Yeah a bootcamp could be appropriate. Look into the top ones and see how they work and which approach is right for you.
I see a "Codesmith." comment and it's a top one or consider but look into how it works. Most people said things like "it changed my life" but don't explain how it works... it only works for certain people that will stretch the truth in their resumes (even most people here who say they went there and didn't do this often "stretched the truth")
If time is not an issue I would also look at Launch School. similarly it's a solid program but look into hired it works and see if that's good for you.
Also look at "career accelerators": Formation, Pathrise, Interview Kickstart. these are typically for people with SWE experience already so I probably would not recommend at all in this market, but you should look at them to compare "how it works" to how bootcamps work.
I mean at the end of the day it's very irrelevant to most people and it's you can call yourself whatever you want. There's a Codesmith grad who is a "Vice President Software Engineer" at a bank!!!
It comes into play on here, and I feel strongly about it, because you DO need to define your terms to compare apples to apples and apples to oranges.
Codesmith's overall point is that Codesmith thinks their grads are "better" (their outcomes advisor says "Codesmith is the best" a lot) than everyone else. There was a panel where the CEO sitting (in person) beside Hack Reactor and other CEOs and said straight up that Codesmith was better because it's grads get "mid level and senior roles". They want to emphasize that Codesmith is not a "bootcamp" per-se and if they used canonical terms, they might get compared to the other programs.
So I think that's reasonable in that comparison. But the down…
What role was this? Was it SDE I, SDE II, SDE III, or was it a tangential role? a contractor role, a frontend role, a solutions role?
Amazon's promotion cycle doesn't allow stuff like that so this would have to be some kind of special case signed off by a director or VP to correct for a hiring error.
The number of times I've seen this EVER for super legit reasons, I can count on one hand, and those people quickly became industry renowned engineers.
So even if this happened where someone went from SDE II to SDE III in 3 months it would be absurdly rare and not representative of any program.
I asked a couple of Senior Managers at Amazon and no one thinks this is possible on their teams, so it's definitely a very weird case.
Every statement like this that I've looked into has been some kind of caveat or weird case that was not as people believed it to be.
For example, the $400K Netf…
The biggest misconception that Codesmith teaches is that mid level and senior are based on 'how ambiguous and novel a problem you can solve on your own' and that's just like entirely made up by Codesmith leaders. Will keeps referring to some LinkedIn post from a Facebook engineer about this as the justification and it's just not true. I'm a former Facebook employee who was deeply involved in hiring, performance, and leveling and I'm telling you it's not true. There are dozens of "traits" senior engineers have that include being able to solve larger scope problems, but that's not the defining trait of a senior engineer.
Fair point, I shouldn't say "all" there, it's more of a "most" or "almost all"
The people I work with/talk to made it seem like it was a unofficial pipeline of alumni referring grads and helping them prep for the interviews and I wanted that to come across clearly.
It's certainly not easy and the people who get these jobs are very strong and well rounded, and great overall.
The main difference is I'm not a journalist and I don't want people getting sued. There's a whole set of ethics around journalism I'm not trained in so I take a cautious route and I think that has resulted in more people feeling very comfortable sending me things. I never reach out to anyone who works/worked there because this isn't my job to dig into, and all of this is inbound.
At the end of the day, everyone has biases and that's why I am non-anonymous, so people can easily get to know me and decide how they feel about my commentary. I'm not some kind of perfect robot (and even the robots have biases haha)!
I gladly accept feedback on my tone, balance and how I can be more useful to the community.
FWIW, PhD grads at Meta entered at the "mid level"/E4 and I think still do. assuming you did a number of legit internships or published research throughout.
It's hard to tell, but a large amount is in the interview process and asking THEM the right questions. But ultimately companies are companies and things change and there's a bit of luck involved.
It's much easier to decide between FAANG for example that have well known patterns and publicly communicate their cultures. Each FAANG is SOOOOO DIFFERENT, it's massively important to choose the right one if one were given that opportunity (which is obviously not common), but if you dont' have that opportunity, at least understanding the culture enough to know the areas you should focus on and the areas you'll be weak at.
For example, Meta values getting work done over overthinking things. So if you overthink things, you can try to change…
1. They do fire them, I do think most survive but I know peopoe fired too
2..There is a range here. Capital One hired like 50 Codesmith grads in the boom. Senior Associate is like below FAANG entry level and Senior Engineer is like FAANG entry level. They comp all cash so that Senior Associate pays like 140K ish total and that Senior Engineer 160K ish.
In some ways so many people going to Capital One messed up the stats because of the title inflation and all cash compensation. And the interview process that asks the same 4 questions for one of the interviews that all the Codemsith people shared and practiced with each other.
I also watch a lot of documentaries: highly recommend [https://www.netflix.com/title/81615919?source=35](https://www.netflix.com/title/81615919?source=35) on Netflix.
It's about two people that start a coaching company and eventually grow it super large by hiring all their students as coaches and leveling up to higher titles, and their status is largely based on recruiting new people and publicly spreading word of the organization.
It's really good!
I take a journalist approach of collecting information and trying to be objective. Just like journalists, everyone is biased, but I've built a reputation on here for being rational and look at things from multiple sides.
I would rather Codesmith replace most of their leaders and change, rather than burn it to the ground. If I wanted to do that I would be sharing way crazier things people have shared with me so I hope my commentary does come across balanced.
So there's two aspects to this, civil and criminal.
Civil, it would be more about a company suing an employee for lying and causing "damage" to the company. This is pretty rare, people just get fired for lying rather than sued. If Codesmith did something criminally wrong, there might be a case for students to sue Codesmith as well.
Criminally, there has to be some kind of bad intentions by individuals to intentionally deceive people for their person gain or in a way that harms others. So you would have to both prove that these actions harmed people or that individuals gained financially from it AND that individuals did this on purpose. If there is no evidence that someone intentionally said something like 'we need to fake these OSPs and figure out how to get people to lie on their resumes' then it would be really hard to prove criminally. Like It's possible the leaders genuinely believ…
That's what I say but they defend this to the core internally. The staff I've spoken too think it's part of the effort to build people's self confidence in overcoming imposter syndrome and if they kind dropped this narrative then people might not have the confidence to get those jobs anymore and if they don't have $125K CIRR numbers, people won't join anymore.
I'm very familiar with this topic and have seen the full spectrum as well as seen most of the data round this. I time box my answers and might edit this later with more details:
1. Short answer yes some people do,
2. Codesmith judges level based on both titles and salaries when they say "senior" so it's not a canonical "top tier level" senior bar. By Codesmith's bar it's about 15%
3. The people who get these jobs fall into three buckets
1. Non-SWE roles, but adjacent, e.g. "senior solutions engineer"
2. People who have experience already as SWE's or adjacent roles
3. People who fake it and lie about their experience to squeeze through at smaller companies, startups, and non-tech companies
4. The average ENTRY LEVEL FAANG engineer has a $150K base salary, so even though the outcomes are high at a median of $127K, these are clearly not top tier senior roles. Codesmith grads that…
- Most schools want people to move around and not stay at the same school for the whole thing
- Most PhD students do internships at top companies because industry has way more resources.
I was supposed to do my PhD and was offered a research job at Intel before I even started the program to do in conjunction with the program and cross publish research.
A number of papers have cross company/academic publication in the CS space
Feel free to DM me and I'll send you over the forms used for that, it's absolutely happening. I can't talk about what current employees said, but it was shared that they will confirm whatever you put in the form. So many people "keep working on their OSP" ;) ;) and put that on the forms and then get it confirmed. One person changed ONE word in a Readme file 7 months later and said they worked on it for an 11 month period.
I interviewed someone who said his "manager was Philip Troutman" and he was "selected to work on this by his acquaintance and didn't have to interview for the position" and that "he hasn't gotten any performance reviews yet" and that it was a "not a W2 full time relationship"
That's what you call not lying?
That's a Codesmith line and the lies continue to the interview.
The policy is to not proactively bring up that it's unpaid and only explain that if explicitly asked. I've interviewed a number of Codesmith people who dance around this and come across incompetent in the first 10 mins until the truth finally comes out and makes the previous 10 mins feel like lies.
So you practice and practice how to talk about the project to both: 1. not get caught in the first place while not saying it was paid work, and 2. if you do get called out, how to handle that smoothly to clarify instead of the interview falling apart.
Presumably the people I talk to need more help because I wouldn't talk to them otherwise, but they all said that's how Codesmith mock interviewers told them to do it.
So something a lot of people don't realize is that Open Source !== free/unpaid work. Look at this resume: [https://www.linkedin.com/in/feross](https://www.linkedin.com/in/feross)
People who contribute legit open source work often work at companies who pay them to do it, or they have some kind of grants/support to do it.
People who do one off contributions here or there, or on the side, do not list that as "work experience" and they do not list it for 4X longer time then they spent on it. So you lied on your resume and you might not even realize you did.
Amazon is the most gamable FAANG but you are doing it wrong by trying to game the interviews. My entire life now is teaching people how to be better engineers and helping them pass interviews by investing in becoming better engineers instead of investing in gamifying the interview.
I know all the Codesmith alums at Amazon and Capita…
\- Instructors (all but one) are former students -> Fellows -> hired as "Mentors" -> hired as "Instructor" -> hired as "Lead Instructor", and almost none have SWE industry experience
\- The instructors I know are overworked and told to let people do "hard learning" instead of helping them too much - but they love to help when they can and are allowed. Several people have independently told me this.
\- Did you put your OSP as 3-4+ months of work while double counting all your Codesmith projects as well? Did you put in the Project or Open Source section or did you put it under experience? Did OSLabs have to do a reference call to confirm your time there?
\- I know people hired as seniors who are paranoid they'll get fired when they realize more junior people are outperforming them. I advise a number of these people because they can't talk to anyone about it without getting found out and…
Me, I'm a non-anonymous member who has been here for 2 years and comment a lot.
My background is I worked at Meta from 2009 to 2017, grew from new grad to E7 principal engineer, did 400+ interviews of all shapes and sizes, participated in calibrations and interview offer panels, and was the number one code committer at the company when I left.
After I took a break, I joined my partners company which helps engineers with experience level up their careers. We work with a lot of bootcamp grads later on in their careers so I know about and hear about just about everything with bootcamps.
Codesmith caught my interest about 2 years ago when I was interviewing people to join Formation for leveling up and they had these really weird jobs at "OSLabs" that made no sense, and were being nervously vague about them in the interviews. I then went down the rabbit hole and found out that OSLabs was (…
I mean I want to have a productive discourse about it, the Codesmith people are downvoting this thing to oblivion just like I thought they would and not saying anything because it will only attract more attention to the post.
It would be great to talk about what you are paying for and where the money goes. Businesses can be for profit and still be incentive aligned, so I would love to have a discussion about where the money is going and what you are actually paying for.
They had layoffs a month or so ago so clearly the money is going somewhere and I genuinely believe that they would rather not take profits off the table to avoid those layoffs, so if the content is not great and instructors are being held back and overloaded, like where is the money going and is it being spent effectively.
Since I've been mentioning this publicly they have stated in info sessions that they are proud that all their instructors are alumni who stay to teach.
I just watched this documentary called "Escaping Twin Flames" on Netflix and they had similar vibes... two people started it and then hired some of their first students, who then hired more students, and then became leaders in a hierarchy of members. Paying customers -> teachers and coaches. And similarly that program has extremely polarizing views about it.
I saw him do a lecture where he makes a mistake on purpose. I saw someone else do the same lecture. Both people acted like it was just a mistake they did by accident, and was EXTREMELY performative.
Comments to me have ranges from: 'he's rusty himself but he's good teacher' to 'he just one of the first codesmith grads and he can't code at all himself at this point but fakes it for lectures'
I worked at Facebook for a long time and know about fake news so I try really hard to look at things from different angles and present things fairly. I'm open about my personal opinions about two aspects of Codesmith that I think are wrong, but I also look at everything else impartially.
RE: that comment. It's true but it's like being a 5th grader playing soccer with 1st graders... that person is probably the best at soccer, but if you are a grown up, you probably shouldn't be judging your soccer skills against kids, you want to find adult games to play. i.e being one of the best of a lot of not-good options doesn't necessarily mean much, but it is true.
This is why I've been here for almost two years now trying to tell people HOW IT IS. A lot of people have gone there knowing this and done well and I've helped them decide to go there, but you need to know what you are signing up for or you feel scammed and that's why Codesmith is so polarizing.... it attracts people who have no idea what they are in for but are ambitious and want the best outcomes, but it's not everyone's cup of tea.
I've heard far more complaints from staff members than students/alumni have complained. A lot of students/alumni have found him motivational because he's given them the confidence to lie on resume and feel entitled to do so and it all came from his lectures about OSLabs and imposter syndrome. Staff seeing those lectures feel very cringy now and it's one of the reasons there is so much churn in instruction yet no one feels capable of giving him that feedback.
Yeah good point, the angle I'm coming from is about people just understanding where they are at and not being misled into believing something that's not right.
I do have two personal opinions about Codesmith that are my opinions (and while backed by others I do personally state):
1. The majority of grads lie on their resumes about their OSP projects and Codesmith's sister non profit signs letters of reference to back that up. I think that harms people who don't lie.
2. They make people believe they are mid level and senior engineers by the end of Codesmith and I don't believe this is accurate at the top tier company bar. I don't deny people get 2nd level engineering roles and good salaries, but I think the portrayal as "mid level and senior" is the wrong narrative, and that people should be getting appropriate junior roles AT TOP COMPANIES with the right setup, support and structure to…
So there are a number of bootcamps well regarded:
Codesmith, Rithm, Launch School, are a few I know.
The problem is one thing: **you have to know HOW THEY WORK and which is the RIGHT ONE FOR YOU.** I know a number of people going into Codesmith who know what they are in for and know all the OPs points and that's what they want to do, and they get good jobs.
Codesmith is NOT the program for a random person finding this subreddit and seeing $120K and 👀👀👀 💰💰💰 sign me up type mentality.
While that's a bit of hyperbole, it's also not for people who are woo'd by the feel-good and welcoming aspect of the staff they work with pre-acceptance who don't really know how this thing works but have "good vibes". You need to know how it works regardless of how much you like the people.
The OP made accurate points that can't be refuted so I think the strategy is downvote and ignore because commenting things like "I went to Codesmith, it changed my life" can't refute these points about HOW it actually works, no one should be doubting their solid outcomes compared to other bootcamps. But commenting will just snowball the post and cause it garner more eyeballs.
+1. I know my main college classes were taught by legit professors but a lot of tutorials and stuff were TAs who were PhD students.
I think the difference is that at Codesmith even the lead instructors went to Codesmith and haven't been SWEs yet.
I mean alumni who are working in industry to the career support stuff. They just aren't super super senior engineers who have had strong trajectories and track records hiring and helping people grow, so their words are taken disproportionately.
Someone I know closely was told to "practice their buzzwords" by one of the mock interviewers.
I mean the way staff have framed this to me is that the leaders genuinely think Codesmith is the best and is a very special place (which I would also describe as a special place and one of the better bootcamps) but that has resulted in what some people perceive as arrogance. The wild success they've had and lack of outside investors, no growth mindset, and the fact that all their technical people went to Codesmith themselves results in decisions being made completely blindly to how most companies do things.
They have this Senior Advisor that the CEO can't stop racing about who I dug into and has some inconsistencies about his past company's claimed acquisition. Yet the CEO might be completely blind to what this stuff means because he doesn't have anyone around him that can advise on this.
This is an advantage when things go well and it will be a major disadvantage when they don't.
Thanks for sharing openly how you feel. I receive a lot of similar messages from people who don't have the courage to post (they are typically in the program or more recent grads and concerned about retaliation or being shunned)
Opinion words aside like "not very skilled" and "scam" the factual statements you make are extremely consistent with what I hear and I try really hard to present on here in my comments as fact-based and transparent as possible.
I get attacked, I'm sure this comment will get attacked too, but all I'm doing is repeating the very clear patterns I'm being told/sent/shown/seeing with my own eyes.
At Formation (we aren't a bootcamp or school and CIRR doesn't work for us) but we have a 95%ish completion on our rigid success form because we work with people intensely until they get a job.
The fact that it's so hard to gather outcomes from people is a sign that the longer and longer time goes by post-bootcamp, the less and less the bootcamp has anything to do with the outcome. And the fact that the more time goes by the harder and harder that gets, is also notable for this.
My 2 cents against using the 12 month window for placements, but that's a whole other discussion haha.
Codesmith students often put their group project as a company and some people don't label that as unpaid work. I have asked dozens of recruiters I asked who mistook these for real companies (and only a handful who didn't!)
Would these projects get picked up as companies by an auditor for LinkedIn verification? The auditors presumably have even less context than industry recruiters, unless they aren't really independent and get more context from Codesmith, no?
Anyways, I'm not sure how much you personally look at audits and maybe this is more of a question for Codesmith directly.
That sounds like you had a solid interview experience where they took the time to get to know you and your code, and that's not what people typically do. Phil at Codesmith repeatedly tells residents that "no one looks at your code" in a way to justify the exaggerations.
But I'm specifically talking about SWE work experience and canonical top tier tech roles. There could be tech jobs where you leverage former backgrounds to get a better offer or better fit, **if you have zero SWE experience you are a junior engineer no matter what your title is and recognizing that is important for your career growth and trajectory.**
More importantly, I'm speaking about trends at the level of dozens/hundreds/low thousands of people AND over one's entire career, and not individuals at a point in time. There are always exceptions and one offs and everyone's journey is unique.
We don't have that many Canadians but they are definitely all over the place and typically lower than in the US.
Some points:
1. The market in Canada is MUCH LOWER COMPENSATION than in the USA, the salaries are maybe 30 ro 40% lower and don't increase as rapidly as you get promoted.
2. We're see a combination of people getting FAANG-level jobs in Canada, working for startups in Canada, and doing remote jobs in the USA, but I don't see any clear patterns or trends (too few people overall), and I don't think anyone can come in expecting any specific outcome.
3. My typical stance is that you should come to Formation and pay to be able to **confidently** walk into a Google interview and feel good about your performance (in DS&A, System Design, Behaviorals) and I feel comfortable saying that in ANY MARKET we as-close-to-guarantee-that-as-legally-possible that if you meet our entry bar, we c…
The program is Codesmith. They have a high bar but most people have zero work experience and get mid level roles. The typical grad does so by lying about the length of their experience and the program itself has a non profit sister company sign off on letters of reference to confirm them.
I agree it's impossible and all of my coworkers agree, but was curious about your opinion too.
They want to see your collaboration and communication. Be a good partner and not a good individual.
My hunch is they might have had some concerns about your communications Either you didn't talk enough or you talked too much and weren't getting social cues or something.
Codesmith fit is really critical. They are selecting for people who have 5 traits and then steering them towards high paying jobs but you have to have those traits to start with or you won't be one of those 120K people.
I argue this often but all the Stanford CS grads I know have 10 offers and red carpet treatment during the CURRENT new grad hiring season RIGHT NOW.
So if you are calling yourself the "best bootcamp", as numerous Codesmith leaders and staff unabashfully do - both internally and externally, then you have to compare yourself to the best.
If Stanford were to compare itself to all the for-profit online schools, it would be apples to oranges.
And comparing Codesmith to programs with no or lower entrance bars is also apples to oranges.
I don't run or own a bootcamp. I'm extremely open about the mentorship platform I do work on (using my real name, one account, and being very transparent), but it's a **mentorship platform** for people with at least 1 year of SWE WORK experience and it's not competing with bootcamps at all. We don't teach anything, have a curriculum, we don't have teachers, so anyone considering a bootcamp wouldn't consider Formation... unless you actually have SWE work experience already and were still considering a bootcamp.
We compete with Interview Kickstart and Pathrise and I never see them mentioned here whatsoever. We in fact work with a lot of bootcamp grads later on their careers and not INSTEAD of a bootcamp so I don't see how trashing bootcamps would be in my business interests at all.
I also don't think you would fall into this bucket based on your post and your clear and transparency for 2+ years here.
I know a number of people that post on their own free will, a number of people who ask me to post things on their behalf, a number of people who just tell me about their multiple accounts and how they use them, it's a really wide spectrum.
Like I do have a trusted source who claims to have first hand evidence of an employee directly asking a group of trusted alumni to comment on specific posts and I want to figure out how THAT is happening and sprinkles down to others.
I don't know if you agree or not, but each cohort is a little different. Part time is a lot more chill (and hence why their ghosting rate is much higher on CIRR), new york onsite is super intense, east coast I get the most concerns about toxic positivity, etc... I don't know all the of the instructors…
Yes, from talking to a number of people casually, this is my current understanding (this is not fact-based but connecting the dots from various first hand sources):
\- enrollment is down, one timezone was removed, there were layoffs a month or so ago
\- there is pressure on admissions to get people admitted faster (less time between interviews and more discretion, BUT KEEPING THE BAR HIGH! - which is important)
\- the teacher hierarchy is students -> fellows -> mentor -> instructor -> lead instructor -> head instructor and program director. when someone leaves they get replaced by someone one step lower in the hierarchy
\- so when pressure comes from the program director, head instructor, and outcomes advisor to increase enrollment and that message gets spread down the hierarchy and eventually hits the current students.
so my working theory is that say the program director pulls i…
Only people who drink the kool-aid feel that way from what I see, the vast majority of people outside of the Codesmith bubble think I'm balanced and reasonable and I tell many of them to go to Codesmith if it's the right thing for them. I help a number of Codesmith grads (at Formation and not at Formation) think of ideas and things to do who are stuck. So I imagine that my view is skewed more for people on the struggling side who don't drink the kool-aid.
But like I said, many of the bootcamp leaders (current and former) talk with me anyone from once in a blue moon to regularly, except for Codesmith - they instead just call me a troll to their staff instead of acknowledging the truth in the things I say and making changes. With so much churn in staff, some of those people who are not so bought in are going to start talking to me (when they see me challenged by people who drink the kool-…
Feel free to send your resume for review, I'm also curious what you've been doing since then since that's a long time. The market is indeed tough for people without experience and there's no shortcut (other than if you lie or exaggerate on your resume) so it does take time, but I can give some tips for things to do while job hunting to be ready.
The market is indeed picking since end of September through now. It will be critical to see through Q1 2024 how things go, as new budgets and headcount kick in. All of my friends are doing all of their headcount planning right now and we'll see. No one can time the market, but you can make the thoughtful decisions you can with all the data you can.
Unfortunately Codesmith is sitting on their H2 2022 report and won't publish it and people can't make thoughtful decisions.
80% in ONE YEAR vs 80% in SIX MONTHS is very different.
Imagine people went to an interview prep program after and got a job from that, all within the 12 months... Codemsith still gets credit. The longer the time period the more people do on their own afterwards that contributes to their job than. And the portion any bootcamp would claim for the success of failure at that point is lower and lower. That's my point here, not that it's not a good point that people are getting jobs but just taking longer.
Like I said before, my commentary reflects what people tell me. With recent churn of staff and longer time staff who left a while ago reappearing there is more going on here.
Look at their Glassdoor reviews (I hadn't but a prospective student shared them and asked if I knew of they were real). Notice how all the 1 star ones have a shit-ton of upvotes and the great ones have none. And this is with Codesmith monitoring page and reporting reviews for fraud review.
Finishing in April means your CIRR 6 month mark was October, so that's about a 40% placement rate. I tend to round up because people that you dont' know ghost, and if their LinkedIn says they have a job, they count as a placement anyways. So let's say 50%, which is consistent with Triathletes' comment. This is also consistent with the data I have as well.
I still think they should be more transparent about this since since they are so all in on CIRR and transparency in results.
For anyone reading this who is skeptical because of the somewhat sketchier pro Codesmith posts recently, this person is a very long time reliable commenter who has been here for a long time.
So about 70% placement in A YEAR is quite low compared to the past CIRR results almost concerninly low because they are advertising an 80% placement rate in 6 months post graduation and telling people that in info sessions. Just because CIRR hasn't published an H2 2022 report, they have a report prepared already and know the numbers and that's deceptive in my personal opinion to life in customers knowing the latest placements rates are.mjch lower. The CIRR executive director already said that Codesmith is free to self publish those if they want to.
Everyone reading this - CIRR is expected to change the 6 month window to 12 months and I expect Codesmith to start quoting 12 months placement rates of…
Zooming out, masters degrees are super complicated.
You know how 2U/Edx/Trilogy has partnerships with most of the top schools to run bootcamps under their names.
Masters degrees fall into a similar world of for profit, where a lot of top schools that have expensive, short degrees that they offer online or in remote cities for a very high fee.
The real benefit I'm talking about above for CS degrees is if you are able to engage directly with recruiters who are dedicated to hiring from your school and get priority interviews and "the red carpet treatment" (recruiters taking you out for dinner, fancy events, boxes of coconut water mailed to you).
It's not going there just grants you these benefits, they happen because the students end up being superstars at the companies and the recruiters go back for the next year's graduates.
The fundamental problem with bootcamps is that there isn't…