Sorry, I don't know them :( I fortunately/unfortunately know a lot about Codesmith because it's a snowball effect of it being discussed so much in this subreddit and then people send me stuff - usually anonymously because I get a lot of pushback from Codesmith insiders in comments and they want to help me and thank me for explaining things more the way they are.
I know a decent amount about Rithm (I know the founder) and HR (I know a number of alumni), BloomTech, but not every single program
The resume I was referring to was of this structure (generalized to hide any way of identifying and shifted the dates a bit, but it listed only years - following Will S and Annie Z's Resumes):
Senior Software Engineer
EXPERIENCE:
Software Engineer at CS Engineering - 2022 - present
Software Engineer at OSP - 2021 - present
PROJECTS:
Scratch - 2022
Solo - 2022
Iteration - 2022
It is because it's the length of Codesmith and the argument is the skills you build before and after are all part of the skills that go into the OSP. This is bs because
1. People choose a very specific tech to work on in the OSP and the rest of Codesmith is breadth across many topics
2. People are told to ALSO PUT THEIR OTHER PROJECTS in another section of their resume - essentially double, triple, quandruple or in one case I've seen 5X counting their time at Codesmith.
That said. It's not done in some super sketchy way to teach you how to lie cheat and steal. It's indeed a good program, the people are great, the alumni do well on the job, it's more of a "optimization strategy" that people see as a means to an ends.
I see both sides and I don't discourage people from joining just because of this. But I do think it's critical for you to know HOW it works and not just see six figures an…
Hack Reactor 12 week covers roughly similar materials to Codesmith. Codesmith has as a higher entry bar and 90%+ graduation rate as a result. HR has way more people drop out/get kicked out and not graduate (75 to 80% "graduate") but it's still okay.
Note about the ISAs - read the fine print. You can usually defer payments for some amount of time (I believe 3 month after graduation), but it's not forever (if you have a job making the minimum salary in a current job or any non-tech job).
Codesmith can be a good choice. It's the #1 choice for super ambitious people who are already decent programmers. The alumni I know are amazing, hard working, and great people who want to have a big impact on the world. If you want to put your head down, do what you are told and exceed all of the requirements/expectations, it's the place to go and you'll be happy.
The only problem I have with Codesmith overall is misrepresenting mid-level and senior outcomes (and by relation, exaggerating the value of the OSP projects that they claim make you a mid-level engineer).
The reason I would consider not recommending them is if they pull some shenanigans with H2 2022 outcomes because the raw data I've been shown is not good and if they don't acknowledge this openly and transparently and continue to try to frame them as Codesmith's best in industry results and keep up the attitude, then I will…
OSLabs is a charity that owns and manages all of the OSPs that Codesmith students work on for 3 weeks and they end up being the highlight of your experience at Codesmith on your resume - assuming you have no prior SWE experience. OSLabs collects donations and pays mentors to review open source projects. Which happen to be the same open source projects that Codesmith people pay $20K to do during the OSP phase of Codesmith... hence why it's so important that there be a clear line between the two entities or it could look like OSLabs is funneling tax deductible donations from people to mentor Codesmith students who are paying Codesmith $20K each.
OSLabs has full control over all the OSP projects and is responsible for choosing students to work on them and not a single person at Codesmith has the ability to influence these decisions or that would be a conflict of interest (people tell me th…
Both of these are solid bootcamp programs, I would also consider Launch School Capstone in a similar bucket.
I've been rabbit holing this weekend a bit on Codesmith because I received some interesting information a while ago and additional information last week that I finally looked at, and I may or may not continue recommending them in the future. I'm going to wait for their H2 2022 CIRR results - so see if the information they present aligns with the information I received or not before I make a call here.
They are in additional doing some very shady stuff with OSLabs, Parallels, and Codesmith. I received evidence directly from an employee, documented, that 'OSLabs will sign letters of reference for 3-4 months of work for a 3 week OSP project'. While I have long complained about the majority of people exaggerating their experience on resumes and LinkedIns - despite Codesmith's docume…
Rounding up: 7 cohorts X 4 timezones (east, central, west, onsite) + 3 part time is 31 cohorts a year times 35 people is about 1000 as an upper bound.
That said there are about 2000 grads total ever so and from CIRR last year I would peg it at 700 for 2022.
Which makes me realize that Codesmith is actually growing quite fast by adding the NYC onsite.
Enrollment for cohorts has been way slower, numerous people interviewing to start a week later whereas last year it was full months ahead of time.
A cohort has 1 lead instructor, 1 instructor, 1 mentor, and 4 part time TAs. At 150K for lead for 12 weeks and 120K for instructor and mento and $25 an hour for 80 hours a week of TA time. I get $125K a cohort in people cost plus career support, overhead and leadership, etc.. that's shared across cohorts.
But they probably need only 10 people in a cohort paying $210K upfront for a cohort to b…
They don't actually get away with it all the time, but because they are so small in the grand scheme of things, it works enough to make a difference for individual students. Other than Capital One, which is a very large company that the alumni have a machine to get you into (referring each other to jobs and practicing known questions with them), alumni spread across hundreds of companies. There are some small companies that explicitly love Codemsith grads and no need to use the Codesmith-style resume there. But most people are just slipping under the radar with a recruiter that misses this.
More importantly - Codesmith students are generally wonderful people and perform well enough on the job (even putting in hours of extra work a day to keep up) so that most companies don't look back and question the on paper experience later on.
We have this discussion a lot and people keep sending me more detailed info that makes me believe otherwise. It's very clear from official instructions to not lie but it's in office hours and 1-1s that the pressures come out in subtle ways. I am far too busy to dive into this but have all the raw ingredients to definitely demonstrate the stats on how every single student ever presents their experience and I have primary evidence of an employee telling people that Codesmith tells people to put 3-4 months of experience for their 3-4 week OSPs.
I showed some people on my eng team in person, without any context whatsoever, a guideline to consider separating OSP from "open source projects" on your resume to make the OSP stand out and how to make a LinkedIn company for that project (while also clearly saying don't lie) and someone very senior said "that's fraud".
The market right now is not great for bootcamp grads. FAANG hiring is opening up again for people with 2+ years of SWE work experience, but not for people with none. And you can't fake this work experience or stretch your resume - it's either 2 real YOE or not - faking your resume will just piss off hiring managers that will tell the recruiter that sent you over to never consider candidates from your bootcamp again and waste their time.
The only data I have here is from Codesmith. They had H1 2022 CIRR placements of 80% within 180 days of graduation for people who graduated and were job hunting. I've seen Codesmith's placement numbers for H2 2022 and for recent cohorts and they are hovering around 50% +/- 15%ish (these are not official numbers but from primary data from students and alumni) and are about a 20% drop from H1 2022 in H2 2022 and H1 2023 (which still has a lot of time left…
Sorry I think I completely miscommunicated and will edit. I meant you will not be one of the CODESMITH $150K cases, but you can totally do it a different path that's not CODESMITH. If you did Codesmith you might be one of the people up my DMs complaining about how bad the curriculum is and how they make you lie on your resume to trick people into getting senior jobs
Codesmith's process is extremely rigid and they know exactly what they are looking for and exactly what traits people successful in Codesmith have. The result is that they have very strong outcomes for the people they let in. So if you get rejected, it's probably a good thing, because you won't be one of the $150K success cases...
Question. It's a fact that the auditors use LinkedIn to verify employment. Someone puts their OSP as a "job" why hasn't this caused more problems with their audits or been discussed transparently? I've audited 200+ Codesmith LinkedIns and have a beautiful spreadsheet showing 2/3+ representing their OSPs as "Work Experience" as a "Company" (whether the company is open source or not is irrelevant from the way it's presented on their LinkedIn to an auditor who has to follow strict rules). I can give you hundreds of LinkedIns that from the "LinkedIn verification" standard in CIRR would be flagged as jobs to an unsuspecting auditor.
So based on what you are saying, either:
1. Auditors flagged to Codesmith discrepancies and Codesmith is aware of this problem and not doing anything about it to stop it.
2. Codesmith has instructed the auditors to ignore all of these companies on their LinkedIn…
\+1 this, a lot of people misunderstand what auditing means. After I called out Codesmith's auditors/and-or Codesmith for signing off and publishing the wrong report to CIRR that contained incorrect data, Codesmith published a video AND blog post about what auditing is and why it's important in validating their results and I think that it further re-iterates this notion that auditing = "better results" instead of actually explaining what auditing is.
I will keep being loud about auditing is but appreciate this haha.
Right, 14.6% of people in pacific time group didn't report salaries so might have been confirmed from LinkedIn or another source.
RE source. Yeah so CIRR has no requirements on how the salary is verified and the auditors for Codesmith said they just ask people to confirm - no offer letter required or anything.
This is the GRAD standard and sounds similar in that it's self reported:
\`\`\`
Compensation Rate
The Compensation Rate includes only annualized base compensation and excludes bonuses, equity, relocation, and any other non-base compensation. If a Graduate has held multiple positions of the same outcomes classification code within the Job Search Period, Galvanize reports on the position acquired at its discretion. If compensation information is known, it must be included. A GRAD Report must indicate the total number of Job-Seeking Graduates as well as the percentage of succes…
Finally someone who reads the standards line by line!! Hello and nice to meet you!
I would love if people ready CIRR line by line too - it has many loopholes.
One of the auditors who does Codesmith said, quote, "LinkedIn is almost as gospel as anything else. So we use that to help us validate and verify as much as we possibly can" ([link](https://www.codesmith.io/blog/codesmith-outcomes-reporting-a-conversation-with-james-white-of-banks-finley-white-company))
Anyways, this is a tangent lol
I was going to spend about 10 minutes doing a deep dive but Monday mornings are very busy for me so I will come back and edit this later.
It definitely caught my eye last night!
The right thing to do here is to compare it to Codesmith's H1 2022 but since this is a different standard than CIRR you have to compare it properly and accurately.
Hi, I respect all opinions and I'm sorry your experience wasn't what you expected. Hopefully you feel like leaving was the right thing and left on a fair note. While the majority of people successfully get placed (on no guaranteed timeframe) and we try to accept people who are a good fit for what we do, we very much understand Formation is not for everyone and support people leaving who aren't a good fit.
I want to correct some inaccuracies though for others reading this and I hope my response is very fair and transparent.
1. I agree Formation is very intense and I discourage a lot of people from joining who don't seem on the same page. I'm sorry you might have joined with the wrong expectations. You can change your workload and schedule week to week up or down as things change and no other program I've seen allow this but it might be that even with that, we couldn't support your needs…
Yeah we work on fundamental skills and those people that got those jobs mentioned did not have portfolios - they openly showed up as entry level and crushed technical interviews at top companies. In this market it's just almost impossible to get those opportunities and you might end up a bit lost between "I need a portfolio!" and "I need strong fundamentals!".
In think in a perfect world the fundamentals are sufficient to kickstart your career but we'll see if the market agrees or not in Q4 2023.
Referrals are a complex topic and are not all equal, for example:
1. Referral from another Fellow
2. Referral from a mentor
3. Referral from a team member
4. Referral from a partnership/b2b connection with Formation
5. Support in finding referrals from your own network.
Not all referrals are equal and effectiveness depends on the market.
So in summary - we don't guarantee any referrals and…
Hi, Formation isn't a good replacement for a bootcamp for most people. There have been a very small number of people that have done this but the reasons have to be right and we usually reject people without some kind of relevant experience. For example, self taught but contributions to large open source projects might be a good fit.
I don't recommend doing it in this market because almost all of these cases were people who got top tier entry level roles and sometimes from new grad headcount, and the market has tanked for entry level and new grad roles. The same struggles apply with going to a bootcamp, but I'm not also not advising doing Formstion right now in this bucket, UNLESS you have a job already and are doing it part time over a long period of time.
Second giant note: ISAs are great for the reasons you mentioned. But if you end up being one of the minority percentage that give…
The results also vary wildly based on the entry bar. So a program like Codesmith that is struggling to fill cohorts right now because of its high bar and lack of demand, has good incomes partly because the entry bar is so high to start with. This matters much more than the quality of education. Stanford and Harvard don't have some magical curriculum no one else has.... they have a high entry bar and brand that attracts the best people.
Look at Career Accelerators like Formation.dev (disclosure: I'm the cofounder of this program), Interview Kickstart, Pathrise, Coachable, Outco. These programs are expensive and might not be for you, but if you are looking at bootcamps you should also consider these.
These kinds of programs aim to prepare you for interviews and fill in various weaknesses you might have in levelling up. They all work well for highly motivated people by acting like a coach to get you across the line. Most of these programs are also part time and focus on people currently working.
If you are really far behind it's possible an advanced bootcamp like Codesmith could help. A bootcamp is a huge time commitment and somewhat of a waste if you are already a competent coder.
I tried to explain the consequences in the above, if enough people do it, then companies will raise their YOE requirements to "4 years for entry level roles" and they will just ignore resumes without at least 1 year of experience - to weed out any bootcamp grads exaggerating their projects to be close to a year (like I see on all the Codesmith resumes that apply to my company)
Hey I think we might have chatted long ago (Reddit deleted legacy chats from before Jan 2023) but feel free to ping me. I think you should work with the manager to set yourself up to convert full time, take the position, give it 120% and don't do any bootcamp.
I know I might seem bias here because Formation is intended to help people like the above to get that really amazing second job/third job, but I genuinely think you will accelerate your career by taking trying to convert full time as soon as possible. By the time you would have graduated a bootcamp + 3 months (super conservatively to find a job) you'll have accumulated actual work experience that cannot be replaced by anything.
If you go to Codesmith and give that your 120% instead, you might get a $120K first job but you'll be starting from 0 at that job (don't let "mid level and senior" marketing influence this, you are starti…
Codesmith, Rithm, Launch School are all doing well. Smaller programs with a high bar - while having lower application rates of qualified people - are finding enough people at the bar to keep running.
That said, we'll have to see how 2023 holds. Bootcamps are a great way to accelerate learning for motivated individuals but it's one step of many, and you'll need a lot of time and effort to get a job for the foreseeable future.
I get asked numerous times a day in DMs what IS the answer then. And I don't have one for everybody - it's a different path for everyone and there is no guaranteed single path - which I understand is super frustrating - but it is what it is.
What I've been seeing is a strong demand for senior engineers, and decent demand for mid-level engineers (1 to 3 YOE) that have worked at pretty solid companies for a few years.
I've seen people with experience but not necessarily full time strong experience (i.e. they might have contract work, large resume gaps, lots of job changes, or are bootcamp/CS grads with no experience) get pretty good jobs that in the boom-times, graduates of Codesmith, Hack Reactor, Rithm etc... (i.e. the top bootcamps) were getting - i.e. 100 to 140K great junior positions.
So my advice to top tier bootcamp grads at these top bootcamps is to not try to sneak into those 120K entry level roles that 2021 and 2022 alumni were getting and to aim for apprenticeships and internships. e.g. start with [apprenticeships.me](https://apprenticeships.me). NOTE: I'm sure I'm going to get some people commenting on here that…
Success stories aren't anomalies but they also aren't the norm. It's somewhere in between and that's why they come across so polarizing - because people only talk about one end or the other.
You could be a good candidate for a bootcamp. Especially if you did some CS courses in college (which it doesn't sound like you did) I would say an even stronger yes. You can absolutely do more than web dev via a bootcamp. Bootcamps try to teach marketable skills so their graduates have a resume of buzzwords that overlap with the most jobs possible. Some try too hard and teach 6 languages and you don't end up learning anything. So the best ones end up in the middle, teaching one language / framework, while exposing them to a couple of others in a lighter way.
Anyways, look at Codesmith, Rithm, Launch School Capstone, and the usual suspects and see if they are a good fit for you. Look at the day to…
It changes constantly. We work with a lot of people who want canonical FAANG and we work with FAANG who want the even "better" tier of companies (FAANG level engineering bar and product but earlier stage with more upside). Notion and Figma (pre acquisition) are that level. Stripe and Square were also that level during COVID. Now it's shifting to AI a bit, like Open AI.
The three criteria:
1. super strong engineering culture and engineering driven decisions
2. product or service is leading edge / best in class and at a fairly large scale / making money / growing fast
3. top compensation and significant equity (on par with the canonical FAANG)
These companies also tend to have very similar levelling systems to each other
The reason I care so much is because I work with people aiming for FAANG and top tier jobs and a number of people come from Codesmith and we have materials on levels incorporated so people can learn how to navigate levels at these companies.
I totally understand how most bootcamps grads realize the levelling at their first job is different from FAANG but Codemsith is the exception where people come in wanting Senior FAANG roles because one person at Codemsith got a Senior role at Google and it's a whole process to explain that that role was entry level - not Senior and some amount of disbelief because Codesmith said it was senior.
Pragmatic Engineer just wrote about levelling today in an amazing post - with the subscription fee: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/what-is-a-senior-software-engineer
I've worked with a few people who have this kind of background and got good jobs. I wouldn't recommend Formation though for you because you are looking for practical skills. We do (as of July 2023) a minimal amount of version control and production coding - but we don't "teach" anything, it's all practice + feedback and you have to be the driver.
If you are considering doubling down on fundamentals and applying to to top tier companies, consider Formation. If you want to get practical experience and then a job applying those practical skills, then I would suggest getting involved with a large scale open source project (that has support from a large company) that checks the boxes and contributing fixes over a few months.
The job market is tough right now for someone with your background and there aren't any paths that will make it particularly fast.
So for a lot of the people I've worked with - they are awesome, hardworking, driven, and those qualities lead to their success on the job. In some cases that gets misdirected to something Codesmith did - and perhaps confidence-building-as-a-product is the product you are paying for with Codesmith - and it's worth it.
That problem you talk about is a fantastic problem to work through and great in an interview, 100%. That doesn't mean it's "production level" though. I had several notable personal projects I talked about in interviews that were super impressive but the code was not "production quality code". One "project" we actually incorporated a company and it was featured on TechCrunch - and even the code was not "production level", it was a group project with tens of thousands of lines of code, had a ton of fascinating product, growth, and technical problems, and it got me a job at Fa…
I can add details and caveats from various discussions with dozens of Codemsith alumni and from analyzing public OS Labs repos
When people on here call Codesmith "culty" three reasons are
1. they convince students these projects are production level projects. They are not and I've looked at many of them. Most don't work properly, many have commented our code and terrible practices, mish mashing libraries, no planning, and fellows/mentors who have no experience. Ive done hundreds of interviews and I have yet to see a OSLabs CODEBASE (the ideas for the projects themselves are great) that would pass as a production codebase and any employer impressed by someone actual code contributions didn't look at the code or did so with the understanding it was a 3 week project and not expecting production code.
2. Do you get formal paperwork you were accepted into OSLabs? Do you sign paperwork wit…
There are other ways yeah :D.
Ada Developer's Academy is free, 4 months of training and 5 month internship with their partners. They had to scale back because of the economy but it's been consistently reliable for getting people into the industry.
I also know several people who are self taught with a tech-adjacent background (other engineering degree or math degree) - focusing on LeetCode and gunning for entry level FAANG roles and got those jobs too (e.g. Amazon and Palantir). **I would not advise this at all right now because of the market** but it's a path that can work for the right people.
Apprenticeships are another pathway - seen several people with no experience get Apprenticeships (e.g. via OnRamp) that led to good jobs.
There's no one size fits all here and the hard part is figuring out what to even do! Too many people do a whack-a-mole approach where they start everything…
I agree with this too, I just think it's important people sign up for it to play the game and understand the game well and not to sign up because they think Codesmith is a magical place that teaches them things they can't learn anywhere else. Don't just choose Codesmith because it has high outcomes and all the reviews say superficially great things about it being life-changing or they made amazing friends or that the program was intense and "hard learning".
I would say that all bootcamps students are signing up to play some kind of game but different programs have different ways of branding that and you want to choose the one that does things in a way you are aligned with... for some people that Codesmith and for others it's not
By the way, it totally trickles down. So we generally support people getting jobs at top tier companies and more people have been taking positions at good-but-not-top-tier companies that in the past Codesmith-level grads were getting, and Codesmith-level grads are getting jobs that less good reputation bootcamp grads were getting, and then those people are not getting any jobs.
Bootcamps enrollment is way down. Codesmith's NYC cohort starting Monday was still conducting interviews as of Thursday and they keep moving back deadlines. They are also doing an "apply-a-thon" to give people prizes for applying.
Rithm has said demand remains strong as has Launch School - but both are smaller programs.
On the plus side, the market is picking up and people are asking me more questions about going to bootcamps so maybe that will change in a few months.
I think about this every time I get attacked. These are my THEORIES (no strong evidence):
1. A lot of accounts have no history and are new, so I wonder who the people actually are
2. I know many people privately have problems with specific leadership at Codesmith ("sketchy", "sleezy", "used car salesman", "lied to me", "obsessed with Codesmith's image"). Apparently there are unofficial ways people talk where they discuss their issues with the leaders. Now we haven't seen a leader once use their real identity and respond to things, so I suspect there could be leaders with fake accounts replying sometimes and displaying the behavior of the words above.
3. Codesmith currently has about 100 former students on staff (full time and part time and contracting) listed on their website.And this list rotates constantly. So I suspect 25% of all students end up working for Codesmith in some capacity…
I constantly point out the pros and cons of Codesmith but I have to say that all the grads I've encountered in reality - with names and faces - are extremely professional, polite, hard working, ambitious.
Skill wise, most also have a lot of gaps to fill to getting to be truly mid level and senior engineers but they are truly solid entry level engineers and competitive with strong computer science graduates. I think a lot comes down to the personality and drive of the person.