Timeline

Oh ok yeah for sure, people can also get temporary jobs too, I'm just seeing right now people who don't go all in on SWE for the entire job search time having a harder time - it's such a difficult job search that people are just going back to their old jobs. Talking Codesmith again since I know them so well, they had a huge spike in placements that 'ghosted' and their placement was verified by their LinkedIn instead of officially. This is a sign of people giving up and going back to their old job or a tangential old job and giving up and not reporting it back as a placement because it's not a full blown SWE job.

Hopeless but not impossible yeah. So look at Codesmith's stats since we're talking about them and they release numbers. 2021 grads: about 90% of grads placed within 6 months 2022 grads: about 80% of grads placed within 6 months 2023 grads: about 40% of grads placed within 6 months (and very notable that there was a huge double digit percentage increase in people who ghosted Codesmith and got counted as a placement because of LinkedIn 2024 grads: no data yet, but based on Codesmith's little bits of data there have been about 250 offers in h2 2024 -> h1 2025, which covers some 2022 grads, 2023 grads, 2024 grads, and then 2024 grads. Now enrollment has declined because they cutback from 4+1 to 1+1 cohorts in Feb 2024 so it's hard to tell what the placement rates are but they definitely aren't good. Codesmith also should have plenty of information about 2024 grads now that i's 6 mon…

I agree with this point as of June 2025. We (speaking for Formation now) use a ton of AI for helping people practice and off the shelf ChatGPT is not perfect for learning right now. We have a lot of unique product applications of AI specifically tuned for helping people have effective practice and feedback and fortunately there's enough judgement and taste and nuance in that that it justifies our existing right now haha.

The leaders that have left are the ones that stopped believing or were laid off. I wouldn't be surprised if Annie also left and moved on. I spoke to Alina and she's a much more reasonable person and open to criticism, but she's in a very tough place with Codesmith imploding and trying to pivot to AI - which many programs have struggled with. Alina: if Will, Annie and Eric all left the company I would definitely be open to talking, but with them there there is too much baggage of low standards and lack of diligence.

I haven't made a penny of salary for the past 8 years and i'm not selling anything. I'm pointing out how poorly positioned Codesmith's AI program is and how they need to seriously watch out for growing it through milking alumni - who are paying for something that they were promised for free for life. I've spoken to a number of companies on the B2B side floated different ideas around. The answer - we want our fleet of 100 ML engineers to teach this internally. Codesmith's AI program is maintained and lead by someone with I think about 2-3 years of industry experience, ZERO prior to Codesmith, has not done AI professionally. AND IS DOING IT PART TIME WHILE HE WORKS AT MICROSOFT. There's no way in heck this program can be good. No way. I'm telling you I will work 16 hours a day to build a much better AI program applying my experience as the number one code committer at Meta and showing…

I didn't say anything about you. I was responding to that person about the typical grad behavior for why many Codesmith grads defend this behavior. I had a rant that I deleted because it was not coherent. But time will tell and the truth is catching up with them. Most people have already figured it out and apparently many remaining staff are one foot out the door. Maybe the CEO steps down and Alina takes over and maybe brings in some funding to buy out the company for cheap and they try to build something new and sell it off for a profit later on in a consolidation of remaining bootcamp brands? Kind of like what happened at App Academy. The founder finally left, the new CEO replaced everything with he own AI platform. They stopped doing SWE and kind of floating around as a completely different version of the program before. Codesmith will probably follow that path and they really sh…

A good question is to ask why I'm like this. Seek first to understand, then be understood is what Codesmith told their staff, and they should action it. I offered to help Codesmith and some ideas to work with them. Their leaders didn't want to. Alina confirmed to me that Codesmith paid some guy to post on Reddit and I gave her evidence that the same guy lied and tried to get me banned and that the mysterious missing founder of the Codesmith subreddit was involved with this scheme. I offered to apologize publicly for any individual person who felt attacked by my commentary if they publicly apologizing for making shit up about me and sending it out to their community. They declined to apologize. Then I open up LinkedIn and see all kinds of fake made up stories that seem to rewrite history and promote Codesmith. I hear about more and more layoffs even as of a month ago. I hear about…

A number of alumni are brainwashed and don't even realize they are lying. And then they get upset or defensive when you call them out because Codesmith "changed their life". A number of these people come around eventually and it's one of the reasons there is zero Codesmith activity anymore on here. After people get out of the bubble they see the truth and they don't go back and Codesmith alumni network is also dying.

I commented on a similar comment but the person deleted their comment so here is my thoughts: Yeah they do and I do not agree with it and would debate him on it BUT he is transparent about it, and quite blunt. He says stuff up to fake it and that you will be exposed like 9 out of 10 times and it just has to work once. I really don't agree but I respect that he's clear on it. Codesmith has a giant facade that pretends to teach people and brainwashes them to think that it was Codesmith that did it. Look the other way and blame students for doing it. If Codesmith told people hey the job market is not fair so you have to exaggerate your experience to get through. You deserve the job and you pass the interviews so this is a means to end.

Yeah they do and I do not agree with it and would debate him on it BUT he is transparent about it, and quite blunt. He says stuff up to fake it and that you will be exposed like 9 out of 10 times and it just has to work once. I really don't agree but I respect that he's clear on it. Codesmith has a giant facade that pretends to teach people and brainwashes them to think that it was Codesmith that did it. Look the other way and blame students for doing it. If Codesmith told people hey the job market is not fair so you have to exaggerate your experience to get through. You deserve the job and you pass the interviews so this is a means to end.

Please keep demonstrating more incompetent use of AI and defending it... it looks terrible for the program you are the lead of shows why no one should go to it... the person in that video is the Lead Instructor for the FTRI and it's not taken down. Seems like you know nothing about the IP situation. Review the internal Microsoft procedures for conflict and review and submit this for review through the internal tools. Don't ask your manager. You aren't contributing to education, you are are the primary person responsible for a for profit private companies AI product. What the f... you are playing with fire here.

No, I've had enough of this condescending bull shit response and I'm not having it. The smug attitude with the tone of arrogance is disgusting and I'm not playing nice. If you don't know about the layoffs a month ago in a 20 person company then I don't know what to say... go figure it out before gaslighting me. I'm not going anywhere until you are all healed accountability for this bullshit and publicly apologize for this behavior.

To give you an idea of how things have changed - if you went to Codesmith and graduated in 2022. 95% of people who started graduated, 70% of the graduates got jobs within 6 months of graduating (and 90% of them reported their placement to Codesmith) = 63% "self reported placement" If you graduated in 2023: 95% of people who started graduated, 43.6% got jobs within 6 months of graduating (only 60% reported their placement to Codesmith - **A MAJOR DECLINE =** 26% "self reported placement rate" \---------- Codesmith hasn't given any 2024 placement data even though **ALMOST ALL 2024 GRADS HAVE HAD 6 MONTHS POST PLACEMENT AND THEY INTERNALLY KNOW THE DATA** The reason I'm so enraged here is that in 2024 when they internally knew about that major decline, they told the public that even in a tough market, Codesmith was crushing it. They conveniently pulled all these blog posts from thei…

I don't care either way, but if a program is publishing how amazing their outcomes are when they are good and goes RADIO SILENT when they are bad it pisses me off. Codesmith's CIRR results tanked so they started publishing random time windows of absolute number of placements and then then even stopped doing that because in the past six months it's like fifty or something and a number of them have been looking for over a year. I criticize them LEGITIMATELY and they come back with garbage data. I bet their response to this is 'Michael is an asshole our placements are amazing, we had an average increase in salary over previous work of $70K so far this year! who cares if there aren't as many placements it's take people longer that's fine, it's all about average increase.' My point is that changing the goal posts and each time telling everyone how "transparent" you are is garbage behavio…

I'm extremely pissed off at your bullshit response Codesmith. It's now 10 months later and things are worse then even and everything I said was correct. Everything you wrote (your post was removed by Reddit) was false bull shit you made up to manipulate people when you knew how bad things were. Things did not get better. The 2025 "recruitment rush" never happened. Another 50% of your staff was laid off and you have hardly anyone left. Your unethical behavior and marketing is catching up with you and I hope everyone sees it.

Here's some feedback for Codesmith you can relay. BE HONEST AND STOP LYING TO THE PUBLIC. Will: you very well know about continuing layoffs that keep happening over and over and over and you straight up lied above that there haven't been any 'restructurings'. I'm absolutely not backing down and going to keep applying pressure until you are honest and tell the truth and stop manipulating the public. Students deserve better. Your alumni deserve better. The former staff members who are treated like garbage deserve better. It's so sad that such dedicated team members who are laid off suddenly are so insignificant to you that you don't even acknowledge any 'restructuring' happening. Absolutely garbage behavior and I'm enraged.

I really hope Will isn't actually the lead instructor for this program for long because this is one of the worst uses of AI I've seen and thank you for proving my point that he is not qualified to be leading with curriculum development and teaching of this course. I don't want to discourage people from learning AI and I wouldn't be remotely hard on Will if this was a student learning AI, not someone branded as an industry leader in AI leading teaching a $4600 for 4 week course. This is a completely defensive comment about one of five points and it doesn't even address the point whatsoever... it defends the legitimacy of the music band - which I never disputed - and instead I was attacking Will for posting like a dozen promotional comments for the band that didn't disclose he actually was in the band at the time. Your comment is defending that behavior - defending manipulating Reddit wit…

All programs have seen much lower enrollment in 2024/2025. The only solid numbers I have are Launch School - which publishes cohort by cohort data and their cohorts dropped below 20 people at the end of last year. Codesmith has been downsizing for 2 years now. They mega expanded during the end of COVID to almost 50 cohorts a year because everyone Google 'best bootcamp' and chose the first one. Now that's not the case and they are down to like 10 or maybe less cohorts a year - which is still shockingly high. People might be dabbling with code but they aren't paying $22.5K for likely nothing. And as of late Codesmith is seeing fewer and fewer show up to those free learn to code sessions. So as others said, SWE bootcamps really ended in 2024 and this is the tail end.

Other instructors feel exploited. So In your case - you do this program for 1 month and say have 30 people = $130,000 of revenue for Codesmith. What are they paying you? $100 an hour? And you are doing like 10-20 hours a week? So you are responsible for making the curriculum, teaching it all, and you get paid like $10,000 a month and Codesmith made $130,000. Even if they have a couple of other helpers (both technical and operations) and the total cost is $20,000. There are no other costs here, no career program, no alumni support, etc... This means that Codesmith is exploiting your generosity to make $110,000 a month off of you, which is absurd. Now imagine you ran a program entirely by yourself and started your own company, think of how much money you would make... you are effectively paying Codesmith $100,000 a month for the opportunity to 'pay them back for all they did for you'…

Well my understanding is the only people left are Annie and Eric (and Will isn't involved with Codesmith much) and that all the other leaders left and keep leaving. My understanding is all the instructors and engineers left and the two leads become instructors right out of Codesmith about a year ago. All of the staff who were dedicated to Future Code are no longer on their website and I believe are looking for work.

Well I hear partial info about some changes going on and a number of staff departed again.... they are really done to not many people left. They also dropped their approval status in New York which was a contractual requirement to have based on the contract for this program. The contractual requirements for the teachers also isn't met if their current staff ran the program. So I'm not exactly sure what's going on and if it's still happening but they downsized it or if it's not happening, or if it's running but with delays to manage the restructuring.