Yeah I wrote about this in my predictions post but if you are a bootcamp it's tough right now because there just aren't any entry level role pathways (similar for CS grads from non-stop tier schools as well). So the only strategy working is the aim for roles requiring experience and hope that someone reads your resume as a qualified for them (and other strategies to connect with jobs).
I think Tech Elevator's model can work, where they have partnerships, specifically the ones in Cleveland, Cincinnati, etc... to get people into entry level roles.
Amazon's Technical Academy worked well for BloomTech, they published 2022 outcomes and that program was an anomaly that pulled up all their averages. Haven't heard anything about this for a while though.
Codesmith is going to launch Future Code for the city of NY in the spring and it's for people making under 50K who live in NYC and have littl…
Ah, I can't give an answer for you and my advice depends on you and your background/circumstances.
Launch School Capstone will support you in building really good structured projects, optimized for the job hunt. I think this is something that Launch School, and Codesmith have really focused on (i.e. making these projects marketable and helping you market yourself in a super nuanced way).
100devs (i.e. an official cohort) is fantastic for free, and the approach isn't all thaaaat different, but there is a little less machinery involved in the resume part. Like Launch School/Codesmith/etc... will guide you through producing a very specific resume and many grads looks look the same. 100devs has a wider variance of resume outputs from the ones I've seen. If you do real client work, then that's also fantastic for a resume.
I don't know that many people who officially did a 100devs cohort, b…
It might be a conflict of interest because I'm the co-founder of an interview prep platform. I didn't disclose that above because it wasn't relevant and I genuinely wanted to answer with my Meta hat on, not my Formation hat, but I'll disclose here because now it is if we're talking about paid/free interview prep.
RE: "If you want something better – then you’re going to have to make it. That’s what I’ll be doing."
I know a couple of bootcamps that started for just that reason. I think one thing many people fail to realize when starting a business is that the skillset needed to run a business, manage, people, grow people's careers, etc... is completely different from that needed to make a "better bootcamp".
So it's more than just the skillset to make something better, but a large set of skills that I have not seen land all in one place.
I think Lambda School in my opinion WAS best marketing (almost so good everything else fell behind and caused a lot of problems). Codesmith in my opinion is like best at community building. Rithm in my opinion is best at live instruction.
We see all of the building a "better bootcamp" efforts turn into program that are the best at one thing and that's exactly wh…
I stand in the "fundamental skills" camp and that you need to build genuine fundamental skills needed to be an engineer and then you need to get an entry level job to apply those skills and build experience you can't get anywhere else.
So I see a bootcamp's role in this to build those fundamental skills and help align people with entry level jobs.
That said, CS grads need 4 years to build those skills and even if accelerated, we're talking way more than 12 weeks to build those. So it puts bootcamps in a tough spot in this market.
I think this is why Codesmith and I butt heads so much on this topic, because their CEO believes that if you have soft-hard skills like problem solving, communication, teamwork, then you can be a mid level engineer.... you don't need fundamental skills if you can learn to learn, then you can get by anywhere.
Very different approach, but the market is demandi…
I've interviewed Codesmith grads and my background is having done over 400 interviews at Facebook.
This is entirely my personal opinion, but these were some of the most awkward interviews I've ever had yeah.
This is the summary of one, not a direct quote but a summary of the conversation.
NOTE: the job I reference was the 3 week long Codesmith project presented as 8 months of experience on resume.
Me: "So what is this recent job you've had for 8 months and why did you leave before a year"
"I worked on X, it's a scalable developer tool to visualize and debug Y"
Me: "So why did you leave"
"The team kind of wound down"
Me: "How big was the team"
"Its like a startup sized of 5 people"
Me: "So what non engineers did you work with, like designers, PMs, marketing, etc...
"The team was only engineers, it's a developer tool for improving developer efficiency"
Me: "Interesting, so how…
At Formation we also believe in the value of peer mock interviews and do those too, but imagine having unlimited mock interviews with actual senior FAANG engineers who run them like the real deal... just a different level of prep for a different target role.
Again, just illustrating the difference and this is with my Formation, biased, hat on because my team has received some nasty emails from Codemsith grads like 'Never email me again, Codesmith gives us all we need forever' and such so clearing that up is self serving for me but I feel compelled in this context.
I've seen people get a little help with mocks and negotiation from Codesmith for future job transitions and not use any paid service, so I'm absolutely not saying anyone needs or doesn't need this, it's ultimately a personal choice, but just want the options out there as clear as possible so people can decide on their own.
Since you seem to have a lot of info too, can you ask your friends how long all those people are taking to get jobs and not just that they are getting placed?
I would also expect about 70% of job seeking grads get jobs in a year. But it used to be over 80% in SIX MONTHS and I want to push Codesmith to be more transparent about that so that people know going in that it's going to be 4 months of CSX plus 3 months of Codemsith plus up to 12 months of job searching, and if it happens to be a 70% chance it will take 19 months to get a job, that's insanely different than 85% chance in 13 months for people who have savings, families and kids and medical considerations and all kinds of things.
Like people need to know to plan the timing properly, and won't be scared away from Codesmith, and Codemsith has these numbers, they have internal reporting on this from my understanding.
I've worked with a couple dozen Codesmith people later on who have paid for Formation for their second, third, fourth job transitions and many still get advice from Codesmith at the same time. The main problem is those support engineers are like your PEERS at Formation and the mentors are actual FAANG-level recruiters and engineers who give better perspective for how top tier companies.
For example, someone's Codesmith mock interviewers told them to "practice their buzzwords more" and they have two mock interviews who focus on DS&A - who could be peers at Formation, versus dozens of FAANG-tier senior, mid, staff, manager level engineers you can choose from to do mocks with at Formation.
These alums have found the Codesmith network useful for referrals because people tend to stay connected for years after graduating.
If you get an offer on your own, free negotiation help from Eric K is…
Interesting, yeah I would like to see more data on placement times.
Codesmith has provided a whole blog post on salaries in 2023, and published a bunch of aggregated data in info sessions, like schools people went to and industries people got jobs in.
So it should be trivial to publish the length of time it took people in those placements, since they do that for CIRR already.
Maybe prospective students should push them on that. Slower placement times don't mean anything bad about Codesmith, but it's critical to know about if you are planning your life and savings.
Do you have more stats on that btw? I have good data on offers/outcomes but not on placement rates.
I do see a number of those offers are peopl way more than 6 months out, and as you saw in my illustrative analysis, people who take longer and longer tend to have their OSP's appearing as more and more "experience" the longer they wait, which would help with getting interviews in this climate.
Codesmith doesn't have a major "job searching portion". There is a week or two of lectures going over resume, job hunt strategies etc...
They walk you through writing your resume with worksheets and then during after Codesmith you have access to resume reviewers and career support engineers (all are former students who have jobs now).
There's a major focus on overcoming "imposter syndrome" because a key part to people's success is building self-confidence that you can do it and are just as good as any other engineer - and it's one of the reasons people can walk into these $120K job interviews and get by.
They also give very good advice on reaching out, like the "Codesmith double down" and such.
Codesmith very strongly tells people not to lie on their resumes, but we tend to see [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/18cpq98/analysis_of_52_most_recent_codesmith_offers…
I wrote about this here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/18cpq98/analysis\_of\_52\_most\_recent\_codesmith\_offers/](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/18cpq98/analysis_of_52_most_recent_codesmith_offers/)
I got a lot of attacks after posting that so I want to triple emphasize this is not trying to send a message to go or not go to Codesmith, it's simply pointing out a pattern to help people get a sense of how alumni are getting placed right now.
/u/Swami218
I'm not trying to harp on this too much but I saw this today and it reminded me of Fanzter.
[https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/21/24011448/hyperloop-one-shut-down-layoff-closing-elon-musk](https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/21/24011448/hyperloop-one-shut-down-layoff-closing-elon-musk)
"The company is selling off its assets, closing down its offices, and laying off employees. It will formally close at the end of the year, at which point all of its intellectual property will shift to its majority stakeholder, major Dubai port operator DP World"
This is fairly similar to what happened at Fanzter, company shut down, staff left and got normal offers at ESPN, Fanzter Inc, Coolspotters all essentially stopped. Sold off some IP to make investors whole.
The typical person characterizes this as a "shut down" and not a "sale".
Again, see my other comments, I'm very bias and this is my personal opinion, people can upskill their day to day practical skills a lot on the job and this why I believe it's important for people to get the RIGHT job out of their bootcamps (if they have the luxury) and not the highest paying job OR the most prestigious company to brag about.
If more bootcamp grads were able to take the top-tier apprenticeship route (e.g. Airbnb, Dropbox, Asana, Intuit, etc...) they would get the support and ramp up they need to catch up to the CS grads with 3 internships and enter top tier impactful roles as amazing entry level SWEs.
Unfortunately these tend to be 1. paid at like $90K to $100K so top bootcamps like Codesmith steer you away from these and rarely talk about them. 2. they tend to be focused on increasing diversity in tech and promoted in channels focused on those areas and not necessarily…
\+1 to therapy not as a joke but as a tool to strengthen your emotional state.
At the same time though, just like you can have a therapist for your emotional state, a personal trainer for your physical state, a nutritionist for your dietary state, you might also benefit from a personal trainer for your SWE fundamentals.
Again (see my comment), I need to disclose that I'm the co-founder of Formation which was mentioned and I'm bias, but just like some people benefit from help in these areas and others don't, some people benefit from help with their CS fundamenals, be it Formation or Interviewing.io or Exponent or LeetCode Premium, or Structy, or reading a 200 page PDF someone shared on LinkedIn, and others don't, but it's something to consider)
I have seen a number of people in this position who have gone both ways. Note: I'm the co-founder of Formation, which you mentioned, that works with people with 1+ YOE as a SWE, you are the target demographic but I'm not commenting to talk about that and I'm purely trying to give you advice based on your post and wanted to preface with that before I get accused of ulterior motives. Genuinely trying to help here and I hope I have some useful insights.
Overall advice: don't quit your job, but what you are experiencing likely isn't just you and is indeed a long term consequence of crammed/12 week bootcamps that focus on getting a job over fundamental skills (this is a bias statement but my opinion).
\- having at least exactly 1 YOE or more at a single company is a good sign for recruiters that you weren't fired within that time so it's a sign you are a decent performer, so that's one good…
I agree they are just one tool and each person will use them differently. But they are also an expensive tool that tie their legitimacy to their job outcomes.
I am super strong proponent that a bootcamp should be judged by the quality of the education and experience that it provides and in the provable skill gains it produces, rather than job outcomes.
If someone wants to pay $20K to level up as a stepping stone, and then spend up to 12 months finding a job, and are satisfied, that's great. A very large number of people I talk to expect a job out of a bootcamp, and I think in 2023 people started realizing that they shouldn't be expecting that anymore - but the bootcamps that are hanging on continue to publish job outcomes reports to validate themselves.
NuCamp gets some flak for publishing satisfaction reports instead of job reports but I actually agree with this in spirit. I'm not j…
Sorry, my words were directed at everyone reading this and not entirely at you personally and I should ahve been clearer about that.
You can read this multi paragraph, multi post thread about someone accusing me of disingenuously trying to TAKE DOWN Codesmith: [https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/18ivago/comment/kdio4ob/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/18ivago/comment/kdio4ob/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
This is just one example, but I'm getting the heat from both sides.
cc /u/InTheDarkDancing
Did you read the post? I have basically being harassed on both sides. When I saw something good about Codesmith, people accuse me of being paid off and a shill. When I say something bad about them, I'm accused of secretly trying to take them down.
I'm not intimidated by bullies and facts are facts and the truth is the truth, but if all that's left here are trolls, there might not be much point in trying to share my perspective.
(I realize this comment might attract all kinds of haters from all sides but please understand that I'm trying to give this person good advice for them and it's in my opinion a neutral comment, with no ulterior motives. I've been getting harassed with downvote campaigns and trolls for the past two weeks after posting about Codesmith's recent placements, so please read the content and evaluate it fairly before downvoting this or making a snarky comment)
Codesmith indeed is a lot of work to get into but if you are already working in a stable job, then putting in that work will definitely be worth it if Codesmith is the right program for you. It will be a waste of time if it's not. So the question I think you should answer first is is Codesmith the right program for you, and if it is, put in the work, and if it isn't, I would encourage choosing another program.
Some context that it sounds…
Yeah Codesmith is a place where people intentionally delay their job hunt start date to teach and many of those people find that time both challenging and useful.
\- They are paid about $50K a year, which is much lower than the $120K job expected at Codesmith, but people see it as continued learning and don't mind the "lower" pay.
\- The time windows for CIRR get bumped until the end of the TA-ship
\- A handful of these people get hired as full time mentors, paid $80K to $100K and have a pathway to becoming an instructor paid at $120Kish if an opportunity arrises.
So this is a very unique pathway but one that Codesmith has gotten working like a machine and it's been critical, in my opinion, to helping them scale very well.
It's based on the experience level and how much work we think you need based on your benchmark. The longer you are at Formation, the more money we spend mentoring you, so if you need more work, the fee is higher.
I need to reiterate emphatically that Formation is not a "program" and what you do will be different from what everyone else does (like the same topics and skills, but completely different pacing and focus areas).
So we want the fees to be based on how much delta we think you have to getting to the top-tier bar and to pay a fair amount based on what others with similar background and starting point are paying.
Generally speaking if you have several years of SWE work experience, maybe an interview or two on the horizon, you'll be on the lower side and less than a year of contract/internship/freelancing on the higher side - most people in the middle. We only take people with un…
I believe the program is free/paid for by the city of NY
[https://www.codesmith.io/new-program](https://www.codesmith.io/new-program)
The name "Future Code" was used offline in a public session, which seems to be this: [https://www.nyc.gov/site/sbs/careers/tech-training.page](https://www.nyc.gov/site/sbs/careers/tech-training.page)
Look at how much you judge me because of who I am and how much information you have about me to judge me, and how little information you have about anonymous accounts.
Yet I've observed (correct me if I'm wrong) that you judge brand new accounts that criticize Codesmith - as take it with a grain of salt, who knows it is. Brand new accounts that promote Codesmith - they have to do this so they don't get DOX'd and criticzed.
You have every right to decide how you want to judge people and for what behaviors and traits you want. But you aren't making those judgements based on transparent information and might be getting manipulated as a result. You know I am me. You don't know that one of those new accounts that said they got a job after a rought job hunt and have no prior experience actually had 13 years of part time web developer experience on their resume (someone who self-doxed in thei…
You should read my post!!! Of the 52 people who reported offers over that period of time, 92% of them looked like they had relevant experience and the average reported was just under 12 months of experience for their 3 week long projects.
Their CEO said this week in an info session: 'The longer people take in the job hunt the higher their salaries, not because they get more experience but they get more practice and better at telling their story' .
So those entries on their resumes accumulate and people then get interviewed for roles that require more experience.
Codesmith is a place that has a high bar and requires a certain type of person to be accepted. The graduates are extremely ambitious, hard working, and well spoken and professional.
"FAANG canonical levels" are just the leveling system that the majority of TECH industry currently adopts. So if you want to be an engineer in the tech industry, you should be familiar those levels or you'll have trouble navigating the industry, even if you use other names yourself. Other industry use other words, like in the banking industry you can be a "Vice President Engineer" which is a tech industry "senior". But if want to be in the tech industry and you insist on a vice president title you'll struggle to navigate (from what I've seen for exactly the Vice President case while I was at Facebook)
My advice has been extremely consistently to get a an appropriate job for your experience and skills and then over-perform and have steady career growth from there. The levels don't matter, it just so happens that no bootcamp gives you the experience needed to go beyond entry level. If yo…
I don't have any affiliation with Codesmith but used them for two specific examples because I did a little deep dive recently here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/18cpq98/analysis\_of\_52\_most\_recent\_codesmith\_offers/](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/18cpq98/analysis_of_52_most_recent_codesmith_offers/)
Can you elaborate more what you mean by disingenuous?
I'm certainly bias, as are we all, and hope to disclose biases and wish everyone else did too, but I'm more than happy to clarify what you think is disingenous about the post.
In full transparency I was concerned that this post would look self-promoting for my company, because we're building a scalable platform that solves a lot of the scaling problems of bootcamps and even though we are absolutely not a bootcamp alternative (and have no plans to be anytime soon) but years down the road we co…
2024 Bootcamp Predictions Mega Post. Revisiting my 2023 prediction post and exploring what I see ahead for 2024. 2023 was a rough year for bootcamps and the future doesn't look great for traditional programs - 2024 will be a year of caution, but I'm optimistically excited to see what happens!
Hi all 👋 for those that don't know me, I'm Michael, daily commenter here for about two years. Congratulations to the sub on hitting 40K members today! It was around 10K when I first joined!
**Background**
I'm the co-founder of a mentorship platform and work with a large number of bootcamp grads later on in their careers in their 2nd, 3rd, 4th, job transitions. Before this I worked at Facebook from 2009 to 2017 as it grew from 200 engineers to 10,000 engineers and leveled up from an intern to an E7 principal engineer in about 5-6 years. I did over 450 interviews of everything from interns to dire…
I agree a lot with this point, but I think there is value of all sides and often say reality is usually somewhere in between.
The most important thing is to have well sourced and correct information, otherwise people can't make good calls. If you have something from two people, say it's from two people. If you have a complete data set, say it's a complete data set, and have integrity in what you put out there.
The challenge with the bootcamp market is that bootcamps (which as for profit businesses they have every right to) are in the other camp, where they make things sound the best possible and it's good to see more sides of things.
For example, CIRR decided to remove all their reports on their website and delayed publishing of 2022 reports so they can publish longer placement windows. You can argue this is a good decision for transparency, but in the mean time, Codesmith had their…
This is correct, the OP didn't properly quote the price. Formation's unlimited packages are currently $**7500 to $13500 flat fee**s and you receive continuous technical mentorship and support until you get a job, which might be months or over a year, and it's significantly cheaper than many bootcamps for the amount of time for most people.
Formation is not me doing mentorship. We have a team of two dozen people who are building a platform and product that supports dynamic mentorship by giving you practice, benchmarks, and 3-5 person or 1-1 sessions with over 200 industry mentors (who are individual engineers and recruiters, many of whom are seniors plus engineers).
We have thousands of tasks you can do, hundreds of sessions across dozens of types, over a dozen mock interview types.
I'm not involved in the actual technical skill side nor do I run sessions, I build the platform and I help people that typically have senior or staff FAANG interviews with advice on preparation and helping navigate the job hunt process.
This reply is mostly for other people reading it to clarify what Formation is and that it has very little to do with me. Sophie is the founder who steers the direction of the company, she's just not on Reddit…
Hi, I wrote a more through reply about Formation on the thread but didn't answer these questions yet, so I'll do my best here:
\- How many paying customers ever? I don't want to give the exact amount for competitive reasons, nor do I have it right now, but it's the high 3 figures / low end of 4 figures of people who have been accepted and joined
\- It takes people about 6 to 8 months (it's gotten longer in the weaker 2023 market) on average to find a job, but the range is very large because of these factors:
1. We work with people who usually have 1+ years of SWE work experience but it varies from 0 to 20+ and people with 0 come in with no interviews in sight and the people with 2+ or more come with with interviews lined up.
2. People do Formation part time on their own schedule and put in whatever time they can, so it takes people variable amounts of time to find a job based on thei…
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
I wrote a long comment on the top level post, but all of this is correct. We don't disclose much information about our membership base and because of the flexibility of Formation, it's hard to come up with useful numbers that you can use. I usually suggest to find people with a similar background and goals to yourself that did Formation or are here now and find out more about their experience. There are people who get jobs in 2 weeks, people who struggle to get a job in 2+ years, and everything in between, and the experience those people have are wildly different - mostly resulting from different backgrounds and goals.
We aren't a school or bootcamps and we have a dynamic program so everyone's experience is unique, we also don't ask people to write reviews. But we have a lot of strengths and weaknesses that I'm happy to elaborate on.
Hi I can comment, I'm one of the co-funders and heavily involved day by day, so my answer is super biased, but I can tell you about what we do and why we do it.
First off, we're not a bootcamp and we don't have a curriculum or teach anything. We're a mentorship platform to practice, benchmark, and prepare for interviews and become a stronger engineer while doing it. Everyone does different things with us and the personal trainer analogy below is pretty good imo... we help you get from A to B with your job hunting goals and your path to get there will look unique to you.
Second off, the vast majority of people we work with have 1+ YOE as SWE (often more) and are currently employed and doing Formation part time on the side. Our platform supports you ramping up or down your commitment every week, so people practice at their own pace and it tends to take people about 6 months or so before…
I wrote about this here at Codesmith: [https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/18cpq98/analysis\_of\_52\_most\_recent\_codesmith\_offers/](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/18cpq98/analysis_of_52_most_recent_codesmith_offers/)
But heck this post has 500 upvotes and the perosn literally said they were encouraged to lie not from staff but from career support engineers: [https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/17m0fis/codesmith\_graduate\_2023\_experiences\_job\_offer/?sort=new](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/17m0fis/codesmith_graduate_2023_experiences_job_offer/?sort=new)
Yikes I thought there was a bug, but they have like 25 five star reviews in literally the past two days and about 1-2 per week before then.
I did my undergrad thesis on online reviews and I received a best paper award at CHI (the tool HCI conference)... this is in my wheelhouse to dig into but I'm far too busy with my day job and I used some side time over the weekend on my Codesmith piece.
I'll put this on my radar of things to look into while waiting for code to push haha.
Yeah it has contributed to the YOE bar for entry level roles going up and companies dismissing all bootcamp resumes without a deeper look.
But it's clearly for these 52 people this is working though and they are choosing their own paths over all of their peers from other programs, and no one is doing anything about it so 🤷♂️.
There was [a post](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/17m0fis/codesmith_graduate_2023_experiences_job_offer/) where someone said
>Students who hustled like crazy, pushed themselves to the limit, and embraced the resume/interview tactics. This is hard to do. It is admittedly pretty shady, but any Career Coach or resume course is gonna have you embellish pretty hard. So I don't think Codesmith's hiring portion is necessarily worse or different than any other field's... but it definitely is ethically uncomfortable if you've never done it before. It…
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
New info:
\- One of the final employees at Fanzter who was involved in the deal didn't know who Eric was and had to look him up.
\- This employee said that Disney had no interest in purchasing Fanzter or Coolspotters and that the purpose of the deal was to pay back the investors in Fanzter as a guesture as the talent was being hired by ESPN to work there and Fanzter was shutting down.
Whatever you call that, it's not something I would show off as the way I introduce myself.
The only change I've seen is the background check process used to 'text this number and tell them what you told the company and we'll confirm it' to a more legit "background check request" process that still includesquestions about how long you told the company you worked on the project and how you framed OS Labs to the company.
Like a legit process wouldn't ask you what you told the company - they would independently figure out what dates you worked at OS Labs and the whole point is that should match what the company expected. If they are just confirming what you told the company that explains how people get through background checks.
I have a draft ready but I need to polish a lot haha. I would read the Interviewing,io post though, that's much more thorough than what I'm writing, I'm writing trends I'm observing in the bootcamp industry and not so much a data driven view of the market.
It's a very tricky subject because the market will start off good for mid level and senior and this problematic in this subreddit because
1. my company actually helps real mid level and senior people and therefore this argument looks self promoting
2. Codesmith claims to create mid level and senior engineers and the grads think they are those titles, but what [Interviewing.io](https://Interviewing.io) and me are talking about is FAANG-canonical mid level and senior roles, and they require 2+ years of REAL work experience to get them. Given my post last week about Codesmith LinkedIn profiles I feel like this is going to be a can of w…
If you want to redo the deep dive I did, look at court records, secretary of state records, and contact the people involved in the deal. It costs a lot of money to get those records, I spent about $100 doing so because this is a very serious claim that's core to Eric's identity so if it's not true I need irrefutable evidence of what happened because making sure a claim.
I'm happy to chat over DM about more about the process I did. People can make official "off the record" comments and statements so there is some things I can't talk about ethically, but I can go over the process I used if you wanted to try to repeat it.
The summary of the story is that the company wasn't doing well, Aaron left in 2013 to go back to ESPN (and is now the CTO of Disney's online services) and was down to two engineers in 2014. They got sued in early 2014 for copyright infringement and shortly after those tw…
I would be cautious and I'm working on a 2024 prediction I will post this week.
Interviewing.io did a great presentation on trends as well, using that slide, and was showing that only mid level and senior engineers with 2 years of work experience or more (not the Codesmith kind) is where they are seeing movement.
My lens is similar and it's still not looking great or improving yet for bootcamp grads.
But the optimist in me is hopeful that if hiring continues we'll see more entry level jobs open up a little farther down the road.
Hi again, I can't tell you what to do and my advice is general specific to certain companies or types of companies.
If you don't have any degree, and no experience, then you need to invest in growing your skills, not focusing on how to optimally fake your resume. For example:
1. Do REAL open source, not fake open source projects for your resume, but spend a year working on a large open source project
2. Turn a project into a real company and learn how to run a company
RE: Dates, 2023 - present can be fine if you actually did stuff the entire time and if your intentions are good - that you are trying to represent the work you did/are doing.
If you've only done a 3 week project - why are you more qualified than the ten thousand other bootcamp grads with 3 week projects. If you think you are just better than everyone else then you might justify lying to get your chance and prove that yo…
Thanks for sharing, if comfortable to you mind sharing when you graduated (or approximately). A year ago or two so I would here this kind of thing more often, and I interviewed a number of Codesmith grads that were very uncomfortable with how they presented their projects and we spent the interview more therapy-like about why they were doing this and trying to explain they didn't have to do it that way. Someone said a mock interviewer at Codesmith told them their problem was practicing their buzzwords and their first response when I told them I wanted to pause the interview to chat about something, was 'sorry, my buzzwords are not up to par yet'.
Needless to say, these very unique situations over the years absolutely brought Codesmith onto my radar, and aren't representative of all cases but happened two or three times. I was interviewing people that needed extra support so presumably…
I'm sorry you feel that way but respect your opinion.
I've been here day in day out, giving people advice on all kinds of things and I'm sorry if you feel my tone has changed, but when I was first around - I had some way more intense conversations with some Codesmith alumni who claimed I was "stealing here with the secret motivation of stealing studetns to Formation".
I am here to provide a unique lens of industry perspective + bootcamp perspective (having worked with hundreds of bootcamp grads from many programs but also interviewed 450 people at Facebook, built interview programs, observer of hiring committees, work on peformance review tooling,, etc...)
Quick story. There was a period of time when I had a goal of connecting with 10 grads a day from 20 different bootcamps on LinkedIn and I was accused of "Tracking down Codesmith students and trying to steal them to go to Formation…
Hi, you are touching on the more real aspect of this that I didn't go into at all and have a strong appreciation of. I work with a ton of people.sho struggle with similar problems.
First off, I wouldn't worry individual about doing this because no one really cares on am individual basis. Fraud requires harm to be done so if you got a job and didn't perform, that would be s problem. The tiny amount of harm you cause on society by getting a leg up is heard to measure too.
More practically what you see is companies raise the requirements bar for everyone and completely dismiss all open source work and bootcamps.
One motivation for this post is I'm working with someone who has about 10 significant commits to a very large open source project, several parts of a sizable feature, and they are struggling to get noticed because they otherwise have no experience and their resume looks less legi…
I've so far appreciated your tone and would like to continue a normal discussion.
\- I have active conversations with dozens of prospective, current, former residents, staff, and former staff, it's not 3. I take the feedback to maybe back off a bit, things have definitely snowballed behind the scenes because they allegedly had layoffs of 18% of the staff and a lot of people were thrown off recently by the leadership response and feeling like every week something new is happening, lack of claritiy, and a lack of stability. I had a number of intense conversations that have continued and I think I that might be rubbing off on my tone as I keep everything there strictly confidential. I apologize and that's not how I intend to come across and hear that feedback.
\- If it means anything I circulated drafts with a number of people, some didn't respond, some demanded I post, some gave feedback…
Thanks for sharing.
I agree to some extent that showing what others in the industry do would be useful to know in general but I also think the analysis is very clear on how it should be used, and lack of this doesn't cancel out the value.
There are two reasons I focused on Codesmith:
1. Codesmith very publicly considers itself in a league of it's own. They claim to be the only non-traditional program to take people from zero to mid-level/senior and compare themselves to "elite grad schools". I therefore hold them to the bar they are presenting for themselves and don't think they should be compared to others.
2. As I said in the disclaimers, I have been following their placements passively for almost two years now and my friends and colleagues in industry (specifically engineers and recruiters) feel that Codesmith grads representation is anecdotally far more exaggerated than the rest.…
That's absolutely aweful and appalling. Let me know if I can help in any way, I know a number of people who work at Reddit who might be able to help with reporting.
Anyone else reading this if you are participating in harassing OP, what the heck? You are all are adults and maybe this is wrong to say, but you should own up and apologize.