I stand by it for FAANG companies. It's why they almost always round down levels if someone is in between.
At a bank, or non-tech-focused decent company, it might matter less and you might not plan to stay for a long time, and you don't have the possibility of making millions of dollars following this.
Eric at Codesmith tells people that mid level worse companies are better than entry level FAANG jobs because FAANG companies make you do all the grunt work. And that's the thing I thing I'm pushing back on as I believe the exact opposite and can back that up for FAANG companies.
The companies for 3 are critical to understanding position level, which makes the levels and titles somewhat meaningless.
I know a number of people that even after normalizing for the actual responsibilities and company still get more senior roles than they should at "medium" level companies. As Fluffy said, it's stressful, constantly worried about getting fired, in a an environment of layoffs, constantly worried about being the lowest performing midlevel/senior on the team.
I feel extremely strongly this is something to avoid and will happily debate their outcomes advisor publicly about this.
(EDIT: From a Facebook, Google, Amazon, perspective) I'm very biased because all junior people I know who were under leveled and out performed had amazing careers and received disproportinately large stock grant bonuses, and the people who were over leveled were managed out or fired within 1 to…
I can add more to what "encouraged" means. They have lecture and references materials that do no encourage anything strongly as the "official" stance. Where these "encouragements" come out are:
1. Former students who are resume reviewers, TAs, etc... might give that advice 1-1 because of "other people who did it and succeeded"
2. In verbal Q&A's it might come up as an option to help you
3. You talk to alumni directly on Slack who get placed, ask them for their resume, see what they do, and copy them.
It sounds like Codesmith is the one you are naturally leaning towards. No one will shame you or force you to exaggerate at all, they help you represent your work however you want to represent it. You might be one of the few that get a really good job regardless or you might have a harder time. A lot of people I know end up in the middle. They don't want to exaggerate, but you have Eric Kirsten constantly telling you that you are hurting your career by taking a junior job and that Codesmith prepared you for mid level jobs, and you see the resumes of the people getting those jobs, and it starts to feel not so bad just leaving off the months on that OSP project on the resume to make it appear longer, but always 100% telling the truth to anyone who asks.
Here is my 2cents having worked with a number of Codesmith grads anywhere from during Codesmith, immediately after, or down the road, for a variety of goals, from just wanting to get a job, to wanting to get a top tier job.
Overall Codesmith is a great program, an incredible community of amazing people. Every one I've worked with is professional, hard working, and great.
It's great for people who are super ambitious and work hard but it's not magic. So I try to help people choose to go for the right reasons and look beyond the on paper results.
I have the same 3 issues you do and comment about them often.
I also have a different perspective with these issues because as an industry engineer who knows literally several thousand other FAANG/ex-FAANG engineers, the dozen or so peers I've asked have had reactions to Codesmith resumes ranges from "omg that's sketchy" to "this is blatant fr…
Yeah I think Codesmith for the most part treats the fellow job reasonably with CIRR, but the loophole to watch out for is that they can "delay the clock indefinitely" by 1) extending contracts, and 2) hiring more Fellows. e.g. hiring 20% of a cohort back (7 people) is a MASSING clock delaying event for CIRR results. It pushes back 20% of people who might have otherwise not gotten a job, into the next report.
Thanks for sharing details as well, I suspect many programs have similar results and it's expected, but it should help people in navigating the tough market!
Again, I think they handle this reasonably, but they should disclose in a footnote on their reports how many people are fellows in each cohort as it manipulates the data.
This is another problem with CIRR, it's not crystal clear on layoffs, promotions, job changes, etc... that could happen in the six months. It assumes people just get one job and they don't specify any requirements on how salaries are collected.
So if I was Codemsith I would
1. Include anyone who got a job, regardless of layoffs
2. If people got multiple jobs or promotions, use the highest salary within the six month period.
Here is my detailed analysis, neutral look at the data (some points might seem boring, but just writing it up thoroughly). I tried to put the more controversial points first as I doubt people will read all of this.
# SUMMARY: Not much change from H2 2021, slight downshift in salary buckets, but overall very similar numbers.
# 1. Median salaries continue to be super misleading because of multiple cutoff points (a CIRR issue I describe often is pronounced here)
So the part time program exemplifies these the best, explaining via example.
37 people included in report. 10% of people were excluded because they said they weren't job hunting when starting Codesmith.
Now 31 people were placed. 21 people salaries, and 3 people did not report salaries. So of the **\~40 people who started, 21 people reported salaries and the median of those was $137K**.
For the full time program, 301 people…
So NuCamp has no bar and focuses on experience outcomes instead of job placements. To be fair, if you wanted to compare it to Codesmith say, you would need to take a sample of people who got accepted to Codesmith and have them do NuCamp instead, and then compare the outcomes, otherwise it's apples and oranges.
That said, NuCamp only has 4ish hours once a week of live instruction, and the rest is self study, homework, graded work, etc... so that's also how they keep the cost down. Whereas a lot of programs have instructors 8+ hours a day... and keep costs down by hiring former students to teach.
It doesn't seem much different than the USA market, but we have seen fewer Canadian interviews. The big tech companies have classic DSA and the smaller companies have very varying processes (some practical, some DSA, some live programming, etc...).
Side note more broadly for other readers as well, even though we do a lot of DSA, the goal is to train you how to problem solve an interview settings and people who fully buy into this tend to find the training really valuable for every single kind of interview. I think the OP and some of the comments that focus too much on DSA are also people who haven't been through the entire program and job support people get during real interviews. Like If you have a practical interview at Square coming up you can do a mock practical interview with a senior Reddit engineer or Google engineer, or Block engineer.
Making you grind Leetcode like that is an inefficient use of time. The fact that you feel barely able to breathe means you aren't absorbing the materials and it's even more of a waste of time.
There's nothing special about Leetcode problems, anyone can just do them for free online, it's about HOW you do them that you should expect a program or bootcamp to help you with.
At Formation we train you to learn problem solving methods rather than raw grinding LC. We have hundreds of years of FAANG engineering experience in our ranks and this is an almost universal recommendation.
This is a simplified version of the approach we work through and every mentor problem solving session you work through these steps and get feedback: [https://formation.dev/blog/the-engineering-method/](https://formation.dev/blog/the-engineering-method/)
Even though a method like this sounds simple, it's really hard…
I would suggest looking at career accelerators if you are considering another bootcamp and it's probably more inline with what you need. I'm the co-founder of Formation.dev, which is an option that focuses more on technical skills gaps and job hunting. Other options to look at are Pathrise, Outco, Coachable, Interview Kickstart, Scaler and each one is different cost, time commitment, style.
The 20 placements? It's out of date now since there have been about 10 more since then so including all the recent placements, the distribution follows a similar pattern to the recent data on our blog, about 1/3 had no experience, 1/3 had 1-3 years and 1/3 has 3+ years.
I don't have aggregated info of who was employed or not already but anecdotally I also feel like it followed the similar trend of 2/3 working 1/3 not working. The typical Formation demographic would not be in this subreddit and probably doesn't know it exists, so you lose that point of view here.
A huge factor in these people's success is showing up and chugging though every day, staying as positive as they can, and appreciating advice and feedback - even if they don't always agree. People that have turned more negative to the job hunt and rejecting feedback are definitely struggling more in the job hunt right now.
We…
Hi, we aren't able to help with DE specific areas or with DE specific domain knowledge. We have a number of mentors who are strong in frontend, iOS and Android, so we do one off mock interviews with them if you are in those areas, but we don't have anyone to do that for DE right now (March 2023).
We have very minimal bare bones SQL practice (\~5, 2-3 hour long practice assessments of varying difficulty, not hooked up to our training algorithms) but we constantly update and change things (which as OP posted can be a bit hectic as things do change frequently - all in an attempt to get you the best resources, practice, etc...) and more basic SQL skills have been creeping into more SWE interviews lately, but nothing formally launched.
We have strong systems design for a junior, mid-level, and low senior engineer, which is useful for full stack, generalist, backend, infra, dev-ops, sre, an…
u/ludofourrage might have some comments about NuCamp, which relies on satisfaction and effectiveness ratings over placements outcomes.
I feel pretty strongly that bootcamps shouldn't be judged by job outcomes and should be judged by education quality value for the cost. It will improve the quality of education, which is what most of the employees at the bootcamp work on.
CIRR encourages bootcamps to be judged purely by placement rates and salaries and I think that not in a great direction. I think it's a piece of the puzzle and useful information, but not the sole way to judge a program.
I also think bootcamps play a part in this by having the "wall of logos" on their websites and advertising the placements in bold. Stanford doesn't have salary numbers of graduates on their homepage in giant numbers like BloomTech does.
I don't think career accelerators like Pathrise, Outco, Intervie…
I 100% agree their goal isn't to teach you to become a React expert in a day and I don't think people are mislead into thinking that. So everyone is on the same page expectations-wise.
My whole point above is that most bootcamps are like this and you don't actually learn enough in a given topic to be good at that topic on the job. You do well on the job if you learn quickly, pattern match, communicate well, and I think bootcamps with a very high entry bar selected for these types of people and teach them how to present themselves as engineers to they can get jobs. The actually day to day teaching is not really a factor in my opinion - for the top programs with broad curriculums with these high expectations. For programs that specialize in teaching you a narrow skill for a narrow certification for a set of jobs, that's a different ballgame.
I have absolutely no problems with this either…
A lot of the people I've worked with didn't use React on the OSP, and have filled in React gaps because of their debugging skills and overall work ethic. Codesmith selects for people that are strong in those areas already and I don't think you can credit Codesmith's React training for preparing people for React roles.
From my perspective there are a lot ton of jobs available all over the spectrum. There are certainly fewer jobs that last year, specifically at large, brand-name companies. But there are some great opportunities are mid/late stage startups.
The problem we have right now is that bootcamps generally don't teach you much or support you as an individual with unique experience and passions. Instead many teach you how to play the resume game and all of the graduates look the same on paper as a result, very little individual passion comes out in resumes that I've seen and you end up with 500 people applying for a job. I've been on the other side and when that many similar resumes come in, you just ignore them because you don't have time to process them.
I've said this several times , but this year will be the end of a bunch of bootcamps. The ones that survive will have to adapt. Codesmith for…
The job market right now is putting "the best" to the test.
Many bootcamps have long been pretty poor education experiences that use a high entrance bar to let in people that would succeed without the program but need a little more guidance. In a good job market where you get a six figure job, that "little more guidance" was easily worth any amount of money. In a tough job market people are pulling out the magnifying glass to see exactly what they are paying for, because they aren't getting jobs anymore.
I've seen Hack Reactor and Codesmith's curriculum, and I don't see how people can learn React in a day (literally at Codesmith, it's 1-2 days as of Jan 2023). I worked at Facebook for 8 years, and after leaving it took me months to get really good at React and I'm still not amazing.
I don't think it's fair to entirely blame the programs though because they largely haven't changed in t…
OSLabs, Inc. is a standalone charity registered in Delaware and in California, whose registration doesn't mention anything about Codesmith. The communications manager at Codesmith is on the OSLabs board, and I have a few letters of reference signed by "Philip Troutman, Board Member" but don't see any documentation that he is actually on the board of the new charity. I have also seen on LinkedIn, Codesmith's "senior board advisor" advertising for the executive director role at OSLabs and asking candidates to reach out to him.
Yeah three things interesting on the website are:
1. The "accelerator program" which sounds like, if free/volunteer, takes the best part of Codesmith and makes it free.
2. The "mentors" being paid $100 an hour for up to 8 hours a week. If those mentors are mentoring Codesmith students working on OSPs that could be illegal/violation of charity laws
3. If they allow…
If you go to Codesmith they just did something pretty interesting here. They created a charity in June 2022, that was authorized in Dec 2022, for their open source projects so people can say they did work for this charity and the charity writes letters of reference for people. I'm assuming they made all the legalities of this work and vetted it with silicon valley lawyers because I can only imagine the IP headaches this would cause and the conflict of interest of having a charity take in tax-free dollars to pay to mentor people in a for profit program that people pay for. Considering Codesmith and OSLabs have been around for years and this charity was formed 8 months ago, I'm not sure what this says about all the people who graduated before then and got letters of reference from "OSLabs" signed by a Codesmith executive. But assuming it's all on the up and up, it's an interesting solution…
Hi! Sorry, I had answered in other threads but not here and happy to provide more context.We do referrals but they are more limited than before because companies are hiring less and have more rigid criteria (which tends to disadvantage people with less experience). In the very limited scenarios where we do refer people, they remain high hit and effective. We constantly change the website as the market changes.
We are far from perfect, but I think some of the negativity in this thread stems from the market changing suddenly in Fall 2022. A small number of people joined during the hot market when many people they spoke with who did Formation at the time were referred to the canonical FAANG and they expected to follow the same path. They trained hard, got their skill level up and then things changed suddenly and all those pipelines shut off. They are understandably frustrated, which I symp…
Yeah a couple people who went through their program and my partner at Formation spoke to their founder a few years ago.
You should absolutely not trust me though about anything! It might be a great fit for you. Just for any program or coaching you look into you want to know how it works and not just be convinced by the big numbers on a website, even for my own program.
Some things to ask:
1. Ask them to explain outcomes in more detail. Where were the last 10, 20, 30 placements? How do they calculate the numbers on the website? The numbers on their website are clearly inconsistent and you need a more practical picture of the outcomes.
2. What is a typical day or week look like?
3. What kinds of strategies help a Coachable student do better than a random new grad?
4. Ask to talk to alumni who have a similar background as yourself and ask them about their day to day and what is good and…
I'm familiar with Coachable but full disclosure, I co-founded a program for experienced engineers called Formation that partially competes with Coachable (we work mostly with experienced engineers and are not a good fit for most new grads).
So there are no shortcuts or secret pathways to jobs right now. You are paying to have a coach work with you to improve you odds and to leverage their experience.
1. Coachable is run by someone who has a few years at Google and has a dozen coaches or so who went through Coachable and came back as coaches. Their approach is very aggressive: exaggerate your resume, aggressively message recruiters with messages they help write, and hope that something lands. Some people find this approach of exaggerating a little sketchy, some find it a means to an ends. Ultimately it's up to you but the key here is to ask for HOW it works instead of just looking at th…
If you work in the position for long enough and perform well, you can apply for a super competitive internal program where Amazon will pay to put you through a bootcamp-like experience, that has a guaranteed internship, and interview to convert. It was extremely competitive and hard to get into.
One of my co-workers spouse worked on this program and a Fellow at Formation went through this program.
You can read more about it here: [https://amazontechnicalacademy.com/amazon-employees](https://amazontechnicalacademy.com/amazon-employees)
I think a larger problem is that a small number of people joined during the hot market when a lot of people they spoke with at Formation were referred to FAANG and saw no reason why they wouldn't follow that path. They were in Formation long enough to get their skills up during the hot market and are in job hunting mode. Then things changed very suddenly, they currently have no path to FAANG (and few do), and they are frustrated, which I totally understand and sympathize with and a lot of people in this bucket are working with us productively to strategize about what to do.
There are two things in my opinion about the website though that people who are not at Formation have been referring to:
1. We have adjusted our website over months to the market. The overall structure hasn't changed at all, but it used to have one statement about 'high hit rate referrals' and another about 'getting…
I'm trying to avoid commenting on threads mostly with new accounts that troll and ignore replies from myself or others... been advised by Reddit employees don't feed the trolls. I love to have respectful discourse with established accounts.
Someone had commented a good answer but I think they deleted:
`From what I have heard they do referrals but its more limited than before because companies are hiring less and being more selective. The companies may also want a certain type of candidate, n yrs of experience, college degree, etc.`
To reinforce: people should not have and should not join Formation only to get referrals, we are not a pay for play referral service and if you think your skills are amazing and you want to buy your way into FAANG, it's not the program for you. We work with people that want an efficient way to get you skills to the top tier bar and gain confidence in your s…
Hi, yeah it depends a lot on you and what you need to work on! Some things to keep in mind if you are targeting a larger top tier company
1. Practice a problem solving method instead of practicing just LC problems. A problem solving method will help you get through interviews when you haven't seen the problem before, and removes the need to solve hundreds of LC problems.
2. \+1 to practicing out loud for real - one of the biggest mistakes people make is thinking they know how to solve problems because they passed on LC while doing it silently by themselves and that they don't truly understand. As you said, [pramp.com](https://pramp.com) is an option. A wider range of options (cost and effectiveness-wise) are finding peers in a Discord server, [Interviewing.io](https://Interviewing.io), or a more intense career accelerator like [Formation.dev](https://Formation.dev), Interview Kickstart,…
I definitely see all kinds of sketchy behavior on Reddit. I have several friends, and Formation alumni, who work at Reddit and hear about things. This subreddit has no minimum thresholds for posting so it's particularly susceptible to bad actors and a lot of the more controversial stuff you'll see is brand new accounts with almost no comment history at all making bold claims out of nowhere, making it impossible to validate. So I tend to read people's histories carefully when I encounter someone new making strong statements.
All of that said, I don't think it's astroturfing and I don't think Codesmith every tells anyone to post on Reddit at scale and most of the anecdotal stories on here are genuine, especially from well established accounts.
This subreddit is a small, nice corner of the world and part of the heavy Codesmith presence is a snowball effect. Lots of Codesmith alumni here,…
A lot of lists are paid for/sponsored posts. Codesmith is 100% one of the top bootcamps they just don't pay to show up in lists, which is a good thing, in my opinion! Codesmith doesn't do much marketing and focuses on getting you to show up to free sessions to get you into the funnel and to get you to keep coming back for more and more commitment, until you sign up for the immersive. They do sponsor Course Report and Switchup and you'll see them there in "featured lists".
Codesmith is also relatively smaller than the other programs and while it has investors, they are not owned by any large company and their founders don't come from a traditional "education" background.
Finally, Codesmith has a "cult-like" (not my words) following that feels like a family. Almost all of the instructors, lead instructors, fellows, TAs, etc... went to Codesmith itself, and alumni are extremely protective…
Assuming we are talking about Formation here, have you reported your feedback to your FM team about wanting to leave and what did they say? If you haven't can you do so! If Formation isn't the right fit we are more than happy to support you leaving.
Similar to DS&A, we are practice based training with assessment and feedback rather than teaching frontend, so I want to launch an investigation into what you expected, what you received, what worked and what didn't work for frontend so we can both make improvements and also make sure people come in on the same page of what we can do and can't do.
Sorry to hear about that. Can you DM me anonymously here? Report it anonymously on the platform? Or have you given the feedback to you FM team, in weekly feedback forms, or on the session itself?
I see you are a new account posting about Formation in several places and ignoring me. We would love to help and support you if you are not in a great place, and help you exit on a positive note if Formation is not right for you, but we can't do that if you only comment anonymously on Reddit and refuse to talk to us.
There was an incident reported along these lines a few months ago and we did an hour-long call with the mentor to investigate what happened and resolved it and the person has since has strong positive feedback. If this is still happening we want to know!
u/TheeKingInTheNorth: I've seen all sides of this and it's not binary. People's views depend on two things: 1. where they are in the program/what point in time, 2. the person's background and their personal resume.
Number 4 below is most important (and the rest is for reference), because a lot of people don't know that step is happening. If you asked those people "how did Codesmith verify your OSP work or provide you with a reference?" I bet most of them will say, I don't know, they didn't need it. Some of them will say, oh I just filled out a Google form - don't really know. And then others will think the references are totally fine and not even mention that it's something controversial.
This is all either secondary (second hand from a primary source), or first hand sources shared with me.
1. They strongly and firmly tell people in lecture to not lie on their resumes.
2. They also s…
We don't force you to take any job and if you want to work at FAANG, **no one is kicking you out and I challenge you to leave Formation and find another path to FAANG right now.** We never promised how long it would take, and we work with people as long as they want as long as they do their part and keep intending to job hunt.
We've had a jump in placements in the past three weeks and people gave very high satisfaction ratings despite more people choosing to take non-FAANG jobs, like Chegg, Citibank, and others. For example, one person chose to change their target away from FAANG companies and was thrilled with how Formation supported them doing that and thrilled with the job they received.
I think this is very fair and is a top reason people come to Formation. If you really want to work at FAANG, you can come to Formation, don't expect to get a job on any timeframe (which I believe we…
I would encourage everyone to spend time and fully read the 54 comments (of which 1/4 or so are my comments) and judge for themselves how I responded to their feedback.
We have some people with no experience, you found one who had several internships but no full SWE experience, and that proves nothing. The other comment thread you shared has a person who loud and clear says they have 7+ years experience, and another person saying that most of the Fellows they work with have experience. And for the fourth time, you have our official data as the primary source proving this. **Yelling loudly doesn't make false statements true**, that's how fake news spreads, like in the 2016 election, which I saw first hand at Facebook.
There are people with tons of experience who are weaker at DS&A and people with no experience who are strong at DS&A, and that's why everyone at Formation gets a u…
You should be super honest on the background check forms, even if they don't align with your resume and I've seen this a few times with Codesmith alumni. They have a semi-sketchy process for getting verified and they will verify your entire time in the program as experience on the OSP, even though it was 4 weeks and the evidence they give you in writing fooled several people I tested with who thought it was a verification letter for a SWE role.
Assuming the hiring company is using a large common company like HireRight or Checkr, they are checking for two things:
1. Do you have any red flags: e.g. a criminal record that might be relevant to the job?
2. Can they verify the information you put on the background check?
The report they send back isn't a pass/fail, but it's more like "able to verify"/"not able to verify". Sometimes a totally legit job can't be verified because the company r…
Thanks for sharing. I give a warning often that one person's trajectory shouldn't be generalized. I know several Codesmith alumni with similar trajectories and several without. I've also seen similar trajectories from many bootcamp grads in general.
Some things that would be good to share are how Codesmith helped you with those new jobs in terms of finding them, preparing for them, and negotiating.
Thanks for the context, I'll absolutely edit ASAP and make this very clear and please let me know if you feel it still isn't clear. I have zero intention to make Tech Elevator look good or bad just want to talk the market the way it is.
To be quite blunt these are numerous reasons why CIRR is flawed. I know something is better than nothing, but at the same time, every program is different and unique, and you can't capture all of this context in a CIRR report.
Everyone's Favorite time of the half-year! H1 2022 CIRR Reports are starting to roll out! TechElevator, CodeUp and LaunchAcademy are live, Codesmith not live yet. First look at 2021 vs 2022 hiring climate stats and things don't look good :S
(will update as more results released)
IMPORTANT EDIT. See Tech Elevators comment below about an error on their CIRR worksheet that resulted in lower placement percentages. They claimed the percentages are actually very similar from 2021 to 2022 and the CIRR report has now been updated officially. I've stated numerous times about flaws with CIRR, for example that results are not audited before posting, or that auditors make mistakes.
**OVERALL: After Tech Elevators data correction, placement rates for H1 2022 are holding up and didn't crash that much yet! I expect H2 2022 to be much more impacted and we'll see in October.**
Notable changes Tech El…
>formation
/u/No-Leopard-1563
Hi, yeah I'm the co-founder and lead engineer at Formation, ex-FB (intern -> principal, over 8 years).
Formation's model isn't to have a dedicated 1-1 mentor. Instead you'll work with dozens of senior/staff/principal/managers/directors at top tier companies in dozens of small group (3-6 people), or 1-1 mock interview, sessions. You might work with some people more than others, but the goal isn't to have a long term dedicated mentor and rather get a larger volume of feedback from a wide range of people. If you do investments, it's kind of like buying into index funds versus putting all your money into one stock/crypto/etc... Any individual stocks in the portfolio might do better or worse, but over a long period of time, you get reliable return on investment.
It is also a large commitment with the current Fellowship we have. If you do it part time p…
More thoughts and random points /u/Independent-Tear3960, also /u/BudgetSense8077 and /u/InTheDarkDancing as I commented some of this on your thread and then deleted to move here. **I think point 4 is most important to the OPs questions**
1. The hiring market is partially to blame because it changed so quickly. One week Amazon was hiring, the next week they were laying off. People started bootcamps in a great environment and the carpet was pulled out underneath them.
2. I'm also not seeing bootcamps meaningfully adapt their program and strategies fast enough. Codesmith still tells people "taking a junior job is the worst thing you can do for your career". Now this is super bias, but I believe the way bootcamps are structured make it very hard to change everything overnight. At Formation, we are feeling the market pressure as well, we have much fewer opportunities to refer people to top t…
Codesmith's placement rates from people who have graduated recently seem to hover around 50% (some lower, some higher) within 6 months versus their prior 85%.
It's the market though and nothing changed about Codesmith that I know of.
It doesn't sound like they are adapting much to the market or making changes, so hopefully things turn around soon, because I strongly believe the strategy of aiming for mid level and senior roles in this market is not going to work
A couple more things we do. Top level OP had several complaints about these, but according to our collective feedback the vast majority of these go very well and these mentors are often nominated as the 'most impactful mentor of the week' awards we do.
1. Everyone does at least one extensive resume review with a FAANG/ex-FAANG recruiter (and more on-demand as needed). Most have many many years of experience. The OP didn't have a good experience with their reviewer, but you can always work with different people if you are not on the same page with a recruiter. Even if you aren't on the same page with several, you can keep trying.
2. Everyone does at least one recruiter-call mock phone screen with a FAANG/ex-FAANG recruiter (as many as you need until you pass). Simulating a real mock phone screen. And unlimited more as needed.
3. Most people will do technical behavioral group sessions and…
I actually disagree Codesmith had quick placements beforehand. They have always had most people placed in the 3 to 6 month post graduation timeframe. After spending 3 months, 11 hours a day in a program, taking at least 3 more months of job hunting can feel like a long time.
As Triathlete said, the salaries are a lot lower as well and I think people are probably going off script and taking more junior or entry level roles.
I think the strategy of going for mid-level and senior roles when you have zero experience, in this market, is a terrible strategy. If Codesmith is still advocating this, I would be more concerned. That strategy is NOT going to work for the foreseeable future and probably why the placements are so low so far this year.
That said, if you have a lot of time, I always advocate for starting sooner and being better prepared when more jobs come back.
Hi there, I'm happy to give more info and my thoughts. Ultimately we want you in the right place and if that's not Formation, we're happy. I've responded a lot in other comments that might be useful as well and feel free to message me directly with more info about yourself if you want me to give more personal advice.
First off, we take every piece of feedback seriously, investigate and discuss it, so I don't want to come across as dismissive, but the majority of people have a great experience and recommend us to friends. Not a single person on this thread has responded to our team or reported anonymous/untraceable feedback despite open arms from everyone on the team. In terms of feedback, so far this evening there have been 7 pieces of explicit feedback (i.e. text feedback, supplemental to numerical ratings) given, 6 were glowing positive reviews about the impact the mentor(s) had, 1 wa…
It's a crazy tough job market right now and you can't invent jobs that don't exist.
Even with an optimized Codesmith resume, you are competing with multi-year ex-FAANG engineers and it's not enough anymore.
My team is working around the clock to figure out ways to get early career people opportunities and we've really had to be creative: house-built job hunting tool, sourcing jobs for people, having FAANG recruiters as mentors, direct referrals, resumes books, even a partnership with Netflix, and people are still getting frustrated with the job hunt and not getting many interviews. So I can only imagine what it's like being a bootcamp grad in this market where you are mostly job hunting on your own.
I'm fairly connected in the industry and 8 out of 36 in 4 months isn't bad, It will hopefully end up being 40% or so. We won't see the impact on CIRR until results come out in Sept 2023 t…
I think one major con as you said in another post, that almost all instructors and TAs of are in India, about half of the cohort mates are in India, all the current job partnerships are in India, and every placement listed on their website testimonial was in India. The company itself is also based in India.This is not clear from their marketing and is fantastic if you are located in India but not as good of you are located elsewhere.
Comment from OP:
"Yes they are available in the US now(launched 7-8 months back iirc). Instructors are based in India. Some are American. Teaching assistants are all based in India. Hiring partnerships are mostly with Indian cos. Not sure about outside India. I am still in month 2 , so job portal is not yet open for me. It's a mix of American and Indian learners. Probably 60-40. My mentor is based out of India. He is an SDE2 at Adobe. Not sure if there are…
Hi, the application process is similar to the Formation interview process, with an additional requirement to submit a short video talking about yourself.
The benchmarking assessment is similar to normal Formation and is not meant so much as a test to rank people, but as a way to assess your starting point.
It's a combination of practical coding questions (which require little specific DS&A) and multiple choice debugging and knowledge questions which require much more advanced knowledge.
We are not looking for the strongest "leetcoders" at all, but you have to have a good starting point of DS&A and problem solving skills. The biggest advice I give about the benchmarking is to focus on speed, because it's a lot for the time aloted. The assessment is difficult to study for because it's trying to assess your general starting point and if you could cram for a few days and do meaningfully…
Hi, I wanted to comment directly since in reviewing the thread I realized your questions weren't answered.
1. I don't think OPs experience are growing pains, or at least not the way they were portrayed. Behind the scenes, our scheduling and matching algorithms actually get better and better the more people we have and create more opportunities for better session matches. We have chosen to grow much slower than we can, and investors want us to, to prioritize experience over growth and making sure everything is great in practice and not just in theory. I said this in another comment but it's not uncommon for 5 out of 6 people in a session to have great feedback and 1 to feel like it was a terrible session. We are fully aware that Fellows are paying a lot of money and expecting a lot, so one bad experience needs to be investigated and improved, but that one experience is also not represen…
Hi, I'm sorry to hear you both aren't finding value in the program. Can you surface specific feedback internally or message me on Reddit completely anonymously with specific feedback and examples so we can action it?
The majority of commenters on this thread are new and anonmyous accounts which makes it hard to get concrete feedback.
For example, IRobot, how do you know you are making better progress through other courses and what signals are telling you so? Like I said in another comment, we link to and suggest all kinds of free content, so I want some clarity on what this means. If you signed up to Formation as an alternative to Neetcode, you didn't sign up for the right reasons and I want to chat!