1. I did not doxx anyone. I referred only to information that was already publicly available. Doxxing is wrong, against Reddit ToS, and I do not support it.
2. You stated as fact that I “posted the real names and private information of others.” That is a serious allegation. Please identify the specific examples you relied on at the time you made that statement, because I am not aware of any instance in which I did this. In fact, the vast majority of information I refer to I cannot post explicitly because of this, even though Codesmith has the information in public for whatever reason, it would still be inappropriate to post or say anything that would identify anyone.
3. I participated in the Codesmith CSX Slack. I used a single account, under my real name, and I never mentioned my company to individuals. My participation was limited to helping with technical questions on a small number o…
I participated actively on the subreddit from around May 2022 to the present, and I served as a moderator from approximately March 2024 to October 2025.
Someone asked: 'If he’s been doing this for years, why didn’t Codesmith say anything?' That’s a fair question. In March 2024, Eric Kirsten emailed me: “With regards to your posts re Codesmith, I generally don’t have any issue with them.”
If Codesmith’s leadership now believes my conduct was problematic. Responsibility for that breakdown rests beyond me.
Instead, information was later presented publicly in a way that I believe lacks important context and portrays my actions and motives inaccurately. In my view, this approach is unfortunate and unnecessary. I strongly disagree with how this situation has been characterized and with the conclusions drawn from it.
This situation has been presented publicly in a one-sided way that omits material context.
I have been characterized as a competitor who harmed a coding bootcamp. However, months earlier, that bootcamp’s CEO stated to me in writing that she did not consider our companies competitors and that our products were different.
I also raised concerns about security practices and the handling of sensitive personal information. Those concerns required multiple follow-ups, and an audit was discussed. There was later a publicly observable disruption to their AWS access. While I did not cause that disruption; I raised issues related to engineering oversight and security hygiene that were unaddressed flags .
I have been subjected to serious and false accusations, including claims of stalking and other misconduct. My personal email was circulated, and I was subsequently subscribed to unsolicited and…
It’s exhausting to have multiple anonymous accounts, many of which present themselves as part of the Codesmith community, repeatedly targeting me in threads where I’m sharing publicly available news, facts, and sources for open discussion.
As I’ve consistently said, and as the record reflects, I’m participating here as an individual, using a single account, expressing my own views. Over the years, I’ve faced sustained antagonism from numerous anonymous accounts, many of which were later suspended or banned by Reddit.
It’s worth noting that what gets characterized as “hundreds of comments” largely comes from a small number of long-running threads where I’ve declined to disengage simply because the information is uncomfortable. I want to find common ground with people I strongly disagree with. My commentary reflects my interpretation of observable market conditions and operational develo…
Do they have open source projects? I know for places like Codesmith and Launch School you can just go through the open source projects that every student does and figure out placement rates. Anyone can do this and see raw information - with the caveat that LinkedIns could be out of date. However CIRR and Codesmith's auditor considers LinkedIn "LinkedIn is almost as gospel as anything else" (quote) so if you go off of LinkedIn you can figure out the placement rates.
I can't comment on that right now but encourage people to spend like an hour digging into it themselves and correlating it with public messaging if they are curious about this, and if they don't care then don't! haha.
I have a THEORY, but this is just my person opinion/thoughts and not a fact.
This sub tends to talk about the most expensive bootcamps (including former ones now closed), Launch School, Codesmith, Hack Reactor, App Academy, Lambda School, because these programs are so expensive that it's a huge commitment. When you spend $20K on a bootcamp you are also more included to self-justify that investment. You are also not paying for nothing, and those bootcamps could have more robust communities, more staff, more marketing dollars to pay for "reddit support", etc...
The audience for these programs are people who are seriously committed, put in a lot of effort to choose a bootcamp, and want to make sure they are confident in the decision.
The programs like Triple Ten, NuCamp, Springboard, Coding Temple are: 1) much cheaper, 2) focus on advertising to a large audience, a lot of them have 'X% o…
You also don't have all the information on Codesmith and this is what lawyers can look at.
For example, this is from a private email from Codesmith's current CEO from March 21, 2025: "I do not consider Formation a competitor, it is quite clear to me that our products are different." This was well after I started commenting on Reddit.
SOURCES (hopefully you can read them because copy pasting all relevant pieces doesn't fit in a comment):
[https://consumer.ftc.gov/articles/job-scams](https://consumer.ftc.gov/articles/job-scams)
[https://help.usajobs.gov/working-in-government](https://help.usajobs.gov/working-in-government) (USAJobs is the only OFFICIAL federal government job board, other than USPS).
[https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/hiring-information/employment-laws-and-regulations/](https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/hiring-information/employment-laws-and-regulations/) Federal hiring is governed by **5 U.S.C. § 2301**, which establishes that hiring must be determined solely on the basis of ability, knowledge, and skills, after fair and open competition.
I have zero idea of what's being offered. I made a statement that having the public nominate me cannot guarantee me a full time job directly with the federal government (i.e. not a contractor, trainee, apprenticeship, etc...)
I was trying to look a bit and this is one of the companies on the contract, and it doesn't sound like it's a positiion directly with the government; [https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/sol/sol20240710](https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/sol/sol20240710)
Bootcamps work for a lot of people!
Look at CIRR data and the latest for Codesmith showed like 40% of people getting jobs within 6 months of graduating.
Launch School has like a 70% ish placement rate within 6 months.
These are the source of the massive negativity right now;
1. Trends are tanking and down. The trend is more important than the absolute numbers.
2. Salaries are down in these reports, despite inflation and SWE base salaries being up. This indicates more people taking worse jobs or tangential jobs instead of the SWE jobs.
3. Ghosts. Launch School doesn't have this problem but Codesmith's data shows about half the people NOT RESPONDING TO SALARY REQUESTS. Meaning that of the 100% of people who start, 90% graduate, 40% get a job, and 50% actually submitted a salary, so the "median graduate salary" for 6 months includes 18% of students. Historically far more people got pl…
Someone recently nominated me for something, and I received an email from Codesmith as part of that process. It made me wonder whether the security audit they had previously mentioned was ever completed, since the email raised questions for me given past security concerns that were flagged.
If Codesmith is operating as, or pursuing, federal government contracts, I would expect that to involve standard requirements like regular security audits and SOC 2 compliance. There was also a period in the past where issues were identified involving the handling of applicant data, which I believe have since been addressed.
Nominate me for what? I'm not sure what this is haha. If you want a job directly with the Federal Government there are background checks and legal processes and you can't just be nominated and chosen by the public to skip those. So anyone guaranteeing a full time job directly with the federal government is scamming you because there are legal processes to follow and there are fixed public pay-scales based on your education etc.... So I'm not sure what exactly this is. A sub-contractor job?
DEVELOPING: FedStack and Lantec won up to $118M government contract for non-IT training for the Federal Government/IRS - Codesmith will be involved (conflicting reports)
Source: https://app.g2xchange.com/FedCiv/posts/smoothstack-obtains-118m-treasury-ocio-non-it-technical-workforce-development-and-training-bp
FedStack is large government contractor.
Lantec is a training company with three locations in Louisiana.
This is a blanket maximum contract and it's unclear what specific services are provided or expected, and what "non-IT training" means.
Codesmith claims here that they won the contract https://www.codesmith.io/federal and made the following statement
"Codesmith now extends its mission to driving tangible impact across the US economy, with the potential to return billions of tax dollars.
Codesmith has proven this thesis true with 5000+ alumni. 90% of graduates get hired with…
I'm going to caution with the premise of the question.
So first off, check for yourself because one off examples of jobs or no job don't mean much in isolation. A small number of people get jobs from all bootcamps. Both Codesmith and Launch School work on open source projects and you can review the projects, see the contributors, check their LinkedIns and see if they got jobs or not. Launch School has provided a report for 2024 grads that accounts for every single person that started and you can see that without doing the work.
Second, it highly depends on the person. People with a engineering background, or experience at a tech company in a non software role, and who take adjacent roles have a much better short.
For example, a 15 year salesperson at tech companies -> "Sales Engineer" is a massively different placement from no-degree no-experience line cook -> FAANG Software Engineer…
Current price: Codesmith: $22,500 (14 weeks). Launch School "18% of your first year salary, or $18k (USD)" (16 weeks), Hack Reactor: $19,480.
Enrollment at Codesmith based on OSLabs Github projects appears to have dropped from about 1000 people in 2023 to about 100(?) people in 2025 and like a dozen in the past 3 months?
Launch School had 71 people in 2023 and 76 in 2024, so it's maybe capturing the market share since that's actually higher.
So not that many people are paying that much no more.
They were offline for about a week and then reappeared with a new website, without much public explanation at the time.
The current site lists three schools: two in the U.S. and one outside the U.S. Of the two U.S. schools, one appears to be enrolling for a cohort starting roughly six months out.
The site now lists four board members. One individual publicly notes on LinkedIn that they are no longer serving in that role, which may simply reflect a recent or transitional change that hasn’t been updated everywhere yet.
The most recent update to the standards documentation was made by someone who previously worked at Codesmith and is now listed as a consultant there, which is publicly visible information.
Separately, Codesmith’s own website appears to reflect some recent staff changes, and they no longer appear as a sponsor on Course Report.
Taken together, these are just surface-level…
BREAKING: Launch School Capstone 2024 Outcomes
SEE ORIGINAL: [https://www.reddit.com/r/launchschool/comments/1q2cvsx/2024\_capstone\_salary\_data/](https://www.reddit.com/r/launchschool/comments/1q2cvsx/2024_capstone_salary_data/)
Launch School is one of the remaining top programs, that announced a small cutback from 3 to 2 cohorts in 2026. These outcomes are very strong though still.
Overall for 2024 grads they had 66% placement rate for ALL ENROLLEES in six months (74% if you exclude non-job-hunting)
Early 2025 cohorts have a lower placement rate but a little above 50% so far.
Overall this is a good sign as the only CIRR reporting school that competes directly with Launch School is Codesmith and their 2023 data had a 42% placement rate (excluding non job hunting) in 6 months, which is almost HALF that of Launch School.
This isn't magic, Launch School's program takes a long tim…
I would recommend getting 2025 numbers from all options. Codesmith's last published numbers are from 2023 students and Launch School has some 2024 data.
But the market really fell apart in 2025. My personal numbers observers are so bad overall that any bootcamp you join needs to be transparent.
Some school bought some time by saying 'numbers are getting better don't worry' back in 2024, but the students that accepted that, joined, graduated, and are jobless, are feeling quite pissed off I imagine right now and the market now is even worse for bootcamp grads.
There are valid reasons to go to a bootcamp but you really need to be going for the right reasons.
I just asked it and there wasn't a single [Reddit.com](http://Reddit.com) source in the results and most of the cons came from their defunct competitor's blog post: [https://www.rithmschool.com/codesmith-vs-rithm-school-2/?utm\_source=chatgpt.com](https://www.rithmschool.com/codesmith-vs-rithm-school-2/?utm_source=chatgpt.com)
I'm not saying you got something different but it is completely unproven and unfounded that I intentionally manipulated LLMs through Reddit as a moderator and it's defamation per se to spread that as a fact.
Learn about the space before trolling me.
Hi, I can’t comment on that directly because of pending legal matters. I’d just refer you to what I’ve already posted [https://www.reddit.com/user/michaelnovati/submitted/](https://www.reddit.com/user/michaelnovati/submitted/) about other programs and also marketing and expectations concerns for context.
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
I can’t comment on any of this at the moment due to legal reasons. I’ve been advised not to make any further statements about Codesmith or its programs while this matter is active.
Anyone who wants context can look at what I’ve previously said directly and review the public sources I cited at the time. I can’t add or restate anything beyond that right now.
I'm not allowed to share primary new documentary because of ongoing legal matters, but what was reported publicly on Reddit about these matters can be found here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/1e7n7y1/breaking\_news\_course\_report\_bootcamp\_review/](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/1e7n7y1/breaking_news_course_report_bootcamp_review/)
I explained this previously but we had a situation last year where accounts associated with the Reddit marketing network were manipulating discussions in the bootcamp space and I explained the moderation rules in the sticky. I was a mod queue 0 person and cleared out the queue daily but we defaulted to accepting the filtering unless there were very strong signals to warrant an override.
I want to restate using a different past example I've said before:
One of the things I spoke about was the git contributor graphs on all the open source projects being like spikes. There are no 'legit' open source projects that have these patterns. That makes Codesmith's open source projects very different from say Firefox or React or Angular, etc...
The same analogy applies here. How Formation people represent their resumes is completely different than how Codesmith people do fundamentally because the underlying goods are different.
I'm sure there are rogue Formation people and rogue Codesmith people that have out of date LinkedIns and who classified things wrong.
Even the fact that the boxes are under "experience" itself is irrelevant to my point.
There could be problems with A and not B, with A and B, with not A and not B, A and B need to be independent and not compared in my opi…
I hear your feedback and it will be heard in thinking of names for future programs.
Like I said earlier, a small minority of people have even put Formation on their resume for the past 2-3 years (a lot of the people you find are not current active members of Formation) so it's not a high priority thing to change across the board that will have a lot of impact. That doesn't mean it's not heard, I disagree that it's a misleading word, but I hear you and it's noted because if potential customers are confused about the naming all the time that doesn't help us whatsoever and we have to listen to feedback.
Resume representation is nuanced argument that you probably understand but most people outside the industry wouldn't.
The vast majority of people are working engineers that don't even think about putting Formation on their resumes. Some people who have been with us a long time - like years - have it on. Some of those people aren't even at Formation and they abandoned the job hunt.
The representation is clear. I have never heard of a recruiter or company thinking that Formation was a job. I can't think of background check someone ever had for Formation as a job.
Codesmith, the vast majority of people put their projects down as a work experience directly adjacent to an Open Source Projects bucket, making it look more like work. The description buries the 'accelerated by OS Labs' in the footer collapsed - if it's there at all.
Part of the mental trick is that they tell you 'Don't lie ab…
1. The person 'exposed' is a person who put on his LinkedIn what he said he did and was doing that during that entire time window.
2. That person was at Formation 2021 and half the stuff he did doesn't exist anymore because we have a dynamic platform with a few thousand things and it changes every day.
I've removed my own posts before. If Codesmith triggers numerous Reddit AI they need to ask themselves why and fix the behavior. I can't tell entirely on my side but I gave them numerous suggestions over time. They keep falsely saying I'm deleting their posts.
Reddit AI removes and flags them -> I or another mod typically mass remove all flagged content. That's the standard in our community right now.
In 2022, Codesmith -> Formation was an adjacent decision that the time and I would say up to 10% of people could be at the top end of the Codesmith side or the bottom end of the Formation side, but that there was a best decision on one side or the other that required zooming in to see which side they fall on.
I'm arguing that 3 people I know of were right on the border and could have gone either way.
1. Our numbers only include full time SWE work experience and exclude contract roles, internships and non-SWE work.
2. In 2022 the average amount of experience was lower, but you can see that that the vast majority had work experience already even then. The people who didn't have work experience were mostly bootcamp GRADUATES who were job hunting for their first full time job and wanted to level up even more. We don't accept those people.
3. This data is from 3 years ago around when I started participating in the sub. Things changes and you should read our newest report for H1 2025, or even 2024 annual. The reported in that article cherry picked 2024 and 2025 data so you should use the same.
4. You can have non-computer science background and still have worked for 3 years as a SWE.
5. Not everyone wants to be a Senior Engineer at FAANG, but the intention of those people was largely t…
I support reasonable and respectful, fact-based discussion about if I should be a mod or not so that the discussion is transparent. My opinion is that anonymous mods with power are more dangerous than transparent ones because we all have biases.
I have email chains explaining the following to Codesmith leadership from Spring 2024 explaining all of this as well. Codesmith has yet to explain directly why they disagree with this framing, but continue to call my company a competitor.
This is my stance on my biases:
1. For the record. Formation is not a coding bootcamp and it doesn't compete for coding bootcamp students. We work with experienced engineers later on in their careers, about 1/3 of which were bootcamp grads in the past. The average work experience now is about 4-5 years of SWE work experience.
With regards to Codesmith, I'm aware of 3 people who were deciding between Codesm…
You should talk to your cousin because he'll confirm that I'm on the ground. extremely responsive. almost 24/7 to pretty much everything that's happening at formation that I'm I'm writing a s*** ton of code and that no one talks about codesmith or really cares about it whatsoever internally. and he'll probably be like absolutely shocked that there's you in this situation going on.
I mean I don't know what to call my relationship with them. from my point of view in my head it's like a interest. I have a small number of things on my radar on the side. that's not related to my primary day-to-day in any way and I pay attention to those things and collect information and some things. I drop some things I add, merge whatever it's like. not a single word to describe this, I would call it an interest.
I mean I think it's a gray area. I was very transparent that I believe that my relationship to bootcamps is that it's in my interest for people to go to my company in the future. so if I'm very helpful in choosing the right bootcamp and it was the right choice and the person goes there then they are more likely to come to my company in the future. so if the right boot camp for you is Codesmith and I direct you there you remember that and then you come back to my company in the future.
I personally don't think that's a conflict of interest, but it's a bias to disclose. That I guess there is some self-interest in being really helpful to people at the bootcamp stage.
But it's ridiculous to state that I'm running a direct competitor to bootcamps and trying to funnel people to it.
That article states that Codesmith lost $9 million because of Reddit or something to that effect approximately…
I've done several investigations into companies and rule number one is you have to document everything from day one because even if you make a statement that happens to be true. If you didn't have evidence of it and stated it as a fact then that's a problem. there's some wiggle room for good faith and you can misinterpret something or make a human error. More like how Reddit reset their chat in like January 2023 and all past chats were permanently erased so there could have been content in there that in good faith doesn't exist anymore.
One of the reasons that I've been so open is that I've also been protecting my ass since day one very carefully. The problem being that a lot of the documentation is private messages or documents that contain a ton of personal information that were shared publicly in public places and are fair game, but it's not fair game to dox people regardless.
I co…
When I interviewed Codesmith grads and they flat out lied about their projects being work. One said his manager was "Phil Troutman" who was the lead instructor at the time. I've never seen this before and when it happened a second time I got interested and Googled and found this https://www.reddit.com/r/TechLA/comments/b7xl98/codesmith_coding_bootcamp_scam_beware/
The polarization was notable.
So then I started digging.
I started looking up the GitHubs for the companies I was seeing on the people's resumes who were applying to get into Formation.
The GitHub projects all had these very odd spiky kit patterns where there are these spikes for 3 weeks and then absolute emptiness. I started clicking through the various projects and they all had these same very weird patterns.
Then I look up the outcomes and I see that people are making over $100,000 a year salaries.
I'm a person that d…
FWIW I talked to Codesmith's CEO earlier this year in a call and told her about it. She also agreed this stuff was crazy but since everyone left Codesmith she couldn't figure out who was responsible or why. So the defense is 'likely rogue former employee or contractor, sorry'. Then two weeks ago, fake LinkedIn account puffing up all their founder's comments against me. Account deleted and removed. No one takes responsibility. Not Codesmith, no idea.
If Codesmith doesn't know anything I need to find the truth.
No, not right now, I've always been about the truth and getting to the bottom of things and I dig to understand not to destroy.
I'm a moderator here to push respectful public discourse, to push for accountability in an industry full of scams and lawsuits for fake marketing and that's my goal. I give credit where credit is due, and supported many people going to Codesmith over the years. But I hold people accountable, which is ironic for the position I've been blindsided with this week. Codesmith takes about this stuff too but I hear two polarizing stories and I've been digging to figure it out. Codesmith is uncomfortable with for a reason and I want to push them to do better, not to shutdown.
People don't seem interested in discussions like this: [https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/1f0rrjf/navigating\_the\_debate\_bootcamps\_criticism\_and/](https://www.reddit.com/r/codin…
My question is where did that money go then? It didn't go to Formation sure as hell. It didn't go to defunct Rithm. Didn't go to Launch School. Didn't go to Hack Reactor with it's single digit cohorts. Didn't go to EdX that shutdown its bootcamps. Didn't go to App Academy or BloomTech or Launch Academy that paused indefinitely. Epicodus maybe? Shut down. Code Up? Shut down.
Answer: it went no where because the industry collapsed.
This is the plain and simple answer that the author didn't look into and that it's absurd for Codesmith to claim and severely damages my reputation with what any reasonable person in the industry would know makes no sense.
Maybe it was taken out of context by the author. 40% decline of a smaller number maybe? Codesmith leaders have been celebrating the article so I assume it's correct.
The little popup log shows just todays approval at 5pm. We had a major problem with fake accounts - particularly pro Codesmith ones - that we're comments all over the place. You might also notice that those "top SEO posts" mentioned are not MY POSTS, but deleted accounts and also very odd posts.
These three posts show the aftermath of cleanup outside of this sub:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/codesmith/comments/1iduu2d/im\_jehovany\_i\_graduated\_codesmith\_in\_2020\_and\_now/](https://www.reddit.com/r/codesmith/comments/1iduu2d/im_jehovany_i_graduated_codesmith_in_2020_and_now/)
[https://www.reddit.com/r/codesmith/comments/1ilpihd/im\_ayleen\_a\_software\_engineer\_and\_current/](https://www.reddit.com/r/codesmith/comments/1ilpihd/im_ayleen_a_software_engineer_and_current/)
[https://www.reddit.com/r/codesmith/comments/1i8yr3f/im\_principal\_associate\_software\_engineer\_at/](https://…
My comments are too boring to write an article about. This is the type of commentary I had for 2.5 years until the market collapsed and Codesmith hired this Reddit guy that completely screwed up their Reddit presence and left me very personally upset.
The good old days were much better.
I wish that guy would tell a fair story from both sides.
1. We compete on new AI stuff programs for existing engineers, that came out a month or two ago for us, I acknowledged that, and it hasn't impacted any of the 3-4 year long drama going on, but it could impact future stuff. This sub has minimal discussion about AI programs as it's focused on coding bootcamps. I will continue to be transparent about biases.
2. Formation used to help people do portfolio building projects and stopped many years ago. The author called though out too. It's not completely irrelevant, but it's not at all what Codesmith was doing. When we accepted people right out of bootcamps back then, Codesmith grads came to Formation directly and saw it as a complementary continuation of their journey. For a couple of years now though we don't accept those people and work mostly with 5+ year engineers so naturally the need for portfolio projects is almost zero. The platform…
I don't really believe in absolutes. I understand the perception. I responded in a 10 part comment in this thread [https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/1o1guxj/comment/nikv1ts/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web3x&utm\_name=web3xcss&utm\_term=1&utm\_content=share\_button](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/1o1guxj/comment/nikv1ts/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
I don't agree with the perception but I understand that many people feel that way after reading that article.
Part of the disconnect is what those things mean. We're talking about preparing you for FAANG jobs at the senior level.
Codesmith does not prepare you for FAANG senior jobs, does not have deep market understanding for negotiation of those jobs, etc...
That debate IS the 3 year story here and it's more boring and nuanced than sensationalism.
I know 3 people off the top of my head that did Formation that could have done Codesmith, out of like thousands or so.
They are completely different programs for different people, but everyone is unique and there are some edge cases that overlap.
I explained this all to Codesmith leaders for years (Eric via email, Alina via phone) and I would love nothing if we could get on the same page about what Formation is relative to Codesmith.
I have been extremely consistent about my criticisms overall and they are very valid criticisms.
>Codesmith markets itself as a zero -> mid-level bootcamp that turns people with no experience into mid-level and senior engineers. I feel this is bad for the people whether they get those jobs or not. I've seen the struggles of bootcamp grads once in the industry and I think that taking entry level roles and apprenticeships is the right path for these people. This is a very fair opinion but Codesmith feels completely attacked by this.
>Codesmith presents their 3-4 week open source projects as 4 months of mid level software engineer experience. I looked at those projects. Most don't work well, have major bugs, bad code issues, security issues, etc... and I pointed these things out. People fish for "GitHub Stars" Medium clasps, etc... and learn how to hype up their projects, but no one actua…
I feel like I've explained this numerous times but I guess there is a new audience now from this post. I have been transparent about this the entire time and the author didn't even mention that and created a new narrative instead.
It's not really fair to summarize '1000 comments' without presenting the consistent arguments I've made in those comments, and instead pulling out the juicy ones.
1. Codesmith markets itself as a zero -> mid-level bootcamp that turns people with no experience into mid-level and senior engineers. I feel this is bad for the people whether they get those jobs or not. I've seen the struggles of bootcamp grads once in the industry and I think that taking entry level roles and apprenticeships is the right path for these people. This is a very fair opinion but Codesmith feels completely attacked by this.
2. Codesmith presents their 3-4 week open source projects as…
PART 10
1. Given your ongoing ownership in Formation, do you accept that your actions could reasonably be viewed as financially motivated?
I don't accept that whatsoever no.
1. Has Formation’s pivot away from bootcamp training coincided with your campaign against Codesmith, and if so, is this related?
Formation never had a bootcamp training model, and never pivoted away from it. We've had the same platform since day one. The target audience has shifted more and more senior. We used to years ago have like 1/3 people bootcamp grads post graduation without work experience, 2/3 of people experienced software engineers. Now we have 99% of people with 2+ years of work experience. Nothing has actually changed internally, same platform, same interview prep, same mentors.
1. How do you respond to the observation that Formation students list their own training on LinkedIn in the same way you…
PART 9
1. Have you ever deleted posts or comments from\*r/codingbootcamp that defended Codesmith or challenged your statements?
I don't remember. I rarely delete posts. If people make provably factually incorrect statements as facts and not opinions is the only time I would consider removing something. Like "It's a fact you beat your spouse" is something that would be removed if there is not evidence of that fact.
The one thing I remember doing is if accounts are later suspended from Reddit and I see their content I I remove it. Sometimes Reddit does this automatically sometimes they don't. This could be biased because I'm more likely to read my own past content and see these there than other places.
1. Have you ever used your moderator privileges to pin or highlight negative material about competitors?
Not that I know of - or at least not with that intention. I consciously allow cr…
PART 8
1. Why did you compare Codesmith to the NXIVM sex cult, and do you consider that comparison proportionate or responsible?
I didn't compare Codesmith to a sex-cult. I commented that someone's reason for going there 'it changed my life and the lives of many others' is something that I hear in cult documentaries on HBO, which I stand by as my opinion.
Codesmith is not a sex-cult.
1. Do you accept that implying cult-like behaviour without evidence may constitute reputational harm?
If you state as a fact or with fraudulent/nefarious intention then that would be wrong to me regardless of harm. I have full right to share my personal opinions on Reddit that are solely my personal opinions through my lens and people can agree or disagree with those opinions.
1. Did you personally research and contact a Codesmith employee’s son on LinkedIn before emailing the company about him, and if…