You are hitting in the fundamental truth of why bootcamps make no sense unfortunately.
Places like Codesmith, where they teach you how to talk about your project without making it sound like a project and you put more effort into how to do that than the project itself. They convince you you are actually a senior engineer so you arent lying, just getting the 'credit you deserve'. One leader repeatedly told the cohorts that the 3 week project is equivalent of 4 months of full time senior engineering work (which is not true).
This approach worked during the good times but completely fell flat ok its face and Codesmith's immersive doesn't have many signs of life anymore.
Launch School and Triple Ten frame the projects more as internships. Triple Ten calls them externships. Launch School has some slots where you can work on some of the largest open source projects, like Firefox, under supp…
Well the "leadership" has minimal AI experience. Of the three people: one has product experience, one has like no tech experience for 10+ years, and one has never worked full time for a real tech company.
Like who the heck would hire tis group of people to overhaul AI at a Fortune 500 company?
I'm not trying to be mean but just realistic.
Like lots of companies ask me to do talks and stuff because I'm one of the highest output engineers in the world but I'm not the right person to overhaul AI tooling at a Fortune 500 company... I know what I'm good at and what I'm bad at.
I think they are going to die even faster with this pivot in my opinon.
You don't get points for good intentions in this industry.
You don't get a trophy for trying.
You don't build credibility by paying somebody on Upwork to write Twitter content for you.
Their homepage hero right now that seemed that changed o…
Well bootcamps basically gave you a $50 course with human accountability and feedback an d then charged you $10,000.
That was worth it when the accountability drastically increased the likelihood of finishing, the feedback made sure you actually learned, and the network helped you actually placed.
The market destroys the last one.
So a $50 course vs a 100X cost comes down to if you need to finish the course and learn.
If you are learning for learning's sake, $50 course.
If you really need to upskill or something without a job guarantee, a more expensive option could make sense.
I can clarify that, sorry I have a felling this will be long but it's important details IMO to make sure my opinions are clear.
So "fuzzing the numbers" doesn't mean intentional deception, but it means representing the numbers in a better light than they are. So by that definition - yes, CIRR was created through a marketing lens to promote bootcamps and it was designed to be rigorous enough to build trust, but also marketing-tilted enough to present numbers in a good light.
For example, there is a number that's like 'median salary'. But the only absolute number of people is the number of graduates and you have to chip away at that to get to the actual number of people in the people. E.g illustrative numbers: 100 people considered in the report, 90% graduated, 10% self employed, 5% not looking for jobs. 60% of what's left actually report income. So right off the bat the salaries only in…
The first bootcamp I dove into was Lambda School and its founder but once journalists published it was less interesting.
I have gathered lighter info on a dozen bootcamps but nothing interesting caught my eye.
Codesmith all started when I interviewed two engineers and they were lying through their teeth about their engineering jobs (that were 3 week projects at Codesmith) and then starting poking around and uncovering this ecosystem.
The second I starting poking around and asking questions I got this attack mob on me (which was later tied to a leader of Codesmith asking people to post on Reddit and go after my questions and observations).
Instead of being intimidated or bullied I launched an investigation that I've been spending now four years on, professionally asking people questions, watching tons of YouTube videos, collecting a lot of evidence, reading corporate fillings, lawsuit…
No CIRR 2024-25 reports? Never taken this long for them to come out, and CIRR did not respond within 2 days to my request for comment prior to publication of this.
I'm going to call it a wrap on CIRR, the self proclaimed "gold standard" of bootcamp stats.
I'll I'm going to say it that I think it's ridiculous how when the times are good, bootcamps are throwing around CIRR as proof of their excellence.
And then when times are bad, they are fuzzing the numbers (Codesmith's report has so many people who did not respond with placement information and they counted because of LinkedIn, that the integrity of the reports is garbage now in my opinion.... or Codesmith publishing a press release that CIRR verified "85-90% of graduates placed within 12 months" - which isn't even verifiable with CIRR).
I hope all of you who yelled at me over and over and over, with anonymous now-banned accounts, j…
Here is a list of the problems to show that i'm not being sarcastic. You could feed this into AI and fix all of these in an hour.
This doesn't include CSX.
1. Footers inconsistent across site, one says 2025, one says 2026
2. Alignment in 2026 footer is not centered properly
3. Header, hover on the final item in each list has no radius and bleeds onto the page
4. Home -> Join Us -> Train Your Team -> Enterprise -> Enquire -> hello@codesmith email. Felt like I was going in circles.
5. Programs say "more dates available" but the other dates are the exact same ones in the header I clicked from
6. The dates make no sense and Jun 1 should be July 1
7. Median Salary & Employment Rate overflows in one box, inconsistent
8. It looks like their loan providers is gone but now the payment options have a gap missing a block that looks weird
9. The Terms and Privacy policy are dated…
Yeah happy to DM, I've always been open to hearing all sides and have had numerous discussions.
I also have dozens and dozens of emails with the Codesmith staff discussing things in private. "Like hey your data is inconsistent and mathematically wrong" and often got no response. I spoke to their current CEO the most and did a call with her about how we could work together more productively, but when she completely flipped the narrative in that blog, I'm done... I can't trust these people whatsoever and a bunch of former staff who can't speak because of various reasons have witnessed similar things working there, so I'm just incredibly frustrated.
Not a single person other than their current CEO has told me Will is a trustworthy person. The arguments I have are people attacking my motivations and never actual counters to a dozen people calling Will a liar, unreliable, flaky, controlling…
We're on the same page that Will genuinely cares about improving education and genuinely cares about each Codesmith student and outcome.
The problem is he's not capable on the ground and his vision doesn't justify sharing thousands of students information in a call, losing the credentials for their AWS account, or his website leaking sensitive info like application gender and disability status. You shouldn't have to sacrifice anything to support that.
He allegedly sold 70% of his company in 2015/2016....
Court documents allege an agreement to make $500K a year and up to 50% of profits (not sure what that is for $23.5M of revenue)...
It's not an excuse for sharing "Landman Season 1 Web Rip" repeatedly alongside a "U.S Treasury" folder on this computer.
It's terribly sad because he hired a ton of people from Upwork to address his deficiencies and they arguably made it all worse. The s…
Well I think they believe they are selling the Nimbus 2000 of shovels and I'm like "hey this is the Shooting Star of shovels..."
And for doing that people try to ruin my life and the nicest and kindest community pulls out their knives and Reddit assassins try to take me out.
Very fucked up indeed.
100% there are a lot of stuff going on in the world that is more intentional bad than this, but 90% of people speed and only a few people getting speeding tickets. The cops allow a little speeding here and there but if you get caught, you can't use that as an excuse in court.
And ironically Codesmith can't use the fact that I did four years of research into them and Bloomtech and a few others as excuses when other people are "speeding" too.
I mean the claims they make about training leaders at the best tech companies in the world are a bit dubious given their own website says of the "5000" people only 76 FAANG offers.
Their website also has bar charts that aren't even accurate (like the bars looks made up and are identical on two unrelated charts).
Like I know their founder went to Hack Reactor himself and is not STEM but it just feels like no one there knows what they are doing in a STEM industry to me but they are trying incredibly hard regardless. After so many fuck ups over and over the recilience is insane... if only they would learn their own role in those fuck ups and improve.
Ultimately the failure is in taking my criticism as attacks instead of as a useful perspective to think about whether they agree or not.
Ok on the one hand, the rankings are on Forbes Advisor / Marketplace, which is incredibly ironic as the author of a blog post alleging that I was manipulating this sub as a moderator built his reputation "exposing" Forbes Advisor and alleging it was manipulating search.
I see Codesmith mentioned all over and I agree that it looks inconsistently represented... in one place it is ranked #6, not #1. And all of the coding bootcamp names that did NOT pay to play still brinf SEO traffic to the ones that DO pay at the top of the page.
On the other hand, I don't think Codesmith paid and they are not listed as a sponsored program... none of the Best of X awards individually is labelled but there is a section of sponsored programs above those and some are listed on both.
I fully agree that this appears to be shoving as much SEO friendly names at the bottom of the page to bring attention to the…
Codesmith launched their new website and it shifts focus to "enterprise" AI consulting, burying all their individual programs.
Codesmith updated their website in the past week and it appears to me in my personal opinion that their individual programs are being de-emphasized significantly.
Note: there are numerous references to being the Forbes #1 bootcamps, which is false and they should remove that. Forbes updated their rankings April 1st (3 weeks ago) and while they used to be last year, that is not correct anymore and the link they provide themselves no longer has them as #1. Forbes now assigns "Best at X" awards in a number of categories and Codesmith has 'best outcomes'... but does not have best for experienced coders, not best career support, not best for portfolio, not student support, not professional development, so that seems like a slip up or mistake.
What are they pivoting…
Yeah nothing takes that away from him, it just seems he can't get his shit together as an operator based on my opinion of publicly available information.
Codesmith lost the AWS credentials and Codesmith's email and primary website were down for 3 weeks as they struggled to recover it.
He personally screen-shared evidence of pirated "web rip" copies Landman Season 1 and 2 numerous times in a public talk just a week or two ago about Open Claw.
He has intentionally screen shared his calendar numerous times in his presentations making it public info, student information numerous times.
Codesmith's website had numerous major security/PII issues that took several attempts to fix.
Codesmith student projects have leaked credentials, keys, etc... including a real charity's test Salesforce login information.
That's just a handful of explicitly public things off the top of my head that in my…
Well I can give my personal opinion on that and I have been researching for a while.
I think Will is a gifted explainer. He said he wrote the Hard Parts originally because he didn't really know how to code well. I think he said in an interview he didn't know what a JS "Map" was when he wrote them. He has additionally said that he does talks when he wants to learn something because it forces him to learn in order to then present it to people as an expert.
So given that it's absolutely fascinating how well he can explain things he literally just learned.
He has additionally said that he never wanted to teach, but both his parents are teachers and he said that as a kid he would force his sisters into doing classes on the weekends at home where he would lecture to them on things....
So it sounds like he's a gifted lecturer and it's just his superpower.
My opinion is the situation is qui…
The blog post does not even mention this lawsuit and the examples it uses attributes incorrectly to causing millions of dollars of revenue loss are out of context comments that received dozens to hundreds of 'view counts' compared to negative Codesmith posts **from other people** that received tens of thousands of views.
It's up to you to decide if the lawsuit was relevant during this period of decline, but leaving it out of that blog post does not give you the information needed to do that.
That is clearly tunnel vision blog post that started with a narrative around motivations that I believe is false and then worked backwards. In middle school that's how you fail essay writing.
Codesmith's CEO emailed me several months before that blog post when we discussed it and said: "I do not consider Formation a competitor, it is quite clear to me that our products are different."
If you want…
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
The blog post does not even mention this lawsuit and the examples it uses attributes incorrectly to causing millions of dollars of revenue loss are out of context comments that received dozens to hundreds of 'view counts' compared to negative Codesmith posts **from other people** that received tens of thousands of views.
It's up to you to decide if the lawsuit was relevant during this period of decline, but leaving it out of that blog post does not give you the information needed to do that.
That is clearly tunnel vision blog post that started with a narrative around motivations that I believe is false and then worked backwards. In middle school that's how you fail essay writing.
Codesmith's CEO emailed me several months before that blog post when we discussed it and said: "I do not consider Formation a competitor, it is quite clear to me that our products are different."
If you want…
Who Owns Codesmith? A Court Fight Takes Us Under the Hood to the Hard Parts
I wrote this piece about a lawsuit from 2024-2025 impacting Codesmith for many years. It's a neutral, factual summary of the public record that hasn't been told before that I can find... hundreds of pages of court documents summarized into something digestible.
[https://michaelnovati.substack.com/p/codesmith-in-court-the-hard-parts](https://michaelnovati.substack.com/p/codesmith-in-court-the-hard-parts)
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
Vote manipulation continues. I'm not saying who is doing it, but someone is.
Comment after 2 hours from commenting: +4 karma, 60 views
2 more hours later: -7 karma, 92 views
So the first 60 people that saw this had a 4 karma rating
Then the nex 32 people 11 of them voted negatively.
The participation rate in commenting went from 7% to 35% suddently, **but only one one comment**
Makes no sense and regardless of who is doing it, it makes Codesmith look bad.
Especially after Codesmith's CEO sent me evidence unintentionally of hiring a Reddit market who manipulates Reddit comments and has had dozens of accounts banned from Reddit.
Explain the vendetta, explain the marketing strategy. Like there's no proof of any of the wild claims. No text messages, no slack messages, nothing... I'm one person, sharing my personal opinions, and not talking to anyone about them.
Yet I have many text messages, slack messages, and otherwise of people who were asked by Codesmith leaders to post and comment and share stuff on Reddit, LinkedIn etc...
I'm defending my reputation as a single person against a very large coordinated group and that's why respond to all of that.
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
The blog post does not even mention this lawsuit and the examples it attributes incorrectly to causing millions of dollars of revenue loss are out of context comments that received dozens to hundreds of 'view counts' compared to negative Codesmith posts **from other people** that received tens of thousands of views.
That is clearly tunnel vision blog post that started with a narrative around motivations that I believe is false and then worked backwards. In middle school that's how you fail essay writing.
Codesmith's CEO emailed me several months before that blog post when we discussed it and said: "I do not consider Formation a competitor, it is quite clear to me that our products are different."
If you want my opinions about the lawsuit, I have many, and I'm not sharing them.
Who Owns Codesmith? A Court Fight Takes Us Under the Hood to the Hard Parts
I wrote this piece about a lawsuit from 2024-2025 impacting Codesmith for many years. It's a neutral, factual summary of the public record that hasn't been told before that I can find... hundreds of pages of court documents summarized into something digestable.
[https://michaelnovati.substack.com/p/codesmith-in-court-the-hard-parts](https://michaelnovati.substack.com/p/codesmith-in-court-the-hard-parts)
Do you know how many people have signed up for cohorts since then? If any?
Like I've been researching Codesmith for 4 years and their student GitHub repos have very little signs of life relative to before. And they did a 3 month pause on new cohorts, breaking their years long tradition of overlapping cohorts and junior/senior model.
I know Launch School cut back from 3 cohorts for 2026 to 2 cohorts, which is their first reported decline, but they also aren't really a "bootcamp" and have never had a ton of students.
I'm not a lawyer. If things are laid out clearly in the fine print for a reasonable person to understand I do think the onus is on the reasonable consumer. But if the debate is over whether this is "reasonable" or not, I won't chime in on that.
My person opinion is that even the bigger bootcamps are small businesses in the grand scheme of things and have so few customers in the grand scheme of things that I think the market and actions of the bootcamp will ultimately be their demise if they are not communicating transparently and openly... like I said, bootcamps are shooting themselves in the foot if their numbers look unrealistically good in this environment and it's actually a negative signal in my opinion. Like what in my opinion happened to Codesmith... covering up a majority of ghosting alumni by counting 'LinkedIn verified placements' that boost numbers. Everyone can see with thei…
I don't think so intentionally. Maybe I'm naive, but the bootcamps I know the founders do really care and want to do good. It's more of a symptom of the psychology of the founders.
I have been doing a 4 year study of Codesmith and it exemplifies this.
Like Codesmith for example, the founder went from NOTHING to $25M a year. He was allegedly (according to court documents) making $500K a year + up to 50% of profits. Like that kind of overnight success could go to someone's head. Codesmith's founder hired a ton of people on Upwork to support him and they all just back up this vision of a genius who made $25M out of nothing.
And that's a big accomplishment right!
But in reality Codesmith was benefiting from the founder's natural teaching ability and a popular Frontend Masters course + and the very hot job market for SWEs. Many materials were allegedly copy-paste, the instructors just gra…
Two things to watch out for in that slide deck of outcomes
1. It's from 2024 and AI changes month to month. A number of industry engineers report not writing code anymore as of 3 months ago, so it's basically irrelevant what happened in 2024.
2. The 88% figure has some crazy fine print. If I'm reading it correctly, 88% of the people WHO GOT JOBS got them within six months and 12% took longer to get the job. But it's not the percentage of people that got a job.
TripleTen does a similar metric, but for TripleTen the weakness in the data is more that a huge number of people remain "active" by not graduating and not dropping out so they don't count in the stats and they are there too long to get job guarantee refunds.
I don't know if Hyperion is self paced with a similar gap but I would ask for clarity on the placement rates.
No program is perfect and any program that looks amazing in t…
Yeah lawyers are involved and my stance is incredibly strong.
Do you know about Codesmith's investor lawsuit in 2024-2025? There are claims of millions of dollars of unauthorized transfers there (which are allegations and not proven). Maybe that has some kind of impact on them.
If you think I'm one sided on here you would be better off chatting with me to try to understand more.
The biggest impact I had was encouraging people one on one to go to Codesmith, Rithm, Launch School and others when the time was right.
The Extinction (or Execution?) of The Junior Engineer - from your friendly neighborhood former moderator
Hi all, it saddens me the sub that I put 4 years of my time into providing honest and from the heart advice in is dying. Coding bootcamps have been dead for months now. Codesmith's GitHub repos look like a ghost town. Launch Academy never came back from their 'pause'.
So I started written very thoughtful essays about what's going on and this one is particularly relevant:
[https://michaelnovati.substack.com/p/the-extinction-of-the-junior-engineer](https://michaelnovati.substack.com/p/the-extinction-of-the-junior-engineer)
**SUMMARY:**
* Entry-level software roles are disappearing because the “training work” (simple, bounded tasks) is increasingly automated or absorbed by senior engineers using AI, reducing the need to hire juniors.
* Employers now prioritize “judgment” (real-world…