Timeline

I can answer this very transparently, apologies it might be long or over detailed, but trying to explain clearly and openly. Originally we worked with Leif to administer "classic" ISAs, which is something like, don't pay anything until you get a new job, then pay X% a month for Y months, capped at Z dollars, e.g. 10% per month for 15 months, targeting 15% of one year's base salary. These also had caps so if you make over $165K base salary, you won't pay more than the cap. If you didn't make $65K or more then your payments are paused until you do, or until a year passes in which case the contract is cancelled. There's a lot of good things about classic ISAs as they really help people pay who otherwise wouldn't be able to afford, or be approved for an upfront cost or a loan. The flip side is that, as I've said many times, the job market was particularly rough in 2023. Since we work with…

Tangent: this is timely, but you should apply to this if eligible: [https://formation.dev/partners/netflix](https://formation.dev/partners/netflix) (disclosure, co-founder of Formation), but you should not apply to Formation otherwise if you are still in school - this is a special program for Netflix. The best thing you can do is to get an internship this summer. If you can't get an internship, then volunteer for Hack4LA or for a professor. If you can't volunteer, make a "startup" and build that all summer super disciplined and try to find others doing that to join with, like Coding for Callie, 100Devs community, etc.... Codesmith is more for people who are almost job ready to brand and market themselves for the job hunt, it's not really a strong learning experience itself in my opinion (I can go into why, but it's 6 weeks of curriculum, almost all instructors went to Codesmith itself…

Now that it's been a day, you can see that cglee is super right - and the voting reflects the distribution of conversation in this sub. This is also the reason why you see me talking about Codesmith so much IN THIS SUB (and I never talk about it in any other subs) because it just reflects the nature of the conversation.

Haha, so Formation isn't a bootcamp or an option to consider instead of a bootcamp and doing so would be a huge mistake. Formation is an interview prep and mentorship platform that doesn't teach any specific skills and instead is about practice - benchmarking - feedback - and mock interviews/job hunt support. From my best estimates, there are somewhere between 5 and 10% (i.e. 2 to 3 people per Codesmith cohort out of 30+) that might BARELY be candidates for Formation - and only if they understand what Formation is and it's genuinely the right move for them. In this market that has become rarer and rarer and it might even be almost 0 overlap because the number of people with under 1 year of experience we accept now I can count on one hand, and the people spend a ton of time talking to our team and determining that Formation is indeed the objectively right fit. \--------- # RE: "CODEMI…

I mean I work with alumni who went to all of them so I have some good insight across the board. I disproportionately hear about Codesmith because it's the biggest anomaly of them all that just has a very unique ecosystem around it. But maybe given the results of this poll so far that helps explain why I get such polarizing information haha.

📌 Netflix x Formation Program is back for 2026 grads in the USA aiming to do SWE internships at Netflix in summer 2025. It's a free part time program over the summer (paid for by Netflix) and the goal is land an internship at Netflix! Applications close Feb 16th. Hi all sharing this with the community if you haven't seen it already! This is a competitive program to train all summer to get ready for Netflix internship interviews in the fall, and hopefully land a coveted Netflix internship for 2025! See the details here on LinkedIn and let me know if you have questions: [https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7160354895420604416](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7160354895420604416) From the announcement: >[Formation](https://www.linkedin.com/company/formation-dev/) and [Netflix](https://www.linkedin.com/company/netflix/) are joining forces to help un…

Codesmith grads don't list on LI, read this why: [https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/18cpq98/analysis\_of\_52\_most\_recent\_codesmith\_offers/](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/18cpq98/analysis_of_52_most_recent_codesmith_offers/) What you can do instead is go through the OS Labs projects (or watch for their launches in the CSX Slack) and then message the people from there. Everything lists the project members and their LinkedIns there or on the project websites: [https://github.com/oslabs-beta/](https://github.com/oslabs-beta/)

I find a lot of polarization from graduates I chat with. Some good advice for anyone you talk to about any bootcamp is to dig into the HOW and not just the superficial. There was a Codesmith grad last week that wrote a comment 'I graduated and it changed my life'... that was it, and it got 40 upvoted in a day on a 2 month old dead post that 3 upvotes. That's fantastic, and it has changed hundreds of people's live, over a thousand! But HOW did it change them is key because what worked for them might not work for you too and you have to get into the details. 1. What kind of background did they have before? 2. Can you see their resume that finally worked? 3. How long have they kept their job for and how did Codesmith prepare them for the job and what do they wish Codesmith had prepared them for? (Codesmith says every single info session I've seen that 100% of grads get promotions within…

Codesmith has posted twice in their CSX that someone is posting negative comment in multiple channels, anonymously. I have no idea what the comments entail but a number of people have shared different side conversations around this that I won’t get into. We’re launching a FAANG partnership publicly and I haven’t been paying much attention but asked about my name being thrown around to see why.

Yeah I know when Formation started, Outco was a big player, along with Pathrise and IK, but a lot of benefited from the tailwinds of the market. In the toughest market, we had a notable drop in top tier placements (down to about 50% of placements from 70%ish) and first year TC increases dropped to 80K on average. I think our numbers still justify the cost of the program for us, but we can't change the market, I wish we could, but we're way too small! But that said, I can see how it's harder for the teams to say focused and motivated. Employees might leave or do new things, or there might be layoffs. I know a couple of people that did Outco that came to my company later on and they felt like it didn't have the heart in it that they expected from the past (completely anecdotal personal reflection, ask people for yourself). It's why every program is different. Like me and my partner have…

Codesmith's CEO explicitly said publicly several times that Codesmith's application to offer rate is 1 offer for every 50 Codesmith style applications. And he said the main factor in people not getting jobs is that it's hard to do these kind of applications (that involve personal messaging and a ton of reach out). He presents this as a funnel from application to recruiter screen to technical interview to offer and if you do the math it implies 1 offer for every 50 applications. Do you agree or disagree with that? I know Codesmith is soliciting feedback from students over the past few days because of a kerfuffle of some kind that people have told me about but I don't know all the details of. So if you disagree it would be good to tell him that.

I think the 12 month placement might be higher than 60% but we'll see. We know placements have been a lot slower, but it's hard to tell whose getting the jobs. If I had more time or cared about this more I repeat my 52 person audit and cross reference their cohorts from some other data. Part of the reason the average time on OSPs was 12 months was becasue people tended to be job hunting longer and just had like June 2022 - present, listed for their OSP. But when you do all the accounting I don't have a strong sense of where this lands but I highly suspect 6 month placements rates of 50 to 60% are reasonable. My nightmare that everyone should prepare for is if CIRR comes out and Codesmith has a 12 month placement of 78% or something, and touts that as not much different than the H1 2022 SIX MONTH rate of 83% (or whatever it is close to that) then I think that would be bad.

Yeah I totally get where you are coming from and we can and want to share more. The hesitation is that people truly do have unique journeys at Formation. They do entirely different things at different paces and it's something noted by many people who go through, and it also makes it hard to review as no one else will have the experience you did again. You can go on leave and there is no expected timing. Some people have really demanding jobs already and need to ramp up and down completely unexpectedly... this is surprisingly common and I don't think I've ever seen a Fellow who hasn't adjusted their involvement because of unexpected things. So we have to be super careful that people don't get misled by making assumptions about their experience or their self assessment of their skills or how fast they think they can do stuff, and we really want to give more personalized data and estimate…

No one has a right to any data, but they have a right to say CIRR's data is outdated, sorry if that wasn't clear. I don't think I'm pedantic about why we don't report CIRR results or other reporting standards, I'll try to explain again very bluntly and directly. Formation is a mentorship and benchmarking platform and not a program or school so we don't publish CIRR-like outcomes data. We really want to publish more data but when we sit down and look at it, it's just almost impossible. We had two $500K+ seniors Meta offers in the past three weeks - for people with a many years of experience and we recently had someone with a few months of experience get a role paying much less at a startup that they are thrilled with. It's super meaningless to publish CIRR-like data that doesn't take background into consideration. Sounds easy, publish data by experience level right? Now because we wo…

I don't think Tech Elevator is a particpate anymore. They merged operations with Galvanize (which has their own reporting system) and have let go of a number of long time staff. It's still running great and a solid option, especially if you are in their in-person cities, but I doubt they will participate in CIRR anymore. CodeUp shutdown so they are probably no longer a participant either. So from the CIRR website that leaves: Turing - an accredited school Code Platoon - a school focusing on veterans Hacktiv8 - a bootcamp in Indonesia Codesmith - a full stack immersive bootcamp in the USA Launch Academy - a full stack immersive focusing on Boston These are so different it doesn't seem useful really I highly encourage schools to make their own standards, have them vetted and audited and then publish their own data on their own time. Using CIRR for branding doesn't seem to have the…

The latest CIRR reports were for graduates from Jan 2022 to June 2022. Jan is over 2 years ago, and June is 1 year 8 months, which rounds to 2 years too. So if someone graduates now 2024, that would be like receiving data about them in 2026. Codesmith for example said they were ready to publish their old format H2 2022 CIRR report and (before the change in specification) said to my recollection that it was coming out 'any day' - which it never did after CIRR changed the specification. So the data is there and wasn't' released and I think people have a right to claim that published CIRR data is out of date for that reason alone.

CIRR essentially collapsed and one of the board members took over and is trying to reboot CIRR. I have no idea why all the historical data is gone but it's expected for CIRR results from 2022 to come out in February (i.e. this month). The new results will look at a 12 month placement window in addition to 3 and 6 months, which is the cause for the delay. The new director of CIRR is super reasonable but I disagree with almost all of this and I get the feeling like CIRR collapsed and lose it's members and the director has great intentions of rebooting it, but it's going to take a lot of time. That said, the new Director just started a full time job and it's questionable how much time and effort their going to spend on CIRR. Anyways, **there is absolutely no reason why schools didn't publish 6 month 2022 CIRR data and then re-publish the 12 month data under the new standard.** At the…

2 month old OP post that went completely inactive.... comment from 1 day ago gets 28 upvotes almost instantly 🤔 Whether Codesmith is good or not, this is why people think Codesmith is manipulating discussion and asking people to comment about them. People read this as an ad and it becomes super polarizing.

I just haven't worked with a lot of people who have done Le Wagon and don't have detailed thoughts or information to surface unfortunately :( Just a note to be clear, I think it's fair to consider each program differently. Codesmith is Codesmith, and Le Wagon is Le Wagon. And I don't want to make any connections or accusations of either party.