FWIW, at canonical FAANG (Meta specifically I can speak to with 95% confidence) this person would likely be an E4 mid-level. Titles don't mean much.
But it's a very good progression - doing really well at this level for a couple (2-3) years and that might pattern match to a canonical E5 senior.
(I see this kind of background often and I'm very calibrated on this)
Awesome, thanks for sharing your trajectory! This is a super reasonable trajectory for a ambitious bootcamp grad working their way up from entry level SWE To senior SWE (generally speaking, not title-wise) in 3 years.
Some questions:
1. Curious if you changed companies anywhere in there or if you stayed at the same company and got promoted.
2. I've also heard from a lot of people that Codesmith wasn't happy with them considering a < $100K job. But your trajectory really worked out so well and maybe even better, so I HAVE NO IDEA WHY. Any more thoughts on this?
3. The market is super different right now, so do you think someone with a similar background to you should start Codesmith today?
Whole range, canonical E4 (FAANG mid)/E5 (FAANG senior) is the most common, skewing E4. The most senior placement was a FAANG staff level. In the current market the majority of people who have joined in the past few months are high mid or senior as well.
This is an example of a more senior person and hopefully we'll have some public examples soon (a couple of people right in that 6 to 8 year bucket who got senior Meta roles): [https://formation.dev/blog/success-story-mike-clarke/](https://formation.dev/blog/success-story-mike-clarke/)
The mentors range as well. We have those super senior managers and principal engineers - generally for specific 1-1 mocks. And we have more mid level mentors that run small groups sessions who are really good at coaching or specific technical topics.
In comparing to [Interviewing.io](http://Interviewing.io) - we want the equivalent of those "expensive"…
Very different things. I think we are somewhat competitive but we're more directly competitive with Interview Kickstart than Interviewing.io.
**Interviewing.io:**
- Good to do one or two interviews if you have an upcoming interview and have no idea if you are prepared
- Good for benchmarking - you know how close to the bar you are.
- Okay/but less good at levelling up - you can buy interview packages and get 1-1 feedback, but it's limited to coaching sessions and there isn't day to day or broader job hunting support
- Not good if you need 5+ mocks with senior people as the cost will be closer to Formation cost and Formation gives you a ton more value.
**Formation:**
- Ultimate goal - get you the highest chance of passing top tier interviews and identifying and getting you whatever mentorship and practice you need to get there
- Very broad coverage - DS&A, SD, technical behavioral…
Sorry, was also not implying you said that either and didn't fully explain what I was talking about.
Tech is still largely dominated by men and it was even worse back then. The big tech IPOs attracted a demographic that previously went to wall Street out of school.
Mothers are statistically the primary care giver in the USA and doing a 11 hour a day bootcamp - in person back then - was not at all inclusive. We still see this today in intensives like Codesmith which have been majority men as well (prior to all the recent changes, don't know anymore).
In person bootcamps were - perhaps unintentionally - made for unattached people who could move to SF or NYC and do 11 hours days in person for 3 months and then hustle their way to a job.
For the past year we don't accept anyone without a year of SWE experience, and literally a handful of people who appeal to come in with say 6 months of experience but are clear on their goals and aligned, so no one recently does them back to back.
We've had way more people come back to Formation twice and pay us twice (or three times) than we have people who have done Formation immediately after graduating Codesmith.
The fact that people come back to Formation multiple times and pay us each time is a very clear indication we are not remotely anything similar to Codesmith. We don't teach anything.
The personal trainer analogy is much stronger. Hire a personal trainer, get into shape, good for a few years, have new training goal, get into better shape again, good for a few more years. Have a kid, need to make routine changes, get into shape again.
\`I think it is very difficult to obje…
Talking out loud and whiteboarding-style prep are two big ones to practice, that is very different from crushing through LC problems in your room alone.
This is very bias and not meant to be an ad at all, but I highly recommend following a "problem solving process" rather than just trying to solve a problem based on ones you've seen before. This is the one I helped create: [https://formation.dev/blog/the-engineering-method/](https://formation.dev/blog/the-engineering-method/) <- I'm commenting here as an individual and not on behalf of my company
There's always a chance you'll get a new problem and you don't want to fail the interview because you spent 6 months memorizing a list. Not only that Meta doesn't want those people, they want people who can solve problems. The same approach works with Google interviews as well.
Finally, SD and the technical behavioral round are also important…
What you said here to me is that the people attending Codesmith are awesome. The people graduating are self-organizing to run standups and encouraging each other in the job hunt.
That's all fantastic stuff but is it what you are paying $21K for? Imagine a random person added all those same people to a Discord and they all had self studied and were supporting each other just the same.
Similar arguments are made about going to Harvard Business School - you go to meet the people, not to learn anything special, so it quite frankly might be worth the cost.
I talk to a lot of alumni, and the lowest ballpark I've heard is 30% placed in a year, and the highest is what you just said at 75%.
Given that they had about 1000 students START in 2022, and 550ish offers in 2023, that sounds like a 50ish% placement rate within a year - maybe higher on CIRR because they reduce the number of people in…
The problem I have with Codesmith alumni is that I'm not in fact attacking Codesmith or defaming them. I'm reporting on the facts, some are good and some are bad. But the WORST of all is the market for entry level jobs, which Codesmith has absolutely no control over, and that's the primarily reason people aren't going to bootcamps right now, not anything that Codesmith is doing poorly.
Formation isn't a competitor to Codesmith but I'm happy to tell you how we are doing. You can read it on our blog. Our 2023 offers tanked and people's average first year total comp increase dropped from $100K to $80K. Our top tier placements tanked from 75% of all placements to 50%. This is on our blog since December 2023. In 2024, which is not published anywhere, top tier placements are back up to 75% and average comp increase is $117K. We don't have any placements rates because it doesn't make sense the…
We aren't a school, don't teach anything, and don't educate. What we do is unique and the closest competitors are IK and Pathrise and we're still unique amongst then. It's on us to explain what we do in our marketing and materials, but we haven't figured it out yet so I'm here telling you directly from the source of truth to try to help.
I would love if you actually listen and ask questions to clarify and talk to me about what Formation does and then I don't have to write essays.
Which competitors am I discrediting? Our competitors are Interview Kickstart, Pathrise, and Outco (before they kind of went MIA) and I never say anything to discredit them on Reddit or anywhere and I've even ENCOURAGED people to go TO SPECIFIC ONES in specific situations, e.g. for Product Management - which we don't help weith.
Our recruiters talk day in and day out with people considering between these options (or only considering Formation) and these are our competitors.
It comes up like ONCE a month that someone is considering a bootcamp OR Formation and the recruiters escalate to see if the person is experienced enough for Formation. The bootcamps vary from Codesmith to Springboard and the majority of the time if the people don't have experience we tell them to go to a bootcamp.
If someone has legit SWE experience for 1+ years they should not go to a bootcamp in almost all circums…
What information have I refused to release? I've explained extremely transparently what information we have and don't have, and why we do what we do. You can see an entire list of every single placement's company on our blog.
If you think that CIRR would work for Formation, you don't understand what Formation is and how it works, and coordinated downvoting my comments doesn't make you all understand what Formation is better than I do.
If you want me to give you a CIRR report you have absolutely no idea how Formation works and you should not be signing up whatsoever until you understand what it is and what you are getting.
We very transparently explain the average compensation gain of a placement which tanked last year from $100K to $80K and will hopefully be much higher in 2024. We were also transparent about how top tier placements tanked from 75% of outcomes to 50% (which is back u…
I wish I had a strong answer, but I don't. I think better information would include:
- backgrounds and experience of people before entering
- more clarity on the types of jobs people get
- more satisfaction related qualitative info, i.e. "how much do you credit your bootcamp in getting the job you got"
- histograms on placement times and salaries instead of medians and averages
- including all forms of comp in data, like bonuses, benefits, etc...
- salary increases - i.e. someone leaked data that mid last year the average placed student at Codesmith had a current/previous salary of about 70K - which is higher than the median placed salary at some bootcamps
- more transparency on hiring companies. too many bootcamps show a wall of logos of amazing tech companies, and talk about anecdotal placements there, but what are all of them. e.g. are people making $120K at a design agency v…
I wouldn't say it's the "only objective metric" no. It's a reliable and good signal to use, combined with other data and information.
The outcomes themselves are more indicative of the job market than the programs themselves, so judging a program by it's outcomes alone was never a good idea, even in the good times.
The fact that a CIRR report exists checks off one box of legitimacy, but it's far more concerning that Codesmith and possibly others had H2 2022 outcomes audited and ready for 6 months and won't share them, while they tout H1 2022 numbers in marketing. Even if this was not CIRR data, if that fact was true I would be demanding transparent placement rates before signing an agreement if it was me, but others might have a different bar.
Just to be clear, this post was a personal opinion and not one of Formation and not about Formation.
RE: Formation, I take that as feedback for sure, I don't think the 750K number is really effective too, but it's accurate and it's what our competitors do, so we took the easy there as we focused on other parts of our website.... Which I think is the fundamental reason we're on such different pages here, Formation isn't a bootcamp and CIRR-type data makes no sense. We've tried to cut numbers with artificial time windows for banks and loan providers and all those people love them and support us strongly, but we don't share them publicly because they used for math for finance people and don't help an individual understand their journey and likely would only mislead them because of the unique commitment and path that each person takes.... the timeframe is largely up to the person.
Not all…
CIRR appears to be done and irrelevant now - Codesmith needs to get off the Titanic before it sinks (Personal Opinion)
As many are aware, [CIRR](https://cirr.org/) started out a business-league from Skills Fund to try to standardize bootcamp outcomes in the early days of bootcamps.
While CIRR's stated goals were to create transparency in the Bootcamps industry, it was ultimately not a charity - and was a business league, like the Chamber of Commerce, whose practical value was promoting and marketing for it's member bootcamps (who pay fees to be members) that did particularly well. So as bootcamps started doing terribly - particularly in 2022 -> 2023, a lot of those backers left.
**You can see this in how important "transparency" was when bootcamps were doing well, and how quickly and efficiently they posted outcomes, and how when outcomes are terrible everything comes to a halt - this…
I went through some of CSX and did some of the materials, and it's fairly light, so you definitely need to supplement. From my experience working with prospective students, current students, and alumni, the universal advice is to leverage the pair programming and live sessions they offer.
Codesmith is looking for students that will ride-and-die with Codesmith and showing up to the live sessions and getting the vibe and fitting in will go a long way to progressing VS banging your head against the wall alone in your room... it's why you see a number of students and alumni so excited when they get in, and so supportive of the program publicly, and if they get a great outcome they will fit to tooth and nail about how Codesmith "changed their lives".
So TLDR: it works if you are the right fit, don't try too hard to BECOME the right fit - because then it doesn't work, and doing live session…
That's exactly why I used to, until the recent changes (which is paused until they settle), recommend specific people go there 1-1 if they are suited to it.
Just because I'm critical about a few things, doesn't mean it's not good for the right people.
But the market sucks for bootcamp grads right now. The most perfect person for Codesmith went there after college didn't work for them and is a totally fantastic person, has really struggled to get a job, even with exaggerating experience.
My university was 25 hours a week classroom time and 40 of homework/projects but 3 semesters a year and summers were off to do research or internships.
I was commuting from home an hour a day each way, no remote classes, no recordings, and it was absolutely draining. I woke up at 5am and went to bed at 10pm, I worked all weekend, people thought I had problems haha and I didn't have any friends or do any hobbies. I read school stuff on the elliptical everyday for an hour, and I did scorekeeping for hockey on Sunday nights where I did homework in the box while doing it.
But other programs are way less intense and way more expensive so this is an exception case.... in the same way that Codemsith is a special program for special people and not something that anyone can just sign up for and make $100K
I mean my university's web programming course was so bad that I wrote a letter to the dean explaining how I had already learned this on my own and got a job at Facebook lined up and what was taught in the course was embarrassingly wrong and outdated.
It took them a few years to finally update it and kept me in the loop.
The university cost $20K for 4 years and I did dozens of courses that actually were really good, and some not.
Finally, my program's goal was to get you into a top PhD program, and I did that path but withdrew for Facebook and they were disappointed in me.
So it's a completely different thing.
My department chair though was doing sell presentation that sounded an awful lot like Codemsith about how for 80 years they have produced engineers capable of solving the world's hardest problems and are leaders because of their ability to bridge communication gaps and execute…
Codesmith offers free lifelong job support i.e. resume reviews, mock interviews, negotiation, etc.... via being able to book calls with alumni dedicated to those things. This isn't so much free but included in your tuition, and it's a great feature to take advantage of. I've heard pay is about $45 session so the weakness and/or way to control costs, is by having a fixed number of slots and it being first come first serve. So if they were pressed on finances they could have fewer slots so you have to wait longer. They have pretty decent availability now, but in the past people have waited two weeks for a resume review for example.
I don't think they ever offered lifelong LEARNING though included in your fees. In fact the CEO said alumni would have to pay to join in new "minors" in ML-for-engineers and others floated around.
As far as I know, the cuts they made were primarily just scal…
NuCamp, Springboard, BloomTech are ones I know of that take experienced engineers as part time mentors.
The interview prep platforms like Formation (disclosure: co-founder), Interview Kickstart, and Pathrise also have industry mentors and pay more, but typically more experienced ones. 4 years at FAANG might be sufficient for some of the options there. I could look at your background and give more advice if you share it with me.
I'm personally very far on the don't tell people they are senior engineers side on this one but I've had many debates with people that "know someone that got a senior job out of Codesmith" who adamantly believe in Codesmith's stance on this.
I would argue with them why a program branding itself as a top tier program preparing people for jobs in the TECHNOLOGY industry should be using the canonical definitions of the top tier TECHNOLOGY industry companies.
Codesmith does this "how to get hired in 2024" talk that I saw most of yesterday and they aren't just saying this anymore, but the CEO spent almost 2 hours straight in the talk convincing people that using - what in my opinion - are incorrect arguments:
1. Argument: the 2024 market has changed and companies that didn't previous prioritize technology - like banks - are hiring laid off FAANG engineers to build the same level of produ…
Yeah a lot of these shut down though sadly: [https://apprenticeships.me/](https://apprenticeships.me/)
My advice is if you identify as one or more historically underrepresented groups in tech, I would join various industry groups as many are advertised there as well.
It's definitely not an all in option to go with because thye are very competitive! Just one you should consider.
The challenge of posting here is they will be directly confronted by me - with my personal hat on, not moderator hat and not Formation hat - in a neutral territory about the three topics I have person opinions on:
1. Constant, loud statements that they product mid-level and senior engineers with zero experience
- I think this is the one we can debate well, because it's a definitions issue, and a debate over what definition Codesmith should use to communicate accurately to the public
2. OSP representation. I would never accuse them of explicitly telling people to lie because there is only evidence of the contrary. But I would not accept any other comments on anything without an explanation as to why they let the majority of people who get jobs exaggerate their experience and if they weren't aware, what they will do about it now that they are.
- I think this one would be scary for Code…
Maybe you are wearing Codesmith-colored glasses too? I totally comment on a LOT of posts and I get how that can be like the loudest person in the room. I try to ask a lot of questions and stimulate discussion if you read all my stuff, but I see where this is coming from.
But percentage-wise Codesmith is not dominating the content in this sub, factually speaking.
It makes total sense there would be a ton of discussion in the past two weeks! They shrunk down a ton and laid off / lost a third - possibly up to half - of their staff, like that's a huge thing to discuss for the "best", "s-tier" bootcamp and if there was no discussion I might be more concerned. If anything there hasn't been enough talk about how people feel about it.
No worries, was just answering very literally like a log-like answer hahaha
But yeah I've known Don for a long time now.
Formation sponsored one of his videos about 2 years ago, and Daniel and Sophie from Formation did a couple of collaborations on mock interviews with him around then.
I used to go to his live streams so that's why he was responsive and knew me in the video and we know other's personalities pretty well.
The last time I interacted with Don prior to this live session was December 8th, 2023, and he had no idea I was going to be there, nor did I, I joined when I saw the push notification about a live session reviewing Reddit posts.
At the beginning (edited out) he opened CodingBootcamp, CSCareerQuestions, ExperiencedDevs and scrolled through the first couple of posts looking for ones to talk about.
There was a lot of odd posts prior to the one Don reviewed that were removed by both mods and Reddit-level admins, so I suggested that post as the most reasonable RECENT post. I then found two more posts that were much older way past the fold about self teaching vs bootcamps, and cs degrees that I recommended as well. And he started with the Codesmith one.
I mean I've seen the paperwork and lecture notes and they very adamantly tell people not to lie.
But I agree that they in the same breath tell them that OSLabs will complete background checks for your entire time at Codesmith on the 4 week projects because they say you were in 'OSLabs that entire time'. And they tell you to list your other Codesmith projects in parallel with overlapping timeframes.
Similarly, the representation of prior jobs is borderline. Don't lie, that customer service job was actually a "Support Engineer" role you just have imposter syndrome and are underselling yourself. I work with a number of students and grads unofficially/casually to help them tell their stories because they feel like they can't tell their authentic story at Codesmith.
Finally, I know someone that worked with a career support engineer to squeeze 4 YOE out of their resume when they had 0, the…
I happened to pop into that live stream when he was going over recent Reddit posts in a few subs.
I answered some questions he had very neutrally since this was his stream and not mine.
Don calls out pretty strongly some of the patterns and behaviors I've seen too, specifically how he didn't know OSPs were 4 weeks because every grad he's seen lists months or years on LinkedIn and hardly writes any code when looking at the GitHub repos. He even challenged the Codesmith CEO to come in his podcast and explain that to everyone, since it sounds like he has done his homework and would fairly aggressively push him on this.
I mean I have a couple of spreadsheets over the years and I would also like to see the CEO's response going through the most recent one of these privately, why 48 out of 52 people stated they had on average 11 months of experience on their OSPs, many not disclosing it wasn…
This is my personal recommendation, not trying to sell you anything:
- If you have multiple interviews at "big tech"/FAANG-ish companies lined up that are about 1-3 months away, I would consider joining for 1 month, 2 months ($4500) or 3 months ($6000). The key is "multiple" becuase, as a I said, joining thinking you are paying a ton of money to pass one specific interview is not the right mindset to have. Lets say you didn't get any of those, we want you to leave feeling like you are still ready and feeling good about more interviews and that you got your money's worth. For people with offers, negotiation help alone can pay back 10X those costs, for others, feeling like they can pass DS&A, SD, hiring manager/technical behavioral/jedi/bar raiser interviews is worth it enough.
- If you are actively job hunting and 95% looking for a new job within the next year, but don't have any schedu…
1. No back of the envelope calculations. A lot of people are worried about that when this comes up, it's primarily used to help you identify which part of a system will break first under different usage patterns and that you should be able to do, math or no math.
2. I'm sure you'll find a ton of resources while Googling but two more I like that are:
The video archives from Meta's official conference website (specifically the product related ones about how core systems work) https://atscaleconference.com/
The author of Blind 75 has a website focused on product SD that has some free stuff too https://www.greatfrontend.com/
I should disclose that someone mentioned in the comments about Formation and I'm the co-founder - which is also why I know a lot about this because we help people professionally to pass these interviews. You should NOT join just to pass one single interview with one…
Haha I like the analogies :D
I think that today, success is still proportional to talent and hard work, but the things that's changing is **TIME**.
If you are talented and work hard for \~2 years, I think you can get a job without a Stanford CS degree, but people are expecting that to happen in 12 weeks + 1000 applications over 6 months.
I have an engineering degree, but what got me my job at Facebook was actually self teaching web programming on my own. I was doing a full time 13 month internship/co-op at the time and woke up early and went to bed late working on a web platform (it was an internship review website, from scratch) for about 8 months straight. I learned so much by having real people using this thing, turning into a corporation with 3 other people, acquiring a competitor.... not just about programming, but product building and growth and marketing and all kinds of things…
Codesmith has weekly "family dinners" where you eat and socialize with others and I think sometimes there are announcements there. I've heard of different rituals during lectures, I don't know if they are set by cohort or by section, I've heard of the powerclap at the end, snapping, various zoom background stuff.
A lot of "family" references. Like in CSX Slack, people sometimes address people as "family".
When you spend 11 hours+ a day with people 6 days a week, it makes sense people feel like family.
Yeah I agree with this but I'm really bias because of Formation so this is obviously a skewed position that I have.
Like I personally worked with someone to increase an initial offer by $200K first year TC and how much is that worth?
It's a really odd industry compared to most because the amounts of money thrown around a "typical" FAANG senior, staff, etc... engineer is not just like 8% per year compounded, but like 5X a junior engineer.
The amount of work on my side it takes to help that super senior person negotiate is less time, but a lot more extremely nuanced expertise that took years of exposure and observation to build.
It's a lot more natural to try to associate the cost with "what services am I getting, how many sessions, how many projects", etc...
**It's a lot harder to think of paying as an investment that will hopefully offer a return. Increasing comp by $200K first y…
By building a jetpack so you can fly above them all.
Joking aside, it's an analogy. You have to do something different, and there three approaches (I got this framework from a friend who was an amazon warehouse worker and an OpenAI Principal Engineer and many things in between and he shares this a lot privately):
1. Do something smarter than anyone else. If you are naturally smarter than 99% of people, you can find some way to show that.
2. Get luckier than anyone else. Maybe you can make your luck by being in a tech city and going to bars every night to "bump into" software engineers, but you can just sit there and hop to get luckier.
3. Work harder than anyone else. This is the only one in your control. But you actually have to do it. The person said he would sleep at the office in a hammock under his desk every day for a month at a time for example. Like you really just have to do…
+1, agree on a lot here.
I do actually agree that the scope of the products could be mid-level and senior, the only missing piece is the SCALE - building a product for a larger number of actual users is important in being a mid-level and senior. Building a tool that solves a vague problem is an important part - actually working through benign day to day problems actual users have and prioritizing and making judgement calls along the way is a missing piece that's just hard to get anywhere. Even the most successful and long running OSPs don't have any real usage I can find (e.g. ReacType is a headliner that as far as I can tell no one uses, and no one seems to care about the security issue I reported that lets anyone wipe out their marketplace thing, and clearly no one is using that feature anyways)
But yeah agreed on scope actually haha.
"storytelling" to me is where the strategy part…
So Codesmith doesn't just hire fellows/TAs, but there is a pipeline - which is extremely disrupted by the recent changes and could very well change
Resident (student) -> fellow 3 month @$50K salary -> lead fellow 3 more months -> mentor (full time paid $80K - $120K depending) -> instructor ($120K to $150K) -> lead instructor ($150K to $180K)
At Codesmith the ENTIRE instruction hierarchy is this except for:
1. One person who was hired as instructor who went to another bootcamp and taught there for two years
2. Two instructors I know of were SWEs in industry and came back to teach. Both of those people are no longer instructors and didn't last long after coming back from industry.
There are a lot of pros and cons to this approach, but just laying out there in this comment for starters, can discuss more.
Sadly, +1 to this in the current market, you need 2 YOE in general to have a "standard job hunt" pipeline and under that is a bit of unreproducible wild west.
It's one of the reasons I jump on anyone posting a success story right now and framing it like anyone can do it. Anyone CAN IN THEORY do it, but there's no reproducible path to getting through with under 2 YOE right now.
I think really tiny bootcamps with a single cohort under 30 people that all get personalized help might be able to increase the odds of finding your edge case path, but again not scalable, not reproducible, a lot of 1-1 strategizing and a bit of luck.
Yesh same for Rithm and Launch School. The main difference in grads is how they present themselves and not in their skill sets or experience levels. I tend to see a little more adjacent tech experience at Codesmith but not enough to target higher level jobs. That experience though could maybe explain why Codesmith grads who really frame that adjacent experience as technical coding experience, can get $130K jobs at less tech focused companies. But no reason a Rithm grad could do the same strategy.
I mean like I said, a lot of people like the vibe, and it was a whopping 11 hours a day and 6 days a week. It's not like it's extroverted activities for 11 hours a day straight.
I saw a session recording once that someone described as an example of what they meant. It's a vibe that you are present and active. You acknowledge you are present with positive emoji reactions to every post.
The more concerning example of toxic positively was if someone had a negative attitude there was a process for instructors and coordinators to correct it and go to phrases like "snuggle the struggle". Being negative was seen as a problem to correct versus a person to debug.
The theories people have said are more around that the people doing the debugging have no SWE experience and just know the Codemsith way so they are going to these tools as all they know to try to help people. Someone sticking with i…
Yes. Codemsith grads with no prior experience are by definition entry level SWEs and I think can compete with CS grads who don't have internships under their belt. I can go more into why if this is challenged, but that's my opinion.
Codesmith levels people by capabilities and not skills when talking about levels, which is the main source of disconnect.
My stance, CAPABILITIES GET YOU PROMOTED FROM JUNIOR TO MID IN 8 MONTHS, BUT NOT MID AS THE FIRST JOB. Again, can do into why but very strong opinion based on 8 years a Meta seeing it grow from 200 eng to 10K eng and observing a lot of growth of poele and hiring systems.
A really important part of what I'm saying that I haven't people comment on is the relative expectations.
If you are comparing yourself to the best in the world, these projects are far below the bar of junior work. The Medium articles and resumes dont match the work. Someone says "integrated test suite and achieved 95% unit test coverage" and then the code has jest with example strings in it still copy pasted from stack overflow in it and there are like 20 tests for the backend only that don't actually test properly. This type of thing is the norm and not the exception. It doesn't come across like it's an MVP but it's a slapped together code to check off boxes to expand resume bullets.
WHICH IS FINE FOR A BOOTAMP!!!!
META COMMENTS:
There's been a lot of suspicious posts regarding Codesmith over the past few days (all over the spectrum, good and bad, and from a lot of brand new accounts, people have gotten banned)
This post is from a brand new account that seems created to write about Codesmith, which is a bit suspicious too.
That said, the factual content about the logistics of Codesmith all reads accurate. I don't work there and haven't gone there, so maybe I shouldn't be the judge of that, but I've seen the entire curriculum, and have private been told of certain little details around "family dinners", the clapping stuff, etc... that either someone is training a on all my public commentary about Codesmith, or this person - if not actually a resident - is pretty close to Codesmith.
OVERALL:
It sounds like you probably shouldn't have chose to go into Codesmith to begin with because your style do…
Yeah I try to explain Formation over and over and each time I have to repeat things not because I'm being annoying but because people might not have seen previous answers and not familiar.
If you are curious how we are doing now, because we have an adaptive mentorship platform model we can adjust in real time and we've therefor adjusted more senior and seen very good placements in February and March so far, this is unedited list other than < 10 person startups removing the name for privacy, and there are a couple Meta and Microsoft offers that haven't been signed yet!
||
||
|Scale AI|
|Google|
|Oracle|
|<STARTUP TOP TIER>|
|JP Morgan Chase|
|Atlassian|
|Meta|
|Meta|
|Netflix|
|JP Morgan Chase|
|<STARTUP 2ND TIER>|
|Google|
|CoreWeave|
|Arista Networks|
|Doosan|
|Withe|
Everyone at Formation has a different timeline, does different things, has different needs, and it's very hard for us…
Hi, I looked this up, and I don't feel like I was super involved in that post or thread, but sorry you feel that way. I do indeed participate in a lot here, which I hope encourages and stimulates productive discussion more than discouraging people from participating.
I have absolutely zero intention or standing (moderator or not) to doubt or question your personal experience as you see it. I have full intention and full right, just as a user, to question extrapolations and statements beyond personal experiences. So saying something like "I feel like I learned all the DS&A I needed at Codesmith" is not something I would question. Saying "Codesmith absolutely teaches you all the DS&A you need for any job" would be something I would absolutely question, because I have a examples that strongly counter that. This might be subtle but I think it's a huge difference that I take very seriously.…
I saw that thread because I was mentioned in it and I immediately commented that I thought it was not appropriate. I don't know why someone posted it, but it was pretty inappropriate for the person to insult and mock people and I stated that on the thread and the person will hopefully back off a bit. I don't think anyone wants that kind of thing.
I know the mods attitude is to only delete things that are very clearly violations and really blatant. Not to apply opinions and not to judge in the gray area.
I think the most borderline Codesmith-related thing I deleted that was in the multi-year long queue when I was added as a mod was a comment from 1 year ago that said 3000 Codesmith grads has mid-level and senior jobs that was reported for misinformation and there is first hand sources from Codesmith that show that that was not correct a year ago. But maybe that's one step too much judgement? I wouldn't delete ANY comment that was an opinion or just 'felt wrong' or something very vague like that.
Maybe TMI, when I was clearing out the queue I approved comment I HAD REPORTED MYSELF like 2 years ago THAT INSULTED ME, but I didn't think met the threshold for removal with my mod hat one.... kind of weird hahaha.
Good question, it doesn't matter at all skills-wise how much experience you have to benefit technically from Formation, and you can do Formation for a fixed length of time if you are at the minimum skill bar (which it sounds like you might not have been yet on the benchmark) but don't have enough experience.
We just don't want you to think we have a magic formula to get you a job, and nor can we afford to pay more to mentor you than you pay us (which can happen if you are here for like 1-2 years) :P
Internship + Formation isn't quite enough experience right now for the unlimited Fellowship. We are actively exploring different shapes and sizes for different people though, because there is a lot of demand from people we currently don't support and that's where are month to month and short term packages come into play right now.
Hey, I'm the co-founder of Formation and before I got to the part about you applying I was going to say it's not a good fit if you don't have any experience yet, but it would be an excellent fit once you get your first job to level up to your next job.
Now in terms of advice/questions:
1. Yeah entry level FAANG is basically internship conversions + new grads via top tier CS schools right now and we'll see in the fall if that changes. Apprenticeships are extremely competitive. Contract to hire might be the only possible option and still not likely.
2. I think that's a good idea, getting a real product in the app store with real users can count as experience but I would give it say 6 months of real work-equivalent full time contributions to really make it count.
3. Real 40 hour a week experience on a single company/project can trump credentials yeah, but you need an equivalent amount o…