I'll confirm you're not me lol! But I looked up all the people in that screenshot and they all have fairly normal Codesmith-y LinkedIns with exaggerated OSP experience.
Some of those people have a lot of experience before too, that's not super common. I've seen info sessions before and Codesmith is pretty clear that people come from 'a range of backgrounds' and most people haven't worked as SWE's before.
Did they talk about that in the session? I'm sure they chose people that were all saying amazing things about Codesmith was and how they persisted with the Codesmith-way of doing things and it worked, without really saying what that means.
I'm sure Eric K was probably mentioned by everyone too as the reason why they got a crazy high offer. Several people have sent me Eric Ks advice (in various forms from audio/video) and it's very good, standard, bread-and-butter advice you would ge…
I don't want to speak for that person, but that person was thanking THE COMMUNITY ON REDDIT (not Codesmith), they were a member of this community for A LONG TIME and asked a lot of questions and really deliberated the right place to go and for them it was Codesmith, and that's great because they were happy with the outcome. For other people it's not Codesmith!
Interviewing.io is currently the best in place to go if you just want 1 to 3 or so mock interviews and nothing else.
If you plan on paying for 5 or more, I would consider an interview prep program like Formation.dev (disclosure co-founder), Interview Kickstart or Pathrise (I've removed Outco because they haven't accepted applications in a month.
Exponent bought PRAAMP (which is free peer to peer mocks) and they offer paid mocks in a number of areas as an upsell but they don't have as many or as a strong mock interviewers as Interviewing.io or the interview prep programs. If you can get a good deal on them then doing a few there is probably fine.
A number of people might recommend various free options, Codesmith also offers alumni free mock interviews for life, but not all mock interviews are the same. If you aren't doing a mock with a person who has either done hundreds of interviews…
I would make sure the post bacc program is legit and not run by a 3rd party that has a bad reputation.
But in terms of which one is better? It depends on you and how you learn and what's a good fit for you so I would focus on finding a program where the day to day work is aligned with what you feel is effective. For example, I did a degree but practical hands on learning works a lot better for me and the most valuable things I learned were from side projects!
I'm biased from my FAANG-ish background but I think the ideal is still a top tier CS program (top 10 or 20 from US World News). After that I'm not sure because those programs are the sure things where recruiters are lining up to hire people. Anything else and it takes a little bit of luck and determination.
Of the ones you mention, Launch School capstone is the most selective and has consistently strong placement rates.There are a lot of people going to WGU but it's unclear that that will result in jobs or not. People primarily go to get a degree for cheap but I suspect they also do other things and are a part of other programs too to get jobs
I have never led Formation and despite being a co-founder, Sophie is and has always been the founder, president, secretary, CEO and face of the company inside and out and she tells me what to do. But you knew that I guess?
Seriously, you all seem passionate about this and maybe you don't want to be open minded about me but you should give Sophie a chance.
This has all the details: https://www.stridefunding.com/formation. You are better off reading the 4 ways the loan ends rather than me trying to summarize.
The new ISA is directly with Stride so we don't have any say or influence over your terms and you need to get the final answer from them directly.
There is some confusion, but a simple answer. We had an old ISA that we stopped offering a few months ago that was forgiven if you left the program without a job and don't have any job paying over 65K. We replaced that with 3 payment options and one of them is similar to an ISA but is not forgiven unless you leave early and make under 55K for several years.
So there are many people at Formation with the old ISA and the new ISA which understandably causes confusion. Many programs have gone through this transition over the past few months as well.
If you are ever confused, DM me or contact someone on the Formation team because it's really important for everyone's sake that you thoroughly understand the payment method you choose and we have 4 different ones right now!!!
It's here and the disclaimers at the bottom explain the methodology of how everything is calculated: [https://formation.dev/blog/2022-formation-fellow-placements/](https://formation.dev/blog/2022-formation-fellow-placements/)
We're working on a mid year update for 2023. Salaries have been a bit lower lately but we're still crunching the numbers for anything interesting!
We don't right now because auditing requires a framework of rules to check against first. But you can get any data audited that has rules and the auditors just make sure you follow the process! And believe it or not, CIRR data is audited AFTER the fact, not before (which is one of the problems).
Believe it or not but CIRR doesn't even say how salary information needs to be collected whatsoever, so just asking someone and taking their word for it can be considered the golden source of truth!
We collect detailed placement data for every single placement and detailed compensation info following an internal process, and some day we could potential turn that into something auditable to make sure we don't make any mistakes in collecting the data. Right now just have a crazy strict authorization and verification process to touch this data to make sure every pixel is correct, but we could pr…
Sure happy to answer:
1. We are not a bootcamp or educational program and we don't have the data CIRR requires. We don't have end dates, we don't have a program length, we don't have a curriculum, even though the pace is dynamic - we don't have any even theoretical length of the content itself to benchmark against, people ramp up or down hours as they please and we have no control over that, people pause for weeks and go on vacation, people have no expectation of what work they will do going in, people don't "graduate", roughly 2/3 of people are ALREADY CURRENTLY WORKING. So it just doesn't make sense and trying to manipulate our data to fit into CIRR would be extremely misrepresenting and misleading and not what you think it would be.
2. We published some outcomes on our blog and plan to every year with extremely fine details of how every single thing is calculated. This goes WELL BEYO…
That was Turing School. Nucamp is Ludo and Nucamp fairly transparently doesn't do job outcomes because they want to focus on satisfaction instead. Which I think is a good idea because you are paying for teachers and curriculum development and not a job so why judge it by if you get a job or not? That said, asking for reviews is sadly a common practice.... have you noticed how Codesmith has like 600 Course Report reviews where they pay them to sponsor, and wayyyy fewer reviews on other sites.... and similar things with other programs: where their online reviews are skewed across different sources.
I wrote a paper in undergrad about online reviews that wone a best paper award at CHI and since then I don't trust online reviews haha.
\+1000 to woman founded, woman lead, diversity focused programs. The only one left I know of is the one I co-founded: Formation (founder and CEO is Sophie, majority of leaders are women), but it's not a bootcamp and it's for experienced engineers. Hopefully some day - when we're confident we can deliver an exception experience - we'll be able to help people get from zero to one as well.
About two years ago I didn't really follow any bootcamps except Lambda School because I had a lot of info made available to me that was inconsistent with the public info but I was friendly with most of the bootcamp founders (and still am). Codesmith came on my radar after numerous people applied to my company and appeared to be 1+ YOE engineers until I interviewed them and found that their narratives fell apart and they were entry level engineers... and then I noticed OSLabs on two resumes and dug deeper... ever since then I have had so much info sent to me about how Codesmith works and OSLabs that I find it incredibly fascinating and have deep dived into it more than any other program and I understand it better than many employees who talk to me even do.
So yeah, not sure how to answer that but short answer - yes I follow other bootcamps and I connect on LinkedIn with bootcamp grads fr…
Update us in a year. I have an analysis of 1000+ Codesmith grads a year into their career and how many have changed jobs already. At Facebook, changing jobs in less than a year was a red flag for recruiters so maybe it means nothing but it's something I'm trained to notice. My working hypothesis is that Codemsith grads mislead smaller companies with the exaggerated resume and get hired as experienced engineers at small companies that don't do their homework and a number don't make it a year when they are found to be less experienced than expected. I have a busy day job but we'll see when I get there time to process the data.