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.
-------------------------
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.
Jeez sorry to hear that you were a sales engineer and still cant make it work.
Can you elaborate for everyone what it means to talk about your open source product as real work experience?
I'm super familiar with it, but I think it's useful for general people to hear what that means because it's a little surprising to a lot of people I talk to.
1. Yes, if you join the Unlimited option we will work with you for however long it takes and you aren't forced to take your first offer. So as long as you keep job hunting, applying, interviewing, and accepting our feedback and guidance (and don't have to withdraw for personal reasons, unexpected emergencies, or change your goal and don't what to job hunt anymore) then we keep supporting you. We have some people with us for two years and counting haha. We don't have strict requirements to meet to maintain this either. We have a two way trusting relationship and as long as you are continuously intending to job hunt we do our part. We don't hand you a job though and it's not a place to sign up expected to be handed interviews and a job on a plate.
2. Yeah sounds like you've read my views on this. It makes a lot more sense when you do Formation and see how individually unique each person's…
I'm the co-founder of Formation so I'm really biased.
I would say that none of these are boot camps, so the perspective you get from here is probably skewed to boot camp grads that then went to some of these programs. Which could be really useful if you're also a boot camp grad but less useful if you're not.
All of these are really different.
Outco, I got the vibe was shutting down or isn't really running because you can't apply on their website and their founders seem to have moved on and there's been a number of people being threatened to be sued by them who didn't get jobs within 12 months. I haven't heard firsthand from the company directly so I can't say anything definitively but I'm not really considering them right now when I talk about competitors.
Pathrise, they publish some annual stats and the number of people who go there as a software engineer is has been decreasing s…
Codesmith kind of pushes you out the door and alumni and older alumni kind of use their ambitiousness to hustle into a job. Leaders aren't super involved in individual people's job hunts.
Launch School's Founder personally gets involved in people's job hunts and tries to use his network to hustle you into a job. This is impossible to scale, so keeping Launch School small makes this possible.
Yeah they have been working on shifting the narrative. I think they are close but the things you pointed out are crushing deal breakers.
You won't be irreplaceable by doing 5 lectures in AI.... anyone else can do that. I can do that, you can do that and next week we are irreplaceable.
You can't be irreplaceable in 12 weeks for $22K or else anyone else can be irreplaceable in 12 weeks.
I like your idea of a 10 month or longer approach.... you became irreplaceable with time, and you can accelerate a little bit with good direction and advice.
Codesmith Immersive and Launch School Capstone have relatively similar formats. Focused on a delivering a big group project and leveraging that as internship-like experience.
Launch School is also working on setting up mini internships and contributions to giant open source projects like Firefox and is leagues ahead of Codesmith right now!
Hi, yeah off topic but I can answer:
- we take data engineers and data scientists but with SEVERE WARNINGS. We don't do any data-specific preparation or practice, so those people come to us for DS&A and System Design, networking, resume stuff, negotiation, etc... and not for any data specific stuff. At the FAANG-level companies the data loops are fairly similar to SWE with 1 or 2 unique interviews that we don't prep for, so some people think it's worth it. We strongly don't advise it though and these people tend to think hard about and come back to us on their own.
- we take people on different visas case by case, depends on the visa and the amount of time before it expires. Generally existing H1B is ok, TN (Canada/Mexico) is ok, F1+OPT with 2+ years left and a backup plan is generally ok.
Hi, thanks for sharing, I've heard similar things. Interestingly, Codesmith isolates each cohort so it's actually fairly hard to figure out how others are doing. People know their own cohort and the ones before and after who they interact with as junior/seniors.
Do you have any comments on how Codesmith staff have communicated to you? Like if they have told you it's not good or there, or they say things are fine instead?
But yeah, the 6 month placement rate for end of 2023 and early 2024 grads has tanked and Codesmith isn't saying a word - instead they are saying things that make it sound like everything is fine and Codesmith is doing great.
Launch School transparently had a 75% 6 month placement rate and because of Codesmith delusion above I've actively recommended not going there and actively recommended Launch School.
Anyways, if others in your cohort feel the same, share this pos…
Yeah for $59 it's a great way to test things out for sure! I'm speaking more at a company strategy level and zoomed out view. I'm on a remote cruise right now and my analogy would be watching all the cruise ships big and small come in and out of the harbor from a top a nearby mountain and trying to gauge where everyone is going. Is the ship sunk? About to collide with an iceberg and just won't move out of the way? Or seems to be doing everything right.
My view on Codesmith is that it's hit the iceberg and stubbornly not acknowledging it. But I might be wrong and they can try to change and do a 180, the CEO could step down, they could sell off, merge, or maybe they find a way to creatively keep the ship floating (e.g. Future Code) and then after reasoning their footings, make changes to avoid the iceberg in the future.
If this are at the CSPrep phase then consider all your free and chea…
I think they have far too much price to drop tuition. I expect them to raise it again in January like they did this year despite tanking placements and outcomes.
If anything they will start to give out "scholarships" to effectively lower the cost but maintain a high sticker price.
Following the ivy League model. Stanford is $60K a year but most people (who don't come from rich families) pay much less or nothing.
So taking a step back....
Codesmith, like Launch School, is for a certain person. There aren't magically more of those people in the world who just aren't going because of the cost. If it's the right program, the cost is irrelevant because the long term impact will be so much more than anything.
So lowering the cost won't do anything at all.
If they relied on anyone with a pulse paying them whatever spare change they have, then lowering the price would result in more people…
I absolutely think you should do many different things that are free because personally I found that you often have to do the same thing a couple times for it to click and to get the ball rolling. and there's also different styles at different times and there isn't just one thing that works the best for everyone. it's one of the most frustrating things about this subreddit is that people are looking for an objective single answer when they're often isn't one.
It's hard to say. Tax credits mean you were paying the taxes to begin with so they eat into profits more than they do to practical impact (for super high profit companies). As long as Wall Street adjusts their modelling and the companies remain insanely profitable, things should be fine.
But companies that are smaller and rely on the credits might hold back and I don't know what that will mean for them.... maybe the Reich get richer and jobs concentrate at FAANGs?
The slow path is to get a job using your existing degree that is at a big tech company and use internal resources to transition over the course of a few years.
I've seen some people do this and it's worked out extremely well.
1. You learn along the way
2. You get a good salary and benefits
3. You have a ton of context to help add value in a transition while you ramp up on technical
4. Some companies pay for masters
5. Many companies have internal engineering training you can try to participate in.
Now if you can't get a job at a top tech company, try to find something that hits on some of these.
Like maybe finding a job at a company that will pay for your masters.
Or finding a non tech job at a tech company that has zero chance at ever becoming an engineering job
I was doing some math on Future Code and it's possible that the program will give them a significant profit to survive for a bit longer. Need more details about how much they are paid from the city.
I'm sure surviving because of a philanthropic program from the city of New York makes you feel even better haha.
Anyways, thanks for sharing. A number of former employees have contacted me over the years. Many to apologize for their leadership's internal behavior calling me out and dismissing me internally when they feel like they agree with what I say. Codesmith tells these people I'm a jealous competitor.
I do what I do because former employees like this appreciate me for being real and wish they could too without violating their NDAs.
I feel bad for current employees who still believe their story and tow the line and it's why I generally have patience with them.
One more question? How much interaction do you have with Codesmith staff.
I was running the unit economy of the program. If Codesmith has two dedicated instructors and one program coordinator for 6 months, that's about $200K. If they have a fraction of other people's time for outcomes, program coordination, grading etc... that's another 100K.
So if the program costs Codesmith $300K, I'm curious if this is a philanthropic program if the city of New York would pay $900K for everyone's tuition to enroll in Codesmith.
Seems kind of weird if Codesmith profits a huge amount from the program to subsidize its other programs.... like the City of New York shouldn't be keeping the lights on haha.
So just curious if you can list out the staff jobs (NOT PEOPLES NAMES) you work with in the program to do the math.
Thanks for the update!
Do you have a sense of how important job hunting is going to be yet? or an emphasis on preparing to get a job at the end and references to that?
Also just want to confirm you haven't started working on the OSP project right? I want to make sure in the end people don't list 6 months of work experience on their OSP when it wasn't close to that haha. Codesmith normally advise to put the entire time at Codesmith for their OSP on their resume.
Launch School is experimenting with Launch School Core Live, which is entirely free and might have prompted Codesmith to discount CSPrep.
Launch School works well for specific people, just like Codesmith still works for a dwindling number of specific people.
The main advantage Launch School has if it's smaller. They run 4 cohorts a year or so, and then the founder is more directly involved in the day to day, keeping costs way down. As a result they have a decent placement rate in this market.
So I am recommending Launch School but only if it's the right place for you and you can explore their free options to try to figure that out.
I have to be fair, both to sleep at night for my own values, and because I have a following on here that expects me to be fair and reasonable.
I don't know Will Sentance and why he does what he does. But the sad thing is that we're approaching scam or incompetence. One is illegal, and one is career ending. So even with the benefit of the doubt, I don't think I'm being too kind here.
I do believe though deep in my heart that everyone at Codesmith would like nothing more than to see their grads succeed in incredible jobs and I stand by that too.
Numerous new warning flags at Codesmith. Concerned they are grasping at straws (Personal Opinion)
Hi all, over the years I've developed a decent sense of the bootcamp industry from both the inside and the outside. For better or worse I have developed quite the insight into Codesmith. As one of the more controversial bootcamps (known in the boom-times for placing people with $137K median salaries who will fight to the bitten end for Codesmith, with others who aren't buying the 'Codesmith way' on the opposite side. "Polarizing" is a good word and the most innovating things in the world are polarizing.
Over the past month I've been pretty quiet as a number of current and former students and staff have contacted me to chat about things and shared their views.
I've organized this post into clear sections.
Just a disclaimer, I'm a moderator of this sub and I supported my founder in startin…
Yeah that sounds good. It doesn't hurt to do Leetcode problems, just do them following a problem solving methodology like I suggested in another comment and not just flailing until Leetcode tells you you passed the question.
The how is much more important than the what.
I would also recommend spending significant time. just understanding the basic data structures and algorithms. The bootcamps that cover them spend like a few days on them and it's just not enough time. for me personally, I had to go over the same cost that several times before they clicked over several years.
I worked with a number of people from a formerly top bootcamp Codesmith, where people do a problem a day during what they call "hack hours" and I saw the pattern a lot of people who didn't really understand the underlying data structures and algorithms and were just kind of trying to get the problems right. I'm…
Outco is a competitor to my company so I'm super biased about talking about them.
Personally, I thought they were shutting down because their website is half broken and doesn't let you apply, some founders moved on to new things, and they are threatening to sue a bunch of people (search Reddit) who didn't get jobs in a year and thought they were getting their money back.
I would compare Outco to Formation (my company), Interview Kickstart, and Pathrise.
These are all different approaches and entirely different day to day, but all are focused on helping you get interviews and pass them.
I have always had pretty fair assessments on here despite my bias, so I'll give my PERSONAL OPINIONS trying to be as fair as I can be:
Formation: dynamic and adaptive mentorship, unique, unlimited mocks, small group sessions (3 to 6 people), 3 dedicated non technical support team members, only focused…
Sorry I should clarify the recommendation is because Codemiths system sounds like a HubSpot website with API integration and they don't seem remotely aware of any of the massive problems with their service and apparently Will doesn't seem to understand the architecture himself in detail.
Their lead engineer left and I don't think anyone does. I chatted with someone who corroborated this.
Like I would not be comfortable giving them any personal information personally based on my judgment.
Someone reached out who attended this talk and I now actively encourage no one to go to Codesmith...
Any alumni who attended - this doesn't seem like a system design talk but rather Will trying to learn about a system he doesn't understand well.
Did he talk about pros and cons of different approaches?
Did he talk about the decision process for each piece?
Was the system large scale and in need of complex decision making?
Are the APIs between components discussed in great detail?
Are the schemas and data model decisions discussed in great detail?
Was there any discussion of a technically challenging problem solved and how they overcame it?
Did the system make sense and were good decisions made? Like if someone reviewed it and thought it would just be one service instead that would be a no hire or fire.
I'm surprised your big tech company is allowing you to reach as a W2 part time employee of a bootcamp. I would run that by the conflict of interest team first.If you are a contractor with that much influence over the curriculum, I would double check the contractor / employee relationship in your state and the state the bootcamp is in to make sure it's not being violated.
Not paranoia but serious. Like if you work at FAANG and you are doing to teach people under any kind of IP agreement with the bootcamp, you have a conflict not to reveal any IP of the company and unintentionally transfer that IP to the bootcamp. You also might unintentionally transfer that IP to students who go and work at competitors in the future.
Sounds crazy but you can get insta fired at some companies so be careful and make sure your relationship with the bootcamp is clear.
Codesmith was telling everyone their o…
I didn't want to share but I found that too and was like what Stealh Startup is public on GitHub and called "Stealth Startup" haha.
Do you have evidence the person was fired from a real startup?
I think it's reasonable for people to not make it for all kinds of reasons, even if they lied about their background and couldn't make it at the level they were expected.
But I think it's offensive and absurd to portray those situations as successed to be celebrated. I've seen potential students who don't know any better asking a "senior engineer" representing Codesmith at an official event questions about hiring and management, that the person was NOT QUALIFIED to answer but answered anyways with bull shit answers... and the potential students were impressed and appreciative. It does such harm to those people to keep the charade going.
It catches up to you and that's what we're seeing now. A…
I'm currently recommending Launch School but only for the right people and you should do their free stuff to see if they are the right school.
The other best ones I'm no longer recommending for various reasons. Codesmith I'm suggested to not go to. App Academy, Hack Reactor, I'm more neutral on. Tech Elevator was amazing when they had in person partnerships but those have been dwindling.
These are just my opinions. There isn't a correct answer for everyone though. Happy to talk through based on your own background.
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
Not publicly no, it's ethically wrong. I have been permanently banned from the Codesmith community for comments I made during a live session so I don't have avenues to responsibly report them.
If you have some connections DM me. I need to discuss this stuff under an agreement because it's quite bad and they might have to legally notify all their people about one or more of these issues and I do not want to be involved and would rather not say anything at all honestly.
My personal opinion is that I would not apply to anything at Codesmith with personally identifiable information.
Hey! Thanks for the update.
Do you have more comments about the group of people? One of my concerns is people who used to make a lot of money, like someone was a Medical Doctor, but who left their jobs, would be considered a low income student. Any insights on the backgrounds of other people?
Also do you feel like people truly have no programming experience and are starting at similar places?
So if you graduated from Stanford, the market seems great. If you are considering senior top tier tech companies, the market seems pretty good.
It's not going to improve for bootcamp grads unfortunately until we see what happens with AI.
The market right now is looking for top 50% engineers (illustrative number, not a fact), like good CS grads and experienced engineers who have done pretty good on the job.
AI is going to create a lot of jobs but unclear yet what they will be.
I'm very nervous about bootcamps like BloomTech, Codesmith, and others focusing so much on generative AI skills. These are skills that we see in headlines, but talk to hiring managers at top tech companies and no one knows what AI-skills they will be looking for. These companies have super consistent and careful hiring processes and they will over a couple years operationalize for AI and the skills they look fo…
What credible employment reports are you going off of?
The only recent one I know of is Launch School, which while still has a 75% placement rate it has dropped from 100%. So clearly things are not the same anymore there.
Codesmith has a CIRR for people that graduated 1.5 to 2.5 years ago which is useless. The six month placement rates I'm seeing for 2023 abysmal. Codesmith won't let us know the official numbers until March 2025 and we won't see 2024 numbers until March 2026. So people who graduated 6 months ago in Jan 2024, even though Codesmith knows their 6 months placement rate and could give a great heads up to people about the changing market, they won't say even one hint of it until March 2026, almost two years from now.
That's absolutely garbage and they need to do better if people like you are relying on these reports to judge the market.
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
Someone sent me this: [https://app.codesmith.io/coding-events/documenting-a-system-architecture-with-will-sentance/3595](https://app.codesmith.io/coding-events/documenting-a-system-architecture-with-will-sentance/3595)
Did they discuss all of the fundamental architecture flaws with the Codesmith website and why they chose to make those decisions?
Seriously disappointing.