Timeline

Hi, where in the post did you see the quote: "People becoming SWEs today are aware of tough market, but persevere because they're truly passionate about coding"? I read "People that are becoming engineers now are definitely passionate about coding. More so than when the iron was hot and everybody was just talking about how amazing it is to have a tech job" I agree with Kim's comment that a far smaller number of people are considering bootcamps now BUT they are far more passionate and committed and know what they are getting themselves into. I thank that to places like Reddit helping people be informed about bootcamps so they can join for the right reasons and I'm glad she's seeing that trend too. I disagree with OP's characterization that people are "persevering" despite the market. I have a couple of friends who graduated from Codesmith in early 2024 and while it's far too early t…

I mean it's very optimistic about ML creating more jobs and I share that optimism. But at the same time, in the past year, Rithm has had layoffs, Launch Academy, Turing School, Hack Reactor, Tech Elevator, and even Codesmith has laid off almost half the staff. CodeUp shut down. Epicodus shut down. Like I don't want to be a big rain cloud hovering over the parade, but there are legitimate concerns for a typical student looking to join a bootcamp right now that didn't exist 2+ years ago. And to not acknowledge them is irresponsible. Acknowledging them doesn't have to be doom and gloom though. Living in an imperfect world and trying to be bring positivity to it, doesn't have to mean you ignore anything negative.

According to Codesmith data, only under 1/4 of students had CS degrees before Codesmith, and a good number of those were people who graduated a long time ago and never did SWE, or recently graduated and couldn't get a job. So while I'm not saying to go there or not to go there with experience, but I will point out that the vast majority of people there, do not have SWE experience and the ones that do are there for more specific reasons than mentioned above.

Similar to other feedback, this person graduated Codesmith in 2017, and has had 3 jobs since then and her trajectory and path don't reflect what a person going to Codesmith today will experience. I love reading profiles about people and their trajectories and I loved reading this post, I'm just giving feedback that Codesmith needs to deal with the market today more directly and not the market they want to have. And appeal to people who they think will succeed in this market through Codesmith. I would love to read a profile about someone who is struggling on the job market and doesn't have a job yet and how much they love Codesmith anyways and how Codesmith is helping them the best they can. That is representative of the common grad right now unlike when the person above graduated and started their career.

Prior experience as a SWE or prior experience in tech? Those are two completely different things. Prior experience as a legit SWE, do not do Codesmith. Prior experience as SWE-adjacent or other tech role, consider Codesmith. Since you are answering this "Official AMA" representing Codesmith, be careful misrepresenting the company. The vast majority of alumni according to your own data had no prior SWE experience and it's not even super correlated to Codesmith outcomes (it is a bit, but not really). If you haven't seen your own data ask for it before trusting other Codesmith staff. The one off single anecdote about a PayPal manage graduated Codesmith SIX YEARS AGO and took THREE YEARS to become a manager.