I'm talking to Jeff (OP) tomorrow. I haven't talked much with him before (both public and private), but this is what normal people do to talk about ideas and get to know each other. I have no idea if we agree or disagree and it doesn't matter. We definitely don't 100% agree on everything but we can talk and respect each other.
Everyone has a story and journey that can at worst - teach you something, and at best - inspire you.
I'm sure there are reasons Will Sentance and/or Codesmith behave the way they to criticism. There are many personality disorders outside of one's control that could explain that, amongst other things. At best there's an inspiring story and at worst something to learn from, but shutting someone down (unless you feel your personal safety is immediately at risk) is the equivalent of throwing away that learning opportunity and you might even be throwing aware an inspi…
I dispute almost all of those "facts", but I don't care personally if they get posted and I need to evaluate everything super fairly and consistently as a mod or I don't deserve the position.
Personal opinion rant: Codesmith has dug a really deep whole for themselves with their own community and it's entirely on them. The more they go after me with statements I can prove are false, the deeper the hole. The more their placements are terrible and they gaslight alumni, the deeper the hole. The more they post in their slack about me (who RECOMMENDED PEOPLE IN 1-1 CHATS GO TO CODESMITH UNTIL THEIR RECENT LAYOFF ROUND), the deeper the hole. When an alumni, who I recommended go to Codesmith, actually went, and then is pissed off because they didn't feel like they liked it, and that alumni sees what Codesmith is saying about me to their alumni in slack, that absolutely **DESTROYS** their credi…
Where are you getting your information from?
1. We had one Bootcamp Grad Open House and it wasn't that popular so we didn't do it again.
2. This subreddit isn't a "massive funnel", and what makes you think that? We put all of Reddit traffic under 'socials' and we don't even distinguish this sub because it's not a significant source of people.
If you are quite senior, become a mentor on an online platform. Formation, Interview Kickstart, Pathrise, Interviewingio, Hello Interview. You have absolutely zero risk, and you can do as much mentorship as you want with whoever you want and get paid a reasonable amount to live off of if you spend all your time doing it.
If you aren't super experienced and want to start a bootcamp, I don't have other options. You might be the most gifted teacher in the world but it will be hard for you to help junior people navigate the industry without experience too.
I would also point out that my team (but not me) does cold outreach (searching LinkedIn and using various tools and sources to find potential fits). Even when we required less experience, as far as I know, we have always trying to target bootcamp GRADS not people earlier in their journey.
If we haven't been able to reach out to every PLACED bootcamp grad from all bootcamps, including all placed Codesmith grads, at this point then we aren't doing a good job in our outreach and connecting with our target market.
We did have a few problems with having to train new recruiters on our team specifically to identify Codesmith OSP projects NOT as "placed bootcamp grads" because there were a number cases of mistakes. This is actually one of the reasons Codesmith even got on my radar to begin with, it was messing with out funnel because a few dozen people were applying and interviewing saying the…
I'm going to ask Brian how he heard about us, it wasn't me reaching out and it will sure be embarrassing if it was Codesmith alumni or employee that recommended it haha. I would strongly guess it was a peer who realized Brian had already self taught to Codesmith grad level and wanted interview prep.
I don't discuss people's individual cases but I'm general, if someone is joining and Formation is not 100% good fit, we'll have that conversation. These are extremely case by case and some people join for different reasons and some people will not join for different reasons.
I didn't mention that in my response but we do work with a lot of bootcamp grads later in their careers. Not on the record (my best recollection) was that Hack Reaction, Fullstack Academy, and Codesmith where roughly equal in numbers as the original bootcamp people went to.
People regularly recommend (or maybe don't recommend if they didn't like it) Formation to their friends and cohort mates from their bootcamps.
The bootcamp market has been TERRIBLE in the past two years. Codesmith's main competitor Rithm School shut down, and their other competitors like App Academy and Hack Reactor have had major changes.
I'll keep saying it, but I would like to have a call with the Codesmith team to try to understand more where each other is coming from, there's a massive misalignment right now both ways it seems.
I'm happy to answer this factually on the record, I don't know where this is coming from but keep asking and I'll keep giving the answers.
I would like to know more specific examples of this to clarify because I don't know what you are talking about from your post.
1. I was in Codesmith's CSX Slack until I was banned and I have respected that ban since and not stepped foot in it and have not stepped foot in a Codesmith event since.
2. I have never messaged, promoted, or mentioned Formation to my recollection in CSX Slack ever. My interactions that I recall were limited to:
a) Messaging one or two OSP groups that their projects were leaking passwords publicly
b) Answered a couple of technical questions, like 5 maybe?
c) Helping the Codesmith Team understand what happened when a different Codesmith posted job postings improperly affiliated with Codesmith LLC and they thought it was…
People can be whoever they want on Reddit, there are pros and cons about being anonymous and about being non-anonymous. Regardless of choice, you can have integrity or not. I'm trying to reach out to Codesmith to talk, because there are two-way misunderstandings about intentions that would benefit not just both of us, but the whole community, to try to sort out.
This post was also flagged by Reddit's filters. Given the other conversation I'm going to contact the other moderators to decide what to do with it.
On a personal note, I don't want a crazy back and forth either. I'm not sure who this is but I was talking to Eric Kirsten a few months ago and planned on meeting in person to chat and that died off when he no longer planned on travelling to San Francisco and the thread died off after I very clearly articulated Formation's vision to him about how we are not competitors - and there appears to be two-way misunderstanding. While I feel you are wrong about where I am coming from and making wrong conclusions and assumptions as a result, you feel I'm wrong in how I characterize Codesmith and discuss it. And it would be a good step to clear the intentions piece. I expect us to strongly disagree on our interpretations of the facts, but I think unde…
The log shows that Reddit flagged it, like it does a bunch of posts for which I am not notified of, and I don't review them in real time, and check periodically.
The log shows I removed it a midnight Saturday night, when I reviewed the queues and it was at that point a duplicate of a post already in the sub.
I'm not sure why it showed up in the queue again today, where the log shows I removed it again and tried to explain that it was a duplicate with a comment this time so it would be clearer.
Your post was blocked by Reddit's filters not by a moderator. That's what the moderator log says.
This happens to 3 to 10 posts a day and is a common occurrence and I was just clearing out the log and filtering duplicates.
If someone else didn't share your post already, I would have overridden and approved it because it's now irrelevant as a duplicate.
Exclusive ex-Meta Engineering poll results: Almost no one is considering AI skills when hiring software engineers at their companies! Bootcamps pivoting to AI might be marketing a fictional gold rush so that they can sell you an expensive shovel that you don't need right now.
DISCLAIMER: I'm a moderator of the sub and co-founder of a mentorship program for experienced SWEs (2+ YOE currently) to help them prepare for interviews. I don't believe I have any conflicts of interest but I am bias by the fact that my corner of the market is top tier big tech (including top tier small tech startups) and not the long tail of companies hiring engineers right now. The below analysis is my personal interpretation of the poll and reflects my personal opinions and insights on the raw numbers presented.
Note: I might update poll numbers as more votes come in.
I ran a poll with a group a few thousand…
I agree. Emotions aside from being publicly attacked in a place where I can't respond and am being name called by people in their community, their response is objectively terrible and doesn't refute anything.
It's why so many people are calling it embarrassing and desperate and it's a really bad sign for Codesmith.
1. Personal income means I haven't made a penny in any way from Formation to date, no secondary sales, no profit sharing, no income, no dividend, big fat $0. I own a large amount of shares in it, and if it sold some day or IPOd I would make money, but I do not make money from any of the operations.
2. That's fair our perceive my message that way. Like I said it's rare, and I connect to a ton of people just to learn more about them and network like anyone else. I don't recall pushing Formation on anyone in DMs. If you felt that way, that's fair feedback and I'm happy we talked about it.
3. There are other mods who can make decisions too, not just me! I haven't changed my behaviors since becoming a mod and I feel like I had a bit influence in here BEFORE then too. I appreciate a reminder to be aware of potential conflicts, this is the kind of fair discourse I want to have. I'm not trying…
1. I don't make a personal income and haven't for 5 years
2. About a third or so people at Formation did a bootcamp in the past, it's far from the majority right now.
3. Are you able to prove that I DM'd you and promoted Formation and told you to go there? I've done it very rarely - like 2 or 3 times, while I've had 100s of conversations telling people to go to bootcamps like Codesmith (which I no longer do), Launch School, Rithm, grad school, Tech Elevator, etc... based on their circumstances. If I DM'd you from my account and out of the blue told you that you need Formation, then that was a one off that rarely happens, was probably a very legitmate reason to do so, and I probably mentioned other options too like Interview Kickstart rather than just saying "go to Formation", it was probably like "you should consider interview prep programs because you have a lot of experience alrea…
From my experience. There are a bunch of people who want to give back and mentoring yes.
The problem is they don't want to quit their jobs and run your program reliably for 6 months. They want to do casual mentorship.
If I'm making $1M a year as a principal eng at Meta, I need you do do a ton of coordinating around my life for me to do mentorship even if I WANT TO. You have to setup effective mentees for the person. It's not about the money but the opportunity cost.
A person like this wants to maximize their impact as a mentor and not waste time.
Who is going to manage all of this? It's completely different process and skillset to manage this than running a bootcamp.
If those developers are making $500K a year and true senior top tier engineers, they won't just randomly want to teach a bootcamp and they won't do so consistently for 6 months.
Several have tried this and it's failed.
What you end up with is unemployed bootcamps grads who were laid off and doing it to make money, which is marginally better than a bootcamp instructor who has never worked in industry.
The free market in the USA makes it almost impossible to have the best engineers teach consistently like that.
Meta and Google both PAY their own engineers FULL SALARIES to do 6 month sabaticalls and teach courses at colleges.
People who would be interested in the above would much rather just get a job at Meta and do it via them.
My opinions is that they don't have anyone qualified to do it.
I've reported a couple of major security problems in projects and no one seems to know what to do about it.
For example, they checked in passwords for some 3rd party charity into source code. They then claimed they removed them from the repo. But alas, they didn't wipe the Git history and the passwords were still there in past commits.
I pointed this out and was told I was wrong.
I sent a link to the password directly, publicly on GitHub.
It took far too much effort to explain this if I was talking to "mid level and senior engineers".
Just a note for others reading, Launch School's Capstone projects are one level better than Codesmith's OSPs and follow a similar idea of building a developer tool.
I love the spirit of the OSP but they went about it all wrong. They responded to my criticism about OSLabs being a fake entity by establishing a charity only recently.
The director of the charity is now 'on leave' and it's my understanding from her that Annie and Phil run the day to day of the projects
Like instead of building a fake charity that's practically run by Codesmith people, put effort into making the OSPs better. Less effort on appearing legit and more effort on being legit.
Launch School is leveling up their projects by having paid mentors work on large open source projects like Firefox and mentoring students to work on those projects without distracting the core contributors (who otherwise don't have the time…
This might be TMI, but someone sent me some completely public but unlisted instructor training videos with no message or commentary that they were secret so I have to assumeI have permission to see (but given they are unlisted I don't think are intended to be searchable publicly)
They were from like 8 years ago, but I was informed upon asking that recent instructors saw these videos. The training was developed by Will Sentance and an instructor who used to be an actor in LA with no SWE experience.
Most of the training was about how to manage people in lectures, like how to get people to put cameras on, introduce themselves, make a comment about each person by name, and then how to handle not knowing the answers to questions you are asked.
Really enlightening. I don't even know if I have the links anymore, this was like a long time ago that I saw them.
But they are/were trained on how…
Yeah no worries and I appreciate being challenged respectfully and with good intentions, even if the challenges are hard.
I'm not perfect and I can't be fair and reasonable without acknowledging and talking about my weaknesses too.
I'm frustrated that while I have tons of documentation from tons of people in making my arguments about Codesmith and other bootcamps that the company is trying to gaslight me and silence me with a post that presents facts about me and my intentions without any evidence.
It's awful.
I'm very fair about potential conflicts of interest. In my opinion, the conflict of interest is that about a third of people at Formation did botocamps in the past, so it's a good chunk of people who come to us in the future. And no, these aren't recent grads who can't get jobs but people with real work experience post bootcamp. I think I disclose.and manage this well and that it's a relativrly minor conflict.
You know what's worse, anonymous accounts that could be run by bootcamps, manipulating discussions, and they shouldn't get a free pass just because they are anonymous. I shouldn't be villainized because I'm not anonymous.
There is a happy medium.
I don't own this sub and there are two other mods with different views.
I was made a moderator after demonstrating for two years that I could manage my biases well and be fair and reasonable.
Reddit permanently suspended about a dozen…
If you suddenly want to be a medical doctor, it's extremely hard to change your mind and go to medical school later in life. Only a small number of people who have the time, support and savings can.
The path that works is a top tier 4 year CS degree (top 10 schools) and for people who decided early only, like medical school, that CS was for them.
Bootcamps can help the late bloomers in adjacent areas find s path on a case by case basis.
While medical doctors are one thing, being a receptionist at a doctors office isn't or being a lab assistant, or a medical clerk, or x ray technician.
AI is going to create a plethora of new jobs at tech companies that are the "x ray techncian" of the SWE world.
Jobs that pay okay but not SWE level salaries, need a few months long certificate or bootcamp, and don't have the ssme prestige.
Codesmith's narrative of the modern engineer fits in this vai…
Bootcamps work for a specific slice of people.
Launch School is the only program I know that systematically tries to find those people though a multi step, months long process of getting through to Capstone.
And surprise, it works better! But you don't know if it will work for you until you try getting through, and you might be capable of getting a job through a bootcamp, just not through Launch School.
Launch School has like under 100 capstone students a year.
The problem with bootcamps, which particularly hit Codesmith hard and they haven't fully recovered is that they scaled from 100 students a year to over a 1000, thinking that if it worked for so many of their students when they are small, it would work for everyone who passes the bar.
While Launch School has maintained a relatively high placement rates. Unofficially reported Codesmith placement rates have gone down drasticall…
Why do you think it's a conflict of interest?
Codesmith's unhinged post is libelous as I have officially informed their leadership about this in the past and have the records to prove it and they decided to intentionally lie to mislead the public.
I have always made it extraordinarily clear my commentary is my personal opinion and nothing to do with my company.
I stated that there are a handful of unique edge case people that could go to either Formation or Codesmith but that our records show it's a very small number and not our target demographic.
They decide to lie anyways with zero evidence presented to support their claim.
An institution that behaves like this is rotten at the core and won't survive, just don't get caught up in it.
I'm someone who was bullied my whole childhood, lived at home through college, and had major conference issues.
My views on Reddit come from defending those being taken advantage of.
For profit companies and for profit and not charities so expect to be marketed to and it's healthy to have critics challenge a company or product as well.
The new Google Pixel phone came out to some great reviews and some terrible ones.
I see myself as a critic. Maybe I'm like a fine cigar salesman who critiques whisky brands, complementary but completely different product, and I feel very comfortable with being a critic.
If you can't survive being critiqued then maybe you are actually a scam, or at the very least, you don't have everything figured out and maybe have to look WITHIN before blaming others. Some products like Rabbit R1 looked and sounded great and have CEOs who tell a great story. But exec…
I don't know what they told you when you graduated but they are telling new grads that they have "2 to 4 years of functional experience" so they can put that in applications and their resume.
From the materials I've seen, the changes seem irrelevant to getting a job right now.
A couple of people have Gen AI related jobs but most people are getting SWE jobs with zero AI, followed by tangential jobs, like support engineering and technical writers.
If the market rebounds enough for people to get jobs, I'm curious to see if they stay the course with the "modern engineer" or just double down on classic Codesmith techniques.
So I'm not even convinced the changes they made are correcting anything, but I could be wrong, I'm going off my corner of the market. Maybe Mavis Tire will hire a ton of modern engineers while FAANG keeps doing its same old same old.
Codesmith's new model is bullshit. They added 5 Generative AI lectures and are calling themselves an AI immersive. It's unclear if the content is even done yet or just in progress, with the people currently working on it having no AI experience in real life.
There is no "modern engineer". It's a fabricated story in the CEO's head that he's setting up and using alumni to +1 like zombies.
The "modern engineer" is a privileged Oxford/Harvard grad's idea for making the word a better place.
Good idea, but it's not what the market wants right now. If he wants to change the world, he needs to give the market what it wants along the way to get there.
Right now he's acting like a con artist, dressing up sly foxes like prized sheepdogs. Telling graduates with 3 weeks of OSP to list that on their resume as 2 to 4 years of "functional experience" because companies don't check (Recent alumni wer…
Absolutely, everyone is biased and so am I. I have a very skewed view of the world.
I started off as a middle class kid in Canada, who was terrified of leaving home.
I stumbled into Silicon Valley and met all kinds of people from self-taught people to Stanford grads, and everything in between.
I worked my ass off to become the #1 contributing engineer AT ALL OF FACEBOOK when I left in 2017.
I didn't like how I got EXTREMELY LUCKY to be there, but the Stanford and Harvard grads with wealthy families - who were brilliant and very hard working - just seemed to have different path.
Kamala Harris called it the opportunity of "failing forward" I think last night?
At the same time, bootcamps were not working to help those people from non-traditional backgrounds make it. There were ONE PIECE of the puzzle, but not the answer.
So after taking a break after Facebook, I joined my partner's…
A couple of alumni have sent ME their complaints because they said YOU personally don't do anything about them and were defensive receiving them.
Word are words. Actions are actions.
Don't gaslight your alumni when placements for people starting LAST NOVEMBER have been terrible, not one recent cohort 3 months ago.
Work all week, every week, for a few years straight fighting tooth and nail for those graduates like Launch School's CEO.
Don't make alumni wait weeks for resume review sand mock interviews.
Actually LOOK AT THEIR OSP projects and review them so your students don't ASK ME TO REVIEW THEM because the people reviewing them at Codesmith has never professionally written code.
When I report a huge security issue with one of your projects, don't ignore it for 8 months.
Do better with your actions, not your words. People aren't falling for your words anymore.
So I used to multitask a lot of events in the background. Their CEO has no idea how to properly screenshare, so he shares all kinds of interesting stuff about Codesmith during these talks, from placements to students info and other Codesmith data. Once he said "I shouldn't be sharing this but...." - proceeding to share it. I collected and documented a shit ton of crazy stuff from these talks.
So it was a great way to try to stay on top of raw evidence.
Why do I care about the data to begin with?
I didn't in the past, but the best counter to any bullshit arguments like Codesmith's post above is raw facts. I'm now armed with so much raw information that I can confidently say what I say I believe to be true, and I can confidently push back on their incompetence like I am doing now.
My response here: https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/s/IFut3FqKNw
And yeah I'm blocked so I can't answer in that subreddit.
I think whoever wrote that lives in an alternate reality and I'm increasingly concerned about their program.
I am just one person, they should be talking to recent alumni instead of me.
We do not compete with you. Our marketing and recruiting team have not mentioned a single person that they can remember in the past year even mentioning considering Codesmith, but many are asking about Interview Kickstart and Pathrise. Do you guys think you compete with Pathrise and Interview Kickstart as well?
I'm not sure if you are delusional or have incompetent internal communication processes but I explained in detail to Eric Kirsten on your team via email a number of months ago.
I full on recommend Launch School at this time. Do you consider them a competitor? Why would I recommend them if I'm here to take down competitors?
As usual you all are big on words and small on details and execution.
RE: Reducing Prices
That's a fair argument to make it more accessible. Why didn't you make it more accessible in 2022 or 2023 and why make it accessible now then?
Launch School Core Liv…
Reddit permanently suspended a dozen or so pro-Codesmith new accounts with various patterns (including two admins of their sub here), often attacking me and my company, but generally posting positive things about Codesmith out of no where with no context on who they were. Reddit has a small super-escalation team that can access all kinds of data needed to detect behaviors. Like fingerprinting computers and identifying people with multiple accounts from the same machine etc... and analyzing patterns on content.
Unsurprisingly, when this happened, all of this behavior immediately stopped for a few months and the Codesmith sub went quite without a post for a whole month. I don't know exactly what's going on with that comment above, but I know former Codesmith employees that explicitly said their leaders follow this sub and one who was asked to manipulate it. Their CEO is an avid Reddit use…
2. I think instead of assuming it should be easy, trying to cooperatively understand why it's not and imainge the scenarios I'm describing would help. Like if you can propose metrics that handle the cases I throw at you, I'm all ears. If you were only going to put in 5 hours a week at Formation you would want to be misled by averages sped up by people doing 40 hours weeks. If you have a bunch of interviews in the pipeline and you are intentionally delaying them for 4 months, then you both bring down the average for others without interviews on the horizon AND don't care about the average because you already have a plan. Like I said, we would like to normalize for amount of effort put into Formation, and have some ideas there, but they can't be computed in a spreadsheet.
3. The post had 1/10th the views of a normal post but your comment (deep in the threads and requiring manual expansion…
Yeah I would say it's relatively reasonable picture. I just did a search myself and it's quite a mix of people:
- mentors
- early career people with jobs that just haven't started yet
- early career people who got entry level jobs listed
- people who are doing well and chugging along just fine at their expected pace, regardless of what their time is at Formation (which is why again - placement time is really hard to figure out)
- people are are severely struggling to get any interviews
I'm not sure what the point is, like I'm extremely open that there are a small number of people we admitted when we required less experience (6mo to 1 year) who have been with us a very long time and we keep supporting and we've spent more money mentoring them they they will even pay us... I think this evidence that we stick to our promises and means a lot to people.
That's correct, people who list Formation on their Linkedin are:
1. generally people with less experience and the group of people struggling the most.
2. generally people not working right now
3. generally many of the people who haven't placed yet
They represent a minority of people we work/worked with and we're proud to keep supporting them as we promised.
The typical engineer (FAANG mid-level/senior)+ engineers don't list Formation on their LinkedIns and are way more low key because they don't want their current employers knowing they are job hunting. We have CURRENT Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft software engineers, for example, who aren't going to advertise they are doing Formation publicly.
After people place, some people opt into being on our network page: [https://formation.dev/network](https://formation.dev/network)
And some people want to do a write up, like these 5 people r…
They don't for companies too.I think it's advantageous to know the radar of bootcamp grads for the future so they come to you down the road in a few years but I honestly think it's just that they have a marketing person cranking these out week after week.
You can try asking them but it's not at all because they are competitors.
Pathrise supports people in many different jobs. You can see the distribution in their report from last year. Very wide range of technical and not technical. Your primary contact is a career coach who is trying to help you unlock your application funnel. They have way less materials and less legit mocks.
Formation is all focused on preparing for and passing interviews. We have unlimited resume reviews and tons of recruiters call prep. We have an in-house job hunt tracking tool. We source thousands of jobs a week and suggest them to based on your background. But we do NOT do a great job debugging the funnel and forcing you to document everything to get enough data to debug the funnel like Pathrise forces you to do.
For example, Pathrise will try to proactively recognize a low application conversion rate. Formation will be more qualitative and give you more resume reviews or one off advi…
1. I do so for bootcamps because I work with a bunch of bootcamp grads later on in their careers and feel like I can combine that with my FAANG experience to give solid advice to peple looking at bootcamps. Formation isn't a bootcamp. If you are going to keep putting in that bucket despite my repeated attempts to explain the difference then that's on you, but I see no problems talking about BOOTCAMPS that have nothing to do with what I do.
2. Yeah we could come up with some kind of aggregated 'amount of time to get a job' data I think, but we have to account for week to week workload adjustments people meet (which is very frequent, vacations and pauses, offer times vs interview times, which topics people were working on and weren't at which times, time to first offer versus time to offer accepted (since people can get multiple offers and intentionally DELAY THEIR JOB HUNT to create a co…
1. There is a thread about removing "guarantee" in that page header and we'll probably change it yeah, thanks for the feedback because we didn't ralize how confusing it might be.
2. This is the post I'm referencing: https://formation.dev/blog/outcomes-report-first-half-of-2024/. It's substantiated data, but it doesn't talk about non-success cases. These are the numbers I'm talking about that are insanely strong in 2024 compared to 2023.
3. You might not be happy if you are in the minority who didn't get a job and can't come to an agreement about paying for the value you think you got from Formation with us, but we do exit surveys, interviews and all kinds of user research and many are, so to each their own. If it's a concern for you upfront then you should talk about it with us and try to map out all of the scenarios and if it doesn't work for you, don't join!
4. Fair enough re: retir…
DIRECT ANSWERS TO POINTS/QUESTIONS:
Generally speaking about the word "job guarantee", I flagged this earlier for our team to think about, so we'll see but it's a uncommon phrase we use in one place with limited spacing that I can see, and there are way more common phrases, slogans, and thousands of other words in our contract to read that are much more important to understand. I standby the accuracy of that in the context, but I think the hundreds or thousands of words, and phone calls, and emails, make it clear to people what that means contractually before signing up.
I take the feedback that you think we should only use that phrase accompanied with stronger data showing that guarantee turns into a job and I've shared that feedback.
1.“**Don't be blinded by their marketing**..." Formations' 2024 numbers are insanes so far. 75% top tier placements, average first year comp gain of 1…
We do not have a lifelong guarantee and we don't say that anywhere? Where does it say that?
Yeah unlimited support in some packages (like the main one we're offering) is cutoff at 15 months and we have the option to keep supporting you at our discretion. We are experimenting with that term but you are right just I should have mentioned that and you are also right that it's a bit confusing.
If you are considering Formation well go over your personal contract after determining which packages are appropriate for you and make sure you are good with all of the terms.
Can you give me more context? You are throwing out a lot of assumptions about my past commentary, my wealth, what our company does, why I am here.
Like are you a bootcamp student, bootcamp grad, industry person, looking at Formation, a competitor?
I'm happy to list all of the problems with Formation directly as someone aware of all the things we do well and things we can improve. You have good questions to discuss fairly but throw in some assumptions that are crossing the line and aren't remotely true about me, my wife, and our mission.
I'll give feedback to our marketing lead about the wording. We change our wording often and I stand by the wording. No one who has joined has mentioned finding this confusing. But if we're losing people from applying because they think it sounds like a scam then we should change it! But our marketing lead has to deep dive and make a call first.
We officially do not consider Codesmith a competitor at this time and in the past and do not market to the same people. Definitive answer on the record. I've emailed the same thing to one of their leaders and explained why.
Launch School is not at all a competitor to Pathrise.
It's extremely important that the record is extremely clear we aren't a bootcamp and don't work with people with less than 2 years of experience. Struggling bootcamp and CS grads are banging at our door and we have a small team and it's wasting time explaining to each of…
They also have "company interview guides" that sound equally authoritative. It's for raw SEO. I mean I know a lot of people there, I know the founders second hand, I think they have good intentions and don't overpromise anything and are fairly reasonable. We just have a different opinion on what the gaps are preventing people from getting jobs.
Their opinion is optimizing your resume and recruiter pitch in the job hunt funnel, our opinion is you need to have a strong technical toolbelt full of tools you know how to use well to step into your interviews. As a result, Formation is weaker on the raw job hunt funnel optimization side, and Pathrise is weaker on interview prep.
PART 2:
2. Yeah I comment on those. I'm aware of two Reddit posts. One is a person who left and ended up going out of SWE for their career and it was the right thing. The other person I don't know who they are but I do know someone who commented on that thread in support of the primary person recently tried to come back to Formation a second time, so maybe their opinion changed haha, but I want to go through the points.
**MOST IMPORTANTLY - we make hundreds of changes (literally) a week and Formation today is not Formation a few months ago, is not Formation a year ago.** I'm going to answer these as they would be TODAY, and I stand by my previous comments on those posts at the time they were posted.
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1. "**Don't be blinded by their marketing**...". We absolutely have people that are still with us and very low morale. There are a number of people who joined us…
Happy to keep discussing yeah, we're not perfect and some of our reasons might not be good enough but I can at least explain what those reason are directly from one of the founders 🙂.
PART 1:
1. I hear you on clarifying what "guaranteed means", because there are qualifiers that I explained, and maybe there is a better one liner for it. The support is guaranteed until you get a job is how I would respond/state it given your framing.
RE: " lifetime career support, job hunt help", my gosh some bootcamps promise this and it's not remotely the same as what any of these four programs offer and not nearly the same as what Formation offers. I don't want to write paragraphs here but to put it one way, a number of "DS&A career support engineers" at a top bootcamp like Codesmith have come to Formation themselves to work on their skills and get their next job.
Years ago I had debates on people…
Yeah a lot of this was manufactured by Codesmith and insider alumni itself. I know some of those people and it's very obvious that they all disappeared from this sub when they realized what was going on.
A dozen or so pro Codesmith against were permanently suspended recently as well (including two mods of their sub) so people with less honorable intentions that stick around are gone.
Now all you get is the reality of things and hopefully future people will see that.