This is correct. When I talk about other programs there are very short threads. When I talk about Codesmith people come out of nowhere and we have these endless back and forths
The Codesmith comments are very dense on Codesmith posts and comments and it has to do both with my frequent commentary about Codesmith AND the amount of back and forth that happens when I talk about them.
Reddit removed your post I think, wasn't me and not sure if my reply will go through, but I'm replying anyways:
1. 100% agree one of the things that comes with being open is that you should be reasonably questioned and that's the critical part to being open. On the other hand, it's not open seasons to anonymously attack me (which you aren't doing Ludo and you aren't anonymous, but others have over the years).
2. I don't know what to say, I logged into our Google Ads account and spent time to confirm myself and the only keyword we are targeting with the word bootcamp in it is "formation bootcamp" and it had 0.2% of all impressions compared to all of our keywords. Google Ads use all kinds of algorithms to display you ads and we are not targeting any other terms with "bootcamp" in it and most of the impressions are for variations of "interview prep".
If you don't think I'm lying on the r…
FACT: I stated this for the public record: I asked the team and we do not and have not as far as they are aware, bid on any Google search keywords containing the word "bootcamp", other than "formation bootcamp" (as we bid on many phrases containing formation as it's a Beyonce song and common term)
I don't know all of the job offer details people are getting no, but if it was shared to the public intentionally I would see no problem using it in theory. But no, I don't know all of the job offer details.
I key part of this analysis is that CIRR 2022 data is out, so if I run a less perfect analysis on 2022 data and compare to CIRR, I can do the same analysis on 2023 data and adjust the output based on that + other factors (like that 2023 cohorts were on average smaller according to the public record, APPROX: 30ish H1 2023 and high 20s in H2 2023.)
I'm allowed to pay attention to details,…
1. We're not competing with any bootcamps at this time and have repeatedly told you that. I've given you the objective correct answer from the source of truth and you keep spreading the same false narrative. If you do not have a year of SWE work experience you will be auto rejected. If you have under 2, you will likely be rejected but can have a conversation about. If you are special case, we might admit you under a year, but I can count those people on one hand in the past year.
We might compete with bootcamps in the future, but have no plans to anytime soon and it would require a large investment and changes on our part.
2. I explained how we advertise on Reddit and that we target all the top programming subs and we have re-targeting ads anywhere. So people who engage with Formation will see us everywhere, not just here.
3. You don't have any right to say who I am and why I do what…
1. As I told you privately before this post, I had our team check and we do not bid on any keywords containing the word "bootcamp" other than "formation bootcamp", and none of our Google ads say we are a bootcamp.
2. As I'm sure people here will attest, we flat out automatically reject people who don't have a year of SWE WORK experience since mid 2023. So a struggling bootcamp grad will not be a candidate for Formation right now.
3. I openly acknowledged my conflicts transparently. The individuals whose close allies have informed me lurk this sub anonymously and manipulate by engaging under the radar are who you should be going after if you care about conflicts and integrity.
I think they will allow you in as long as you don't have paid work experience doing programming and don't have a CS degree.
I was also confused about this because Codesmith claims people who did CSX are junior engineer hirable so therefore they shouldn't be eligible but they assured me that someone who did CSX could do this as long as they weren't paid SWEs.
Yeah I mean the number of alumni in 2023 vs 2022 is about the same and I expect 2024 to have like 1/4 of the number of alumni and they are more "ready" for the process mentally speaking. I don't know if that means they'll get more jobs.
I know Codesmith for example, people are starting to tangential jobs and be celebrated for it. Like customer support engineering roles, whereas historically people got SWE roles and all they talked about was mid level SWE.
Got long, TLDR: agree a bootcamp should do what it needs to to help you get your first job, including career services, but ultimately you are paying a bootcamp to teach out and not paying for a job and that has the following consequences.
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I have had super intense arguments with Codesmith people about this who adamently INSIST their lifetime mock interviews are amazing and any other service (like [Interviewing.io](http://Interviewing.io) or my company) are a waste of money.
There is a massive difference in a mock interview run like a real interview with a former Google engineer who has interviewed people on the job recently, than an alumni or teacher doing a mock interview and giving you feedback.
Notice I said "DIFFERENCE" and not that one is better or worse, both are good. The bootcamp should do what it does because it's super helpful to have multiple points of view and types…
SWE generalist is the most secure you can be. Which is a SWE who can work in any part of the stack on on any kind of problem.
I wouldn't worry about AI yet. AI is going to create a bunch of new kinds of jobs - which might be amazing for bootcamp grads. We're seeing Codesmith go heavily in this direction trying to push AI skills to students and encouraging them to take all kinds of "tangential" SWE jobs. Those are all one-off jobs right now, e.g. a Lawyer Prompt Engineer (definitely not something anyone going in would assume they would get), but in the future, these will be real entry level jobs to get into tech, and being a Generalist SWE will be the longer term thing you become over time.
1. It's free for you so that's amazing, you are basically getting Codesmith's immersive and more for free.
CONCERNS
1. The job market is terrible right now and this program requires you to have zero experience to get in. Unless they have hiring partners guaranteeing jobs, I would be cautious about planning to get a job at the end, just like any bootcamp.
2. Codesmith grads tend to portray their group projects and past work experience as close to software engineer work experience as possible in your resumes, many resumes leaving it up to the reader to realize these things are not actually SWE experience because they look like it. I'm going to be watching these people like a hawk because all Future Code people have zero SWE experience and if the majority of resumes indicate otherwise at the end of this program that will be a huge concern and they might get into legal trouble with the Ci…
Unofficial Analysis: a top bootcamp's 2023 grad placement rates APPEAR TO DROP ALMOST HALF from 2022 grad placement rates (from about 80% to 45%). Even the best can't beat the market right now. [Illustrative only, may contain errors]
DISCLAIMER: I'm a moderator of this sub and I'm the co-founder of mentorship and interview prep platform aimed at helping existing SWE's prepare for upcoming interviews and level up their SWE jobs. We do not compete with bootcamps but I have a conflict of interest because we work with a bunch of bootcamp grads later in their careers. More bootcamp grads === more customers in a couple years, so I believe I have a bias to encourage people to go to bootcamps rather than be doom and gloom on the industry like this post largely is. BUT having worked with so many bootcamp grads I think it's imperative people have as much information as possible if they are inve…
Sorry I didn't realize the wording of that was poor at the time but think it was now.
I meant the CEO, the advisors, etc... have other ways to make money and could do number of other things so my theory is they are sticking to Codesmith's current narrative out of 1. loyalty and 2. pride.
I didn't meant to imply Will was making money from FrontEnd Masters directly - just that it's evidence that he could make money teaching in other ways.
I posted the thing you linked to above but I want to clarify two things in this comment:
Launch Academy temporarily halted enrollment
Codesmith continues enrolling but reduced from 4 cohorts options + 1 part time to 1 cohort option + 1 part time
Rithm School had possible layoffs, but continues enrolling as of 5/26/2024
Thanks for sharing and hopefully it was also a learning experience good and bad.
A lot of bootcamps are in a similar situation unfortunately, some nicer than others.
When you say that they needed to pivot to ML and AI, was that officially planned and they couldn't pull it off?
I've seen Codesmith (adding on AI) and BloomTech (pivoting to AI) but it still feels like the days of Web3 and BlockChain bootcamps that popped up during the Bitcoin spike.
No one knew what Web3 skills companies wanted and companies didn't have systematic ways of hiring and accessing for Web3 skills so a bootcamp focused on Web3 didn't make sense.
Right now no one knows what AI skills companies want because the companies don't know.
We're in a 1-2 year phase where companies are exploring generative AI internally and we'll see what kinds of skills people need.
The existing senior engineers will have a lot of…
I've studied Launch School grads and Codesmith grads side by side here because both do these group projects called "capstone projects" (Launch School) or "OSP" (Codesmith) that are open source, have websites, blog posts, and all kinds of scaffolding around them to brand them as super legit projects.
I did this write up last year of [Codesmith](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/18cpq98/analysis_of_52_most_recent_codesmith_offers/)
I haven't done one for Launch School because they are much smaller and it's easier to find students yourself and look it up.
There are three completely separate issues here:
1. Representation of project as Software Engineer job. Codesmith students often list the project as "Software Engineer". They occasionally add "Open Source" to the title or description and occasionally add "Developed under OSLabs" in the description - both of which don't m…
Yeah disclosure my company runs an interview prep and mentorship platform to help people get ready for interviews. We don't solve these problems I'm talking about but we help people on the ground who are in the process of changing jobs. So some overlap, I disclose if I was directly promoting my company to someone :P
Teaching AI or using AI?
BloomTech has a B2B $5000 'using AI' course that's 5 months or something fairly detailed.
Codesmith is working on an AI add on package and had the first session this week and someone who went didn't find it very useful yet. (It's early stage)
Most of the companies I talk to don't really need any AI skills yet and want senior product engineers who will figure out AI. Because it's changing so fast there isn't a way for these companies to consistently and fairly test people for AI so it's not really meaningful yet in hiring decisions.
It might matte…
1. Yeah we'll see, I hope that's what happens too and it's what's broadly expected. A number of bootcamps that are not doing so well though are banking on this happening to avoid further layoffs or shutdowns. If I'm planning ahead for multiple outcomes I would bias towards your view here, but I wouldn't bank the survival of my company on it.
2. Agree to disagree, I don't think my view is the only view here and it does depend on a bunch of personal factors. Agree there are startups that can be fantastic to go to as well.
3. Yeah it's old and it's Galvanize so I assume it's bias. I have a bunch of friends leaving Climate Tech to go to AI companies, so my personal view is bias and I tried to find other resources and couldn't find any showing that Climate Tech will dominate hiring this year.
RE: CODESMITH - long story. But the triggering point is that they are an advanced bootcamp that t…
Lots of interesting back and forth here, just wanted to chime in. I'm not sure who you are but these are Codesmith's talking points so apologies if I sound like a broken record - I strongly disagree with Codesmith's narrative about "the modern software engineer" and I think it's being made up to highlight non-SWE and non-tech placements as the future instead of because the people can't get entry level SWE jobs in this market.
1. It's really not a given that interest rates will drop and they won't drop THAT much. Like going from 5.25% to 5% isn't going to trigger all this dry powder to get dumped.
2. This is why you want a really good top tier tech job from day 1 if you can get it, improving a button is shortsighted and not thinking about your 30 year career: [https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/1cz4pal/comment/l5e8600/](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/1cz4…
Yeah agree she didn't say enrollment was down. Codesmith cut their offerings from 4 cohorts to 1 so I was assuming that as fact since she works at Codesmith and I agree that I shouldn't assume she knows that in making that statement, it's likely but not assumable.
I agree with the rest of what you said too regarding higher costs, lower outcomes, less appealing and maybe impossible for people financially is a good argument too that's unrelated to the outcomes.
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
Hi, where in the post did you see the quote: "People becoming SWEs today are aware of tough market, but persevere because they're truly passionate about coding"?
I read "People that are becoming engineers now are definitely passionate about coding. More so than when the iron was hot and everybody was just talking about how amazing it is to have a tech job"
I agree with Kim's comment that a far smaller number of people are considering bootcamps now BUT they are far more passionate and committed and know what they are getting themselves into.
I thank that to places like Reddit helping people be informed about bootcamps so they can join for the right reasons and I'm glad she's seeing that trend too.
I disagree with OP's characterization that people are "persevering" despite the market.
I have a couple of friends who graduated from Codesmith in early 2024 and while it's far too early t…
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
I mean it's very optimistic about ML creating more jobs and I share that optimism.
But at the same time, in the past year, Rithm has had layoffs, Launch Academy, Turing School, Hack Reactor, Tech Elevator, and even Codesmith has laid off almost half the staff. CodeUp shut down. Epicodus shut down.
Like I don't want to be a big rain cloud hovering over the parade, but there are legitimate concerns for a typical student looking to join a bootcamp right now that didn't exist 2+ years ago. And to not acknowledge them is irresponsible.
Acknowledging them doesn't have to be doom and gloom though.
Living in an imperfect world and trying to be bring positivity to it, doesn't have to mean you ignore anything negative.
+1 don't draw any conclusions from one off anecdotes whether positive stories or negative stories, they are all one offs.
I do think it's fair to look at the market trends and recent layoffs at Rithm, Turing, Launch Academy, Hack Reactor, Tech Elevators, and Codesmith as signs that the market is the dominant factor right now, anecdotal stories aside.
The ones at Stanford, MIT, and CMU are haha.
I'm from Canada originally my program was 100% engineering courses other than three electives my entire four years. When I did an internship down here, I was housed with a bunch of Carnegie Mellon students and they stayed up till 2 AM every night just talking about different rhythms and technological approaches and debating the pros and cons and stuff like that. It was like a magically eye-opening experience that made me regret commuting from home.
Obviously, that's not the norm, but if you're someone like Codesmith who is comparing themselves to ivy league grad schools then that's I'm holding them to.
If you want to talk about like a decent state school compared to a Bootcamp, then I would expect graduates to also have a hard time finding jobs if they don't have a lot of internships and didn't spend most of their time engufled in software.…
Sorry to hear this and it's an unfortunate reality of the industry.
**!!! A 12 to 16 BOOTCAMP CANNOT PREPARE YOU TO BE EQUAL TO SOMEONE WITH MORE EXPERIENCE !!! EVEN CODESMITH DESPITE WHAT THEY TELL YOU (**Actually read the following notes on why everyone!)
I see day in and day out people from bootcamps, people who are self taught, CS grads, all in later stages of their careers, these are my notes:
1. Everyone is unique. Any person's unique journey cannot represent a bootcamp, a background, a city, or whatever aspects you are trying to generalize about the person.
2. Grit, hustle and effort can get you very far in this industry. If you are less experienced than a new grad and outwork them you likely will have better initial traction on your job. You might get accolades and a promotion. If you are a CS grad who has grid and hustle, it will be really hard for a bootcamp grad to outpace…
I post about this often and I get ripped apart, but Codesmith grads are not fairing as well as Codesmith says they do in talks and blog posts.
Many ARE! don't get me wrong! But some people who exaggerated to get that first job during better times are hitting a ceiling. Their hustle and grit got them 1-3 years of time on the job, but they struggle to continue growing - as the company expected them to when hiring the high-intensity under-qualified person. I've seen people who are really lost. They don't know what to do. They don't know if they should apply for "senior jobs" or go back to entry level (1-2 years is still entry level) and the next step might feel like a step back in order to get back on a good career trajectory. This impacts other bootcamps grads who had a similar story as well.
It's very personal and very tough and I know grads who are crushing it and doing awesome. But th…
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
According to Codesmith data, only under 1/4 of students had CS degrees before Codesmith, and a good number of those were people who graduated a long time ago and never did SWE, or recently graduated and couldn't get a job.
So while I'm not saying to go there or not to go there with experience, but I will point out that the vast majority of people there, do not have SWE experience and the ones that do are there for more specific reasons than mentioned above.
How do you know you couldn't have gotten that outcome anywhere else?
One of the interesting patterns I've observed is Codesmith students who have low self confidence + high ambition, work ethic and are naturally smart and Codesmith re-programs you to get over "importer syndrome" by building your self confidence.
I think it's incredibly amazing if a program can systematically build self confidence in people - that's like probably worth more money than any bootcamp.
But when I see people who will irrationally fight for Codesmith because it changed their lives, it feels like it's from the above \^\^\^.
The thing to watch out for is that the job is step one. Getting the right first job has a major impact on your career. Codesmith gets many people great first jobs, but more than other bootcamps, I've seen great alumni go to the wrong jobs. They posted on Reddit FERVANTLY, attacked me FERV…
I mean reading between the lines from everyone, things aren't going great and the top bootcamps aren't filling cohorts or are filling them last minute.
If there isn't demand to fill a cohort, a school has to decide - lower the bar? increase marketing costs (which can kill the company if they don't work because it's expensive)? give successful alumni free stuff to post reviews (like Codesmith is doing haha)?
Or you can accept the fact that it's not great for bootcamps and turtle up, shrink to the minimal size to survive. Don't make many changes, and try to ride out the market.
Unless they are on vacation on a pre-arranged pause, if they don't do anything for a week they are automatically flagged and paused and then we schedule a check in or contact their emergency contact and find them.
So someone can't just do nothing for 12 months. They can pause though for a month and come back later and that's not considered a failure case, it's very common for people to pause while launching a big project at work and then ramping up afterwards, or moving slower until they get promoted and then ramping up to change companies.
Every person has a team of 4 team members monitoring them and working with them, separate from technical mentorship.
We do NOT have lifetime membership. If people come back in the future they have to pay again to do Formation again. Formation ends when you get a job by definition (or otherwise withdraw)
It's strictly impossible for someone to join…
How does "no new job" happen I think is the point that needs clarification.
There's no end to Formation so everyone who continues to intend on job hunting keeps going until they get a job.
So the only way you do not get a job is if you change your mind and don't want one anymore, or you don't think Formation is effective for you anymore and you choose to leave early.
I don't really know who is "responsible" for you leaving early. If people want to be here then we work with you until you get a job and there isn't a failure case. But I think the answer is that it's the Fellow's responsibility if they do not get a job.
It's our responsibility to get you ready for a job as efficiently as possible, and if show up and do stuff but you progress too slowly then that is our responsibility.
We don't tend to remove people and I don't know. The handful of people we have removed are people that paused for person life circumstances and then never came back. People ramp up or down and go at their own pace, so it really depends on the pace the person wants to work at and our system supports whatever.
If Formation isn't a good fit and people are not progressing towards their own goals and we don't think Formation was effective that we have talked to case by case to leave and be partially refunded based on the activity the person did but this is also a single digit percentage non-generalizable case.
We don't have a generalized way of removing people.
That's why we have people with us for months and for years and it's impossible to provided high level aggregated data and stats that mean anything.
I think the mental framework of a school doesn't work at all for Formation and I don't feel like I can answer that.
Anyone who shows up is guaranteed to get to the bar, it might just take years for one person and weeks for another.
If someone doesn't show up and doesn't want to get to that bar, they will voluntarily leave, or we'll work with them to adjust to their news goals, if their new goals don't work, we'll remove someone.
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
Similar to other feedback, this person graduated Codesmith in 2017, and has had 3 jobs since then and her trajectory and path don't reflect what a person going to Codesmith today will experience.
I love reading profiles about people and their trajectories and I loved reading this post, I'm just giving feedback that Codesmith needs to deal with the market today more directly and not the market they want to have. And appeal to people who they think will succeed in this market through Codesmith.
I would love to read a profile about someone who is struggling on the job market and doesn't have a job yet and how much they love Codesmith anyways and how Codesmith is helping them the best they can. That is representative of the common grad right now unlike when the person above graduated and started their career.
Question #1 wasn't responded to and I think Question 1 is most important because it's critical for how prospective students understanding your process for creating curriculum that delivers outcomes.
I say this all the time, but it's critical to understand HOW a program works and not explaining this is a lack of transparency IMO - even if the answer is we don't tie curriculum to outcomes.
Tis should be my number one concern as a curriculum manager - if you can't measurably demonstrate your curriculum is improving outcomes then why does Codesmith exist (rhetorical question).
Again, I'm being tough because if you call yourself the best, you have to hold yourself to that bar.
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
Prior experience as a SWE or prior experience in tech? Those are two completely different things. Prior experience as a legit SWE, do not do Codesmith. Prior experience as SWE-adjacent or other tech role, consider Codesmith.
Since you are answering this "Official AMA" representing Codesmith, be careful misrepresenting the company.
The vast majority of alumni according to your own data had no prior SWE experience and it's not even super correlated to Codesmith outcomes (it is a bit, but not really).
If you haven't seen your own data ask for it before trusting other Codesmith staff.
The one off single anecdote about a PayPal manage graduated Codesmith SIX YEARS AGO and took THREE YEARS to become a manager.
I'm familiar with all three of those grads actually yeah, but I'm curious what data is backing this narrative. From hearing Will it seems to hypothesis on the idea that "capacities" are all that matters, but no one is giving me hard experimental evidence this hypothesis stands up - it's all anecdotal and quotes from individual alumni. And all you need is single counter examples to disprove a hypothesis so this is not a valid argument and I want to know more!!!
Like I know these people and I wouldn't say these are reproducible paths that any Codesmith student could choose to follow.
For example, if you had a bunch of alumni at OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity and generalized from them and resulted in each person with a unique path, that would make more sense to me.
But if everyone is a unique case not in these large scale consistent AI roles as hiring managers and building orgs of tho…
Hi James! I have some tough questions about the logistics. Codesmith markets itself as the best so I have some tough questions I expect answers to from the best :D.
1. How do systematically measure the impact of curriculum updates on placements and outcomes?
2. Related to 1, how do decide what updates to make based on the job market? For example, I have talked to a bunch of the top AI companies and if you aren't being hired for an ML role with a PhD and 10 years of ML experience, they don't actually want or need any AI experienced whatsoever to hire you for product and infra roles. So I'm curious where the decision to add AI/ML comes from if it's not related to getting people jobs.
3. How do you systematically identify and prioritize "best practices across the software engineering landscape"? I'm aware of a survey that's given to alumni and a curriculum panel of 6 or so alumni in in…
I would probably talk way less about Codesmith if their CEO commented on here, because the discussions would be efficient. I will absolutely grill him on the facts, but respect his views and people would efficiently see different sides of the argument, no name calling and anonymous attacks from people making false assumptions.
Without that voice, we have a dozen alumni contributing pieces of that discussion and not being qualified to respond to challenges about the pedagogy and strategy.
Yeah we only take on Fellows we can support, right now in this market we have more capacity, but in the past we've had a waitlist when we didn't think we could operationally provide the experience we want.
You do four primary activities:
1. Practice (doing problems by yourself and with others)
2. Benchmarking (you do a ton, probably dozens or over a hundred practice assessments and get evaluated on each one)
3. Mentor Sessions (typically 3 to 5 person group sessions where the mentor guides people through a problem and you all work together to solve it)
4. Mock interviews (1-1 run by actual engineers as real interviews but with feedback on where to improve)
You do a combination of all of this and it changes week to week based on how you are doing.
And when you get to the point that you are consistently at the FAANG-level bar, we switch to job hunt mode and we track all your applic…
In general, we try to look for recent outcomes of people who are similar to your background on paper, and where you are starting from and compare that to your goals.
So if your goal is to become an E5 at Meta and your background doesn't support that we might say, people similar to you have gotten E4 Rotational Engineer jobs at Meta and we would be aiming for that if you came to Formation. That job pays $175K base with a $50K signing bonus and is a 12 month rotation that converts to full E4 if you ramp up as expected.
It's really personal and through examples and pattern matching but it's much more specific than any aggregated numbers could be.
One of the challenging aspects of Formation for us to explain how it works, is that more experience people tend to not broadcast on LinkedIn that they went to Formation and people with less experience tend to put it out there to build a profile. Like if you currently work at a good company at doing Formation to level up, you don't want your company to know necessarily you are doing Formation or that you were doing it for the past six months to leave.
So if you are experience (which most of the people we work with are) then it's harder to find people like you to talk to.
Add in the fact that our entrance bar was slightly lower in the boom times and we took more bootcamps grads about 4-6 months post bootcamp or CS degree, a number who are struggling still in the market, and you end up with a biased sample size on LinkedIn.
I also fully expect Formation to not work for everyone too! We'r…
Hey, short answer to long prompt but I did read it all and appreciate you sharing your thoughts about it. I think you are trying to pull conclusions from my writing and tying them together and the missing piece is that it's not my job to blanket recommend or not recommend programs. Every program has good and bad things and the larger the program the wider range of experiences people will have there. I actually stand by most or all of the things you quoted.
Codesmith itself (staff and leaders) are strongly against lying. Somehow though most graduates I've seen on LinkedIn end up with embellished resumes.
I have heard numerous theories why, but it's not as clear cut as Codesmith the entity is a bad actor manipulating the industry and some people do go through it feeling like they didn't lie about anything and got a great outcome. So if I think you would be one of those people, go for it…
I don't really think this is a great number but it's far from misleading, it's very clear what the number is and how it was calculated, and that it was the highest reported offer in 2024 up to April 22nd.
We then talk to each person before joining to explain how Formation works and learn about your individual goals and advise if Formation is a good fit or not.
I can't give specifics about that person because it's not public and I haven't asked for permission, but the person placed at Meta in a SWE role and has about 13 years of experience. The person took their time and was currently employed when doing Formation. The offer is very reasonable for everyone at that level and we have a couple of people in Formation now at that level who are looking at changing companies. That number is a bit low for them and we had to talk and explain to them about what their outcome might look like.
At…
Can you block the ads, we genuinely have a low ad budget on Reddit and I don't really want it all going towards you hahaha.
I pointed out some challenges in number 5 above. I think it would fair to publish more data with detailed explanations of what it means.
The motivation is actually the opposite. If we publish data that is misleading it's a much larger risk for us then not publishing data. We can spend 30 min calls one on one going through your personal situation and making sure you are clear on what we do to make up for it. But if we publish averages without a lot of explanation and caveat they might mislead people a lot.
The average comp is so high right now because of a bunch of people that got senior offers at Meta. And it would be absurdly misleading that anyone's starting now gets $300k to $500k offers. hence why we need to be really careful and explain things really carefu…
It's a hobby, I get really interested by things like Codesmith. I watch documentaries about all kinds of business things like I've already seen the new Ashley Madison doc on Netflix and the Con Queen one on Apple+
Codesmith is just a super fascinating entity that is absolutely unique amongst bootcamps and extremely polarizing. People love it or hate it and maybe I'm the only person in between lol.
Conflicts of interest exist whether you call them out or not and a lot of people have them... discussing what I may or may not have is an incredibly fortunate opportunity we're in.
Imagine anonymous accounts claiming to be normal alumni that are people employed by a school with no way to check it out.
Or people claiming they got a job with no experience but their LinkedIn says they have "10 years of experience" and I can't say anything without DOX'ing them.
These are two cases I know about and can't say anything about without DOX'ing people and how I know, but these kinds of things go completely UNQUESTIONED because people are non transparent like I am.
I except to be respectfully challenged but that also involves listening to what I say and judging the facts and not making false conclusions because you are suspicious.
Hi, yeah there just aren't that many of us around because it's kind of a new idea. We compete with Pathrise and Interview Kickstart directly. Interview Prep or Career Accelerator maybe?
The idea of getting like a "personal trainer" for your career is kind of new and some people are still shy about sharing that they went to these places.
As you pointed out it's crazy different to have like 10+ year Google hiring managers who have really seen a lot and genuinely have insights advise you than at a bootcamp where an alumni who worked at Google for a year is advising you who hasn't interviewed anyone yet, neverless managed, or done dozens of hiring committee reviews, etc...
On the recruitment side, it's not super lucrative yet for these companies. There are still so many people applying naturally big tech doesn't really need to partner with anyone and there has to be a reason. Will these c…
This is a false narrative. If you think my narratives about Codesmith or Launch School or CIRR are false, you are entitled to methodically poke holes in the arguments with other facts and data, or opinions (stated as such).
1. I have to say we are not a bootcamp whenever anyone calls us one because we are tiny and have little presence so the public is mislead by those false remarks. The question should be why are people accusing us of being one in the first place and not dropping it when I explain so often why we aren't.
2. We spend very little on Reddit ads, we mostly spend ad dollars on Google search keyword ads to appear above Beyoncé's Formation album in results. You probably see the ads because you click on them and engage with Formation, that's how online ads are meant to work!! To target messages to people who engage with Formation for the lowest cost possible.
3. I can see how…
I appreciate this discussion! I have my real name on here so that we can have this discussion! If you have anonymous accounts it's hard to track people's backgrounds and biases and that's even more concern for manipulation than people being transparent.
As other people pointed out, Formation isn't a bootcamp - we are an interview prep, practice, mentorship, and mock interview platform. Our acceptance bar varies with the market and right now we are taking mostly mid level senior engineers and a surprising number who formerly worked as senior engineers at FAANG companies.
I don't know why Codesmith people think we compete with them, including their Director of Outcomes stating that in their AMA. The most recent 20 reviews on Course Report: ALL 20 speak to either how they had no experience prior to Codesmith or they didn't say anything about it, but more generally how they recommend it f…
I can speak for LeWagon but Codesmith is pride and not greed from what I've seen.
They genuinely believe they have a unique and special program and anyone criticizing it is jealous or a competitor trying to leech off of them.
The CEO has FrontEnd Master money and could do a number of other things to make more money.
Their founding advisor could do a lot of other things and does Codesmith because he likes helping people.
Admitting they aren't better than the market is a pride thing. I would love to see them say "the market is impact us and we have slowed down to save money, were trying to break even and pour every penny we can into Codesmith but we can't do as much as we wanted to and we are focusing on offering one incredible cohort with a minimal team".
They still have far too many staff members. You don't need more than one outcomes person to manage a few offers a week and 30 peop…