Yeah sorry, I could make it more explicit or clear. Like I had a thread of two anonymous accounts: one got AI-collapsed by Reddit, the other suspended by Reddit, both were making false claims but Reddit PROACTIVELY took action, so clearly some really weird stuff is going on in the sub. There's nothing remotely like this for other programs.
🏛️ Get to know a moderator: Michael Novati
Hi all, I thought it might be a good idea to share more about myself as one of the three moderators on here and one of the most active members. It might be a surprise but I spend way more time writing code and helping Fellows at Formation than on Reddit. Here's my GitHub as evidence 😝 [https://github.com/mnovati](https://github.com/mnovati)
I just wanted to share a little more about who I am and where I come from so you can work with me better in making this subreddit a better place.
There's no advice or lessons in here, it's all biographical, but I'm happy to answer questions in the comments.
# FOUR FUN FACTS
1. Meta created the "Coding Machine" archetype for me when promoting me to Principal Engineer.
2. I've met Taylor Swift. In fact I couldn't convince Mark Zuckerberg to meet her too at the time and played a prank on him by hanging…
Thought experiment.
So if we take it as fact that the Codesmith mods are banning people from their sub that have never interacted there. So far this is just a conjecture from the OP that I haven't seen evidence for, so I talked to OP privately about it and I feel it's likely true, but with the door open for someone to disprove it. For example if the Codesmith mods came to me and said they have never banned someone who hasn't posted something violating their rules in their sub then I might have to take action if it at my discretion that is more credible.
Now let's I really actually hated Codesmith, and wanted to attack them.
Why wouldn't I do the same? Why not just ban you all, delete all your comments. Wipe every positive trace of Codesmith on here. I'm responsive all the time, I could easily act on things super quickly and no one would see anything.
That's what I've personally exper…
I don't really know what to say, you seem down conspiracy theory lane and it's just all not true.
This post wasn't held up for review.
I said very clearly for the record that no accounts have been banned from this sub by me, temporarily or permanently.
What's your deal? Do you have questions thoughts?
As someone pointed out, a major part of the problem is no-one from Codesmith or otherwise never discusses or refutes the things I say with facts, it's all just made up stuff and bullying. A year or two ago people used to, and then I talked to those people and they say what I do and then they disappeared and we keep in touch on LinkedIn every so often.
I meticulous document, screenshot, capture, record, collect anything that I reporting facts on to show my work.
if you want to mudsling and play games you haven't seen the half of what I know.
And this why INTEGRITY is important, becau…
Want to know the best defense to bullshit trolls... INTEGRITY. No matter how much I get poked I play by the rules and I have integrity.
I have one account and I hope anyone making fake accounts to manipulate discussion gets banned for life.
I HAVE NOT BANNED A SINGLE PERSON FROM THIS SUBREDDIT.
If you can't fathom someone who is as responsive and productive as me then put yourself in a better network of people before this kind of bullshit.
Codesmith has consistently raised prices every year, but I agree that in my opinion, that raising them this year with tanking outcomes is a bit arrogant, but I don't know their marketing strategy.
They just lowered the prices of JSB and CSPrep SIGNIFICANTLY like 75% off for CSPrep, so maybe they changing their view.
Launch School lays out their outcomes here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLKHZYX8D78](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLKHZYX8D78)
Unsurprisingly if you are transparent there isn't any drama. When your outcomes are tanking, your alumni believe in you like a religion, and you don't acknowledge it publicly then you get drama.
Rithm School sadly is really small right now, running a small cohort every few months, so I still think it's a great place if you want high touch, high access learning. But their outcomes aren't that meaningful right now due to size.
Again, I'm not collapsing any comments, and I've turned on "crowd control" on THREE POSTS EVER for LEGITIMATE REASONS.
Reddit has added more AI capabilities recently that more aggressively diminish the posts of people suspected of being bad actors.
Given how many new/low history/anonymous accounts come at me on here, I'm not surprised whatsoever that they get flagged as people "likely trying to break the rules". Reddit knows who everyone is based on their fingerprints and IDs. There are five so accounts that have been suspended from Reddit with similar posting patterns so when those people/person come back with new accounts... Reddit knows.
If it means anything, I was in a similar talk in the past and made comments about other people too, because they were placed like a year ago and I didn't think that was "recent".
They ignored that comment and added dates to the newer version of the slides.
People who worked there talk to me and I think it's very passive aggressive to not ONCE contact me, ONCE (other than Eric Kirsten) and yet to post blog posts and videos, and wording to respond to the things I'm saying.
I'm more than happy to talk to people about this non-defensively and openly, and this conversation is great to have madhouse!
This is correct, it's now more common for SENIOR engineers to join, competing and trying to get a leg up in the market. There are indeed a very small handful of edge case people without much experience who have joined in the past year (literally a handful - under 5) and each case was after many conversations and trying to convince them of other options. Just like there are a handful of engineers with experience who go to Codesmith. But that overlap isn't competition, it's an edge case.
Both the statements are wrong haha:
1. We're not a competitor. We would be amazing partners in another world where Codesmith acknowledged us not as a competitor haha.
2. I don't spend much time on Reddit no, I know it looks that way, but it's just the way I am, I am always on and one of the most responsive people - if not the most responsive - out of anyone I've ever worked with. It's not fair for people to tell me who I am and what I do when they see 1/50th of what I do and make up their own narrative portraying it as 1/4 of what I do.
I have no idea why the person left and I didn't imply anything, but it was just a factual statement that the person isn't there anymore.
Was it necessary? Probably not yeah. But as with all my other comments it was just a statement and wasn't bad intentioned and didn't warrant a public humiliation.
I told one person about it who called it yelling, another called it not yelling but a stern tone.
A current Codesmith student say this session and messaged me to apologize because they thought it was yelling and they were disturbed by it and felt bad for me.
The video was since removed so I don't think I can share anything from it, have to look up the rules and laws.
I don't want to fan any flames. Regardless of what he said in the video there are clearly some frustrations outside the context of the actual speech and sharing it would require full interpretation. I'm a rule follower and they have the right to remove me from their communities if they want for whatever reason and I have to respect that ban.
My message goes both ways and I have asked corporate Reddit to look into both subs to try to advise on the situation. It's really bad for the Reddit ecosystem and both sides are claiming about violating the rules, so hopefully corporate Reddit can sort this by looking at who all the people are and seeing if there are disingenuous actors on either side they can remove or if there is anything else they can do to help increase the integrity of discussion.
I attended an event recently and this is what I said in the chat throughout the entire event.
1. Early in Will was talking about one of my long time friends as the "founder" of React and "co-founder of Vercel". Maybe I misheard but I said in the chat that I know that person well and he doesn't call himself the founder of React and co-founder of Vercel.
Will responded to that with 'Tom said gest things about you, that you were one of the best engineers ever at Facebook'
2. Will suggested someone talk to a specific alumni and I said how awesome that alumni is.
3. Will mentioned the B1M YouTube channel and I said how awesome that channel is.
Then suddenly I got an email saying I was permanently banned from Codesmith's subreddit.
4. I commented that I was just banned from their subreddit and won't be able to participate in the AMA after. Their was no response.
5. Shortly after Will w…
I didn't ask for formal comment no. I can't remember but I think it was either a codesmith account on Reddit, a comment on LinkedIn thread, or that I commented on or it was in a live stream over the past few months as they have been showing slides with Alex Zai giant face teasing the upcoming AI/ML.
It wasn't for official comment no and I wouldn't say that I asked formally enough or clearly enough to expect them to reply though.
I am banned from Codesmith's community, Slack, events, entirely so I have limited avenues as I intend on fully respecting their ban. Although they started sending me emails inviting me to events so I'm not sure anymore haha. The whole operation just has so many issue in executing the details you know and I'm always confused if they are intentionally sharing so much data (which common sense says they shouldn't) but then they acknowledge the problems.
Rithm has max 20 people per cohort and a dedicated super experienced teacher. It's more like having someone with more experience than Will Sentance (both teaching and in industry) being the primary instructor for your cohort.
The content itself is a little different and it's a little longer I think.
It's also 9am to 6pm every day instead of 9am to 8pm.
A bootcamp choice is very personal to your circumstances. If you don't really need to learn anything and are going for networking and support, education doesn't matter. If you want to learn how to program, it matters more.
We had someone join us who wanted to do Formation with no experience. I told them to go to Codesmith and come to Formation in a year or two. Instead they got a role at a startup in another country and came to Formation after 6 months. Person just got a job at Google in a SWE adjacent programming role.
I don't think bootcamps work right now and would love to see something like the above. Training focused apprenticeships for people with zero programming training that are paid for via tax credits to big companies that pay for the person and more. The bootcamps could be more like level up tools to go from that to full time role. The anecdote above was a one off and not reproducible and a special person who is extremely driven with significant tech industry experience.
People getting jobs tend to rely on some creative representation of past work anyways and giving those people real training…
Oh wow that's unfortunate and ouch... like kicking the bootcamp industry while it's down :(
I feel so bad being real about the industry right now, I don't want to be this way, but people looking to spend $20K on a bootcamp need to know how it is before making that choice.
I feel even worse when alumni and staff from Codesmith go after me for telling the truth about this stuff. Coordinated downvoting my comments because they think they are bad intentioned :(
Yeah you know I respect your path too and good luck!
I think things have really changed with the alumni graduating now and late 2023 that talk to me.
I think the layoffs in Q3/Q4 really hit a lot of people hard. Some loyal instructors were let go, a bunch of career support people left too, so there apparently are fewer people to talk to, instructors have an eye on backup plans.
I know I annoy them by expressing my views on all this so openly because I get the vibe Codesmith does NOT want to talk about this stuff.
Our debates 2 years ago are tame compared to the stuff I'm getting now 😞
Congrats on your trajectory! Would love to hear more about how you got the first job. I work with some people self taught and we found that they often have equal or better outcomes than bootcamp grads (NOT ENOUGH DATA TO MAKE A CONCLUSION ON THIS) and it's interesting to me.
I couple of people have told me about weird interactions with Will that resulted in them staying clear of Codesmith, like he had note card of facts about people that he paused and looked up in front of them when he met them?
But I'm an extremely socially anxious person and sometimes a bit awkward and it might just be his personality or sense of humor too.
I would say in general though the second largest anecdotal complaint I get is social pressure to participate is very off-putting if it's not for you. The examples reported to me are:
1. Trying really hard to make people turn cameras on. But passive aggressively…
It quite frankly is, I posted about this here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/1dpyh7t/warning\_codesmith\_subreddit\_is\_mostly\_propaganda/](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/1dpyh7t/warning_codesmith_subreddit_is_mostly_propaganda/)
OP was banned from their sub today because of their post HERE.
Common: no, most engineers went to a top CS school
They then looked at the best engineers at Meta, looked at the schools they went to, and then recruited from those schools.
BUT, a number of "best of the best" engineers either didn't have a CS degree or went to a not well known school at all.
The theory was the best of the best will find Meta or Meta will find them through acquisitions or because they like hacked into Meta and were offered a job.
The best way to get in right now without a top CS degree is to get another job for 2 years and then apply for the Rotational Engineer program. At Formation, we've sent maybe 10+ people through there and it's super super ideal for non traditional grads with 2+ YOE at non-top tier companies.
I messaged him after Codesmith declined to comment on if Alex had Zoox's approval to do the curriculum yeah so I put even more work into it. But time-wise very little time.
Yeah doesn't have a problem being connected to his DSML work, he just doesn't want it to be implied that he is currently working on it or recently worked on it as it's fireable and worse at Zoox to create IP relevant to your job without permission.
I sent him all of the links that made it seem like he was more recently involved and Codesmith has since modified those, including the blog you linked to, that was modified as a result of this.
The title of that blog post changed from containing Alex Zai's name, and you can see the remnant in the url.
Jared's name was not mentioned nearly that much in marketing materials it was all Alex Zai and a little James and Jared had significant involvement in DSML.
But the recen…
I have no doubt that's the vision. But they've published stats and only a tiny number of people at Codesmith didn't have a degree (single digit percentage?) and the majority cummulatively went to top public schools or presitigous private schools.
So it's more like a place for Ivy League people who changed their mind and want to quickly go into SWE than Ivy League for everyone.
I could talk for hours about this topic, it's super complicated but if that's the vision, I'm sure he speaks about it and it sounds awe inspiring but it's incredibly impractical and I could rip it apart piece by piece.
The first step to understanding all this is what unpacking what "gatekeeping" means.
It's not a group of privileged people intentionally trying to protect their jobs and culture and exclude outsiders.
Second is to unpack these top 1% jobs. The are paid so highly because it's a free market. If e…
I mean laws and laws and everything in the USA requires interpretation.
But I don't think anyone can possibly say that an institution has integrity if it's paying people to write reviews. And maybe that's why the bootcamp industry is so messed up.
Stanford isn't paying people to write reviews.
If you want to do this a better way you create a prize with Course Report (anonymously) where a random person who submits any review to any school will be chosen for some kind of prize.
This is an incentive that isn't biased to one school and is an effort by the Platform to increase content on it even if one school secretly funded this because they think they will benefit from some of those new reviews.
Well Codesmith is absurdly selective and creates a community of tight knit people that support each other.
Sounds exactly what he did - simulate the Ivy League gatekeeping model where he is now the gatekeeper and selects the most brilliant people from non-tech backgrounds and gets them into tech.
Nothing wrong with that, it's a good idea that has gotten some exceptional people (I've worked with some of them later on!) into tech much faster and easier than traditional paths.
I'm not a lawyer either and I chatgpt'd to try to analys it in forming my opinion. I think my opinion is reasonable but open for debate and I still don't agree with your interpretation either haha.
But I concede it's not explicitly stated "you cannot be paid directly or indirectly" for reviews.
Zooming out, let's say Course Report says this is totally fine (I reported it to them already). I'm going to post about it, and I don't think it will look good. Someone has to take responsibility for manipulating online reviews whether everyone else does it or not.
I know at my company we have never once offered anyone anything to write a review. We used to indirectly say long ago 'Reviews are important for people deciding on their options, consider writing one on quora' but I felt that was even not good so we removed it. We don't do it, and I'm offended others and everyone can be wrong even if…
The list of recent Codesmith placements is much more of 'intern', 'it analyst', 'program manager', 'technical writer', 'apprentice'. There are still SWE jobs, but people who had committed to a bootcamp a year ago are really struggling and taking whatever jobs they can get. And this is on top of the fact that placement rates are down significantly
The story needs to be told because celebrating the 15% of success cases only is misleading.
I actually think your questions are fine and good to stimulate discussion. But you can't win in this sub. People are suspicious about scams they should be questioning everyone, it's just not a fun place right now now :(
I agree it's not explicitly stated literally as not allowed, but these are two places imo. This is good discussion and I appreciate being asked - I should have shared this first so people can judge from first hand source.
1. "Write a Review" page: https://www.coursereport.com/write-a-review.
"I certify this review is based on my own experience and is my genuine opinion of this school, and that I have no personal or business relationship with this establishment. "
- Being paid to write a review is a relationship IMO
2. TOS: [https://www.coursereport.com/terms-of-service](https://www.coursereport.com/terms-of-service)
"You agree that you will not upload, post, transmit, distribute or otherwise publish through the Site or any service or feature made available on or through the Site, any materials which \[...\] constitute or contain false or misleading indications of origin, endorsemen…
Someone who worked there said they have people good at "finding people" specifying more details, and they try to track you down and correct.
Someone wrote a fairly negative view on here "anonymously", they found the person and offered them a high paying contract job at Codesmith, which the person accepted. This was shared with me by the person themselves and not second hand information. I'm sure the job was actually good intentioned to help someone struggling, but the person perceived it as being paid off.
They're definitely some successful alumni who graduated in 2023 the number of people getting really good jobs from my personal view smaller than in the past but it's not zero.
The people who are getting placed, though are not super keen on broadcasting into the world because they know that some other best friends and people who they were in the trenches with during the immersive didn't get placed and I think that's actually holding them back from talking. I also know some people who wouldn't recommend Codesmith at this time who got pretty good jobs eventually, but wow, it was a rough journey. Finally, I know people who are really exaggerating their resumes and they just don't even care or feel bad about it anymore because they have absolutely nothing to lose and they would just leave the industry entirely otherwise.
... I guess shit show of the market pretty much summarizes all this…
Codesmith paying for reviews was something I knew about and documented but no one has shared with me the exact text.
You might be doxxing yourself with that date and maybe should edit it to XX because they told different people different dates to stagger the reviews and they only sent this to people placed.
Thank you for publicly sharing because this was something people talked about in confidence and I could share yet.
I spent too much time trying to people but if others want to DM about this, I'll do a top level post sometime when I catch up a bit over the weekend.
I have careful documentation of all of this too and it's desperate. Codesmith is not doing well, not filling their cohorts even though they have reduced them significantly.
They lowered the price of JSB and CSPrep to get more people into them even though JSB Flex videos are entirely free anyways in their website (unless this is an engineering mistake, there are so many odd engineering choices and user information being shared out from their website all over... I'm operating the assumption that this is all intentional because it's so widespread and pervasive it would be incompetent otherwise)
Before attacking me, look into the mirror Codesmith. If Hack Reactor was setup this way would you think they are the best of the best and maybe look within and fix things before coming after me.
Alumni: if you hate me at least try to understand what I'm saying and think about it s bit.
I 100% agree people should respectfully question me and push me. I'm one of the most responsive people on Reddit and I'm here to talk reasonably.
My company works with people later on in their careers and the more people that go to bootcamps, the more people that come to us. So I feel like I have major bias to promote bootcamps and not take them down.
Now others seem to feel I'm here to take down bootcamps so my company is the only option left.
I strongly disagree with that but people can share their opinions, all I ask is that people can see all sides fairly and judge for themselves and that people present evidence for their beliefs for why they feel that way.
Prove that my involvement in the sub has boosted my business. Prove that people are leaving Codesmith or other bootcamps in droves to come to my business. They aren't so there is no proof! Just people trolling.
Yeah, I mean they are increasing AI based stuff and mods don't have that much control. They collapsed someone's comment about me because she was flagged as a highly suspicious account likely trying to break the rules. I don't know how they determined that whatsoever and cannot do anything about her comment.
10% fight publicly for it, work there, keep in the community, keep doing talks and calls, etc... and "stay in the family"
Many more are positive or neutral-positive about Codesmith, thought it was worth it because of their outcome but not the content or the advice and they move on after settling into their careers.
I'm also bias there because the people that move on come to be too lol. The largest groups of people coming to me on a weekly basis are current students or recent alumni venting about something, and then older alumni who trust me because they feel like my analysis is spot on and want my advice about the industry.
I think it's about 10% of alumni and it's because they credit Codesmith with changing their lives. And I don't argue it didn't. Something can change your live and not be perfect.
The people that just can't acknowledge that are going to have a lot of problems later on in their careers, lots of struggles with progression. Codesmith is far too early to see that yet.
With $130K salaries come layoffs at the drop of a hat, and other negative things that will need to be confronted.
I've worked with a lot of alumni that love Codesmith. Both officially and unofficially and some more directly than others. I have no idea if they like me as person but I think they understand better where I'm coming from once actually getting to know me.
It's really sad that the staff are so locked in. I was talking to Eric Kirsten over email a bit but that died off when Will yelled at me for 3 minutes straight in a public talk and banished me from the community forever.
I didn't auto hide anything and I didn't touch any settings for this post or any comments or any users.
Reddit identifies and hides accounts it thinks are sketchy and maybe that's why the comment was collapsed. Our subreddit at the top level has typical Reddit filters on and they have been improving their algorithms over the past few months.
Hi, unlike in your sub, I'm not going to ban you and delete this for "lies" because I want to try to get more on the same page. Feel free to DM me if you want to talk more because this comment is making me really sad the way you are characterizing what I'm saying and we're on very different pages.
1. I'm sorry Andrea feels that way. I honestly have no idea who she is, other than that she's a moderator of the sub and I apologize if she felt attacked by that statement.
I do stand by the statement, that it was shared as the official rules and the entire body is written as "we". I have documented the post for myt archived and think that a reasonable person would interpret this the way I did. If she didn't mean to post on behalf of Codesmith, she can edit the post to clarify that as well. I'll also edit my copy to remove references to that post to help reset that.
2. A number of people who…
This is a totally fair comment so it wouldn't deleted and you shouldn't feel that way. I think it's an excellent comment with a tone open for discussion, I wish more of them were like this!
1. Codesmith's co-founder Alex Zai, told me to clear the record that he is not currently involved in the AI curriculum and hasn't been since DSML shutdown, and specifically that Zoox is not involved in any way in the curriculum either nor has he worked on since working at Zoox.
He told me that he asked Codesmith to not represent that he is working on this currciulum.
I don't have an analogy for you but maybe it's like Juliard saying they have a brand new course created by Adam Driver, when Adam Driver created some materials years ago when he was TA'ing and those materials were used inside of this new course.
I think that's wrong.
2. My data is showing about 45% of people in H1 2023 getting jobs…
These are all good questions I'm more than happy to answer.
First, why do we have the average compensation increase and not the average.
we're working with people coming from all kinds of backgrounds and situations and we think the best way to capture their outcome is to show the change relative to where they started.
otherwise we would have to try to bucket people into a bunch of very granular buckets of similar type people and then show some average about how they did in absolute terms. We could try to do that but the buckets change constantly and the people we are working with now are very experienced. the people we worked with a year ago had maybe 1 to 2 years of experience on average and now the people have 5 to 10 years of experience on average. So because these buckets are moving and changing all the time, we don't feel that showing those. give you a pulse for how things are d…
Maybe I'm taking it too literally, but in the exact same font size and UI formatting we have the average outcome right beside the number you're talking about. So to me not acknowledging that fact and stating that
>"I said it was deceptive marketing to show one huge salary number on your companys homepage instead of average results"
Now there could be misunderstandings, or we're not on the same page, but I've said this a number of times and you've said the same thing a number of times - which is why that starts to become harassment.
Do you have more questions about these numbers we can sort out if it's a misunderstanding and not harassment?
This sub doesn't have explicitly clear rules so there is subjectivity in their interpretation. I often message the mod thread to discuss things I'm not sure about.
DMs are not required no, I'm suggesting it as a tool when there is conflict becuase it can help for both sides to see where each other is coming from.
I said that I repeatedly clarified things about my company that you did not acknowledge and kept saying the same things, which to me is analogous if someone says "stop doing X, it's bothering me" and you ignore them and keep doing it.
I sent those posts directly to the other mods and told them to examine them because I'm biased. They have yet to approve them...
I've received a ton of screenshots and texts over the years and I still don't have a good picture. I think it's a combination of the folllowing:
1. Primarily - alumni are the product Codesmith (i.e. the community IS the product, not the education) makes and the ones most bought in where the product works they protect Codesmith fervently.
2. Leaders share around some of my post and ask people or imply they should 'help out the community'. Or calling me a 'jealous hater', or that 'when you are the best people always want to take you down', stuff like that.
"I'd rather that then spend hours discussing some beef a keyboard warrior has with some random company"
I'm genuinely not here for hours, this is like priority 10 on my list
I felt personally attacked when you said that.
Maybe you can DM me and we can talk about this and you can see where I'm coming from? You're making a false connection that I have this been to promoted my company. It's just not true. I can see how you might see that if you just look up backgrounds, but without talking to me about it, it's not helping move things forward to the better community you are asking for.
Again, if you were in the Codesmith subreddit you would get banned and deleted, and all you would see are positive comments supporting me.
If you ignore me and don't discuss, you will be banned.
Do you think that world would be better, if all the negative comments (whether they support me or not) are deleted and the authors re banned?
The history is that I was made a mod because it was becoming a cease pool of spam and negativity and I was tasked with improving it.
1. If you weren't here before then please explain how it got that way before I was a mod?
2. In the spirit of transparency, what's your agenda for being here if you 20 years of industry experience?
The fact that you calling this out without even talking to me has the same pattern as the Codesmith people