Yes. the hard part of building projects is building a startup-like project and not just toy projects for fun. Having real users and iterating and deploying something publicly that is used. Even the best bootcamps don't produce projects people use. Like Codesmith's OSP capstone projects, 90% are untouched or dead after the people graduate. The larger projects that have undergone many teams working on them, I struggle to find anyone actually using the project. All the GitHub stars are fake and farmed from the community. I tried using some of the big ones and found security problems and broken experiences and I really don't think these things are used.
So you can see that just making a project that is a useful product, launching it and getting people to try it and then making iterations based on the feedback is already better than anything a $22,500 bootcamp gives you.
The $895 was meant for people that did the new SWE immersive because it's the same as the old + the 4/5 AI lectures now. So the $895 would be for the Saturday discussions I guess? I'm not super sure but I get the vibe they are trying to leave the door open for heavily discounted alumni rate because they originally said loud and clear that Codesmith will give you everything you need to be hired for LIFE and by backtracking on that to extract money from alumni, it's a bad look, so maybe if you watch the 5 free alumni lectures you can ask them to qualify for the $895.
I don't want rub salt in a wound, but an alumni could organize their own thing, like slap a calendar invite on your calendar to all watch a lecture recording every week and then discuss it with each other, and then do a project together.
You'll get 85% of the value for free.
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
Yeah it's absurd to me. They have a feature piece and video interview with a Codesmith student about their recent experience and then the video came out and I went to the person's LinkedIn and noted that the person was the Lead Instructor now for the course he just took.
Like they aren't doing journalism or vetting. They are making videos for whatever people pay them to do and then try to claim they aren't bias in choosing the awards.... well there are zero reviews for this new AI program so I don't understand how they could have any information to make this claim and their info is heavily based by what Codesmith paid them to say... and that's echoed back in these awards.
It's just a pile of garbage.
Launch School Placement Date - Q4 2024 Cohort, ~70% placed within six months - similar to previous cohort. Lower salaries at $100K mediums - indicating role shifts. Very strong results given the market but very small program so hard to extrapolate.
Results [https://www.reddit.com/r/launchschool/comments/1kzrkyv/cohort\_2405\_salary\_outcomes\_6months/](https://www.reddit.com/r/launchschool/comments/1kzrkyv/cohort_2405_salary_outcomes_6months/)
2024-2025 saw major changes to top bootcamps. Codesmith - arguably the top program alongside Launch Schoo - is down about 80% of it's staff and the founder seems to be moving on to writing a book about AI Ethics and doing a new Front End Masters course while the remaining Codesmith students are taught by recent graduate 'lead instructors' with no SWE experience that their website calls 'engineering industry experts' - most recent 6 month placemen…
oh yeah don't get me started on the patterns. I reported suspicious date patterns and also didn't care about that.
Codesmith gave people giftcards and they got like 20 reviews in a month and then nothing for months and months and months, then out of no where 3 reviews on the same day. Like WTF they are clearly asking people to write reviews.
Which on it's own isn't the worst thing in the world, but Course Report doesn't acknowledge that people are gaming the system and defends themselves.
Feedback for anyone reading this - if you get critical feedback from a competent industry leader and the feedback is delivered in a way that makes you defensive - accepted the feedback and give that person feedback on how you feel. By defending a bad product you are going to kill your product.
I don't say no one, but I do say that it's not systematic anymore - every placement feels like a one off case. Launch School Capstone is small enough that historically each person was a one off case and it never relied on patterns.
Larger programs had hiring partners and common places where alumni pass down back channel referrals and cover up the fact that all the people have zero experience and then help the people ramp up. For example Codesmith -> Capital One is this.... people scheming to lie on resumes and get through interviews and then help each other not get fired after starting.
I'm not a Peter Thiel supporter (and not a not-supporter either, just centrist) but Gawker is no more after they slighted him.
I can't speak for others but for me it's not personal in any ways whatsoever. I could pick up the phone and have a conversation with Will Sentance anytime.
This might sound crazy grandiose but I don't need to work for the rest of my life so I do what I do out of a deep belief that humanity will better if each person is contributing (work or otherwise) to humanity doing what they are both passionate about and good at. So people doing jobs that they don't like drive me to figure out how that person can move to a place where both THEY are happier AND they are contributing more to humanity.
If you have a scam product and scam marketing that bothers me a lot less.
When you have a pretty good, mediocre product like Codesmith has that refuses to see how it can be BE…
Other programs are bad too but Codesmith confirmed to me that they paid some guy on Upwork. And that person coincidentally (Codesmith claims that no one currently employed there asked them to) posted garbage about me and tried to get me banned from Reddit.
I asked them to apologize and they declined so any company that behaves like this deserves to be called out in my opinion. I'm sure others do it to but I can prove this about Codesmith and I'm not going to drop it, no.
Launch School is doing ok because its model protects against the market to some degree and the market impact is less severe.
1. You do Core for months so then only people who are perfect fits for Capstone get in
2. The founder is hands on doing most of the work, so there aren't many people to pay. He could personally take lower income for some time to survive. Codesmiths founder uses your tuition money to go to conferences and write books and make lectures for Frontend Masters and students complain they never see him. Fine but you have to pay more people to run the program and when most of those people leave and you are still MIA - math doesn't work out.
3. Launch School's very small, like 20 capstone at a time, 60 a year. Codesmith had like 1000 people in 2023. The founder knows everyone by name and helps them try to get jobs individually.
So yeah Launch School ends up with like a 70…
I believe that when an engineer is working on something and it "just works" without knowing why - some day you will have to understand why. Maybe not right away but some day in the future.
Similarly I believe that about integrity. Integrity doesn't mean being nice or friendly or a good leader or friend. Integrity means acting honestly, transparently, and with good faith towards others.
If you lack integrity and lie to one or more people to get a job, it's going to catch up with you and you will have to pay the price some day.
In Codesmith's case they never taught anything technical of value. All of the teachers and instructors are former students who follow a script and don't have any / much real engineering experience. They lie about the nature of that work. A lead instructor who claims to be a senior engiee= at Codesmith has hardly any commits on GitHub because they are actually a t…
Surprisingly I was actually quite neutral until mid last year. I gave the pros and cons fairly and genuinely was in the middle. Recommended a number of people go there.
They didn't see things that way and paid that dude who went on Reddit and literally straight up defame me with lies... and no more neutrality until they apologize which they refuse to do and thought it was a joke that I asked for that.
It does get screened and you get a "unverified" for that section - and many companies don't care and ignore it.
Just remember that selling your soul has a price and it will catch up to you some day. Maybe it will take 10 years.
Look at how great Codesmith felt taking in $20M a year and feeling like the kind of the world.... changing the industry.... creating the leaders of the future.
All bullshit built on lies and when people figure it out, reputation is gone, money is gone, and you are worse off than when you started.
I've been trying to talk to them privately but it's too hard. Too many lies and I can't trust anyone there. I talked to them in good faith and they did nothing.
I tried to extend the smallest olive brand and they did nothing.
They told me they care about fixing the problems I talk about but I think the only thing they care about is keeping me quiet. No changes except half of the staff left since I stsrted talking to them.
They have a rotten seed there and until the seed is removed nothing will ever change.
I dont think this tone is great but it's worse than that.
First, the stats were wrong because they only included people who responded to reach out and submitted salary information at first. The "adjusted numbers" included all the people who never responded but appeared to have jobs somewhere on LinkedIn and count as placements who "did not respond" boosting the rate to 42%.
But the reason it is worse is because the newest numbers don't make any sense.
They published unofficial 12 months numbers but the 2022 numbers are copy paste from the 6 months report so the drop of 2023 12 month from 2022 six months doesn't look as bad.
On top of that, they had to check everyone's LinkedIn to count them as a placement so they are fully aware that all those grads are exaggerating and lying about their experience.
Finally, I proved they paid someone to post on Reddit - a person who posted bullshit…
During the boom times of 2021-2022 it had like a 95% graduation rate and 90% placement within 6 months.
Now in 2024 they have like a 90% graduation rate and 40% placement within 6 months.
HOWEVER, people list like "X to Present" for these fake listings. The bootcamp has like a 60-70% placement within 12 months now and as people hit like 1 year post bootcamp these fake listings look like 1+ years of work experience and help people start getting jobs.
So the TLDR - no - Codesmith is falling apart and I would recommend running for the hills - they are down to a skeleton crew of staff, half of who are looking for work.
The best bootcamps have closed down or pivoted.
Rithm closed, App Academy closed SWE, General Assembly pivoted to B2B according to their annual report, Bloom Tech closed SWE, Turing shut down, Launch Academy shut down, Code Up shut down, Episcodus shut down. Tech Elevat…
Codesmith is the SWE place where 80%+ of graduates do this by stretching their resumes.
How people get away with it all?
1. Companies not verifying employment
2. The person putting friend's contact info and the friend verifies
3. They use fake pay stuffs or offer letters to verify
4. The bootcamp lies for them for background checks
5. They list group projects as work and have peers from the group project do the background checks
6. The list a bunch of stuff on LinkedIn to get recruiters attention but they don't talk about it to the engineers and they don't include it on the background check.
Both App Academy Open and Codesmith CSX are not good now.
App Academy Open: AA paused their SWE program so it doesn't seem actively maintained. The only good thing is that it's the entire AA curriculum and not just an introduction trying to upsell.
Codesmith CSX and workshops, I have a lot more to say about this.
CSX:
- it's an introduction to JavaScript only and their goal is to upsell you to Codsmith by the end. They don't have enough money to dedicate hundreds of thousands of dollars to building a free platform of unique content that doesn't do.
- their coding editor CSBin isn't even HTTPS and my browser won't let me open it anymore... I don't see how anyone can take this seriously nowadays.
- it also hasn't been updated that much. They could at least run their curriculum through ChatGPT in 5 minutes to improve what they have now. But substance isn't the priority... spend more time…
I wouldn't do a bootcamp no, it's probably a waste of $5 to $10K given you are in college.
If you can't get an internship, try volunteering for a professor/lab at school and if you can't do that, try volunteering for a startup. It's better to be paid $0 for as summer of real work than to pay $10K to do a Udemy-type course with human mentors.
I've brought it up directly to their leaders a couple of times now and I'm not getting a response or acknowledgement on it. I'm not being mean, I'm trying to give them a strategy that recognizes the value they create and focuses the energy on that value.
They have been losing staff members left right and center and hardly have anyone left anymore, and I really feel like if they don't change their tune they will cease to exist soon enough.
But they have been pushing mid level and senior for 10 years now and it might just be the hill they are willing to die on - would rather not exist than focus on entry level placements.