They pivoted to doing this because the next CIRR report for 2024 students will be out in April 2026 and they want to give some idea of what's going on, but their reports are very problematic to me.
Why?
CIRR reports account for people who graduate in a specific time window. 2023 report means people who graduated in 2023 and got offers.
The reports Codesmith is publishing are offers in a specific time window but from any cohort. Meaning people who got those 102 offers could have graduated in 2022, 2023, 2024, 2021 even.
For all you know many of them are 2022 grads who took 1.5 years to get a job?
I actually like salary lift as a metric but they are confusing things by providing these reports side by side with CIRR reports with completely different definitions.
I used to give more benefit of the doubt, but last year this time they were defending against word of mouth of reports of de…
So they cannot control the domain or direct it anywhere else because that is configured under DNS which is under AWS. The domain registrar can point the domain to a new DNS configuration to work around that but the domain registrar in this case is also AWS.
What they should have done on day one reboot become irreplacable, then get a semi peromanent redirector domain like [cs.site](http://cs.site) or something, and then change all of their socials to the new redirector and have that redirect to become irreplacable. Then whenever they get their site back they coulld have it redirect back to [codesmith.io](http://codesmith.io)
This doesn't solve the email problem and the user data problem though. They could re-host CSX but people would have to create new accounts and it might be a mess, but it would be better than notihng.
Email is a huge problem - because a lot of other service will sen…
Technically they have a website at become-irreplaceable.dev that was updated 4 days after the outage, but they don't have an AWS account so they don't control and these are down:
1. codesmith.io
2. email to codesmith.io
3. all their user data stored in AWS
4. the CSX platform
Not at all a defense but just giving facts for people to digest on their own.
I spend very very little time on Codesmith. It might appear that way but it's all relative. Instead of assuming I'm spending a lot of time on it, try just imagining how much code I'm writing on a daily basis.
Like other than a couple of threads that blew up, I'm genuinely not spendong s lot of time here relatively speaking.
I use a lot of voice to text a lot too while causally walking around which is why I have so many typos and edits.
I don't want 'revenge', why do you think that?
I'm pissed off because their leaders have been gaslighting me for years and now that their website/email/AWS is down for like 3 weeks almost and counting, you all can see what kind of garbage was going on behind the scenes too.
I'm frustrated that their leaders don't acknowledge problems or issues and they have been driving their business into the ground and it pains me to see that impact the people who pay $22,500 to go there.
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
Codesmith's problems are a leadership skill issue, not a student or alumni issue.
I criticized for years while simultaneously recommending specific people go there.
For a handful of people it's the right place. For statistically the vast majority of people reading this it is not.
But that was before the 20ish day outage and counting.
Leadership skill gap caught up with them and took down the company and there are zero people that should go there right now.
This is what I do all day. I spend ridiculously little time on Codesmith: [https://github.com/mnovati](https://github.com/mnovati)
I explained everything to their new CEO in a video call a few months ago and told her face to face the full truth from my mouth.
Their founder keeps going around perpetuating false narratives, paying people to post on Reddit, encouraging people to mock my appearance, some fake LinkedIn account is now in on the game.
Like I'm angry but I'm right and even though I'm just me, I'm not going to tolerate any bullying from the "team" as they call it.
There are a few days of DS&A. I'm possibly one of the industry experts in DS&A and it's laughable to call that sufficient. It's the equivalent of a "sneak peak" without even really getting started.
The idea of hack hours is great, but they are a waste of time because it's you and recent alumni going over problems and no true expert guidance.
So you are wasting your time.
People who have a natural affinity for DS&A don't need this and would be much better off NOT paying $22,500 and learning on their own.
I really wish I could articulate this more - so many things at Codesmith are about putting on the appearance of something legit and I get where their DS&A motivations come from they have to acknowledge how much it sucks.
Instead they celebrate it as the reason people get great jobs.
I've spent SO MANY YEARS really studying all aspects of Codesmith - I know more about it than their c…
Nope, I've been telling them about problems publicly and privately for years. They have problems with their platform, whenever it comes back, that a credible org would never allow to be live and they shouldn't turn it back on even if they get their domain back.
I can't speak to what happens inside Codesmith, but people who have worked there have told me they have complained about it. They had a code freeze for a year or something because they had no competent engineering leader so none of the "engineers" that worked at Codesmith during that time actually did anything.
Some of the issues I pointed out it took them several attempts to fix after repeatedly telling me they were fixed each time.
I know my tone is extremely offensive to them so I see why they act defensively instead of open minded to it, but seriously, I got this way because the sheer incompetence breeding incompetence bree…
1. Well a lot of the more tenured teachers resigned or were laid off recently. They then promoted newer people and filed out the rest with people who just graduated.
2. Well Codesmith is saying they are getting access back soon and that seems to be at least 24 hours ago now... so... these people clearly have no idea what they are doing and what's going on. It's kind of sad that I've been calling them "delusional" for years and they are showing that to the entire public about getting their AWS account back - they don't understand the magnitude of what happened.
To me Codesmith is dead and it's because they haven't APOLOGIZED ONCE for this. No responsibility.
I'm shocked anyone calling themselves an engineer would support their behavior right now.
I received a tip that Codesmith claims that they are making progress and expect access very soon.
My understanding is that they successfully removed the 8 year old phone number from the account, however they can't login or recover it yet and have to proceed with account recovery.
No matter what they tell you - keep in my that this is not normal.
If you have an account properly in your name and company, you should be able to recover it in fewer steps with proper identification.
My suspicion os the account is not setup properly and they cannot restore access based on the name/ownership and they are trying to get back in via creative approaches.
For example, by proving they pay the bills and that the two factor phone number is invalid and getting it removed, it removes one of the hurdles, but if they can't get access to the email address on the account, and someone else's name is on th…
1. Alina is CEO
2. Phil left almost a year ago
3. Eric K is still there as an advisor
4. Will is doing a visiting fellow program at Oxford so he's still involved but not in the same way as before.
5. There are only 4 full time admin team left: admissions person, program manager, events person, outcomes person + Alina
6. All of the instructors are recent Codesmith grads, most within months, and one about a year. No more head instructors or senior lead engineers to head of engineering or CTO etc..
I did criticize them a year ago that they had like 6 directors and needed 1, but I didn't expect them to go down to 0.
If I was Will, I would have posted this on day 1:
==== HYPOTHETICAL MESSAGE - NOT A REAL POST ====
"Codesmith community. I'm deeply sorry and I let you down. We have been so focused on delivering value to the community we make a rookie mistake with keeping our AWS account up to day, and we lost access. Not only did we lose access, but the our website, email, and all backend services are down as well. We don't know when we will regain access, and we will communicate daily updates.
==== HYPOTHETICAL MESSAGE - NOT A REAL POST ====
In the meantime, we purchased [codesmith.org](http://codesmith.org) \[it's available for $10K\] and we will be moving our operations there ASAP, keep an out for more about that.
==== HYPOTHETICAL MESSAGE - NOT A REAL POST ====
Most importantly, we are conducting a thorough activity log of what happened and what we will do to change our engineering team to pr…
1. CSX is not there
2. This is not AWS shenanigans whatsoever. Whatever drug your on, where can I get some, I've been having a rough week and need some delusional juice.
It's 100% their fault
1. Using a phone number for 2 fac
2. Not having other 2 fac backup options
3. Losing the phone number 8 years ago
4. Not having a monitored email on the account
5. Not updating a credit card for apparently 8 years because they haven't logged in for 8 years?
6. Not have multiple backup payment options provided (AWS allows for many)
7. Not having proper information on the account to recover it
8. Not separating accounts and systems for separation of concerns.
If they did ANY ONE OF THESE THINGS, they would not lose their account.
That is SHEER INCOMPETENCE and not AWS shenanigans.
It took them 4 DAYS (which is absolutely absurd) to relaunch their marketing page on their previous temporary domain yeah. It's a .dev which AWS doesn't support so must be registered somewhere else.
But they should have fully moved over to a new domain on day 1, put the issue loud and clear there to explain, and redirect all inbound organic links at their source (or change url redirecting services) to point to the new domain.
I can't state enough how much incompetence is being demonstrated here.
I made a list and it was 15 things they did wrong and I wasn't even done and I gave up because it was just like so ridiculous.
Codesmith is done. Even if they get the domain back there is zero they can do to rebuild credibility now.
I even called them out on DAY ONE and pushed them to make a report of what happend.
The "report" was a set of MARKETING SLIDES that didn't explain at all what h…
They have not been transparent at all in explaining the problem at all and shame on them. Their founder would rather choose now to call me on LinkedIn instead of doing anything about the problem.
They made a number of failures but the length and escalation of the outage are consistent with the problem being that someone else's identity is on the AWS account and without their cooperation it could be impossible to get it back.
Instead of dealing with this like a real company would, they have had zero mitigation plans. Zero communications in a week after repeatedly saying they will get access back soon.
Zero ownership of the problem.
Icing on the cake is they have this fake account manipulating the arguments I'm having with them on LinkedIn and whoever is responsible will probably get their real LinkedIn suspended too.
It's indeed a disaster at a time when they were already on thin ice…
Codesmith's website is still down and recovery is not guaranteed. But the company claims to be operational and that they will be around forever.
It's been 9-10+ days now and the situation is unacceptable.
Since their reputation is built on engineering excellence and they teach people to be engineers, how can anyone trust anything they say if they can't take responsibility for what happened and be transparent. Like if the founder was like "I'm an idiot and I completely screwed this up. I let down the team, alumni, and everyone and I'm ashamed of myself. This doesn't reflect the contributions of hundreds of engineers and the great things we've done and we need to reflect on what went wrong, leave no stone unturned, and implement a comprehensive 3rd party audited set of changes to our infrastructure. We will let you know when those implementations are complete in two weeks."
So far their…
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
Oh so it's Meta then. Yeah Meta doesn't take bullshit, and maybe that's why I'm equally firm about calling out bullshit.
Meta is particularly sensitive about levelling and people who are mis levelled are generally laid off instead of adjusted or supported.
Also most of the people were contractors via 3rd party and those are throwaway at Meta and not a path to full time work.
I wrote a letter to Codesmith about this because one student lied (he apparently APPARENTLY STARTED WORKING AT CODESMITH BEFORE HE EVEN WENT TO CODESMITH on his LinkedIn) and I suspected this was to meet the YOE requirement at Meta.
Codesmith defended it and wrote a blog about him.
I both agree and disagree. So first off, the highest performers are ALWAYS KEPT. Just think about it. You have a company. You spent a ton of time getting some amazing people. You have to layoff a team. You will keep these top people and move them ANYWHERE. It would be ridiculous to keep (or resume) hiring outside people who are probably worse performers than keeping your top talent.
So people who are laid off might not be the worst but they generally are not the top 10% either.
Now lets say you are a manager and you have to remove 2 engineers out of 10 on your team. Who do you choose?
The lowest performers.
Let's say they ask you to get your budget down to $X instead. You fire the people with the worst pay : performance ratio.
Let's say the entire team is cut. You director/VP of the org will hand pick the top people and move them.
Finally, the term "performance base layoff" is bei…
I know the people that exaggerated their resume to enter as seniors had trouble there. Their titles are non standard but
Associate is FAANG apprentice
Senior Associate is FAANG entry level
Senior Engineer/Principal Associate is FAANG mid level
Lead Engineer is FAANg senior
The people who had trouble were grads with zero experience who got Senior Engineer titles who should have been Senior Associates.
I mean I audited dozens of Codesmith grads to see where there are later on a small majority still has jobs as SWE but a large number did not and many had changed jobs frequently.
Napkin math, illustrative only. Of the 4000 grads, several hundred have been employed by Codesmith in some capacity and I'm excluding all of them.
This analysis supported me writing a letter to Codesmith encouraging them to try to be the Stanford of Bootcamps that produces the top ENTRY LEVEL talent in the ind…
1. Agreed. And the fact that they can't recover through an ownership claim leads me to believe the account also isn't setup properly with proper ownership info and such.
2. Their email is also down which is even more crazy because that might be more critical than the website in terms of business impact
3. Someone send me a screenshot that they are telling their community how transparent they're being and what happened and they're absolutely not and I don't want to hear any freaking defense on this, there's an industry standard that top-tier tech companies have for disclosing technical incidents and they are not following that standard. and if you went to codesmith and you worked at a real company then you know this too. e.g.https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-1-1-1-1-incident-on-july-14-2025/
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
Let's start with looking at an AMA I did 3 months ago: [https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/1jz5i0h/ama\_im\_michael\_exmeta\_principal\_engineer\_1\_code/](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/1jz5i0h/ama_im_michael_exmeta_principal_engineer_1_code/)
Normal comments, normal replies.
Now let's look at a Codesmith AMA from 3 months ago:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/codesmith/comments/1ilpihd/im\_ayleen\_a\_software\_engineer\_and\_current/](https://www.reddit.com/r/codesmith/comments/1ilpihd/im_ayleen_a_software_engineer_and_current/)
Notice how **EVERY SINGLE COMMENT IS DELETED OR COLLAPSED BY REDDIT** except for the OP's comments and ONE question.
Most of their other AMAs - similar thing.
I'm not saying it's a fact that Codesmith is responsible, but like something they are doing on Reddit is very sketchy.
I have reems of similar documentation of this kind of…
You have a brand new account and you have suspicious voting patterns on your comments.
Even this post has a really odd view count given that it was completely blocked. so either you're refreshing the page like crazy or you've shared this with a bunch of people offline because the view stats are very odd and we get detailed view stats for posts.
Everyone's treated the same and you have no f****** idea the s*** that comes through this every single day that's also banned and nothing to do with this.
Reddit has these filters for a reason and as I said, I'm perfectly happy to continue this conversation in DM.
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy· edited★ FEATURED
I dunno, you seem to now want to be collaborative and that's on you. You never mentioned anything about stating that we do this to make money and I hope that's your opinion and you aren't starting that as a fact because it's provably untrue on our side and I can't see how you have facts to prove that yourself. So if you had this opinion the whole time, you are debating disingenuously.
I started the conversation with 'I'll talk to you if you accept the facts' because the facts are important.
The average person we work with has 5 years of industry work experience as a SWE. Why would they put a mentorship community Fellowship on their LinkedIn as a job or resume when they currently work at Google or Amazon?
It makes no sense whatsoever and why would they not do Formation if the name changed?
Like the facts are abundantly clear that very few percentage of people put Formation publicly…
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy· edited★ FEATURED
I'll share your feedback with our team to consider it, that's what I mean about gaslighting, like I'm not saying you are crazy and I see where you are coming from and I'm arguing that I don't agree and I don't think it's a problem and why I think that.
Like it's a good debate and if a lot of people feel that way we might change it so your feedback is important to share and note so we can pay attention to it.
We improve through feedback and accept it.
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy· edited★ FEATURED
Here is what AI says to the question: "Is Formation Fellowship a paid job"
"No — Formation is not a paid job, nor does it offer employment. It’s a paid fellowship/training program (focused on interview prep and career coaching), not a salaried position."
Here is what it thinks about Codesmith: "are oslabs engineers paid?"
"Yes - OSLabs does pay engineers in at least one of its key programs"
Like I don't think you'll find anything anywhere that would make a reasonable person think Formation Fellows are paid roles - but acknowledge that edge case people might be confused because of the multiple definitions.
But in Codesmith's case like everything is blatantly twisted to appear that way.
This discrepancy is one of the 3 primary reasons I've been going after Codesmith.
Dictionary definitions aside, what the leaders of these companies do and stand for and their integrity matte…
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
The official on the record answer - we used the word Fellow because our industry doesn't have many competitors: Interview Kickstart and Pathrise. Pathris used the word Fellows so we copied them and used the word Fellow. So that our customers could compare the two familiarly.
I'm not trying to gaslight you but I Googled Fellow and this is the dictionary definition it presented and not any of them say anything about being paid.
The definition for "Fellowship" has two meanings, none of them saying anything about being paid either (I can only attached one screenshot, but pasted:)
1. friendly association, especially with people who share one's interests."they valued fun and good fellowship as the cement of the community"
2. the status of a fellow of a college or society."she held the Faulkner fellowship"
Formation is not affiliated with education/schools/universities and no where in our…
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy· edited★ FEATURED
I'll give you the straight up facts on this if you are willing to accept them. I can prove every one of these statements.
Formation has flaws and this isn't one of them.
FORMATION:
1. A small fraction of Fellows at Formation put it on their LinkedIn.
2. No one says it's paid anywhere. Of the ones that do it's abundantly clear that it's a mentorship program for high performance and not a job.
3. We have not received a single request for a background check for anyone that I'm aware of in the past 5 years for anyone claiming they were employed by Formation.
3. The people who say 2-3+ years have genuinely been at Formation that time and actively participating. Maybe it's terrible they didn't get a job yet, but the timeframe is correct from what I'm aware of.
CODESMITH:
1. In my [reporting end of 2023](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/18cpq98/analysis_of_52_most_recen…
I'm restarting my comment:
Formation is not a bootcamp or generally competing with Codesmith. Codesmith has marketing adds explaining what a for-loop is and assuring you that even if it's too confusing Codesmith is for you. You can't join Formation without industry work experience as a SWE. The closest overlap is the AI program because we're offering AI productivity courses soon and they offer AI leadership courses. But there is very little overlap.
We are harmed if Codesmith declines because because 75%+ of Codesmith grads that join Formation like Formation a lot and it's a wonderfully complementary service.
There's a difference between continuous demonstration of incompetent engineering practices, tons of security issues and such.
I meant that this was the last straw about engineering practices because I had been privately telling them all kinds of problems for a while now and th…
It's long but the TLDR is this person posted things in the mod escalation channels and was almost instantly suspended from Reddit because the person was using a network of fake accounts that Reddit has recently cleared out.
It's very much possible this person was retaliating because after going after me Reddit discovered the network of accounts and removed most of them.
So I genuinely saying that Codesmith claims they had nothing to do with this.
But they hired someone who specializes in "reputation management" (which again, they confirmed) and are partially responsible for what that person does.
It's a good question because I'm not normally like this and it hurts my personal reputation.
I'm so so so so professionally upset at Codesmith's lack of integrity on the matters. Gaslighting me and the public when I criticize their competency.
I'm personally upset because a person that they paid to post on Reddit (which they confirmed), coincidentally (which they deny being involved with) posted negative things about me and tried to get me banned.
I'm not a happy camper here.
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
Google wasn't down because the team has incompetent engineering practices.
CIRR also has incompetent processes and deserves equal criticism.
In my opinion Codesmith is full of liars and exaggerators. For god's sake the founding advisor's own sign had a LinkedIn and resume full of lies and exaggerations.
I meant that this was the last straw about engineering practices because I had been privately telling them all kinds of problems for a while now and they keep telling me how great their engineers are.
If you are going down, just blame everyone else on your way down!
Their Founder needs a close friend or family member to give him a wake up call that these problems are HIS PROBLEMS for NOT KNOWING WHAT HE'S DOING, and it's not imposter syndrome, or gatekeeping or AWS's fault, etc... He needs to authentically own up to this stuff, or his company literally will implode, like it seems like it literally is.
Codesmith is down and they can't access their AWS because of incompetence. I've had enough of their claims to go from "zero to mid/level senior engineers" when they repeatedly demonstrate lack of engineering competence (this isn't the first incident)
No excuses for this and it's the last straw for me. I've privately reported a number of engineering issues to their team, and they have continued to try to gaslight me that their team is "extremely talented" and other claims.
I apologize that my tone and wording comes across direct but people need to wake up to this.
I've had enough of bootcamps marketing themselves in ways that in my opinion mislead people to reality and I hope these situations show you what's going on if you don't see through the marketing words.
https://preview.redd.it/l07ritvw3pdf1.png?width=1246&format=png&auto=webp&s=f944dff9e23eaca40bec9bb3b9ea50a8e630510b
http…
I have someone recently who told me that he submitted bogus dates to Codesmith on his OSP and Codesmith signed a letter the next day and handed it to him without checking anything. He believes they are committing fraud that just signs off on whatever people tell them.
Now, this person himself lied. But he didn't use the letter for anything and was testing the system instead so he wouldn't get in trouble telling his story.
I plan on pressing on this more in the future but don't have time now.
If you are a Codesmith grad and want to confidentially send me letters Codesmith signed for bogus OSP dates, my DMs are open and I will not share your name or identifiable info.
If there is systemic fraud and Codesmith didn't verify information intentionally to have an excuse to blame the students for lying to them, then they are in huge trouble.
I don't care about getting them in trouble but I…
Well if you have the facts to back up your claims then you should have infinite courage because the truth should always win at the end of the day. Codesmith isn't accepting the facts and is trying to gaslight me about them and I'm not having it. The people there have no integrity in my opinion and am not backing down until they acknowledge the truth, make changes, and apologize.
If you frame a 3 week long bootcamp project as a year of experience and then ask your bootcamp for a letter of reference and they give it to you without fact checking it can help.
It's why you see recruiting banning Codesmith, but even the people that ban it admit that people fall through the cracks every now and then.
Codesmith doesn't know anything about this though and denies this happens... so they won't tell you this is how it works.
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
I suspect you'll get messages from Codesmith people telling you I'm crazy, all you have to do is ask how many people were placed in 2025. They were very upfront about that number in 2024 and they currently list 102 offers between August 2024 and January 2025. Ask them how many offers that have reported in 2025 and if they won't give you a number, don't give them your dollars.
Just look at their own data carefully, look at the "percentage of people not reporting salaries" spiking on their reports. Look at the dropping salaries.
By all objective measures the data is falling off a cliff - and this data is trailing reality.
They know very well what's going on internally and it's offensive to me that they gaslight the public to the contrary in my opinion by still quoting old data combined "recent placements at Amazon and Meta" (yes, like 4 people... and most had tangential experience). Don…
You should look into extensive detail on your own as these are my opinions, but you also shouldn't just trust their market and their branding etc... The ask people to write Course Report reviews, etc.. (which most bootcamps do too) but you have to try to dig deeper for how the sausage is made.
There are still a handful of people for whom Codesmith could work, and you might be one of them, but you have to go into it knowing all the baggage and problems and choose it for the right reasons.
My overall argument is that the fact that they don't admit the baggage (I've heard 'that was just a misake' so much that it's not just a mistake) and are gaslighting people and spinning the narrative TO ME is a huge red flag and I would never tell anyone to go there anymore, but that's my opinion.
I would do a masters over any bootcamp. Or consider Launch School.
Codesmith and Merit America are entirely different options with no similarities so I would also spend more time trying to understand deeply how these things work if you don't cross them off entirely.
So my personal opinion is to avoid Codesmith at all costs. You can read my history and I'm intimately familiar with their workings for years. I used to recommend people go there all the way up until they had about 50% layoffs and in Feb 2024 shrunk about 75% in their offerings. I was curious then and paused recommendations to see how they adjusted.
Unfortunately they didn't adjust well and instead of just removing my recommendation I changed it to actively recommend not going in fall 2024
The short reason is that they are imploding in my opinion. They have a skeleton crew of full time staff left. All of their full time i…
Tell Codesmith leaders this. Every frickin day I see posts on my LinkedIn grasping at every possible straw, any possible value prop that will stick with people:
(Paraphrasing actual daily posts):
\- AI generated images for Rubber ducks/"array functions in javascript", etc...
\- Do this free course you might even get a job without paying anything!
\- People lie that you need a CS degree! Tech is for everyone!
\- We are a program for people with 10 years of experience! If you have a CS degree we're for you!
\- This is how you do a FOR...LOOP, if you want more come to Codesmith!
\- Do our free courses like "your first webpage!"
\- AI is scaring engineers, but if you are an experienced engineer who wants to learn AI with 10 years of experience, Codesmith is for you!
\- Here's an alumni video clip from 3 years ago saying something random!
\- Here's an alumni making $150K from IT sup…
I would qualify that to say that in 2021 you had a shot if you did a bootcamp for the right reasons. And now even if you go to one of the former-best bootcamps that hasn't closed yet and you go for the right reasons, you have maybe a 50/50 shot within a year (accounting for graduation, placement, etc...), and at Codesmith for example, salaries have been going DOWN EVERY YEAR by like $10K - indicating that people aren't exactly taking as good jobs even if they do get placed.
2/2 Fullstack - they have traded hands from Zovio to SimpliLearn so it's really a front on top of SimpliLearns business. I don't know enough about it but I suspect similar to Hack Reactor it's kind of like floating around with most of the below-surface running generically within SimpliLearn.
Flatiron - they spun back off WeWork and I haven't heard anything either.
General Assembly - they actually are still chugging along and they are focusing more on B2B upskilling than. You can read more about their parent [https://www.adeccogroup.com/investors/annual-report](https://www.adeccogroup.com/investors/annual-report) and they actually ARE mentioned often as a potential business boom. But not as a bootcamp, as a B2B upskilling platform.
Launch School - yeah the only actually honest bootcamp left that discloses 6 months after a cohort graduates how each student is doing and has still done t…
Alright these are my well informed PERSONAL OPINIONS UNLESS FACTUAL DATA IS EXPLICITLY MENTIONED BELOW:
Codesmith is the worst of the worst and their "transparent" data is smoke and mirrors and everyone needs to be cautioned about it. I'm taking a hit to my reputation calling them out so aggressively but I'm so morally against what they are doing I can't stand silent. Share with your friends and carefully review my arguments your self - don't listen to them without doing so.
Hack Reactor - they have been fully rolled into Galvanize with Tech Elevator, which was fully rolled into Stride Learning. My understanding from people there is that Stride Learning isn't putting that unit high on the priority list and it's kind of a drag on the company. You can read the investor updates here and see what you think: [https://investors.stridelearning.com/events-and-presentations/default.aspx](https…
Yeah nothing negative invalidates individual experience - good and bad.
But far too many people are looking for confirmation bias and latch onto an individual success story as justification to do a bootcamp they want to go to.
Bootcamps prey on this, because as you said, you referred someone because it worked for you, and this is a strong strategy. It's why every bootcamp asks for referrals for friends.
But you have to zoom out and look at the market right now:
1. Market disappeared for bootcamp grads
2. Failing bootcamps are cutting back and providing worse services (be in Springboard or even a top three like Codesmith and Rithm (shut down).
3. Almost everything about the programs are equal or worse ( when the students need BETTER support.
4. They don't have the cash to invest in making things better so anything marketed to you as a major change is smoke and mirrors - the "change" wa…
I'm seeing similar cuts at Codesmith (in my opinion in judging their staff disappearing and cost cutting measures implemented) and am equally concerned of an implosion.
I'm not sure why these bootcamps don't just wrap up on good terms and call it a day and resort to cutting back so much to survive.
Like is it a game for their replacement execs to show that they can turn around a falling business to boost their resumes? App Academy didn't make it after trying the new CEO approach.
Bootcamps are expensive and impact people's lives... it's not a $100 Udemy course and it's not a $50 Kickstarter... like these are huge time commitments that mess up people's lives.
Anyways thanks for sharing some perspective.
NuCamp has never been known for being the best quality, it's affordable and their pitch is like do the same materials that you do for $20K for 1/10th the cost.
But because of the relatively lower price point, their community isn't as strong and committed.
I talked to a Codesmith grad this week that theorized that because it costs so much, people want to stick it through and lie on their resumes to get something out of it instead of complaining about it and admitting they wasted $22,500.
Whereas as $2000, NuCamp has way more people testing the waters.
Anyways, the premise of these Vibe Coding course is ridiculous.
Like if you are curious about vibe coding and don't expect anything out of it... nothing wrong with it.
But bootcamps need to stop making people feel like they will be successful over night.
Running a tech company is brutal and only naive and crazy people should do it. T…
1. I'm a mod of this sub (and I was made a mod by people I don't know)
2. My company requires several years of work experience as a SWE, we don't accept new bootcamp grads or CS grads struggling to get jobs.
3. I make it clear when I'm commenting on behalf of the company (which is rare) and I make it clear when I'm commenting personally if there is some kind of confusion or questioning.
I take your feedback that it can be more clear because it's important to know who you are talking to.
I'm completely not-anonymous to help people judge who I am - this sub has a track record of people using anonymous new accounts to promote bootcamps with attempts to produce "organic content" that is super sketchy. Better to be able to judge than rely on new accounts you have no idea who they are.
My entire life mission is about supporting people bettering themselves. I'm trying to HELP people. A f…
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
Shame on you OP - according to Codesmith's website, you work there on staff and didn't disclose that anywhere in your post or comments.
This is an ad for Codesmith and it's really not cool to manipulate people like this. Everyone reading this, please don't fall for this kind of fake-organic advertising.
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
# ⚠️ SCAMMER ALERT
This thread is full of Codesmith planted questions that are not disclosed.
**Your LinkedIn is full of lies - you apparently already have 3 years of "software engineering experience".** So you are lying there or you are lying here.
Sounds like you are just like the majority of Codesmith grads who lie cheat and steal your way to a SWE job.
Check out all the recent alumni who get jobs, open each of their LinkedIns and see how many months or years of experience are listed for their 3-4 week long project.