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.
Okay it's not that bad and being so negative only provokes them to be more defensive!!
But yeah if you say bad things about Codesmith, you get weird anonymous accounts on both sides coming out of the woodwork (my observation is that it's mostly supporting Codesmith, but not 100%).
I used to have way more crazy convos on here when people didn't know me, but day in day out I've been unexpectedly consistent and students, graduates, employees, managers, etc... have noticed, sent me volumes of interesting information and facts and anonymous trolls can attack facts - whether for or against.
Interview Kickstart is based in India and might be a good option. I'm the Co-Founder of Formation.dev and IK is a major competitor but we don't support many international engineers and IK might be a better option for you at this point in time.
No coding bootcamp places people at MAANG regularly. Codesmith is one of the best bootcamps and they have 10X the number of people ever who have gone there than we do but have about the same number of MAANG placements (excluding contractor jobs) in absolute number... so I think if that's your dream, go with the career accelerator and interview prep bucket.
Yeah as someone said below, this is a strong TRUE mid-level FAANG offer, or low end senior FAANG offer.
Their previous salary was $145K already, so they were probably someone who didn't really need to go to Codesmith.
I've worked with a couple people in this bucket who dropped out in their first week because they really needed something else (like Formation.dev - disclosure, co-founder, Pathrise, Interview Kickstart) and not a bootcamp. but didn't know those existed.
While this is a little opinionated in tone, I think this is all true except that there's no point in sharing it. It shows a super key thing, which is that the median Codesmith grad was about the same in their LAST JOB that the median bootcamp grad in the whole industry makes AFTER THEIR BOOTCAMP. I think that's a pretty important thing to note for people looking at their options and Codesmith had this data all along and didn't share it!
This is really hard to extrapolate, I have a lot of data people have shared and I threw it into cohort-based charts.
For CIRR, it's placed within 6 months of graduating. Some of these 73 people are people that graduated more than 6 months ago so they wouldn't even count in the "83%" and some are and would.
So you can't extrapolate anything from the number alone... whoever at Codesmith shared this knows exactly what they are doing and shared no dates and no timeframes to make a point about hiring picking up to motivate people and not a point about actual placement rates
Or as Ludo said below:
https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/162t5y6/comment/jy0n28j/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3
I commented above but it's also interesting to note that the median salary going in was in the $70Ks and 20% of people were making $90K+. So it depends on where you are starting from! If you make 40K across two restaurant jobs, the odds are much lower of making six figures than someone who is an accountant making $90K.
I added these to my comment above that I think are super interesting from this data,
​
>It's really interesting to see "past salaries", the number of people making six figures BEFORE CODESMITH is an anomaly for bootcamps, and one of the things that skews the numbers. 16, or 20% of the people made over 90K BEFORE with and I would say most people on here are hoping to make 90K AFTER. People really need to know this going in... that part of the success is that a number of people going in are already successful.
>
>2. This gives more insight into the split distribution - lots of high salaries, lots of low salaries - which, like 2., is not the norm for bootcamps. You can see personas in the data. Some people with $140K+ salaries started with high salaries anyways. Some didn't, those people are the "all in Codesmith" people who defend it to the bitter death - but it's like 5 peopl…
I'm talking the official the spreadsheet (with the same columns the one you posted has) and it having about 20 more people on it since mid/end of July, but it could be incorrect. The other data source was someone said the celebrations channel had under 20 people on it in the past month (but said those can be opt out, and sometimes delayed by months) but given how proudly most people share their outcomes with their cohorts, I doubt THAT many people would opt out of sharing in the celebration channel.
ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY. I think people know me around here well so I won't introduce but I have a lot of comments. Most important point is in bold, the reset is just commentary.
1. **IF CODESMITH HAS THIS DATA SO EASILY ACCESSIBLE - BE TRANSPARENT ABOUT IT AND TELL PEOPLE THAT SALARIES ARE DOWN $20K (median/mean) FROM LAST YEAR.** I've seen a few info sessions where employees say that outcomes are "similar" to last year but at "different types of companies". Second, I've seen numerous documents shared with me where Codesmith ties it's "excellence" with the high salaries compared to bootcamp and CS degrees, so they have to take a hit with this kind of drop, when the best CS grads from Stanford and Harvard are still all making $150K base salaries at Figma, Asana, Palantir, etc...
2. The columns of this data align with their post-graduation CIRR collecting intake form so I think this is r…
I mean they are using the full and proper data set for CIRR, but this is the source yeah. I'm just surprised how much Codesmith cares about talking about compensation and pushing people for compensation, yet they don't even collect granular compensation information. With the quality of data they collect, they can't say someone got a $400K FAANG offer. Every FAANG offer needs to be considered in terms of base, signing bonus, performance bonus, equity, vesting schedule, job location, and benefits (e.g. Amazon has much worse benefits than Apple and pays a lot more cash.... you are not smart at all if you compare the base salary one on one and say one offer is better than another.
Anyways, I'm writing up more separately!
So believe it or not but the column titles are the real titles of the official data they collect. Literally from their CIRR collection worksheet. I was shocked too when I saw this because they collect such little information about compensation, e.g. someone put "some stocks" and this is the data that turns into CIRR outcomes.
But yeah, meaningless in this context... doesn't even have the companies or time frames.
You and me both! I never heard of Codesmith until I was interviewing numerous people that all claimed to be engineers and had the same pitches about their 'experience' that quickly fell apart when asking any real questions about the team they worked on, and then went deep down the rabbit hole on Reddit, and I now I know more than most employees, including instructors, about them hahaha.
I think it might end up hurting a bit but hopefully not. Hack Reactor's brand was hurt a bit when it was acquired, because it used to be like the Codesmith-level entry bar, and since being acquired they grew to larger cohorts and a lower entry bar.
My completely personal opinion hunch is they will replace the instruction and curriculum in Tech Elevator with Hack Reactor/Galvanize curriculum, and leverage Tech Elevator more for it's partnerships in smaller cities like Cleveland and Columbus.
You should DM me or LinkedIn message me, especially because M2 sounds like it might be Facebook and I worked there 8 years as well.
I can look at your exact experience and try to get ideas, like one of your best options could be to to make a series of hops within a big FAANG company into engineering work.
I would 100% start with self studying with resources like Odin Project before jumping into a bootcamp.
I don't have a lot of data points but if you are already super experienced and comfortable in a field there's a lot more to this decision mentally and I think patience is better to give yourself room.
If you have downtime in this next job hunt, I might consider doing an intense program, while job hunting for your old job, getting your old job type, and then trying to find ways to add in programming at that job on the side in the goal of making a long term internal transition.
Fo…
That's a subjective question and I try to just answer with evidence backed facts so that people can make up their own minds of if it's good or bad FOR THEM.
Do not go there if you need a job ASAP after graduating. No program in fact will do that and the closest thing is a bootcamp like Revature - which comes with numerous catches and down print that many find concerning.
If you can get a job in your old industry that works though for Codesmith, or getting a less intense job now and doing part time. You could definitely get your old job back and job hunt for a SWE job simultaneously after Codesmith.
I've written more details about the market as a whole, but it's terrible for bootcamp grads right now and it's opened back up for experienced engineers... we have had offers at Formation in the past month or two at Google, Adobe, Capital One, Apple, and people currently at on-sites at Meta…
Hi! Yeah send me a DM so I can explain a little more how the new ISLs work. They are very different from these old ones as the payment term is longer and the individual payments are typically smaller and what the typical person will pay back is expected to be closer to the cap.
You have to start making payments after a year, but only if you are making the minimum salary at the time, so if you are unemployed your payments won't start. This is less friendly than the old ISA but it helps solve the problem that numerous programs have discussed where anecdotally, people don't feel motivated to look for a job as aggressively as those who paid upfront.
I say this all the time but it's very important because of the down market that no program, including Formation, hands you a job and you are not paying for a job. You are paying so that you present your best self and become a better engineer an…
We don't have any ISAs that cost exactly $25,000 so I'm happy to explain your ISA better if you ping me internally! There is a cap to make sure your ISA has an upper bound that is meant to be a positive feature for you and that is not the amount you owe necessarily. The amount you pay back depends on your salary so for this specific "full option", $25K is the cost if you get a BASE SALARY of $167K or higher.
In the past few months we have clarified our payment options to help explain this so hopefully this will only be clearer in the future that the ISA option (which is just one of many) is an alternative to paying the upfront cost but with a higher cost for the luxury of deferring payment.
The price of Formation varies by experience and needs, as it is a mentorship platform as opposed to a form of education, so that was an example for making a simplified point, but for anyone reading…
Said by a true Codesmith grad with a $130K job that says they couldn't have gotten it without Codesmith.
The Ivy Leagues have dampened diversity efforts for 100+ years with that attitude and the industry will be a hell of a lot more productive if everyone with ambition and drive had a way to fulfill their potential.
Having talked to a very wide spectrum of Codesmith grads, from those who loved it and wanted more, to those who hated it and wanted more, to those who hated it and never want to talk about bootcamps every again, to those that loved it so much that they won't even look anything without a Codesmith lens and are limited themselves and closed off to growing their careers at the rate their could if they were more open minded, to those that were meh about it and got fired from their first job after 9 months and are a little lost, to those say they couldn't have gotten their first job without Codesmith but it prepared them zero for the actual day to day.
The world is complicated. One thing for sure is that if you are accepted into Codesmith, you are likely to be successful at a number of similar top programs, because their bar is high, they have strong consistency in that bar, and they have a…
A bootcamp probably doesn't make sense, I think the easiest thing to do would be to try to transition more into SWE at your current company. Try to meet SWE managers and see if you can get a shot at a lower level SWE role.
I would also look at "career accelerators": [Formation.dev](https://Formation.dev) (disclosure: co-founder), Interview Kickstart, Pathrise. These are intended to help you level up your career rather than carerr change entirely. If your gaps are too large for these programs, then I would CONSIDER a bootcamp, but really transitioning in your own company and being supported doing that, is ideal.
Good question:
1. Formation has a frontend track. I need to emphasize that it's not educational and people with no frontend experience find it not good for them. It's the equivalent of how if you can do LC Easy problems then these DS&A programs are good, but not if you haven't done any at all. Our frontend is good for people who know frontend and want practice, not for people with no frontend experience. It's JS/HTML/CS/React
2. Interview Kickstart has a similar view as Formation, where you can do a short amount of practice on frontend but the focus is still classic DS&A. Interview Kickstart also has a lot more modules you can do like Data Science and ML
3. Outco: I don't think they have frontend
4. Pathrise: no frontend
5. Coachable: no frontend
6. Scaler: has frontend and projects in their longer program
I can't speak to IK, but Formation basically covers 14ish interview types, so we…
Hi, full disclosure, I'm the co-founder of Formation which is a competitor for Interview Kickstart, but I'm also a daily active member and contributor to the community and try to give good, fair, advice.
So first off, if you want to consider the "career accelerator" bucket of programs these are the competitors. Note that each one is very, very different but they all focus on the job hunt process rather than building new practical skills:
1. Formation: focuses on fundamental problem solving/DSA/SD/behaviorals, adaptive platform to move you through skills efficiently, small group sessions (2 - 8 people), dedicated support team, unlimited targeted mock interviews with senior top tier engineers as you start job hunting, senior/staff/principal FAANG-level mentors. Most 360 coverage program of the group.
2. Interview Kickstart: fixed curriculum/structured program with larger lectures and mor…
It's generally high because it's the easiest way to juice the outcomes. If people who are weaker leave, the best people graduate and placement rates are only based on people who graduate.
Bloomtech has a 50% or so graduation rate and a 90% placement rate of people who graduate.
TripleTen doesn't publish a placement rate but has a 87% placement rate.
Codesmith is one of the stronger programs that has like a 95% graduation rate and 80% placement rate.
It's important to factor both in because your odds of getting a job from day one are the odds of graduation times the placement rate and not the placement rate alone!
Yeah this is the basis for my recent observation that a number of the alumni at top companies either 1. are working so hard to keep up, they move on from Codesmith and don't look back, 2. they aren't actually reviewing resumes and interviewing people themselves.
I reviewed thousands of resumes and did 400+ interviews at Facebook and it makes a HUGE difference on how you see things for sure!
The way Codesmith teaches LC I think is not correct and reinforces the LC-mentality.
Disclosure: I'm super biased here because I started a program to practice fundamental problem solving abilities and how to use that to solve LC problems and make you a better engineer. So I'm VERY OPINIONATED ON THIS!
But just doing hack hours where your friends tell you if a problem is right or not is missing the point entirely. If you learn how to solve DS&A problems the right way, then you can apply that to solving any interview-setting problem.
You hit the worst timing luck for sure :(. You joined Codesmith when people were still getting Amazon and C1 offers, you graduated right when the tides turned. Then you job hunt and get the suggested '5 or 6 interviews just for practice to get warmed up' out of the way in Jan/Feb when hiring picked up a tad, and then did real job hunting during the worst time period. Then by the time hiring picks up for real - people are demoralized and jaded.
Yeah those were reasons I've been told.
My personal opinion is that since every single instructor has only worked at Codesmith (a fact they are open about) from fellows (TAs), to instructors, to lead instructors to senior engineers, people don't have industry experience to fallback on and they perpetuate a unified consistent message.
But one hole in this reasoning is why alumni later on, don't come back and try to change the narratives. "Career Support Engineers" who review resumes tend to do it part time while working in industry. I hear anecdotally that are told more 'how it is in reality' during 1-1 chats, but these people still uphold the Codesmith guidance. I'm curios why they don't question the presentation of the OSPs and presumably encourage it - because Codesmith's official guidance is very clear to not lie.
Unfortunately, I can't give one recommendation for everyone because everyone has a different background, life circumstances, personality, goals, and learning style.
I usually recommend you start narrowing down your list objectively: which programs have good outcomes, which ones have good reviews, etc...
Then try to do free programs at each of them, many have some kind of free community or free activities. Keep in mind that these are marketing events in disguise, but at least try to get a sense for what the day to day would be like!
And then focus super hard on which one is right for you by asking questions:
1. What is the day to day schedule and workload like?
2. What is the teaching style (e.g. lectures, self teaching, projects, etc...)
3. How much instructor access do you have?
4. Do you want in person or remote?
5. What cities are people getting jobs in?
6. What kind of background…
Full disclosure I work with a number of Codesmith alumni later on in their careers with thier 2nd, 3rd, 4th jobs and support people 1-1 to tell their best narrative. And it's highly personal how people portray themselves.
The reasons I've been given are, in no particular order - pretty much all the reasons:
\- Unawareness: a specific leader told me that my 3 weeks was equivalent to months of mid level industry experience because the 11 hours days and the difficulty of the projects.
\- Fake it til you make it: hustler mentality, no regrets
\- Ends justify the means: if people get jobs and do well on those jobs, does it matter how they go them?
\- I tried being very correct and didn't get any interviews and saw friends get interviews were using this style of resume so I tried it
\- Slippery slope: as I didn't get interviews, I adjusted my resume every week or two and each time was a…
Sorry "trick" might be the wrong word, it's conscious but it's not bad intentioned, and people are repeatedly told not to lie. They are told so many times in so many places not to lie it makes you ask - why do they need to tell people this so much lol.
Anyways, look at Codesmith project for example this one (I chose one randomly, I'm not calling our or identifying any individual people here): [https://www.linkedin.com/company/grpseek-app/](https://www.linkedin.com/company/grpseek-app/)
And look at how people who work on it present themselves on their LinkedIns. All of those people are recent Codesmith grads and gRPSeek was a 3 week long project.
Most people present:
1. the project as 3-4 months of experience at a company
2. have their 3 other projects under "open source projects" to misdirect that the highlighted one is NOT an open source project - or else why wouldn't it also be un…
This is true for big companies but it's not new. Most big companies do not hire directly out of bootcamps and I can tell you why from my experience 8 years at FB as a principal engineer!
So first off, where do these applications go:
1. Apprenticeships! Big companies often have apprenticeships/emergent talent/etc... programs for bootcamp grads who come from diverse backgrounds.
2. During the boom times, Amazon would interview anyone with an online assessment and passing that would usually get you an interview. So people with very little SWE experience but who had good professional experience to talk about in a behavioral interview, could pass. Google briefly was talking to bootcamp grads via a number of contractor recruiters at Randstad but you had to get connected through them directly.
Second, why don't big companies want to hire bootcamp grads. Unfortunately they DID in the past. B…
this is correct. it's very hard to find alumni but because of the tremendous structure that Codesmith has in its resume guidance it is absolutely possible to find people.
The most consistent way is to look for their open source project announcements which are blasted pretty much everywhere and then you can collect a list of people's LinkedIns.
Your question is probably better for CSX Slack because there are a lot of alumni there. The downside is that it's mostly successful alumni who continue to participate in the community and people who failed out of Codesmith tend to disappear quietly and they don't complain because they put the blame on themselves and I found anecdotally that those people are more often people who don't have any kind of professional experience, even outside of engineering.
I'm intimately familiar with month to month and week to week trends and how many Codesmith people graduate each month and when their 6 month clock starts and ends and then even account for fellows, whose clocks are delayed for 3 months (or however long their fellow contract ends up being)
I know for a fact that outcomes for CIRR H2 2022 are significantly worse than H1 2022, about 15 to 20% worse, being generous.
July through August 2022 saw strong hiring at Amazon and Capital One, whom were filling out remaining headcount.
The market was terrible in November and December as headcount ran out, freezes continued, and people decided to wait until next year.
Because of the cadence, which you understand as well, that means only one or two cohorts from each coast were impacted super bad and had terrible placement rates that were somewhat cancelled out by the stronger earlier ones.
Januar…
They are worse! It depends a lot on the program.
One of the best things to read is this from /u/cglee [https://medium.com/launch-school/evolving-landscape-for-software-career-transitioners-a-three-year-review-of-capstone-data-dbab52b6550c](https://medium.com/launch-school/evolving-landscape-for-software-career-transitioners-a-three-year-review-of-capstone-data-dbab52b6550c) . Launch School Capstone is a top tier program with high entrance bar, small program, but it at least shows the trends.
Ada for example essentially paused entirely because their model was based on internship partners - who all backed out and hence they have no internships for people.
Codesmith's enrollment pace has slowed (they used to be booked for months and are now interviewing days/weeks before new cohorts) but they are fortunately keeping a high bar and their outcomes remain strong (although my information…
Sorry yeah I was aggregating. The 6 weeks is 4 weeks of super fixed concentrated lectures and another 2-ish weeks sprinkled across the other stuff.
You might be the first person to say I've oversold Codesmith!! I always get yelled at for downplaying them and that Eric Kirsten told them Formation is a scam that offers everything Codesmith does for free for a lifetime... although that has subsided a bit since the market has tanked and I've worked with dozens of Codesmith alumni - and the vast majority at best love us (we have several "spotlights" written for people who wanted to talk about their story post-Codesmith) and at worst think it was maybe break even-ish, and not a single person I know of has said we offer what Codesmith offers haha.
I'm going through a dilemma right now myself and I can't give a well sourced, confident answer. I'm focusing on Codesmith because week after week I just get so much stuff sent to me, I know the ins and outs better than any program.
At the end of the day, there's no 12 week program that can turn anyone into a really good industry engineer. I see so so so many people, covering all backgrounds and there are patterns between successful ones and unsuccessful ones but each individual is a unique human that is unpredictable!
I can say it's extremely hard to get entry level jobs right now and there are no shortcuts, loopholes, "get rich quick" ways of doing it.
I can also say that THE JOB IS THE BEGINNING, not the end. This is one of Codesmith's "dirty secrets" - people get highly paying first jobs - that they exaggerate their experience to get - but if you follow the alumni down the road,…
We need to see official numbers but maybe just ask them and if they don't give you a clear answer that would be more concerning too! I don't think the rate is concerning but just the transparency so you can feel good about the program.
The market is improving so my bet is they will say this: "We haven't finalized placements for H2 2022 but it was a much tougher market and results were worse but we are seeing placements improving every day now"
The goal of the program is to help increase diversity in tech and Waymo is looking broadly for "College students from underrepresented or non-traditional backgrounds pursuing a BS/MA/MS in a technical field (Computer Science, Engineering, Math, Statistics) graduating Summer of 2025."
So not necessarily "strictly for URM".
Good question! It's about 20 hours a week (say 5 hours of scheduled sessions and the rest of tasks and benchmarking assessments to do). Formation's magic is that we pull your calendar and schedule all of your sessions and workload around your calendar (even weekends are fine), so as long as you're organized you can fit it in, but it will be a lot of work.
You do have to interview but we're working with Waymo recruiters and engineers to prepare you for their interviews specifically and you should expect to have interaction with people at Waymo in different ways along the way. If you do everything you need to at Formation then you should get an interview (assuming the market or hiring doesn't change unexpectedly) and you should be extremely prepare for these interviews.
If you don't pass the interviews you'll also be super setup for other companies that have similar interview styles... you are getting approximately $13,500 of value from Formation paid for by Waymo if you are selected for the program.
Of the super top tier / competitive bootcamps the only in person ones I know are Codesmith (NY) and App Academy (NY and SF).
I totally get everyone is different, but I would advise on finding the right program for you over in person/online, unless there is a particularly strong reason to have a worse fit program because of the stronger benefit to you of an in person program.
In person programs in smaller cities are often a great way to get a foot in the door with local companies in that city. This was the bread and butter for Tech Elevator during the good times.
PSA: Waymo + Formation Program applications opened today - targeting 2024 summer internships (for 2025 grads only)
Hi friends! Waymo and Formation just announced the [Waymo + Formation Program](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7094403935964205056/) and applications are open now through August 23rd, 2023. This is a free program (paid for by Waymo) that will take place online and part time (on your schedule) in the fall. The program provides 2025 grads (undergrad OR masters) rigorous extra CS fundamentals training with the goal of being selected for a 2024 summer internship with Waymo - which is a pretty cool right now to work at!
I'm a co-founder of Formation and want to disclose that transparently, but this program has no catches (other than that it's for a very small number of people and will be very competitive to get into) and is a great opportunity for qualified…
If you are concerned about building, yeah maybe not the accelerators. Codesmith could be an option, Launch School Capstone would be another.
Alternatively, look into things like Hack4LA - where you might want to just volunteer for free and build some stuff. Codesmith's open source partner OSLabs also seems to have free options for people to build stuff without doing Codesmith.