the CSPrep level, helps keep their bar for immersive high and their outcomes high.
I agree with your reflection that you might have been better off starting another program sooner. It's great that Codesmith is hard to get into and waitlisted, but it means that you spend months preparing, 2 months waiting for your start date once you get in, and then months job hunting at the end. A lot of people would be better off starting sooner at another program, getting a foot in the door job doing anything programming related, and then working towards leveling up to a better job. (Disclosure: co-founder of Formation.dev and we help a lot of bootcamp grads make that second jump, so I'm bias in this opinion).
The biggest problem with th…
Codesmiths curriculum spends about a week or two on CS fundamentals and then has practice for the rest of the time while doing intense project work.
I also agree it’s not a single bar for what is “cs fundamentals” and that is not meant to gatekeep. Everyone learns and progresses differently.
My point restated is that interviews don’t ask these questions to gatekeep but they are testing understanding of the broad abstractions that all coding is based on. The best way to do well in these interviews is to understand those fundamental abstractions and patterns incredibly well instead of understanding minimally and practicing intensely. Don’t get me wrong, part of understanding intensely IS practice. But it’s practice for the sake of understanding, not practice for the sake of trying to pass an interview if that makes sense.
An example is someone might solve a LC medium problem and techn…
Hi, disclosure, I’m the co-founder of Formation.dev, which isn’t a bootcamp but a career accelerator focused on practice and feedback and not on lecturing/teaching.
I believe data structures and algos are extremely important but not just to practice them because they are interview questions. A lot of Codesmith alumni I work with are able to solve problems but lacking a bit in the underlying fundamental concepts.
If you believe DSA are important to you for interviews, learning CS fundamentals for months (not a week) and applying them to DSA is the way to go, rather than whack a mole trying to just solve problems for the sake of solving interview problems.
I saw you added the median thing or maybe I missed but this is my views on that. If I’m Codesmith I would very justifiably be marketing like you are saying, but to have students personally insult me about trying to steal Codesmith students
and tell me the “average” Codesmith student makes 120K and it is the best with nothing close is not looking at the data critically. Averages, medians are different things. Data excludes stock and bonuses, etc… It is not a factual statement to say that. Dancing, you are super reasonable on here so this message is meant for the others haha.
https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/x44mov/how_legit_are_codesmiths_stat/imtfku9
Yeah to be clear, this isn’t really talking about Codesmith so much as people who are fighting tooth and nail with me that Codesmith is the the “best bootcamp” because of CIRR and any data that’s not from CIRR is not to be trusted.
I think i just fall victim to engaging with trolls because most people are a lot more reasonable…
cc u/InTheDarkDancing, I commented on this today elsewhere and adding here for consistency.
I also appreciate the blog post explaining how Codesmith supports CIRR. I don't have a problem with Codesmith's position on CIRR, but what I have a problem with is people blindly supporting Codesmith as the "best bootcamp" because of their CIRR outcomes and regurgitating their marketing as unwavering fact. These are smart people, who want six figures jobs levering their problem solving and critical thinking abilities and regurgitating marketing without thinking critically about it is not demonstrating that ability.
Codesmith directly comments about how important equity and bonuses are in compensation. Yet they continue to market their CIRR results (which explicitly only include base salary and exclude stock and bonuses) solely as a marketing strategy to make a claim they are better than other b…
Yeah if someone starts, as long as they have the intention of job hunting after, they are included in the report and impact the graduation rate. The placements rates and medians are all based on the number GRADUATED and not the original number who started. Finally, if someone is unresponsive to CIRR requests but they can confirm they got a job, they person is included in the "placed" count but not in the salary counts. So the way CIRR is designed is it tries really hard to make sure the salary stats are only counting successful people and have the highest medians possible.
This doesn't change the fact that Codesmith has very strong outcomes, but their outcomes don't include equity and bonuses and hence are somewhat meaningless, other than as a marketing tool. They are well aware how important equity is in outcomes and would make their outcomes even better but they support and promote CI…
CIRR H2 2021 is out! [Discussion Thread] Same schools as H1
[https://cirr.org/data](https://cirr.org/data)
No new schools added, so same ones: Hacktiv8 (Indonesia), Juno (Canada), Launch Academy, Tech Elevator.
Codesmith and Turing are missing, but I'm sure will show up soon.
Feel free to comment in this thread to discuss! I'm busy but will add edits later!
1 minute glance looks like Tech Elevator and Launch Academy's results all improved for placements and salaries. End of 2021 was certainly a faster hiring period from my observations as well.
Stats are real but there's more to the stats. For example, CIRR doesn't include equity and bonuses which means the numbers are actually only equal to or HIGHER than in the reports.
The key thing here is "median", i.e. the 50th percentile.
20% of people make under $110K and 20% of people make over $140K.
An “average" is most useful when you have a normal distribution and this data certainly is not. A “median”, which is used often for data sets to remove the influence of outliers, is, but it loses a lot of information in the calculating. Let’s say one bootcamp has 3 alumni with salaries 0, 100, 200, and the other 100, 100, 100. Same median, same average, completely different stories.
Which is why you have have to look at the outcomes for people who are starting with a background like yourself.
It's very likely that people with zero experience and a few months of CSX before joining a…
I can add some info about Formation.dev (disclosure co-founder, not bootcamp, not an option for people with no experience). Each Fellow has a continuous conversation in their private job hunting channel containing 5+ team members. Each Fellow has a dedicated human (their Fellow Manager) to talk to and who checks in with you constantly. You have career team members who are constantly trying to find you opportunities for referrals at good companies. You also have ongoing continuous scheduled training and practice that never ends to you keep getting stronger and stronger as you job hunt.
This isn't the right forum as we compete with Interview Kickstart, Pathrise, and Outco, so apples to oranges. I'm commenting this because just because the bar for bootcamps is so low that even if the above commenter's story sounds like strong support, there is a bar 100X beyond that that exists if you look…