I'm someone who posts a lot of criticism of CIRR, the most out of anyone, do you think my comments are misinformation or are you talking about other comments. My comments are critical but sourced directly from the CIRR standards, worksheets, the website, and talking to one of the founders of CIRR, and not made up.
Most Codesmith students I talk to get their information about CIRR from Codesmith posts.
Some people do state misinformation about it on here but that doesn't mean that all criticism is misinformation either.
For starters, Codesmith openly doesn't follow CIRR's standard for graduation date as it considers PAID FELLOWS to not have graduated until the fellowship contract is complete and does not count them as placements, even though the CIRR rules are clear than any job after someone meets the consistently applied graduation requirements is a placement and graduation dates ar…
Thanks for sharing more details! Yeah that's what I've heard from the people in the "Eric is awesome camp". What I've found though is that while his advice is solid, he's overconfident in his understanding of the market. He said 'I'm friends with the CTO of Disney so I know the better than anyone on Reddit or TikTok', and 'I've done 4 startups and 3 of them were acquired' and like I said, public documentation raises a lot of questions about that.
But I guess my question is, while he has been helpful, how do you know he's given you good advice and how do you know you wouldn't be able to be more successful with other advice?
A senior engineeeing manager, M7, at FAANG, with a trajectory of being promoted every year would be making about $800K to $1M a year. It's analogous to E7 - [https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries/software-engineer/levels/e7](https://www.levels.fyi/compan…
Yeah me too and I appreciate you engaging because I know my direct and transparent tone is not interpreted how I intend it inside Codesmith, where the response has been 'badmouth me private, ignore in public and respond with positivity'.
But yeah I had notifications on for the entire post and got one 1 hour ago for different comment, and then came back 20 mins later for this comment. None of the other comments on the post had any engagement changes at (no comment/no change in votes) and this comment had 11 upvotes within 10 minutes.
I wish this place would be more welcoming easy to have professional discussions, but none of this behavior makes it approachable.
Can you elaborate more on why you found Eric K "awesome" and "inspiring"? There is some controversy around other team members but Eric K is by far the most controversial - people who work there love him or people hate him and no one is in between haha.
I do have two sources of confirmation that he has a group of alumni that he asks to comment and post on Reddit and that raised eyebrows for me. But again, I keep an open mind until I have clear patterns, and sources are super polarizing on him.
I did a deep dive into his resume (looked up press releases, articles, etc... and poked around) and found some questions about his background that appeared different or portrayed differently in his personal pitch, but I've never met him or talked to him personally to clarify those things.
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
/u/InTheDarkDancing, enough time has passed now so one of the examples of things I'm going to be talking about more is their "culture management" and how Codesmith strategically manages the culture (e.g. not just the slogans but internal processes to identify and manager any signs of negativity). It's not just a goal but it's someone's actually paid job to do.
I comment a lot about Codesmith and it's not "a shitshow" internally but it's also not run flawlessly. They don't have a typical company org chart and I've corroborated some of the anecdotes of HR/internal stuff, but every company has things they are doing well and not well and that's not a reason to flip a table because overall it's doing a lot of things right too.
Now in terms of outcomes. First off, CIRR hasn't been updated and is overdue.
They have released some numbers though of offers signed in 2023 and the Q1 median was $110K and Q2 median was $115K and Q3 median was $120K. Presumably H1 was when most of the H2 2022 grads were placed so I don't expect their next CIRR report to be nearly as good.
These are ways the numbers can be steered, but I severely doubt they would be intentionally fraudulently made up.
1.CIRR lets you confirm a placement by external sources including Lin…
Fair point on people's goals and that was lost in this thread for sure. A lot of people don't aspire to "FAANG" and I help a lot of people go to NOT-FAANG explicitly.
I also appreciate the callout on "worse" and it's not at all pedantic. That should have been qualified since it meant "worse in most respects to top tier tech companies, such as compensation, empowerment of engineers, scale, challenges of work, career growth" but even then "worse" is still a judgy word and a mistake to use it.
I use a definition of top tier as follows (which I mean by "FAANG") and I'll be clearer from now on:
1. Tech focused company - the primary business value is the technology or a product relying on the company's core technology.
2. "High compensation" - which varies particularly by region, but generally offers include some kind of equity or ownership participation (or equivalent), extremely strong be…
It's a good question and there isn't one answer. I've even heard Codesmith's CEO changing his tone a bit here, he said recently 'by mid level and senior we mean real Software Engineer jobs'.
Which is a fair point. ENTRY LEVEL FAANG jobs pay about $200K with $150K base right now, so even measuring by cash, Codesmith's "$127K median outcome" would not be below even entry level of the highest paying roles so I don't think they are trying to say their grads are "canonical FAANG mid level and senior" but rather that they are "legit" engineers. Many bootcamp grads get much lower paying, engineering jobs, and Codesmith's point is that the grads get full blown SWE jobs.
My problem isn't so much debate over the choice of language, but that they claim the OSP PROJECTS ARE A KEY TO PRODUCING MID LEVEL AND SENIOR ENGINEERS and that is where I draw the line in my personal opinion. Any kind of non-e…
Yup, and in info sessions they say that your OSPs are mid level and senior projects that will hundreds and thousands of stars. Or one project that got a tweet once from a prominent React figure that it was a 'good idea' has been now become 'industry experts love the projects'.
They are no, most don't get those stars, and the main source of people starring it are Codesmith residents themselves, and posting in the broader Codesmith CSX community to people who have just started learning how to code.
Marketing is marketing but when challenged on this marketing they double down and I'm shared all kinds of things staff and residents say to push back against me... they truly unequivocally believe at all levels of the company that these projects are genuinely mid level and senior work.
I can only speak to trying to generalize the people I know but everyone is a unique person with unique set of skills and experiences.
So the "hustle" comes someone who would do 11 hours a day M-F and 9 hours on saturdays. People who will ping and message recruiters, people who will genuinely apply to 1000+ jobs and send outreach for many of them. People who will come to you and say "how can I make this past accounting experience sound like 2 years of engineering experience" and then spend a lot of time practicing and practicing until they can make it sound convincing. Like someone who might post on Reddit about their journey and how hard it was to get a job, but leave out that they had 13 years of "web developer" experience that's on their resume that might have helped.
Again, not trying to be negative even though when I talk about this it sounds like blatant fraud, it's too easy to ju…
I actually find Codesmith grads have great hustle and produce a lot of code too. Look I hired a Codesmith grad and know dozens, I worked with dozens of new grads directly in my career.
Most of them have more hustle than new grads I've worked with but most also have way more skill gaps. Very much ready to have a shot at succeeding in entry level roles and that's commendable for a 12 week program.
I have looked at a few yeah! The documentation, presentations, and overall code structure is more consistent with a production codebase, the GitHub orgs and repos are setup more consistent with larger.o0en source work as well. I see more "good practices" and haven't seen the kinds of security vulnerabilities I see in Codemsith projects. But the actual code occasionally has commented out code and things and isn't flawless. The PR naming and structure could improve too on some I've seen. But they are a lot closer to a real production codebase than the Codesmith OSPs. I still don't think any of many become widely used or maintained projects though just like Codesmith.
The state of the Codesmith ones is a result of (my opinion synthesizing dozens of private comments):
1. Don't have anyone with extensive industry or open source experience so the guidelines and best practices are hit and miss…
I agree that there aren't enough Codesmith grads to make a dent in the system. It's why every time I talk to people about this they are super offended and some say they would never hire anyone who went to Codesmith, but no one does anything about it, because it's just not a significant number of people OR the complexity of training the ATS to block OS Labs is not worth it.
But the motivations are wrong and so think you know that. I had an AMA last week live that you could have come to and Neetcode, Blind75 and Sophie are doing a panel next week if you want to see our story and motivations and what we do and what we believe in, you can do so live and hear it from own mouths instead of inferring from comments I'm making in a minute or two typing like crazy on Reddit.
Anyways, this behavior will catch up to them. NY onsite paused indefinitely now, down to 2 cohorts a month instead of 4, c…
I would add to this to do open source work throughout. Like at Codesmith people do THREE WEEKS on a big open source project and then claim months to years of experience (4 months is signed off by OSLabs) and they claim that it turns them into midlevel and senior engineers
So you can only imagine how good you should be getting if you starting working on LARGE open source projects for actually MONTHS.
I did a break down of the "achetypes" of top bootcamp grads in their first year post job. And I do think the majority of top grads do indeed see the 12 hour days of the bootcamp as much "harder" technically that most non-top-tier jobs, and that communicating well cross function and to other engineers and making sure you are on the same page, is important.
I've heard in a Codesmith session that Software Engineers "nowadays" don't just write code like "they used to" and are collaborative team members. From what I've seen, nothing has really changed and that was always really important and hasn't really changed.
The biggest change is that entry level engineers don't need as much hard tech skills because we have AWS, Google Cloud, and all kinds of frameworks and tools, like VS Code, so entry levels engineers can differentiate themselves by being great team members and communicators.
It's…
Codesmith is fantastic for the right people! It has a very unique culture and that's why it's controversial on Reddit. I'm an under the hood type of person and try to look at how things work and Codesmith isn't super transparent about how it actually produces really good results.
So how it works:
1. High bar. Their process looks for numerous characteristics of successful grads and is an objective measure or raw programming skill. You need to be good AND have good communication and the right attitude.
2. You don't really learn much... topics are rushed through, you are told to snuggle the struggle, and all but one teacher came from Codesmith students themselves. BUT you are building strong bonds with friends and you are being supported infinitely from those instructors. You might have an hour long convo about your imposter syndrome that helps boost your confidence and do better.
3. Exagg…
✨ For the Leetcoders out there I have a mega-event to share.... the founders of Neetcode, Blind75, and Formation are hosting a panel discussion talking about DS&A and also a chance to get to know the people behind these things. It's on Thursday next week!
Bias disclosure: I'm the co-founder of Formation, but I'm not taking part in or involved in the event itself. Sophie (the founder) is moderating and Daniel (lead instruction engineer, 20+ year FAANG engineer) are representing Formation.
RSVP and **SUBMIT QUESTIONS!:** [**https://neetcodexblind75xformation.splashthat.com/**](https://neetcodexblind75xformation.splashthat.com/)
Happy to chat more in the thread!
✨ For the Leetcoders out there I have a mega-event to share.... the founders of Neetcode, Blind75, and Formation are hosting a panel discussion talking about DS&A and also a chance to get to know the people behind these things. It's on Wednesday next week!
Bias disclosure: I'm the co-founder of Formation, but I'm not taking part in or involved in the event itself. Sophie (the founder) is moderating and Daniel (lead instruction engineer, 20+ year FAANG engineer) are representing Formation.
RSVP and **SUBMIT QUESTIONS!:** [**https://neetcodexblind75xformation.splashthat.com/**](https://neetcodexblind75xformation.splashthat.com/)
Happy to chat more in the thread!
If it's not Codesmith, that's definitely THE one for the behaviorals. You spend more time working on HOW to talk about and present projects then you do on the projects. It's the most extreme place for focusing on that aspect at the detriment of the actual technical curriculum in my personal opinion.
I don't have any universal data so I should make it clear that Codesmith claims 100% of alumni get promoted within 5 years (it's based on 120 grads who decided to reply to the survey and from a long time ago, vs the 3000 grads they claim they have, so I don't entirely believe this - and know counter examples that were probably not in the 120 people, but that's the most zoomed out data we have).
Anecdotally, four buckets:
1. People who get by but change companies within a year or around that time, or they get a contract job they don't do super well on and just don't get the contract extended and then switch to a similar or slightly better company after a year, and then do this a few times. And soon enough they have the 2-3+ YOE for real to make a bigger jump to a top tier company. Worked with a few of these people at Formation. So they kind of show up, give it a huge amount of hustle bu…
The market is indeed tough. It's not quite "improving" in the sense of going back to the good times we had.... it's changing.
I won't give my full background but I'm expressing my observations having a pretty good pulse on hiring at the top tier companies specifically.
Hiring during the freezes was senior engineers only. Like canonical senior engineers with 5+ YOE at strong companies and who have worked on large scale products already.
The hiring now has opened up to canonical mid-level engineers. At Meta for example, this means a bare minimum of 2 YOE at solid companies working on large scale products.
So this is benefiting people who have solid experience already.
New grads are generally struggling. There is new grad headcount during the current fall hiring season, but it's going to top tier school grads, like Stanford, and other schools they have dedicated recruiters for.
So for…
RE: Outcomes, I summarized my threads a bit to respond to that. So what has been publicly stated is that average cohort size is down 25% from full capacity, people are being accepted until immediately before a start date, on their first interview, resulting in reported "lower bar" (a handful of reports from more "advanced" students who feel like they are working with more people were let in later, completed an accelerated pre-work, haven't been working for months in the Codesmith ecosystem before, and are struggling to "write basic code" as it was put) I don't have numbers on this but it tracks with the trend that Hack Reactor has done by making a "beginner" track (the 19 week one) as the enrollment of advanced people is down there too.
Placements are at not as strong companies as in the past. Their own data that was shown at an info session, albeit with the caveat of the presenter sayi…
+1 to this, don't go to Codesmith for content. The instructors are your mentors and guides who care about you succeeding but.there just isn't enough time to really teach anything.
From their website it also appears their prior curriculum developer departed at the same time as the recent batch of layoffs.
Hi I commented in the [Formation sub,](https://www.reddit.com/r/formation/comments/17155jl/comment/k3or36f/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) with a thorough reply in the context of Formation and how we feel about the contract.
In the context of bootcamps, I'll share some other examples of this kind of thing. I do not think "this is the standard" is a good justification and ultimately you need to feel comfortable and confident with what you are signing.
[Codesmith terms for attending any public event](https://codesmithdocs.s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Codesmith+Documents/Code+of+Conduct+-+Events.pdf) (without joining the program):
>Codesmith, at its discretion, may record audio and video from the community event. Codesmith may use these recordings in various ways, including, but not limited to, for promotional and educational purposes, at its sole discretion. By actively par…
There are about 5% of people that might overlap is my estimate.
So if you don't have 1 year as a SWE or a full time job that will be 1 year by the time you are job hunt ready then we won't even accept you and will reject you, I ironically recommend Codemsith often for ambitious people who are trying to move a little too fast but don't have that yet.
If we reject you and you spend a significant time talking to the team and we do think Formation is a good fit for your goals and your goals likely aren't 200K job in that case, we may accept you or wait-list you because we limit the number of people in that bucket. These are also the people who might show up in this subreddit in the very limited talk that there is about Formation (and also why stuff in this sub is likely not representing the typical person at Formation).
Our reporting is clear on what YOE means in that context and it exclu…
Reddit is very strict about doxing, and a number of people who I think Codesmith deeply trusts are less bought in than they think and things get out, I have to strike a balance between presenting these facts and not doxing or revealing anyone's identities.
It's confusing as heck yeah... but Reddit is completely anonymous and people should be going to authentic sources if they want actionable information.
Like I said, I'm confident because facts can't be manipulated and misinformation can't be backed up.
1. Codesmith admissions staff during an info call 2 weeks ago said the average cohort size is down 25% to "25 people"
2. Will Sentance shared data in an info session last week that Q1 2023 median salaries were $110K and Q2 2023 median salaries were $115K, that's a huge drop.
3. They had reported layoffs of up to 10% of staff a few weeks ago. There website staff was updated and you can use the way back machine if you want to compare.
4. The CTRI cohort was cancelled for the rest of 2024 and after the layoffs, it's possible other people are looking for jobs too.
Now about Formation:
1. We don't have any program costing anywhere near $20K, you might be talking about ISAs, loans or interest that hit that much, but the underlying cost is much lower than that. We move fast and things change.…
Who said this was a marketing channel for my business? I've explicitly said otherwise very transparently so you are making false assumptions or calling me out as a sketchy liar?
I have a business motivation to encourage people to go bootcamps, because then there are more people who go to Formation in 2-3 years. So I assure you this commentary is not "business motivated".
My entire life's mission after leaving Facebook and coming out of semi-retirement afterwards, is to address inequality in tech and I see day in and day out how people who are from underrepresented backgrounds who thought this was an honest industry get passed over with their 1 YOE for people putting down 2 YOE for their 3 week project and getting interviews and that's not fair either.
I used to be more open minded on this based on all the materials I saw that every clearly tell you not to lie.
But there have been some layoffs recently, employees are concerned and some ask/have asked me for advice on what to do because they cannot express their concerns internally.
I don't think it's a mega conspiracy but they are well aware that alumni resumes don't portray what their guidance is internally but they have no control to change that.
The reason I changed my mind is that these placements are celebrated by Codesmith as mid level and senior placements. Not everyone lies and they handpick the ideal alumni to talk about how they didn't lie and got high level jobs, but they are well aware of the ones that are and getting high level jobs and bucketing them all together showing that the handpicked cases are just common examples of the larger pool.
I'm sorry I can't break peo…
This is a not so secret-secret to how a number of bootcamp grads get past resume screens. There are two critical pieces if you do this:
1. You have to practice your narrative and story to not get caught (you can't fake real experience so you won't pass every interview, but you have to get good enough to pass some.
2. Since you'll be in more senior roles than you should be, you have to be ready to fake it on the job to not get fired while also not telling the company the truth about your background and getting the support you need. I've seen some amazing people get fired or let go (and they might not even tell the program they were placed because it happens so fast sometimes). But I've also seen people make it with a little extra sweat, but they make it. Can't give numbers on each bucket, but it's not an easy journey for anybody.
I work with hundreds of people from zero to 20+ YOE and h…
It depends how you define outcomes. Again, since we're not a school or program, we are trying to help people achieve their goals, we take you from A -> B in C time for D cost, and those expectations have to be aligned for it to make sense to join. But everyone's A, B, C, D are different.
We currently focus on preparing people for top tier DS&A/SD/classic interview pipelines and if we scale super large then it wouldn't make sense because every top tier job would be competing for Formation Fellows and so many people would want to join, there probably wouldn't be enough jobs.
So the vision for us is to actually figure out what the best company is FOR YOU, help you figure out your best "B" target. And on the other side, we can help companies find the RIGHT people for them. If we can match everyone up with the right jobs for them and help every company find the right people, we have a scala…
I might want to move this offline but can we connect on Codesmith's OSLabs. Feel free to DM me or LinkedIn Message me.
It's a 501.3c charity but:
1. President went to Codesmith a long time ago as a student
2. VP is a paid consultant for Codesmith who co-founded a subsidiary of Codesmith
3. Treasury is Director of Community for Codesmith
4. 3 Codesmith employees posted about how they are helping hire / involved in hiring the executive director position at OSLabs
5. The contact phone number is the same for OSLabs and a Codesmith for profit subsidiary.
6. Letters of Reference from OSLabs are signed by Codesmith's Chief Academic Officer but titled as a OSLabs Board Member who is not listed as such.
I'm curious because we've explored sponsoring non-profits in various ways and consulted expensive Silicon Valley lawyers and non of this would fly according to them.
CIRRs standard doesn't have clear processes for everything. For example there's no clear process for collecting salaries, while there is a clear process for collecting job start dates. The document itself isn't written by lawyers, like GRAD (Hack Reactor's version) is, which has clear language and a clear structure. In addition, the worksheets they provide have formulas in them and some are not explained in words in the docs. Like if I remember correctly, there are some about excluding students or deferring graduation dates where the sheets were.doi f something that wasn't explained in the spec.
Finally, Codesmith extends the graduation date for people that get hired back as fellows/TAs. While they don't count them as placements (which is good) they do extend their clocks for the life of the contract, which gives these people an extra 3 or more months to find jobs and be included in the…
Anyone know what's going on with CIRR? H2 2022 Results delayed, two more board members no longer working for their bootcamps - which leaves potentially just Codesmith and Launch Academy left managing CIRR
Hi all, sorry for posting so much recently, but I hope it's useful!
So we are all waiting for CIRR H2 2022 results to be posted. Last year the first wave came out mid September with Codesmith's results coming out at the very end of September, but now it's October already and I made some concerning observations.
I have made some observations below in trying to collect the facts.
I have been really on top of CIRR because the signs of this decline have been apparent for a while. It was setup as a business league from a bootcamp loan provider, and the standard was prepared by outcomes members for marketing purposes (according to one of the founding members of CIRR in a Reddit comment) .…
lol, the AMA is next week!
It's a harder question to answer than it sounds, but I don't want to misrepresent our size so I'm going to try to answer properly.
First, we are a mentorship platform. We're not a school or educational program or training program or anything comparable so we don't have "students", "curriculum", "classes", "cohorts", or even "programs" (we have an ongoing project this year to try to improve marketing to be clearer what we actually are lol)
We don't have any kind of fixed offerings and we work with people on a 1-1 contractual basis - for as long as it takes to get a job if you do your part - and the cost is based on your skill gaps and work experience, which we bucket into 3 tiers, but we're constantly working on new pricing models. But everyone comes in with different goals and needs. Some people need mock interviews, some need group mentorship, some need c…
It's really hard to answer this question. It's just impossible to work on this scope of project in 3 weeks. I would say that having a smaller scope project would LIMIT the potential, and the potential is NOT limited by the scope of the OSP, it's limited by the time.
Even if people worked 24 hours a day for two months it wouldn't be enough.
[Ada](https://adadevelopersacademy.org/) is a 11 month bootcamp, where everyone spends 6 months learning and then 5 months at a top tier internship with a partner company. It's a non profit with very strong partners like Zillow, Redfin, etc... And IF these people convert full time at the end of a 5 month full time internship, they are hired as entry level engineers.
Ada has paused enrollment because of the market and they can't guarantee those internships.
What makes Codesmith's 3 week OSP a secret sauce that makes it's alumni not just equal to a f…
So practically speaking, their grads are pushed to judge level via salary, e.g. if you get a 65K offer, you'll get a call from Eric convincing you not to take it, regardless of the actual position and if it's good for you long term, just based on the salary.
The thing they do is repeatedly tell people they are mid level and senior engineers just by finishing Codesmith. This sounds like there must be more to it, but the materials I've seen literally just start convos with, "Alright so since you graduated and are a mid level engineer, we'll have to do A, B, C on your resume" or "The OSP is the secret sauce that makes you a mid level or senior engineer by the end of Codesmith", or "Mid level engineers solve problems on their own and that's what Codesmith prepares you to do"
Yeah entry level FAANG is in the $150Ks base salary and about $200K with stock and bonuses, not including strong ben…
I agree that that's the view some people take and I understand where it comes from.
It's ultimately up to you to decide what you want to do. If you want to do that, go to Codesmith with the knowledge that this is how it works and be ready to go down that path.
My main goal here is to prevent people who DON'T WANT TO DO THAT from going to a program that has fantastic outcomes but isn't aligned in the how.
Thanks for sharing. Yeah some people who push back on this think I have some kind of hidden interest in calling this behavior out, but it is solely because I know thousands of engineers, recruiters, product people that I've met during my Facebook days, who now work at hundreds of other companies, and the sentiment is unanimous that this behavior is anywhere from lying to fraud. Not one person has condoned if for any reason. That said, I very much understand the other point of view and acknowledge it as well: industry gatekeepers are blocking ambitious new engineers from getting a foot in the door so the ends justify the means. Which practical speaking, is a reasonable argument for the small number of people who genuinely fall in the bucket and then get appropriately levelled jobs they wouldn't get otherwise.
My concern is lack of transparency in behalf of Codesmith. When called out they…
Yeah but you can also build account history by commenting valuable, non identifiable responses, and building enough karma before posting said anonymous AMAs.
I also think people can talk about their experineces without giving away context.
If you are doing an "Ask Me Anything" you are going to get questions that result in you giving context on your background that is identifying at the end of the day.
I appreciate you sharing your views professionally. The fact that I'm extremely open about who I am enabled this kind of reasonable discussion, and anonymous new accounts that might have their own biases cannot possible be evaluated fairly.
Codesmith isn't a competitor in my opinion. There are a small number (about 15%) of people who go to Codesmith who might be a candidate for Formation, but likely not. We don't work with new college grads right now and people with zero experience is an edge case. Like the 15% is an edge case for both Codesmith and us that neither of us market to, in my opinion.
I in fact talk to make people 1-1 and suggest they go to Codesmith and to consider coming to Formation in a few years.
The way Formation works though could expand in the future to people who don't have any coding experience but it's not on the radar right now. I think it's fair that the fact…
I worked at Facebook during the beginning of the "fake news" era and people blamed Facebook completely blind to their own biases, so there's only so much mods can do.
Us vs Them narratives get a lot of activity and further polarize the narratives and that's why I use my real name here and try to sources things.
It's very reasonable to question a new account posting about a $140K outcome and we can have a very REASONABLE conversation about it.
If people are that passionate for and against Codesmith and don't want to have REASONABLE discussions then moderation won't help... people have to self reflect a bit more and try to be more open minded.
I've had 20+ alumni, sutdents, staff, former staff and family of students tell me that Codesmith is extremely positive place with processes to "correct negativity" and that's part of the problem. The result is that people with feedback message me telling me they have no where to give feedback and they dump it on me instead. It's really hard to navigate!
I'm really plugged into to Codesmith and this post is not fake in the sense that the content is incorrect or that the responses are not genuine, but leadership members at this program do indeed monitor this subreddit and react to posts.
I wrote [this code review a couple days ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/16v4fig/codesmith_osp_code_review_numerous_unbreak_now/) that was then shared internally to numerous people and actioned very quickly in a number of ways. They do ways to get successful, dedicated alumni to post on Reddit and respond to things but I haven't seen evidence they put words in people's mouths directly. I asked the OP directly and they acknowledge that "Codesmith always encourages us to share our stories to help others" but that this post was not encouraged or prompted, and I have to believe the person. I do know less successful graduates who were ne…
There's a lot more going on here behind the scenes that I'm not speaking about publicly, but highly recommend you post extremely well researched points because any vagueness in my messages is to protect confidential sources and not a lack of information. This only means so much without those sources, and this is not something I actively spend time on, but I'm just mentioning this because you and I have been discussing for maybe almost 2 years now and since then, I have dozens of insiders (generally people who work there or worked there) who send me direct evidence or secondary evidence of things.
Codesmith has a somewhat unique company structure that only supports positivity and squashes negativity so the dozens of people who have feedback and can't share it internally have begun sending it to me instead for whatever reason.
I asked for clarification in my questions above, if I don't get a reply I would assume so because I'm aware that at least one Codesmith team member monitors this sub and has a group of alumni that are prompted to post and comment. I can't go into more details because of confidentiality but it sadly is a thing and has been demonstrated to me.
Yeah, apprenticeships, internships, and and every company has completely different leveling systems.
I use [https://www.levels.fyi/](https://www.levels.fyi/) to compare the levels at different companies (don't get distracted by the salaries but just compare the granularity of levels)
You can see how Microsoft has more granular lower levels versus something like LinkedIn or Netflix.
There are no bootcamps that I know of based on my definitions.
If you want high compensation, Codesmith, Launch School have well into six figure median salaries for placed students, and Rithm and Hack Reactor are close as well.
But there is no program that creates mid level and senior engineers because you can't get there without industry experience, but **let me explain what this means.**
I was promoted at Facebook from entry level to mid level in 3 months from starting and then mid level to senior in \~1.5 more years. The senior to staff in \~2 years.
So when I started, what was I? You could say 'well I was a mid level engineer from the start and underleveled!'
But that's really not true. I was an entry level engineer and I was treated like one, and I crushed it.
If I was hired as a mid level engineer, I might have underperformed or not done as well and maybe taken a lot longer…
Yeah, I've "written" two papers as an undergrad. One won a best paper award at a large conference... after the PhD students rewrote it in the "proper language" lol.
I think the difference is academia is heavily peer reviewed and collaborative and these projects have literally no one looking at the code.
But it's somewhat similar yeah
I've interviewed a number of Codesmith grads for Formation acceptance (which is not a job, so I have a more constructive/feedback hat on and more tolerance) and they practice all of these questions at Codesmith yeah.
But yeah I noticed within 5 minutes, and the misleading answers kept going or we would have awkward silence, but people would not say it was a job, but they say it's something else. I was "working with an company under OS Labs" for example.
There are a number of buckets here but generally, this is why all of these jobs are with small or less well known companies - who are not tech companies, and don't have solid vetting processes, and sometimes people make it through.
1. People who get entry level jobs at solid tech companies that they call "mid level and senior" but aren't. e.g. someone at Google got entry level L3 job and said it was "level 3 senior" but L3 at Google…