Timeline

Apparently someone said there are no support engineers available for March for resume and mock interviews? It's sad if Codesmith worked for you back in the day but it's imploding right now they don't deserve people's money right now. I can't believe one of their leaders texted an alumni who was considering Formation and told them 'it's a waste of money and Codesmith will give them all they need for life' Sure.... 'all they need'.... we have hundreds of mock interview slots available for the next week.

Does doing your research include looking at reports and asking critical questions and then interpreting answers? Question: the ghosting rate for placements went from 15% to 65% from 2022 grads to 2023 in CA reports, what happened there? Why are alumni not responsive and is there a problem continuing in 2024? The problem, whether you think I have biases or not, is that I **do my research** and I show it to people. When things are good, I publish good. There has been nothing good in the past 2 years, no silver lining, nothing. There have been anecdotal one off success cases. Codesmith added 5 lectures of AI to their curriculum that are already dated and worse than the free stuff from Andrej Karpathy on Youtube... and they intentionally chose to go all in on an AI curriculum that they knew was changing daily and they didn't have any unique expertise in teaching. Like I wish I had more…

You would think it's that obvious but Codesmith explicitly tells people the opposite. They say that you are a mid/senior because Codesmith nurtures your capacity to be a mid/senior engineer and that gatekeepers in the industry are unfairly preventing you from getting the change you deserve, so their job is to make you realize your ARE a mid/senior and build your confidence believing that so you demonstrate that in interviews This is what they have directly said almost word for word numerous times. They have a chart of your "perceived capacity" vs "actual capacity" and they the problem is that people ARE mid/senior and just don't perceive themselves to be. Comes across like an MLM pitch... you are "triple diamond status" you just don't know it yet. Give us $20,000 and work really hard and you'll see that soon enough!

Do you know for sure that he intentionally copied Hack Reactor? As in his strategy was "I'm going to copy Hack Reactor's material and teach it better" or was it "I'm going to start a school, all bootcamps are the same, I'm just going to follow the curriculum Hack Reactor did because it doesn't matter" Both are wrong, but one is criminal and one is a civil lol.

I've seen two groups of people 1. People who want to be "honest" (their words) and none of the career support engineers are helping them do that and they all push the "Codesmith style resume" templates and check lists that indirectly guide you to exaggerating your experience (which Codesmith says is unintentional) 2. People who genuinely think they are mid-level and senior - generally ambitious and intense people - successful in other careers - well connected - ivy league background - and they really think they have the grit and smarts to make it, but can't seem to pass the interviews. These people are definitely heading places but you just can rush things. In 2021 these people were getting jobs and doing okay, but in this market they are competing with their clones who also have CS degrees and actual SWE experience and they just can't cut it. A lot of people in the second bucket unde…

I don't think I could disagree more. I work on an interview prep platform, which is unrelated to boot camps, but we've shipped hundreds of changes in the past year. we're going to start announcing a bunch of changes publicly because we want people to see just how insanely hard. we are trying to help people navigate the market, read how we continuously challenge our most basic assumptions and redo things and rethink things to match what's needed. week to week and once a month. and yes, it's absolutely a rough market and a lot of people are having a hard time but if people are paying a lot of money then it's your job as a company to really give it your all. so like I said, if the CEO is more interested in spending more so his time writing a book right now about AI ethics, that is nothing to do with software engineering placements. then I don't think that they deserve your money.

But why is it taking longer just because supply is low. I reiterate, If there's nothing that codesmith can do about this because of the market, then they shouldn't exist right now So I'm trying to open the door for them to be able to do something within their control to produce the placement numbers that could justify paying $22,000 for. If they've made all the changes they can and they don't think there's anything else then they're done right? Their CEO is off writing a book about ai and inequality and doesn't seem interested to be spending 12 hours a day on the ground with every single alumni helping them in whatever way they can. So maybe that's a sign that they've tried everything they can and these are the best the results are going to be and if that's the case, they're not good enough to justify their existence right now or at least their cost.

A lot of people say that but what do you think that means? Like does it mean that people need to continuously apply and they finally get lucky at month 12? Or do they need to do more supplemental work and then job hunt when they have more experience? Are they waiting for a local maximum in hiring to get into a job? Are people fishing interviews from competitiveness? And whatever the factor is, why isn't Codesmitb addressing that factor to strengthen grads in the areas slowing them down? Codesmith's CEO loud and clear said that Codesmith style applications have a 20% response rate so why the heck would it take so long.... someone could spend an ENTIRE DAY doing a Codesmith style application and get a response a week. They don't seem to understand the market or how to navigate it and keep telling people that the same old same old works, gaslighting alumni, not making enough changes,…

The thing Codesmith leaders won't accept is that even if they have good intentions and even if they built a great community, they can't beat the market and the market says they shouldn't exist anymore. Instead they have raised prices to $22,500. I bet you went it was $18,000 and 80% got jobs making $125K in six months. Now it's $22,500 and 40% of people in that time frame get jobs making $110K. Finally, their CIRR numbers have always showed relatively low 90 day placement and very solid 180 day placement, so people weren't getting jobs in a month that often.

What I'm observing is around half of the placements I see... which is not many anymore, take over a year to get packed and their LinkedIn has them 'working at' their 3 week group project (listed as a company) for the entire time... often offer a year. This looks to the untrained eye like the person has a year of experience and the longer someone is job hunting the more experience this item shows. So I think it's indeed taking people longer because they need to have a year or more experience to even be taken seriously on the market. But all that said, their ghosting rate of alumni skyrocketed and that indicates that alumni are not engaged and disappearing after six months so even if they are getting jobs and it's taking longer, they are figuring it out on their own.

I've been calling this out loud and clear and pushing them very hard for being deceptive and manipulative. Their response: hire people on Upwork to manipulate Reddit and try to dismiss my posts and hire new people to push the brand with a refreshed story. I'm appalled at their responses to my critical scrutiny. Their 2023 California numbers showed that 2/3 of "placements" ghosted and were verified by LinkedIn - compare to just 15% the year before - and when I asked them if their contractor could have mistaken misrepresented group projects on LinkedIn at work experience.... no response. Instead they pulled the report and replaced it with an unofficial one using 12 month placement windows instead of 6 months and published these random stats about 102 offers accepted in the past 6 months. 102 offers accepted is a massive decline in offers per day from their previous numbers, $110K is a…

There are a bunch of bootcamps that have pivoted to AI and started to abandon/pause/not improve their SWE support like App Academy, BloomTech, Codesmith, and there are new AI-only bootcamps popping up. The problem is that no one is an expert in AI tools yet and they change literally week to week. First it's Devin, then Cursor, now it's Windsurfer. It's co-pilots, its about data protection, it was about giant context windows and now it's about reasoning models, like. I'm going to post top level in a sec about this.

I agree that the world is changing and SWE bootcamps haven't adapted, but at the same time the SWE market isn't tiny and it has trends and well the world is changing, there are tons of SWE jobs still and they are going to top CS students. I'm using that to judge specific bootcamps marketing and claims that say otherwise. Stanford CS is like 200K plus 4 years plus effort to even get in the first place. So there's an argument that a boot camp could accelerate something in a shorter period of time, but it is not getting you to the same destination. therefore, my view on this is that bootcamps are competing for the wrong SWE jobs. It's irrelevant that the market changed, all that did was expose the above fundamental facts. When I see bootcamps like Codesmith just yesterday advertising incredible 2024 outcomes (like they did throughout 2023 and 2024) they are absolutely delusional abo…

Yeah I've actually seen some Codesmith grads start an LLC for their project. Not sure if the IP paperwork is on the up and up there, but running an LLC teaches you something! haha. Before I did Formation, we ran a company called Buildschool that WAS a free bootcamp, where senior engineers did paid contracting projects and the students learned by shadowing those projects and some became paid contractors on them later on was a really good model and a lot of those people placed and have great jobs. The problem is the projects don't scale. Each one is different and unique. But like I keep saying, if you stay smaller and hands on focused on placement, it could work.

Yeah for sure, I've also seen probably every permutation of representation under the sun haha. Ultimately people are responsible for their individual choice. If they over-represent and perform poorly, then it makes companies never want to hire bootcamp grads again (which is one thing that has happened a number of times). If they over-represent and do well, do the ends justify the means? A lot of this is blurry for sure. The thing I have a major problem with at Codesmith is the majority of people have the exact same looking experience on their resumes, and grads have told me it's the only way the career support engineers advise doing it (as an explanation as to why -as Codesmith denies telling people to do this) - and then their 'sister company' OSLabs signs letters of reference for background checks backing whatever people tell them they did. Codesmith's CEO has stated explicitly that…

Yeah I'm really curious what's working for entry level jobs. I have a very good handle through Formation on FAANG-mid-level and FAANG-senior. As you know, I keep a close eye on Codesmith as the largest 'top 3' bootcamp, and placements are still terrible there and half the people placed have over a year of "work experience" on their LinkedIn which is their 3 week long project. I had some AI analyze that and it didn't do a good job to publish, but it was ridiculous to see maybe half the placements relying on framing a 3-4 week project as 12+ months of experiences only because they put "X - Present" on their LinkedIn and have been job hunting for 12+ months.... A bunch of the people also worked at Codesmith as a teaching assistant and they delay their clock by the time they worked there. So someone who graduated 2 years ago, was a part time assistant for 6 months, has 1.5 years at their gr…

My 2 cents is relative outcomes are important and as long as a bootcamp is consistent in it's measurement and explains the trends then we're good. It's not good if see something like Codesmith where they change the goal posts (e.g. 12 month placements instead of 6 months - conveniently changing in a terrible market when their placement rate tanked) and trying to post metrics and numbers that look good, while insulting you by calling it rigorous transparency - that's scam behavior. I expect Turing to continue to publish the numbers they have been and explaining the trends proactively. I don't think Turing's recent struggles have been hidden or misleading anyone. I would push on what 'market turning around a little bit in 2025' means. I'm not seeing anything turn around for entry level roles and there are two possibilities: 1. The partnerships they are making are helping some people…

Wow that's a lot of hustle to try to find paths for grads and I think it's really the only way for bootcamps to survive right now.... by dedicating 150% of your time to trying to find any nook and cranny of advantage for your grads in a market so bad that each partnership puts only a small debt into the problem and you find something deep inside to keep on going. We've seen a similar level of trying creative angles at Launch School (e.g. open source mentorships on Firefox and such). Others give up and try to pivot to AI, like App Academy completely stopped its SWE program and only does AI - same with BloomTech. Launch Academy paused entirely. Some of the larger ones like General Assembly and Galvanize are somehow keeping the lights on and I would like to know more about them. I'm very nervous about Codesmith, which was arguably the top bootcamp based on outcomes until 2023, and which…