Yeah the whole industry has this problem, and it's not Codesmith causing the entire thing. A very common pattern is people who have "3 years of self employed contracting" when they were just on Upwork and never even had a single contract. Or they did volunteer work that they call "contracting work".
I've seen everything under the sun and talk to my friends a lot about it.
The way most Codesmith alumni portray their experience though is by the one that triggers most people and makes then have a negative view of Codesmith. "scam", "liars", "no integrity" are words used.
The weakness in the approach is that all the code is public and anyone can read it - very few do - and those that do see how embarrassing it can be to portray those projects as months/1+ years of "experience".
You're right that it is what it is is, and the industry and the market will adjust.
It's why DS&A is preva…
This is a great example of how Codesmith's 4 week long OSP turns into what looks like a large project/company, fit with the website, logo, and it's posted all over the place.
I looked at the code and this is about 1 day of focused work for a really good senior engineer (the core project, not the marketing and write ups) and it is not mid-level or senior engineering work from 4 people for 4 weeks. Obviously the ideation, planning, and marketing take a lot longer when you don't have experience yet, as expected, so this is not a criticism of the people working on it, but a criticism that the project is at the equivalent of months of work at the mid to senior level, as their chief academic officer has stated (presented to me as notes from lecture from a student that though this was concerning)
This is one of the key ways that Codesmith grads, who choose to do so - not all, present themselv…
I don't have one answer for everybody.
1. I would consider a bootcamp if you have the time and finances to go all in, e.g. 12 hour days for 3-4 months (or part time where you have no free time outside of work and bootcamp). However, in this climate it's far from a sure bet that it will lead to a job quickly.
2. Consider lower-end apprenticeships/work to hire type programs
3. Do volunteering for non-profits like Hack4LA
This is an extensive set of resources from Vanessa Vun, who learned self-taught but by diligently participating in many different organizations: [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/vanessas-tech-resources-faq-vanessa-vun](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/vanessas-tech-resources-faq-vanessa-vun) (disclosure: while this resource has dozens of things, it does mention the program I co-founded Formation so I want to disclose to avoid it appearing self-promotion)
Plus 1 to market improving. Something subtle you said is also something I'm seeing myself which is that newer members are getting jobs sometimes faster than people who started in H2 2022.
My theory is people who applied for jobs then basically had their resumes go into a black hole and ignored. And the people are so demoralized they aren't in a great place for chugging along. Whereas people applying fresh now have a better chance to get seen.
For CIRR companies (i.e. Codesmith) I'm seeing some people get placed post 6 months so they will be excluded from CIRR even though they got jobs, which is another thing that can make CIRR not align with perception.
BTW if you know why Codesmith's CIRR was restated, I'm dying to know, I thought they would publish an explanation because they are extremely proactive about defending Codesmith's stance on CIRR in their blogs.
Hi, so I can speak to changes we've made at Formation, which is not a bootcamp and was engineered to be dynamic and flexible, these are the things I remember in the past 6 months off the top of my head in the 3 mins I timeboxed to writing this:
1. Redid job hunt reference materials twice
2. Redid async resume review process so people can get reviews faster in general
3. Created 5 new group and mentor led session types around job hunting, networking, job hunt office hours, storytelling, and specially check-ins
4. Created dedicate peer referrals channel, which isn't working too well because of the market
5. Added dozens of industry recruiters for mock interviews and responses in chat
6. Created a book a recruiter call on demand flow self service on our platform for people in interviews
7. Added on platform referral request flows for people who are a good match for companies to request re…
Sorry I don't :(. I work/have worked with hundreds of bootcamp grads later on in their careers and most come from Codesmith, Hack Reactor, Rithm, Fullstack Academy, General Assembly, Hackbright, and some other ones that are escaping my memory, but not Coding Temple. There are a surprisingly large number of Codesmith STAFF, students and alumni on here who have over time contacted me as a well which gives me a lot of insight into their program more than any other.
UPDATE: 2023 Predictions check-in and updates!
Hi all, it's halfway through 2023 and I wanted to quickly revisit my predictions from this post to give some updates based on how the industry is doing: [https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/1226i27/bootcamp\_predictions\_for\_the\_rest\_of\_2023/](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/1226i27/bootcamp_predictions_for_the_rest_of_2023/)
# New: What's left for 2023?
The main thing I want to add is that outcomes for H2 2022 are going to go off a cliff. At first when we saw H1 2022 CIRR results come out they were better than expected, however Codesmith restated their numbers after audit and they were notably lower than originally posted for placement rates and high end salaries ([https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/14341x7/codesmiths\_newly\_posted\_audited\_version\_of\_their/](https://www.reddit.com/r/co…
It doesn't sound like you are making the most of your experience and using the resources available and it's our fault if you aren't making the best use of them or aware of all of your options so I really want to make sure you have all the support you are looking for. The premise of Formation is that there are tens of thousands of hours worth of free content out there and you are paying us because we consistently help people get to a top tier skill level efficiently and without having to think what to do all the time. We don't think you should pay a lot of money for content alone. So again, you should talk to someone internally about how sessions can be better. We can make all kinds of adjustments. You are paying for the engineers who built a highly adaptable system and to have a team of three full time support people in your dedicated channel and for check-ins and if you aren't communica…
If you're already in Formation, ping me internally! I can give you more qualitative estimates based on other people with similar backgrounds right now. Like since the end of 2022, people with no experience are taking a lot longer to place at top companies, but are getting jobs are less strong companies. People with a few years experience have started getting FAANG-level offers in the past monthish, and even earlier to today, but overall are taking longer because of the lull in late 2022/early 2023. So it's really a personal conversation I'm happy to have based on your specific goals and background.
If the real timeframes don't align you have a team of people who are around to help you figure out what kinds of changes you can make to accelerate based on new company goals, or to help you get motivated, or to help figure out what's not working. The more you give the more you get at Formati…
Thanks for sharing thoughts!
Placement times range from 3 weeks to 18 months and counting.
One of the main reasons we don't publish time to placement data right now is because people don't understand what Formation "is" yet and we don't want people to look at numbers that would compare us to a bootcamp or even our competitors, like Interview Kickstart, Outco, Pathrise, Coachable, Scaler (all of which don't publish much data).
Your program is truly unique to you, the person who is still here after 18 months has done hundreds of sessions, almost a thousand tasks, a few dozen mock interviews, and keeps chugging along. Some people even do contracts and part time jobs and ramp down Formation and then ramp back up again when the contract ends (I can't comment on specific people, but it might contribute to the people who have been here longer).
I completely agree that someone looking at Fo…
How would you answer that given the above restrictions? I would love to answer it but we just can't in a way that is actually clear and transparent?
100% of people adjust their schedules and time commitments throughout Formation (at least once, the majority adjust every week) so what would you do if someone goes on parental leave? What about if they go on a lot of vacation? How do you compare the time it takes for someone training 50 hours a week vs someone training 10 hours a week and the majority of people change their workload several times throughout? If someone is stressed and needs a mental health break, or needs a physical health break, that will impact their training time and unlike a bootcamp we don't kick you out or "defer" you for these cases. As I said, the majority of people fall under these kinds of situations so it's not an edge case that will get averaged out in placeme…
Hi, Formation isn't a bootcamp, doesn't have "graduation", doesn't have cohorts or start dates, doesn't have a expected amount of time you will spend in it, doesn't have a curriculum or topic list you will study. In addition, most people train in Formation part time and have jobs, and ramp up or down their commitments to suit their own needs rather than along our fixed timeframe. Finally, people come from all kinds of backgrounds and start at different places, so it's very hard to look at data and guess what your time and outcome might be like.
So in conclusion, CIRR makes no sense for us at all and we can't even answer basic questions like "how many people graduated" because the question itself doesn't make sense for us.
We have published average outcomes and a list of companies placed at in 2022: [https://formation.dev/blog/2022-formation-fellow-placements/](https://formation.dev/blo…
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
I randomly stumbled on this because of a random comment talking about something I was looking for.
Four days ago you yelled at someone for talking about H1 2022 results because you said they didn't apply anymore but 16 days ago you were touting cherry picked results from H1 2022 to promote Codesmith.
Source https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/14341x7/comment/jna31yd/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
I'm flagging just so others can see this in the future when evaluating sources.
I totally understand how my view here could come across elitist or disconnected for not just the average but most people.
The reason is that inequality is a huge problem in the US. People who are starting off lower almost never make socioeconomic jumps to catch up to the people who start off higher. And the above argument is a reason why. A kid born to millionaires expects to make a "measley" $200K as a fallback in case they fail out in life. Whereas someone born in the lowest income bracket might dream of having a stable job and making 60K.
To address inequality I'm pushing people to all have the same expectations and trying to create paths for people to make the jump even if they don't see a path themselves or have the confidence they can do it.
From my experience, people are very happy and proud to drop their names in the spreadsheet and cheer on their peers outcomes... and a lot more reluctant to talk about how hard it is on the job and the failures that come with it.
I think this is the reason you see so many Hackbright and Hack Reactor and App Academy alumni at FAANG companies 5 years down the road, and while you see a good number of Codesmith alumni at FAANG too there is a greater number 3 jobs in as "senior engineers" at unknown non-tech companies pushing $200K. A mid-level Google offer though is $300K and I reiterate that an appropriate first job -> FAANG mid-level is a much better outcome down the road than what most Codesmith students do.
Yeah exactly, students are pushed towards "mid level" roles at less strong companies that pay $120Kish. It's one of my criticisms of the career services product there, that most bootcamp grads are better off at top companies as entry level engineers and they discourage people from looking for those jobs.
The "Codesmith way" of doing things is particularly impactful at less good companies that don't realize the resumes are exaggerated or look into was OSLabs is, and I think that's a factor in why they encourage this. These strategies don't work at top companies and Codesmith grads just look like any other bootcamp grads to them.
I lot of bootcamps incorporate DS&A practice into the programs, AA, Hack Reactor, Codesmith, for starters.
That said, I don't know of any bootcamp that actually teaches fundamental problem solving with DS&As. Codesmith spends under a week on all the theoretical concepts for DS&As and even though they assign you a problem a DAY they don't actually teach you how to solve them. I've worked with numerous Codesmith grads that can flail through a LC Medium problem but wouldn't pass a Facebook-level interview because the thought process demonstrates a lack of deeper understanding.
I'm the co-founder of Formation, which is a program for experienced engineers that focuses on DS&A, SD, and behaviorals, and it typically takes most people - including graduates of HR and CS - 2 to 5 more months of pure DS&A focus to get to the top tier bar.
So it takes the entire length of time you spent in a boot…
1. +1 the Lifetime career services at bootcamps aren't helpful because they are meant to help bootcamp grads get jobs. When you have a job and want to get a better job, they don't support you as much as you could. I've heard people say "\[my bootcamp's career services\] helped me negotiate my next offer and it's a gift that keeps on giving".... but what they don't realize is that if they sought help from others that specialize in experienced engineers (disclosure: co-founder of Formation which helps and hence I'm very biased) that you might have made wayyyyy more. The average person placed after Formation increased their first year TC by $96K (see website for how we calculate). So if you are super thankful for "free" help to you increase you compensation by $50K, you could have paid $10K to make almost $100K more... Anyways, this isn't an ad for Formation - Formation has lots of concerns…
I agree with this in general. The CIRR standards have no requirements for verification of salaries, other than asking a person. They also allow LinkedIn verification to be used to confirm employment but without any more qualifications on how to do that. So if someone works as a self employed Uber driver on their LinkedIn and ghosts bootcamp staff, that could as a "confirmed placement" but with "salary not reported".
The one thing they do have more qualification on is the start dates, and the process for verifying with a letter. Even there, they have subjectivity if someone has multiple jobs within the 6 months, to choose a job or the other.
Anyways, all in the spec, don't have time to write all this out yet again, but the TLDR: it was written by bootcamp marketing and outcomes people and not lawyers.
I have it locally and it looks the same to me. It only has about 30 people in it so it makes sense. ONE placement is over 3% of the class instead of 0.3%
But I guess that means swings this large means there were numerous errors in the full time one :S
If this is a submission error of the report itself or the auditors audited the wrong version and signed off that's even worse because it destroys trust in the CIRR ecosystem because it means either Codesmith got away with publishing false data - and might be legally liable - or the auditors signed off on the wrong report and obviously can't be trusted.
So it's actually better if this was human error in the spreadsheets that the auditors fixed.
Codesmith's newly posted AUDITED version of their CIRR H1 2022 show discrepancies from their initial report published a month or two ago (... and a reminder about blindly trusting CIRR)
UPDATE (June 25th 2023): The Auditors re-released a correction and they republished the original report as the final audited report. This is all very confusing how such mistakes and errors could pass audit to begin with, but I believe the "original report" is the final numbers and the "audited reports" contained errors that were originally signed off on.
One of the misconceptions about CIRR is that results are audited before being posted. This is not correct and rather they are audited once a year and then updated after the fact.
Codesmith recently added their **audited** report to CIRR and it has worse outcomes:
[Link to original report](https://static.spacecrafted.com/b13328575ece40d8853472b9e0cf204…
Hi, my partner and I both have many years as staff, principal SWE's at FB and Nextdoor. My partner left Nextdoor and ran a free coding bootcamp for a year or two. After seeing how good intentioned people were trying over and over to "fix bootcamps" but had numerous quality issues, she wanted to do it better. She did, and the people she worked with have great careers now, but it didn't scale beyond a number of people she could train herself (\~10 at a time). What she realized though is that the brokenness of bootcamps was resulting in tens of thousands of new engineers who were employable but lacking fundamental skills needed to grow in their next career step. So we joined forced to start Formation - which is a personalized and dynamic coaching and training program for experienced engineers.
If you want my advice - be ready to run a company and not to create a coding bootcamp. Almost all…
We run ads for our program (not a bootcamp but have experience with ads)
Honestly, with good quality ad targeting it's impossible to know. It might FEEL like a company is spending millions of dollars and you see the ads every place you go.... inescapable... but the company might be spending very little and just optimized how to target you or their audience very well and not waste money on irrelevant people.
So it's possible that the more you see a company, the better their marketers are. It's also possible they are spending a ton of money. You'll never really know though and advertising is the main way companies find customers so almost everyone does it.
The ones that don't spend money, hire people to create public content and "free" workshops. They end up spending MORE MONEY on those people's salaries and running those than they would on advertising.
Codesmith is a good example, a…
I see people interviewing at all stages of companies at Formation (disclosure: co-founder) and they haven't changed much recently. Larger companies that have complex proprietary technology continue to do generic, stack-agnostic, problem solving (i.e. "Leetcode") problems. Smaller and less tech-focused companies that expect you to show up on day 1 and contribute in a more generic stack continue to have more practical questions, realistic work.
Rent is crazy expensive despite super high vacancies. Rithm School was in person with a great office in the heart of SF and might be able to comment on this, but it's prohibitively expensive.
That said, my partner used to run a free bootcamp in the heart of SF that we paid rent for from our savings and some people got remote jobs anyways, but some people just met random engineers in person, which led to networking + jobs and it did help, but you can always just move to SF while doing a remote bootcamp and get a similar benefit.
Codesmith opened a NY in person program but the enrollment appears to always be lower/fills up slower as they have repeatedly pushed back application deadlines for it almost until a week or two before the program start.
Choosing a program based on outcomes is extremely dangerous. Outcomes should be used as a way to identify a small number of "legit" programs, but it's **extremely important** to look at outcomes of people with a background similar to yourself.
I chat with so many people that want to go to Codesmith or X because they like all the conversations with alumni from X but that Codesmith has the "best outcomes". For people who are doctors, lawyers, accountants, PMs, mechanical engineers, CS grads, I say sure because those outcomes are representative of people with your background. For people who have no "office work experience" you are better off finding a lower paying job that's a really good fit and Codesmith's methods are harmful to your development for most people - pushing someone whose never sat at desk before to get a mid level job and reject an entry level offer is not the right approac…
Posting salaries is really not useful and it's all anecdotal. I have an non-CS engineering degree and I made more money in a year than most Americans earn in a lifetime in my first job at Facebook.... does that mean everyone should do a 4 year non-CS engineering degree because it worked for me? Obviously not! Just because someone went to Hack Reactor or Codesmith and got a job making $120K, it means nothing. You will be mislead if you do something because a small number of people comment on Reddit about it.
I wouldn't recommend a bootcamp right now. Codesmith is a program that markets to CS grads and people with more experience and even their placements rates as reported from recent alumni have dropped drastically since last reported.
I have a few recommendations to look at... what works for you is ultimately a personal choice, but just things to consider:
1. Consider career accelerators: Formation.dev (disclosure: co-founder), Interview Kickstart, Outco, Pathrise, Coachable.dev, Scaler, are main ones to look at. These are all very different programs but they focus on fine tuning and enhancing existing skills and focus entirely on the job hunt. They pick up where bootcamps end basically.
2. Consider doing volunteer work at places like Hack4LA, or other Code For America branches. This is a way to get more realistic "volunteer work experience" that is a notch above a group project that you…
Codesmith slowly and quietly shut down the data and machine learning intensive? Anyone know why?
I noticed a few months ago that Codesmith had removed all future cohorts for the data and machine learning intensive from their website but kept the landing page up, and now the entire program is gone (it used to be here: [https://www.codesmith.io/data-science-and-machine-learning-immersive](https://www.codesmith.io/data-science-and-machine-learning-immersive#upcoming_program_dates))
Anyone know why?
I don't think this reflects poorly or is a sign that there are troubles at Codesmith as it was a new program. It's probably a good thing so that they can focus on placing people in the immersive during a really hard time.
EDIT: Someone DM's and I won't share the details because it was a private message, but the program evolved into a separate, more academic, project outside of the Codesmith b…
I PERSONALLY agree, but I still want to deeply understand why people who also agree have gone down this path after thinking they wouldn't. I feel it leaves me with a nuanced understanding to help people navigate... but this my job and my prerogative
I find the way that Codesmith itself defends the mid-level and senior target roles more bothersome because it puts pressure on people to do this and they too have seen thousands of people go through the program and deeply understand why they are doing it.
Dynamic and self paced is the way to go. You have to be in the driver's seat the whole time but there can be different routes to get from A to B! A bootcamp is like driving from NY to SF and there is one road you must drive down at EXACTLY the speed they tell you to, rather than choosing the path you like the most. Maybe you love southern food and want to swing by the south. Maybe you want to hit up Canada. Maybe you want to take the shortest route possible and speed excessively. maybe you want to avoid highways and go super slow, maybe you want to hit all the national parks along the way, maybe you want to try to cross as many states as possible.
Some programs that are self-paced let you go down that single path at your own speed - which is just one tiny small step towards the amazing, creative world we want where you can get to the same destination on your own journey!
Sorry, super…
One of the problems with this though is it is very non inclusive. /u/-procrastinate- I'm not sure if you have comments on diversity but it takes someone who is reasonable successful in a prior to job to have the money and/or support system in place to do 11 hour days + saturdays + extra study time for 3 months. Sure the people who put in the effort get rewarded, but statistically those people tend to be less diverse demographically and this kind of approach can make tech LESS DIVERSE long term. For example, mothers are still more often primary caregivers to their children, and with these hours it's very hard to be a primary caregiver and do Codesmith (or Hack Reactor) without savings for childcare, or a supportive family to help.
Bloomtech publishes diversity numbers and 75% of graduates identify as Male. Codesmith doesn't publish diversity numbers but I've hear they are dominated Male…
I see both sides of this working with alumni who are also conflicted. I agree with OP that it's not something trained as the key to success officially, it's more something people do because they see alumni do it and succeed, or they get stuck on the job hunt for months and day by day massage the resume a little more.
Some people do intentionally pride themselves in bs'ing their OSP under pressure and passing interviews, but not many.
I think the reason it's important to talk about is that it's a tool in a toolbelt. And when we talk about people tend to go to extremes defending or attacking this strategy. There are consequences to a lot of things in this world and there are consequences to this strategy. I think it's important people understand their tools and use them effectively instead of being sold on a magical hammer that can fix everything with no effort.
I have push notifications turned on for every single post in this subreddit yeah and I'm an inbox zero person where anytime, anywhere I try to check push notifs ASAP of all kinds (and I aggressively manage them so they aren't spam)
My day job is coding and the green boxes are the proof http://github.com/mnovati
My priority is helping Formation Fellows with advice, bug fixes, and new features and managing my team and I spend about 10 to 30 mins on Reddit a day (depending on the day)
I'm actually glad you asked, because a leader at Codemsith just assumed because I'm so on top of things on Reddit that I'm a 'dark disturbed individual who spends all day on Reddit trying to take down Codesmith' and it's always better to ask instead of assuming and making such strong conclusions.
\+1 to this, talk to people and ask what it's like.
Like zoomed out - people exaggerate their OSP on their resumes and in interviews - but it's not like Codesmith is like spending 10 hours a day teaching people how to stretch the truth without officially lying and that fact doesn't represent the vibe and feel of Codesmith as a whole.
I completely agree that more Codesmith conversations should be about the substance. I'm in a bucket where I complain about people not discussing HOW Codemsith works and instead just saying fluffy reasons to go there or fluffy and vague complaints.You need to know HOW it works to know if it's a good fit for you.
I'm frequently involved in controversial discussions on here to try to steer them to more concrete discussions and present more sides. If someone posts a vague positive or negative answer, you won't get more details and valuable discussion by yelling at them.
The most frequent DMs I get are 'I really respect your consistent and thorough comments' or 'I'm at Codesmith and can't believe how accurate and representative most of your comments are' and that's my goal.
1. Codesmith has a bimodal distribution, so there is a chunk of people making on the low side and a chunk of people making on the high side, and few people making in the middle.
2. But that $137K was Q2 2021 when a ton of people went to Capital One and Amazon, both companies with high base salaries (which is the only thing reported to CIRR) which bump that up significantly. It fell by $10K in Q1 2022 as those companies slowed down.
3. That is the median of PEOPLE PLACED WHO REPORTED SALARIES, not the median of all Codesmith grads, add in the 10 to 20% of people without jobs who have $0 salaries and that's not the median anymore.
I commented this above but copy pasting because it's important, I agree with the qualitative arguments, just an important note for the CIRR data:
Standard disclaimer: several people are mentioning average salaries, it's super important with CIRR data to recognize that the numbers at NOT averages, they are medians, and they are NOT the "average Codesmith grad" it is the median salary of PLACED CODESMITH GRADS, not ALL CODESMITH GRADS.
So it's the 50th percentile base salary of the 80% of people placed of the 95% of people that graduated. If you put $0 for the other 20% that didn't get jobs, the "average Codesmith grad" is making FAR less than this and the median would be shifted down to about 100 to 110K based on the CIRR distribution.
Just important to note, because I'm constantly on top of people who misrepresent CIRR outcomes.
CIRR outcomes don't include stock and bonuses so the…
Standard disclaimer: several people are mentioning average salaries, it's super important with CIRR data to recognize that the numbers at NOT averages, they are medians, and they are NOT the "average Codesmith grad" it is the median salary of PLACED CODESMITH GRADS, not ALL CODESMITH GRADS.
So it's the 50th percentile base salary of the 80% of people placed of the 95% of people that graduated. If you put $0 for the other 20% that didn't get jobs, the "average Codesmith grad" is making FAR less than this and the median would be shifted down to about 100 to 110K based on the CIRR distribution.
Just important to note, because I'm constantly on top of people who misrepresent CIRR outcomes.
CIRR outcomes don't include stock and bonuses so the actual median and average compensation is probably a lot HIGHER than what CIRR says, so I'm not saying this to bash Codesmith, I'm saying it to pro…
I'm familiar with Outco (disclosure, they are a competitor to my company Formation, and both of us are not bootcamps or directly comparable to bootcamps) and have also had some peope at Formation get super confused by their recent marketing thinking Outco was offering them a job, rather than coaching and mentoring that they were already doing with us.
I would give them the feedback that their new marketing campaign is sketchy. They are a very small company with only a few full time people, they don't have investors, and I don't think this is intentionally trying to be offensive. That said, I'm not saying anything about the quality of the training because I'm super bias and I don't disagree that it might not be worth $5000 for a lot of people... I can say that for many people having structure, direction, FEEDBACK, and practice are extremely valuable and a catalyst to a new job making \~$…
Open Source Project. 4 weeks at Codesmith are spent coming up with a group project, building the project, releasing it as a new open source project OR releasing a new version of an existing project, marketing the project, and then updating your resume to reflect the project.
The controversy around them is
1. Most people list the project as a company and as a Software Engineer (with very fine print "Project supported by a accelerator OSLabs")
2. Most people list the time spent on it as 3 to 18 months (the average being about 6)
3. The average person only committed 2 to 3 commits on the projects over 2 to 3 weeks in a sample of 200 GitHub profiles analyzed a year ago
4. The projects are supervised by a former student as a mentor who typically don't have any or much industry experience, but the projects claim they are "mid to senior level work equivalent"
Don't get me wrong, the project…
I've worked with (bias disclosure, co-founder of a coaching program for experienced engineers) a wide range of alumni from right after Codesmith, during Codesmith, down the road, people who work at Codesmith, and everyone is super professional, polite, hard working, and driven.
I've been the target of several attacks (where people have told me that posts were shared in both official internal slacks and unofficial discords) where alumni, staff, etc... have said some pretty mean things personal things about me but I think it's a very small number of peopel. Codesmith has been extremely defensive to things that I've called out. I criticized their "sponsored talks" for a lack of proper referencing of content and they staunchly defended that telling the entire student base that I'm wrong and incorrectly quoted laws that don't apply. All of that because a student blatantly copied the code sa…
I flagged this post for logging and it's insane how the upvote/downvote count is being attempted to be manipulated. Reddit has algorithms to prevent abuse and the way the upvote and downvotes are changing by +/- 10 when you reload the page is an indication that a lot of sketchy accounts are attempting to manipulate the post.
Hmm Philip Troutman is still listed as Head Instructor and Chief Academic Officer and most recently as a Senior Software Engineer as of Dec 2022, which was after this fork. I doubt they would do such a crazy legal risk without vetting it with an experienced lawyer or they just don't know the consequences of what they are doing.
Hi, can you confirm that the number for a reference on an OSP is actually a Codesmith phone number? My understanding is since June of last year, OS Labs Inc was forked as is an independent official charity that can't have conflicts of interest with Codesmith and must be run entirely separate by independent board members. The letters of reference I've seen are signed by Philip Troutman, Board Member of OS Labs and don't say Codesmith anywhere on them.
I've been consistently commenting on this, but in the past, bootcamps have always been not that great for learning and were being over credited for the results because of the hot market. We haven't seen bootcamps go through a tech downturn EVER.
All of the "There were a lot of challenges but I followed the advice to just stick with it because it works, and I got a six figure job!" .... are turning into "there were a lot of challenges but I followed the advice to stick with it because it works, and no one in my cohort is employed, what a scam!"
1. It's so important to learn HOW a bootcamp works to see if it's a good alignment for you. If people say "firehose", "hard learning", "just follow their advice" then you should start asking how it works at all and what people are actually learning. If they are "learning how to learn" or vague things like that, dig deeper and be honest! At Codesm…
Yeah the OSP posts that get tons of engagement have also been controversial. On the one hand, an incredibly supportive and engaged community. On the other hand, Codemsith steers that raw awesomeness and it comes across people spending almost more time promoting their OSP with posts, websites etc.. than they actually spend on the OSP itself and then get celebrated for it.
I also think some of that fear above is misplaced. Like it's very very very rare someone disappears out of the community (from what I've heard) but people seem to really really want to do what Codemsith tells them to do because the community is so close and the remote possibility of losing touch is so scary that people are super cautious.
I mean why the community is abnormally strong is for you to decide. Some say it's a family who have "family dinners" every week and some say it's unintentionally cult like.
I watche…
I've spoken with several people who are currently in Codemsith or recent graduates concerned about identifying themselves for fear of being removed and shutoff from the community. Codesmith staff monitor this sub closely and if you give any info that could identify your cohort or OSP project and they find you, you might get in trouble. There was a mega AMA thread recently that disclosed a ton of numbers and info that was allowed but it was very positive.
So I agree this won't be useful without the why, but the OP might have reasons.
This is true for the most part. They are working on updating their materials by having alumni in the industry give official feedback. The ethos of education is "hard learning" and they want you to learn how to learn when overwhelmed, so I don't think they care that much about the curriculum. But enough people have complained I think they are looking into it.
I kept a close on on the staff backgrounds since I was shocked to see the vast majority of alumni exaggerating their OSP experience in number 4.a. I investigated after numerous staff members where I work didn't realize Codesmith alumni had no experience based on their resumes and the people were not super clear in their interviews either :(.
There are about 80ish +/- a lot out of 130ish employees on their website that are alumni of Codesmith itself (it fluctuates a lot, check for yourself!)
50ish are TAs/Fellows, 15ish are career…
By web developer I mean people who are doing just HTML and CSS and primarily working in tools like Webflow, or doing custom Shopify websites or marketing emails.
Someone in that role is a common person to do a more advanced program to level up to. “Software Engineer” role
Codesmith is aiming at getting people legit software roles and it’s one of the reasons outcomes are high. A lot of bootcamps place people in support roles or customer analyst roles or developer roles… again why it’s so important to find the right program for you because depending on your goals, do you want to choose the right path or you don’t wanna just go to Codesmith because the numbers on paper so high