Haha I wrote almost a year ago now and things are the same on the Formation side - we still don't take people without SWE work experience, and people with under 2 years have a very hard time getting interviews. On the Codesmith side, their grads are really struggling and those strategies aren't working anymore. Placements have tanked at Codesmith and people are taking significantly lower paying jobs (average salaries down about 15% from peak).
Honestly out of those ones Codesmith is still probably the best if you are entrepreneurial. Recent students and grads have reported that the bar has dropped from the past for technical skills, but it's high on communication and people tend to be driven achievers who go there. For all of the mess I mentioned, former employees describe it as even a mess internally during the peak times that was never run like a "real company" (reference from employee), and ultimately I think they try to produce a consistent experience for you the student.
It's a very uniquely weird one of all the others (which are more similar to each other)... it has a "cult-like following" (not in the religious sense, but colloquially). People who go in skeptical, tend to see it for what it looks like under the hood and feel like it's overpriced, the instructors almost all have no SWE experience, lots of superficial stu…
Sorry, I normally disclose more, Formation isn't remotely an option so I hadn't mentioned it but we do work with a number of bootcamps later on in their careers and a big reason I have a broad real time pulse on them and pay attention to the bootcamp industry.
That context is indeed helpful. I would look at structure linear courses that are less intense. Bootcamps are kind of a pressure cooker where you retain little of the actual stuff and instead are forced to learn how to learn under that much pressure (which is how your first job feels on day 1). The people who succeeded at getting jobs quickly already self studied and were ready to go hard.
If you are sure you can't do self paced, then I would do part time that isn't too intense.
Or you can do some classes first to get a headstart and THEN to a bootcamp.
But given your goal of starting a company/working at a brand new startup, I…
Yeah Rithm was fully in person before COVID and was a pretty cool office.
I don't know any that are left honestly. Office space is still to expensive, despite being very empty and no one wanting to work downtown.
You could maybe just get a co-working space membership for $500 a month and go there to do remote lessons, you'll probably make friends with engineers and learn some stuff they are doing and working on haha. Maybe work your way into an internship.
All of the bootcamps you mention are having struggles :(
**THESE ARE MY PERSONAL WELL-INFORMED OPINIONS HERE**, do your own research too:
App Academy recently downsized yet again a few weeks ago and is allegedly cutting back part time programs. It's relying more and more on "AI helpers" and it's all untested and hard to know if it will work. After some extremely loud and angry employee departures, I think it's risky to go because…
Yeah I see this kind of thing often. I started doing an analysis of bootcamps grads trajectories and if they still had their first job a year out. I didn't complete it, but it was a shockingly high number of people who changed jobs or didn't have a job within a year or so after their first one.
The job is just the beginning. Bootcamps sell you the job as the end because for them that's when they advertise you everywhere and call it a day.
There's even a bootcamp Codesmith that after promising support for life after, just launched a cash grab AI followup course for $900 for alumni. A completely untested gamble and having the audacity to charge alumni for it. In all fairness, they don't charge for the classroom part of the course as they offer that in their bootcamp now and retroactively give that to alumni for free, so you are paying $900 for 4 Saturday workshops and a monthly "leadersh…
Yeah I would at least apply and talk to someone to see more.
Signals of strong fit:
1. you are getting interviews already and failing them or feeling lost (would expect subscription or shorter time at Formation)
2. you know you need to practice leetcode, system design, etc... but you have no idea where to start and you are busy and want to be efficient about it (would expect 3-8 months)
Hi, I can answer with my Formation hat on. It's a good question because there isn't anything else that operates like it, even competitors like Interview Kickstart are also super different.
In one sentence, we're an interview or and mentorship platform. Our focus is job hunting and preparing you for your upcoming interviews.
So philosophically we are based on the idea of mastery and helping you efficiently get form where you are to where you want to go. This means we try to spend your dollars efficiently by giving you the type of session we think you need at the right time.
If you want to hire an Open AI engineer who makes $1M to be your tutor, it would cost you hundreds of a ton and they wouldn't even be able to give you the time you need.
Instead, we give you mocks with those totes of people when you need it - usually when preparing for specific upcoming interviews, and when you don…
Some alumni have talked to me about the materials yeah. They said they only received the 5 lectures but that the projects weren't done yet. I think the people starting Codesmith now will get the real material for the first time in abouf 2 months. Which is why it's insane to me they are charging $3200 (discounted for the first cohort in Jan) instead of making it free. They both have to iron out the bugs and also have no idea how useful this course will be.
The lectures sound laughable as you said. Like RAG and fine tuning spent defining all of these techniques that were invented in the past year but not really being that useful.
There are some excellent free under the hood YouTube series on AI. There is an amazing one I watched part of that is like dozens of lectures for 2-3 hours each that really explains from basics how everything works, and still often says things alike "this is a si…
Codesmith also launched their standalone AI course. 4 weeks part time for almost $5000: https://www.become-irreplaceable.dev/ai-ml-program
I commented on this and will continue to comment it.
The best way to learn AI if you are a generalist SWE is to get a job at a top tier company and learn through their internal materials, confidential research, and thousands of ML engineers.
These are cash grabs capitalizing on fear of missing out, unless you want to be a prompt engineer and not a SWE job. But those jobs haven't solidified at all to justify experimenting on you to try to get you there.
I would recommend no, and I've been consistently recommending against AI/ML bootcamps unless you want to transition to a non-SWE AI role. I posted a poll result here a few weeks ago that shows at the top tier tech companies about 90% of engineers weren't evaluating for AI skills in interviews and had no plans to.
MY STRONG ADVICE TO ANYONE WITH EXPERIENCE WHO WANTS TO DO AI: get a normal SWE job at a big tech company that has a lot of AI product or infra and learn internally. They all have thousands of amazing engineers working on AI, breaking confidential research not released to the public or discussed outside, and many have internal courses on AI... it's like better than doing a course in every way.
In the face of tanking enrollment, a number of bootcamps have added AI/ML standalone options for existing engineers: BloomTech and Codesmith being two of them.
They are popping up as a…
I have the perspective of:
1. being a silicon valley outsider who broke in
2. working at Meta from 200 engineers to 10000 and learned a ton about how the sausage is made
3. I started a mentorship program to help engineers prepare for interviews and many people went to bootcamps in the past so I know about them and their pros and cons for your career down the road.
The story of why I'm here.
It all started when a bunch of people applied to my program claiming to have about 6 months to a year of work experience. When I interviewed them their stories all fell apart quickly and I realized these are all Codesmith graduates and the work experience was actually 3 week long group projects and when I confronted someone they said that they were coached into how to talk about it like it was months of work experience.
I did a deep dive and found a Reddit post from 2019 from a tech hiring manager…
I know of two instructors who worked as SWEs and then went back as instructors at Codesmith. I can't speak to their personal situations, but they seem like at least not bad engineers. So I wouldn't say that's universally or unanimously true.
If a decent paying job drops in your lap and you otherwise wouldn't have income, I can see it being an okay option while you job hunt.
I was being sarcastic, but people are paying bootcamps because they think App Academy or Codesmith will get them a $120K job in 12 weeks for $20 to $30K.
So if that's what they are expecting, then what are bootcamps missing - well they aren't getting people jobs quickly anymore... haha.
If people cared about HOW the bootcamp works they wouldn't have signed up in the first place to pay $20K to do a udemy-type course taught in large part by recent graduates.
Hmm BloomTech (where the CEO of App Academy used to work) also used Canvas. In all fairness she was able to help them survive instead of completely shutting down so if App Academy was headed for shutdown, maybe she's trying to save it like BloomTech.
In my opinion the layoffs in [March 2023](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmIBwP6tBh4) should have been a giant warning sign to run. I know they promised things would improve and get better, but it was prudent to give them a chance to prove that instead of joining anyways and hoping for the best.
Codesmith had layoffs in 2023 and again in February 2024 where it drastically[ cutback programs](https://www.codesmith.io/blog/community-update-doubling-down-on-remote-learning-timeless-pedagogy-frontier-tech). Most of the things promised didn't happen (or didn't happen to the degree stated) and four more employees left in the past few weeks. Yet…
I can speak for Formation. We are not an alternative to bootcamps at all and not even an option for CS grads who don't have SWE work experience yet. If you have SWE work experience and are considering a bootcamp, then we might possibly be an option, but even then, not a slam dunk and I might still recommend a bootcamp depending on your situation.
We have a very small team and we don't have a lot of online presence, so want don't want people to misunderstand what we do.
For example, a non trivial percent of people come BACK to Formation in the future and pay the full amount to do the same thing AGAIN. This is a good example showing how completely different it is than a bootcamp... it would be like doing the full Codesmith Immersive for $22,500 twice two years apart... makes no sense.
Second, we don't teach anything or have any classes. This is SUPER important because people should not…
There isn't a home for those (add Pathrise, Interview Kickstart and Outco to the list).
I'm the co-founder of Formation, and we call ourselves 'interciew prep and mentorship' rather than a career accelerator.
So the discussion here tends to be from bootcamp grads later on in their careers.
The discussion in CS majors is mostly about Headstarter and Coachable because this appeal more to that demographic.
Pathrise is big with people on Visas.
Interview Kickstart in is India and bigger in those areas.
Interviewing.io and Hello Interview are more a la carte Interview Prep and more in the Leetcode sub. Formation is also mentioned in the Leetcode sub sometimes.
Very bluntly, there are all entirely different programs and audiences with a lot of overlap between various ones, but no single gome really makes sense. People tend to be looking at 2 or 3 of these and which 2 or 3 are differen…