I 100% assure you that no one got an SDEIII senior role at Amazon out of Codesmith with zero work experience.
SDEI - L4 is entry level there, SDEII - L5 is mid level. I know 2-3 people from Codesmith that got L5 jobs (and I think at least 2 are still there) and those are extreme edge cases out of 4000 people.
These aren't case you put on the website as a core feature of Codesmith.
The fact you call their Leadership Principles questions "bullshit questions" shows me how messed up and broken Codesmith is... taking ambitious people and making them feel like the job market is a "game" to get a high score on.
They don't set people up for good careers and with good long term mindsets. It's all a game where the ends justify the means.
You completely dodged my rambling about how people lie on their resumes to get jobs and it's a fact from my research. It's the elephant in the room. Amazing…
Those placements were accidents and people exaggerating on their resumes.
There isn't a single person with zero relevant experience who had an honest resume who got a senior role.
Did people get "senior" titled roles at Capital One (which map to entry level FAANG) by lying about their SWE experience and getting referred by other Codesmith grads and get coached on questions in a special Capital One channel? Yes.
Did people leverage past experience that maybe wasn't SWE work but had a lot of similar behavioral skills and call it "engineering" experience on their resume to squeeze into mid level roles? Yes.
Did most people put their 3 week long project as 8+ months of work experience? Yes.
Did people who were hourly TAs at Codesmith put down months of work experience as a Software Engineer at "CS Engineering" that Codesmith provided background checks for? Yes.
People who got these job…
It's been 7 months now and based on the people that have pinged me on and from this thread (not sure if it's circulating with a cohort) the placements haven't changed much and these cohorts were described as a ghost town and worse than ever placement rates - some saying they don't know anyone placed in their cohort.
**You knew at the time of posting that 2023 cohorts had been doing half as good as 2022 cohorts (40% 6 month placement rate) and you knew how the earliest 2024 cohorts were doing and terrible things were.**
I saw an ad last week saying that 2024 was great for outcomes and "you could be next".
Historically they never did that though as far as I know so I would t assume but this is awfully suspicious given then anecdotal evidence and the massive increase is ghost placements demands at least a clarification. like if it was legit I don't see why they wouldn't say Michael. this is absurd how we do even suggest this, we obviously are not committing fraud like that, and they haven't acknowledged it.
There was a bit of an issue because their CA 2023 report originally had 20% placements for 2023 grads which they updated to 42% by adding in like 40 to 60 people who didn't report salaries and were verified by LinkedIn.
I asked them about it and they didn't respond (while they responded to other questions, so it wasn't due to lack of receipt).
Apparently a contractor/advisor did the report so I asked them if it's possible all of those LinkedIn verifications were ACTUALLY OSP PROJECTS PORTRAYED AS WORK and not actual jobs, and they didn't reply to that either.
I started doing some analysis but I'm way too busy because I'm working on so many crazy AI features that are so exciting and cool I just doing have like an hour to do the actual number crunching, but I really want to know what's going on.
It's impossible the leadership doesn't know about these problems no? Like how could they mi…
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
33 is a pretty big cohort too for 2024. If this is true, I really wish people would do their fricken research and stop believing their bullshit marketing and leader.
I used to have way more pros and cons about Codesmith and things have degraded to much over 2024 starting when they laid off everyone and promised amazing changes that never happened.
You can follow my history. I'm pissed off now but back then I very rationally paused my endorsement of Codesmith in February when those layoffs happened and then a few months later when things continued to decline I actively recommended not going there.
Now the leader is writing a book and barely involved, grads are less and less prepared and alumni complain to me more and more about grads who are faking their resumes but not accompanying if with the grit and hustle needed to fake it til you make it.
Codesmith CEO: here's a thought experime…
This came up in my Youtube queue: [https://youtu.be/yZomz9vPqjg?si=QJ0DHU\_PrGEMMdHP&t=683](https://youtu.be/yZomz9vPqjg?si=QJ0DHU_PrGEMMdHP&t=683)
Apparently the CEO totally is transparent that it's not that he's "not a very good engineer" but he's "barely one at all" and that "the stuff I was teaching \[\] I was learning as I go", "when I was making my hard parts workshops I didn't know how a map function works"
So I guess it's not really a secret that he new practically nothing about engineering when starting Codesmith and he actually considers it a strength.
But he does claim that he made the Hard Parts from scratch. Which was late 2010s, so even if it's true that the original materials were copied, it seems he entirely changed to a first principals approach at some point long ago such that any recent Codesmith student went through original curriculum.
Great example here: [https://www.linkedin.com/posts/codesmith-llc\_programmer-coding-codingbootcamp-activity-7303912379589820416-c\_03](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/codesmith-llc_programmer-coding-codingbootcamp-activity-7303912379589820416-c_03)
"From conducting orchestras to software engineering"
1. The person's LinkedIn says they had 11 months of SWE experience prior to Codesmith and then 1.4 years of open source experience "software engineer" experience during Codesmith.
2. Then you read the blog post there and find out the person was an orchestra conductor with no experience prior to Codesmith
3. Then you ask a recruiter at Capital One that says to clear a background check for a "Senior Associate" role (which is not a Senior Software Engineer role there - which requires 4 years of experience), you need to have 2 years of verifiable SWE experience to get hired...
So something…
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
Don't get me started on this because I've been hounding them for literally years on this and it's been happening since 2019 https://www.reddit.com/r/TechLA/comments/b7xl98/codesmith_coding_bootcamp_scam_beware/
Every time I significantly push back you'll see like a blog post about someone who got a senior job right out of Codesmith, and they just adamantly adamantly believe this to the bitter end.
So I don't think they are lying but instead are delusional.
No leader there has a STEM degree, and no leader has been an engineer ever either in industry.
Enough people for $130K jobs in the past they made them believe they and the secret formula to creating mid level and senior engineers out of s bootcamp that it became their identity.
When your identity is attacked, you often defend completely irrationally.
There are a handful of people that have gotten those jobs. and then when you zo…
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
I've been a massive fan of apprenticeships (some are better than others though so you have to watch out).
You need 10000 hours to develop the taste needed to be a valuable engineer and a bootcamp gives you 1000. Doing apprenticeships for 2 years can get you almost there.
You can rush it and you have to put in the time.
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
It's not that at all.
They are gaslighting critics of Codesmith hahaha by countering facts with cherry picked numbers and then telling the critics they are wrong.
But the students are genuinely rewiring their thinking to believe they are mid level and senior engineers.
It takes 12 weeks and lots of tactics:
- if you are ever negative you do correction meetings to readjust your mindset to be positive
- You have to emoji like every post and an instructor apparently complained they didn't get enough emoji reactions for example.
- you are told you have imposter syndrome and the solution is to follow Codesmith's resume advice to fix it and to trust them because you have imposter syndrome and aren't thinking properly about your work so you have to trust Codesmith's way as the "reality"
This stuff actually works though! Like people systematically come out thinking this way and when Codesmit…
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
The way this has been framed to me:
1. the top couple of students usually get jobs quickly. they aren't on Reddit and they often aren't very engaged because they are in and out. others wonder why these people did Codesmith in the first place. when I've talked them I get a mix of responses: they were misled to believe Codesmith was more senior and they were way to advanced and we're advising the teachers, they needed some kind of structure and peers because doing it alone was emotionally challenging, and some people just wanted to do projects to refresh their skills and were misled that the codesmith projects were like work experience.
I hear people here saying that it wasn't really with it but that they enjoyed the community and didn't think it was a scam or entire waste of money, just probably wouldn't have done it in retrospect.
2. the 2nd tier of students get hired by Codesmith. T…
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
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…
Haha Formation is far from perfect but we have an advantage to scale for sure because of our dynamic scheduling engine that gets better the more people we have. We match people up through hundreds of mentorship sessions every week, all scheduled for scratch based on what topics people need to practice, availability, and seniority level. So the more people we can match from, the better the matches end up being!
BUT! The downside is that with such a dynamic schedule, it's more likely for a mentor to have to reschedule or for people in a group to have to drop out. So to make it work, we have to have layers and layers of product and algorithms to handle these cases and make them as least abd possible.
Another aspect of scaling is our mentors. Because Formation doesn't teach anything or have any curriculum and instead we facilitate mentorship and practice: you might like or dislike a mentor…
I have an email thread with all of their leaders, asked them twice about why the ghosting rate (number of included placements who did not report salaries) went from 15% in 2022 to 65% for 2023 data in their government report and while they responded to numerous other questions they completely ignored this question with no response.
I wouldn't say the entire data is a lie but I would agree with you it's 'fabricated' in the sense that it's manipulated, massaged data, that was selected to tell a story, rather than just tell you how things are.
I don't disagree at all that some people from bootcamps had good outcomes but I also strongly believe this view is why in the past 3 years people ran to bootcamps as a magical path to get a $100K+ job in 12 weeks that was very much not the case.
Take Codesmith for example, which in 2021 had a median $130K salary or something. Out of thousands of graduates ever, something like 100 placed at the canonical FAANG companies. Almost all of the Meta placements were contractors who left within a year.
So historically what happened was this (I was there and this is what Is saw):
1. Big tech wants to source more broadly to have more diverse candidates than just MIT and Stanford grads
2. Big tech looked at local bootcamps in Silicon Valley - Hack Reactor, App Academy, and Hackbright are three big ones.
3. Big tech made relationships, sending engineers as mentors and paying to get first crack a…
I can't tell if you are trolling, not understanding, or just have such a fixed mindset you aren't trying to understand.
How does that work exactly if someone is paying for a month subscription and someone else is paying for an unlimited membership with the goal of getting a job in 12 months.
What would either of those people get from an average placement time?
If someone has a three month subscription, what clock do we use for placement, 12 months from the end of that? What if they have a bundle and pay to extend a month and then get placed? Isn't that worse than if they got placed in the 3 month bundle they were hoping for even though they had a great job.
I believe most of our Fellows have full time day jobs, many do a couple sessions a week and have a long term timeframe and take a long time to place.
On the other hand a bunch of people were engineers who were laid off who are p…
Our full year report has been on our blog since December.
I think I wrote tens of thousands of words explaining our outcomes and there is no question I will not answer honestly.
Our main goals are salary increase and top tier placements because that's what people pay us to achieve.
We don't have a concept of a placement rate because it doesn't make sense for an interview prep program with a month to month membership that allows ramping up and ramping down week to week. It's not useful.
I've explained this to people on your team repeatedly and I struggle to believe you don't comprehend what I'm saying. If you have specific questions I try to elucidate or if you disagree and think we are bootcamp that can publish these things then explain why and I can respond or clarify misconceptions.
Better yet talk to your alumni that have done Formation and find A SINGLE PERSON who thinks Format…
I also agree 110k salaries are great roles!
The part I'm pushing Codesmith on is the trend and the marketing message.
If you tell people they are mid level and senior engineers and the salaries have dropped 130k -> 120k -> 110k, it just doesn't add up.
It's not true and it's misleading.
For example, at Formation, you can see in our 2024 report from December, we had a $110K INCREASE in first year total comp (see the exact calculation mechanism on our blog), increase from 50% top tier in 2023 -> 76% top tier in 2024, and people are getting ACTUAL mid-level and senior top tier roles.
**So the market improved a ton in 2024 from our point of view.**
Codesmith is blaming a bad 2024 market for worse results than 2023, but it's a bad market for **entry level software engineers** not a bad market for all.
**Sorry, this is rambling - but my consistent point for 2-3 years now has been that…
People can count as placements if they ghost and don't report salaries but have a job listed on LinkedIn. So it's a subset of placements that reported salaries, not just placements.
In their CA 2023 corrected report, 65% of people in the report did NOT report salaries in 2023 but were considered placements.
I agree that zero to placement doesn't make any rational sense anymore without having corporate support and potential jobs lined up.
By "you guys" I'm assuming you mean Formation, and Formation doesn't teach any vocational skills, so yes, you have to have employable programming skills coming in and our job is to help you level up to more impactful roles and pass interviews in a competitive market. So our entry bar will always change on paper as it's philosophically "already has hirable programming skills"
I mean do the math... $110K average salary, $55K increase, means that people make on average $65K coming in.
Now $65K isn't a 6'10 high school kid, but it's the median outcome of a lot of OTHER BOOTCAMPS.
I'm not sure if they include $0 in there or if they exclude them - again - no methodology is problematic and legally risky for them - but if they don't then it could be that half the people have no job because they quit and went all in, and half the people make $120K.
This is all speculation and exactly why publishing data is can of worms. You have to public reliable data or it means nothing except for marketing tricks and without disclaimers - legally playing with fire.
Well I'll try discussing lol.
A lot of people say the 'STEM people had an easier time' but I actually think the quality of your undergrad matters. From Codesmith's data, only a tiny number of people didn't have a degree. I think the ranking of undergrad school matters.
For example, if you have an ivy league undergrad majoring in law or music, you probably have a lot of friends in tech, are very bright, and have a lot of soft skills to succeed.
Salary increase over previous job is a good metric to use in general because it's demonstrating the value the career change had.
It's not a CIRR metric, it's not audited, it has no rules or guidelines, but it's a good metrics. The problem we have here is presenting that along side audited data can make it seem like all of the data is equally valid. I don't see ANY KIND OF DISCLAIMER EXPLAINING HOW IT'S CALCULATED (which is the non-lawyer legal advice I would give them)
I don't know anything about your program :S, did I attack it? And where so I can check?
Zooming out though the point is that if you pay people on Upwork to post on Reddit and make fake accounts to upvote and like your LinkedIn posts, it's not good behavior and it catches up to you over time and has nothing to do with me, I'm not forcing you to do that.
The Codesmith CEO could have emailed me 2 years ago and said 'hey, our team really doesn't like your tone on Reddit, can we chat so we can learn more about each others perspectives'. Someone from Codesmith did reach out to me and never replied after I insisted that we have to agree that I'm not competing with them to continue conversations.
If a whole team of leaders are making up their own story about me and don't even try to acknowledge my point of view, I can't really control that.
I think you reached out to me too and while I don't…
I dunno, I think it's totally fine and good for Codesmith to make a case for themselves, but I completely agree their response is more defensive and out of touch than making a legit case.
Making a case for themselves would be something like:
1. Codesmith staff work really hard to help people change careers successfully
2. For the right people, they feel confident in placing you, but for the wrong people, it's not working out anymore and there are no more shortcuts
3. Codesmith is focused on finding the right people, and if you want to see if that's you - apply and work with them on that.
4. Here are ANECDOTAL (not systematic) examples of what that looks like for people that it works for, and here are their backgrounds, LinkedIns, and strategies employeed to get jobs, and if you think you align with those, it might be a good fit for you too.
\------
Instead the defensive responses…
If you map out Codesmith's outcomes from 2021 -> 2024 with public data, you see 6 month placement rates dropping from like 90 -> 80 -> 70 -> 40%, you see salaries dropping like $125K -> $130K -> $120K -> $117K -> $110K
The trend doesn't look good.
BUT some people are getting jobs! The jobs do exist.
However I think it's going to take small bespoke programs working with the right people to get to the right place, and no program will systematically produce results.
These outcomes are the nail in the coffin to to speak because we've flipped from 'more likely than not' getting a job to not getting a job (when comparing apples to apples) so even the 'best bootcamp' can't more likely than not place someone in 6 months.
If you know me, I'm more than happy to write paragraphs of explanation. Using fake accounts to manipulate discussion is a pattern that Reddit is onto, banning dozens of Codesmith affiliated accounts, including two of their "official" ones.
It has nothing to do with me - it's just plain bad behavior.
Currently we require 2+ years of SWE work experience or we will decline working with you, so no brand new CS or bootcamp grads.
But in theory yes, and we have informal connections to many bootcamps who recommend Formation to alumni in their future job hunts and we have positive relationships - even though I'm equally hard on them about their outcomes and many have closed or paused/
I've been on contact with Codesmith and they haven't offered a call.
I'm still trying to get answers for harder questions, like why the ghosting rate went from 15% to about 65% in their CA government report and what caused that.
They have been evading the hard questions but I have a channel of communication open.
I feel like this post from Annie is trying to change the goal posts now from CIRR placement rates and salaries to overall offer count and salary increases. These new metrics might make sense but they are changing the goal posts to try to frame the numbers better instead of being transparent.
They know preliminary H1 2024 6 months placement rates for example and haven't shared them - which would be extremely relevant given their past data, and instead made up new metrics, just like the bootcamps they criticized who failed during Codesmith's rise to success.
Top level comments:
1. How many of the 102 offers were people job hunting over 1 year who would not be included in any reporting
2. 102 offers is a significant decline of offers per day from past reporting and a further decline deterioration of outcomes. can you clarify if this is that the job market is even worse in the end of 2024 or if this is because of significantly lower enrollment at Codesmith?
3. Similarly, $110,000 is possibly the lowest salary you've reported in 5 years or something. inflation has been running rampant and entry-level salaries have increased as well during that time. so can you give more explanation into this number? are people taking worse jobs or are they taking adjacent jobs that pay less that aren't software engineer jobs? or maybe just more insights into that number.
4. Why not publish preliminary H1 6-month placement rates now that 6 months have fully pas…
Formation is an interview prep mentorship program that doesn't teach anything and everyone has a different experience. Our main competitor is Pathrise and with some overlap with Interviewing io and Hello Interview. The key is that engineers who come to us need to be already trained in the practical skills and we help them prepare for interviews and land the job.
Codesmith is a bootcamp primarily focused on people without SWE work experience changing careers, or otherwise with no SWE work experience. Codesmith is training underlying technical skills required by the job based on a fixed curriculum that all students do.
There is a small overlap for atypical cases. We take some people with no SWE full time work experience who have the circumstances where we think we can help. Codesmith takes some people with work experience who don't have underlying employable skills or project experience.
I've explained this numerous times. We aren't a bootcamp and what we do doesn't fit into bootcamp reporting standards. We have subscriptions, we have people with interviews line up, as have people with super long job hunt timeframes, we have people with 1 year of experience and we have people with 20+ years of experience.
There is no single report format that will properly capture this data in a way that a new person could use to estimate anything, and it might do more harm than good if the person thinks they will get a job in 3 months and it ends up taking 6 for example.
We have 1-1 conversations with people about their goals and we try to advise on reasonable outcomes for them.
This takes more time and effort but it's essential given the nature of what we do.
Additionally:
You also made a mistake posting with an alt account that got instantly suspended by Reddit and then reposting…