It sounds like Codesmith is the one you are naturally leaning towards. No one will shame you or force you to exaggerate at all, they help you represent your work however you want to represent it. You might be one of the few that get a really good job regardless or you might have a harder time. A lot of people I know end up in the middle. They don't want to exaggerate, but you have Eric Kirsten constantly telling you that you are hurting your career by taking a junior job and that Codesmith prepared you for mid level jobs, and you see the resumes of the people getting those jobs, and it starts to feel not so bad just leaving off the months on that OSP project on the resume to make it appear longer, but always 100% telling the truth to anyone who asks.
Here is my 2cents having worked with a number of Codesmith grads anywhere from during Codesmith, immediately after, or down the road, for a variety of goals, from just wanting to get a job, to wanting to get a top tier job.
Overall Codesmith is a great program, an incredible community of amazing people. Every one I've worked with is professional, hard working, and great.
It's great for people who are super ambitious and work hard but it's not magic. So I try to help people choose to go for the right reasons and look beyond the on paper results.
I have the same 3 issues you do and comment about them often.
I also have a different perspective with these issues because as an industry engineer who knows literally several thousand other FAANG/ex-FAANG engineers, the dozen or so peers I've asked have had reactions to Codesmith resumes ranges from "omg that's sketchy" to "this is blatant fr…
Yeah I think Codesmith for the most part treats the fellow job reasonably with CIRR, but the loophole to watch out for is that they can "delay the clock indefinitely" by 1) extending contracts, and 2) hiring more Fellows. e.g. hiring 20% of a cohort back (7 people) is a MASSING clock delaying event for CIRR results. It pushes back 20% of people who might have otherwise not gotten a job, into the next report.
Thanks for sharing details as well, I suspect many programs have similar results and it's expected, but it should help people in navigating the tough market!
Again, I think they handle this reasonably, but they should disclose in a footnote on their reports how many people are fellows in each cohort as it manipulates the data.
This is another problem with CIRR, it's not crystal clear on layoffs, promotions, job changes, etc... that could happen in the six months. It assumes people just get one job and they don't specify any requirements on how salaries are collected.
So if I was Codemsith I would
1. Include anyone who got a job, regardless of layoffs
2. If people got multiple jobs or promotions, use the highest salary within the six month period.
Here is my detailed analysis, neutral look at the data (some points might seem boring, but just writing it up thoroughly). I tried to put the more controversial points first as I doubt people will read all of this.
# SUMMARY: Not much change from H2 2021, slight downshift in salary buckets, but overall very similar numbers.
# 1. Median salaries continue to be super misleading because of multiple cutoff points (a CIRR issue I describe often is pronounced here)
So the part time program exemplifies these the best, explaining via example.
37 people included in report. 10% of people were excluded because they said they weren't job hunting when starting Codesmith.
Now 31 people were placed. 21 people salaries, and 3 people did not report salaries. So of the **\~40 people who started, 21 people reported salaries and the median of those was $137K**.
For the full time program, 301 people…
So NuCamp has no bar and focuses on experience outcomes instead of job placements. To be fair, if you wanted to compare it to Codesmith say, you would need to take a sample of people who got accepted to Codesmith and have them do NuCamp instead, and then compare the outcomes, otherwise it's apples and oranges.
That said, NuCamp only has 4ish hours once a week of live instruction, and the rest is self study, homework, graded work, etc... so that's also how they keep the cost down. Whereas a lot of programs have instructors 8+ hours a day... and keep costs down by hiring former students to teach.