RE: INTERNSHIPS
Possibly, but you are competing with people who had FAANG internships, so it's tough. I would consider enrolling in a Masters (or having the intention of doing it) and then applying for 2026 (summer but possible spring) top tier internships RIGHT NOW through NOVEMBER and try to land one, and convert it full time job and 'drop' the masters program.
RE: CODESMITH
You heard about more layoffs since like this week? Or just general layoffs?
They have had numerous both layoffs and voluntary departures without 1-1 replacement yeah but there are hardly any people left.
They were advertising for a part time program coordinator offering below minimum wage in some cities like Seattle so it doesn't seem like they are replacing those senior staff with high paying roles.
A recent review from a staff member on [Blind](http://www.teamblind.com/company/Codesmith/review/R_kgSHMi_K) s…
1 YOE is taking a long time right now overall in the market and at Formation but I don't have exact averages because each person has different commitments and goals and it's not meaningful to average all people.
Additionally, we have people that had 1 YOE that joined like 2 years ago that it took 2 years to get a job... but the market when they joined was different then. So it's even harder to try to average people who started at different time because the market has been changing. It's like a bootcamps touring 2023 CIRR number when they very well know things are different now... I feel that kind of thing is misleading.
So to help advise I would need to know:
1. what is the 1-2 years of experience and what kind of company?
2. have you been promoted yet?
3. are you getting interviews either directly from recruiters or from applications?
If you work at a solid company, commit fully to F…
I guess I've been overkill then documenting and organizing hundreds of pieces of evidence over three years for the statements I make on Reddit about Codesmith and other bootcamps.
Maybe I am crazy then or at a minimum I'm drastically underselling my arguments if you don't know where they are coming from.
Let's just say that I'm not commenting so much about Codesmith because of any reason other than the overwhelming amount of documentation I have that Codesmith gaslights me and others about.
"lol bro is actually clinically insane"
This is a statement that negative impacts my reputation.
And it's provably false and you said you don't want to put the effort into a paper trail to back that claim.
You can say "In my opinion, this guy is clinically insane" and I would be totally fine with that!
Then don't comment here making stuff up. Research what libel is because you are admitting to it - making false statements as facts with the intention of discrediting me and admitting to not putting in the effort to research those statements.
If you don't want to read anything then make it clear these are your unproven "opinions" and not facts.
You also have an extensive Reddit history on many different topics so this wouldn't apply to you. Not everyone who criticizes me is a bad guy. I'm saying there are like a dozen or more accounts that ONLY comment on Codesmith stuff and my posts and have been suspended over time as they get caught doing something not allowed on Reddit.
Almost all of the older "AMAs" in the Codesmith sub have entirely deleted, collapsed, and suspended commenters. It takes months sometimes but eventually get caught.
I'm not saying Codesmith itself is organizing this. I have a written statement from their CEO that Codesmith she talked directly to the leaders and their founder (has explicitly decided to not engage with any of my content) and lead advisor (doesn't have a Reddit account but might make one) don't use Reddit and never engage with me, so I have to assume it's not them. If evidence came my way the…
No, accounts that have zero comment and post history that come out of nowhere attacking me generally are though and Reddit has been pretty good at wiping them out over time as the people create more fake accounts with the same forensic fingerprinting.
I'm not going to assume anything about who you are, I can only act on evidence, not theories. I'm just making an observation.
I also don't know if they know but I can see the moderator list of the Codemsith sub and have been following that for a while. A rotating cast of suspended accounts and the official Codesmith account also moderates the sub!
Like you might not like my commentary but imagine how many documentation I have over 3 years too. I've been dotting my Is and crossing my Ts for 3 years in case Codesmith tries to blame me on the way down.
Well people can read for themselves and decide.
This thread is ironic because you are a fake account that only comments on my stuff and about Codemsith literally every single comment and this thread is an example of why I have so much comments in volume about Codemsith.
General public: do your research and don't fall for bullshit like this. This behavior is exactly why Codemsith is collapsing, students aren't signing up, staff are leaving.
You can wake up and try to fix it or keep doing this same old strategy and destroy the company.
Here is an analysis of my commentary purely about Codemsith "sporadic but consistent"
"Here’s an unbiased summary of Michael Novati’s commentary on Codesmith over the past few years—covering the topics he addressed, frequency, tone, and the overall vibe:
---
Topics & Themes
1. Curriculum Stagnation & Slow AI Integration
Michael pointed out that Codesmith’s curriculum has remained largely unchanged over the years. For example, in early 2024 he noted:
> "Codesmith's curriculum has been the same for YEARS but in Feb 2024 they added 5 lectures on AI… This is 'not changing'… 12–14 weeks of the same structure they did 5 years ago… I guess they think it's enough to raise prices to $22,500 this year."
---
2. Deteriorating Placement Outcomes
He emphasized a steep decline in graduate outcomes. He shared CIRR-based figures showing that six-month placement dropped from ~90% in 2021 to…
In case anyone is curious, here is what AI said about my last 3 years of Reddit activity:
"Here’s an unbiased summary of Reddit commentary by Michael Novati over roughly the past three years (from mid‑2022 to mid‑2025), covering common topics, frequency, tone, and the overall vibe:
---
Topics & Themes
1. Bootcamps & "Learn to Code" Critique
Skeptical of the bootcamp model. Novati has been notably critical of coding bootcamps—and especially the broader "Learn to Code" ideology. He highlights structural issues like oversupply of CS graduates, declining outcomes, and economic realities often overlooked by bootcamp marketing .
For instance, in /r/codingbootcamp he wrote:
> “The tech unemployment rate now exceeds the national average…” and argued “Learn to Code… ignored basic economics (oversupply depressing value/wages)” .
He has also raised doubts about data reporting by entiti…
My commentary on Codemsith is fair and research backed.
And yes, please look at my post and comment history!
Do you realize how much of that is these 50 comments back and forth threads with fake accounts that are now suspended or deleted from Reddit?
Their founder is encouraging people to attack me on this by selective pulling comments deep from threads where I was frustrated - which had dozens to hundreds of views and we're later edited or deleted - instead of focusing on the tens of thousands of views that point out fact based major flaws in Codesmith.
- twice publishing mistake reports to official bodies and issuing corrections after I called it out
- running a fake charity with no notable income with a fake leader who told me that Codesmith writes letters of reference on behalf of the charity and that she has been placed on leave for a year and isn't involved anymore.
- tanking o…
Good question and really you shouldn't take only one person's advice because this industry is full of strong but different opinions.
Formation isn't all me and I'm not really involved in the theoretical aspects either - we have people who are better at that stuff working on that haha.
I work on the platform that powers all the practice, sessions, etc ... and I help people 1-1 with support, job hunting strategy, negotiation etc...
Our general model is that you'll have a core team of support staff that's stable, but that all your sessions are run by independent industry engineers . Each has different backgrounds and different strengths and weaknesses so you actually get a wide range of perspectives and personalities. You'll like some mentors and you won't like others, depending on you.
RE: coding machine. At my level I believe in the professional sports analogy. I plan one position rea…
Launch School Capstone announces cutback from 3 cohorts a year to 2 cohorts a year starting in 2026. Acknowledges tough job market, longer job hunts, and new changes to help people get real work experience though internships and open source commitments to to Firefox and large projects.
[Source](https://www.reddit.com/r/launchschool/comments/1moix9n/capstone_changes_announcement_for_2026/)
Note this is unofficial, personal commentary and opinions on these changes:
**SUMMARY OF CHANGES:**
* **Schedule change:** Moving from 3 cohorts/year to 2 (Spring & Fall only) to focus more resources on each group
* **AI Engineering expanded:** Now 2 full weeks dedicated to AI Engineering (model selection, evaluations, ingestion/retrieval strategies)
* **More experience opportunities:**
* Expanded Open Source Initiatives (OSI) - last cohort got everyone patches into Firefox
* New internship op…
Well I wouldn't assume it's doing that well business-wise, I don't think any bootcamp is doing well right.
The thing Nucamp has done very well, leveraging Ludo's strengths from Microsoft experience, is making connections with partners and governments to pay for aspects of the program.
But yeah for some reasons I always felt like Nucamp was advertised as Udemy + live mentors, rather than a legit pathway to a job, but I might be wrong.
Codesmith advertises itself as an 'outcomes of an elite graduate program for 1/10th the cost'.
Springboard is where I would be upset with because they license all their content, which is like Colt Steele's Udemy course + Rithm's original curriculum + mentors but charge like 2-3X Nucamp.
To me this is the difference:
Like people can 'owe so much to Harvard' and still see the pros and cons of going to Harvard - even if the pros outweigh the cons for you as an individual.
If you 'owe so much to Harvard' and then attack anyone criticizing Harvard for anything, then something is wrong.
When people are in the mindset of 'it changed my life', It comes down to leadership.
I talked to Codesmith's new CEO and said straight up about why I do what I do face to face, so when their founder goes around riling up the community as a 'competitor attacking the community' - that's a cult-like characteristic - turning reasonable and well-researched criticism (even if you find me annoying) into an "us vs them" ideological battle instead of a reasonable debate.
I'm aware of both groups at Codesmith. Many alumni that reach out to me or that I connect with, are very much in the 'I got a go…
The key thing here is "it"
YOU changed your life. YOU decided to sign up and put in the work to pass the entrance interviews. YOU showed up 13 hours a day. YOU hustled hard on your narratives to get past resume filtering. YOU passed interviews.
What did Codesmith do?
1. accountability
2. support
3. building self confidence
4. helping tell your narrative to get past screens
5. basic programming education
6. access to a network of alumni
I can see it getting blurry when instead of feeling like "Codesmith supported me in changing my life" the feeling tilts towards "Codesmith changed my life".
Cults (speaking generally from watching over 200 hours of cult documentaries) prey on people with low self confidence who will credit "it" with the positive impact the cult brings because that is easily turned into devotion and exploiting a need to "pay it back"). Things like free labor, donatio…
If people will pay for that given it's available for free, maybe that's not so bad.
I guess the jury is out on Codesmith because we'll see if they ever get it back or not yet. Not paying your bills, not having the phone number for 2 factor, and not being able to reclaim ownership of your core AWS account and not having a backup plan though is one in a generation failure if they aren't able to ever get the account back.
They pivoted to doing this because the next CIRR report for 2024 students will be out in April 2026 and they want to give some idea of what's going on, but their reports are very problematic to me.
Why?
CIRR reports account for people who graduate in a specific time window. 2023 report means people who graduated in 2023 and got offers.
The reports Codesmith is publishing are offers in a specific time window but from any cohort. Meaning people who got those 102 offers could have graduated in 2022, 2023, 2024, 2021 even.
For all you know many of them are 2022 grads who took 1.5 years to get a job?
I actually like salary lift as a metric but they are confusing things by providing these reports side by side with CIRR reports with completely different definitions.
I used to give more benefit of the doubt, but last year this time they were defending against word of mouth of reports of de…
So they cannot control the domain or direct it anywhere else because that is configured under DNS which is under AWS. The domain registrar can point the domain to a new DNS configuration to work around that but the domain registrar in this case is also AWS.
What they should have done on day one reboot become irreplacable, then get a semi peromanent redirector domain like [cs.site](http://cs.site) or something, and then change all of their socials to the new redirector and have that redirect to become irreplacable. Then whenever they get their site back they coulld have it redirect back to [codesmith.io](http://codesmith.io)
This doesn't solve the email problem and the user data problem though. They could re-host CSX but people would have to create new accounts and it might be a mess, but it would be better than notihng.
Email is a huge problem - because a lot of other service will sen…
Technically they have a website at become-irreplaceable.dev that was updated 4 days after the outage, but they don't have an AWS account so they don't control and these are down:
1. codesmith.io
2. email to codesmith.io
3. all their user data stored in AWS
4. the CSX platform
Not at all a defense but just giving facts for people to digest on their own.
I spend very very little time on Codesmith. It might appear that way but it's all relative. Instead of assuming I'm spending a lot of time on it, try just imagining how much code I'm writing on a daily basis.
Like other than a couple of threads that blew up, I'm genuinely not spendong s lot of time here relatively speaking.
I use a lot of voice to text a lot too while causally walking around which is why I have so many typos and edits.
I don't want 'revenge', why do you think that?
I'm pissed off because their leaders have been gaslighting me for years and now that their website/email/AWS is down for like 3 weeks almost and counting, you all can see what kind of garbage was going on behind the scenes too.
I'm frustrated that their leaders don't acknowledge problems or issues and they have been driving their business into the ground and it pains me to see that impact the people who pay $22,500 to go there.
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
Codesmith's problems are a leadership skill issue, not a student or alumni issue.
I criticized for years while simultaneously recommending specific people go there.
For a handful of people it's the right place. For statistically the vast majority of people reading this it is not.
But that was before the 20ish day outage and counting.
Leadership skill gap caught up with them and took down the company and there are zero people that should go there right now.
This is what I do all day. I spend ridiculously little time on Codesmith: [https://github.com/mnovati](https://github.com/mnovati)
I explained everything to their new CEO in a video call a few months ago and told her face to face the full truth from my mouth.
Their founder keeps going around perpetuating false narratives, paying people to post on Reddit, encouraging people to mock my appearance, some fake LinkedIn account is now in on the game.
Like I'm angry but I'm right and even though I'm just me, I'm not going to tolerate any bullying from the "team" as they call it.
There are a few days of DS&A. I'm possibly one of the industry experts in DS&A and it's laughable to call that sufficient. It's the equivalent of a "sneak peak" without even really getting started.
The idea of hack hours is great, but they are a waste of time because it's you and recent alumni going over problems and no true expert guidance.
So you are wasting your time.
People who have a natural affinity for DS&A don't need this and would be much better off NOT paying $22,500 and learning on their own.
I really wish I could articulate this more - so many things at Codesmith are about putting on the appearance of something legit and I get where their DS&A motivations come from they have to acknowledge how much it sucks.
Instead they celebrate it as the reason people get great jobs.
I've spent SO MANY YEARS really studying all aspects of Codesmith - I know more about it than their c…
Nope, I've been telling them about problems publicly and privately for years. They have problems with their platform, whenever it comes back, that a credible org would never allow to be live and they shouldn't turn it back on even if they get their domain back.
I can't speak to what happens inside Codesmith, but people who have worked there have told me they have complained about it. They had a code freeze for a year or something because they had no competent engineering leader so none of the "engineers" that worked at Codesmith during that time actually did anything.
Some of the issues I pointed out it took them several attempts to fix after repeatedly telling me they were fixed each time.
I know my tone is extremely offensive to them so I see why they act defensively instead of open minded to it, but seriously, I got this way because the sheer incompetence breeding incompetence bree…
1. Well a lot of the more tenured teachers resigned or were laid off recently. They then promoted newer people and filed out the rest with people who just graduated.
2. Well Codesmith is saying they are getting access back soon and that seems to be at least 24 hours ago now... so... these people clearly have no idea what they are doing and what's going on. It's kind of sad that I've been calling them "delusional" for years and they are showing that to the entire public about getting their AWS account back - they don't understand the magnitude of what happened.
To me Codesmith is dead and it's because they haven't APOLOGIZED ONCE for this. No responsibility.
I'm shocked anyone calling themselves an engineer would support their behavior right now.
I received a tip that Codesmith claims that they are making progress and expect access very soon.
My understanding is that they successfully removed the 8 year old phone number from the account, however they can't login or recover it yet and have to proceed with account recovery.
No matter what they tell you - keep in my that this is not normal.
If you have an account properly in your name and company, you should be able to recover it in fewer steps with proper identification.
My suspicion os the account is not setup properly and they cannot restore access based on the name/ownership and they are trying to get back in via creative approaches.
For example, by proving they pay the bills and that the two factor phone number is invalid and getting it removed, it removes one of the hurdles, but if they can't get access to the email address on the account, and someone else's name is on th…
1. Alina is CEO
2. Phil left almost a year ago
3. Eric K is still there as an advisor
4. Will is doing a visiting fellow program at Oxford so he's still involved but not in the same way as before.
5. There are only 4 full time admin team left: admissions person, program manager, events person, outcomes person + Alina
6. All of the instructors are recent Codesmith grads, most within months, and one about a year. No more head instructors or senior lead engineers to head of engineering or CTO etc..
I did criticize them a year ago that they had like 6 directors and needed 1, but I didn't expect them to go down to 0.
If I was Will, I would have posted this on day 1:
==== HYPOTHETICAL MESSAGE - NOT A REAL POST ====
"Codesmith community. I'm deeply sorry and I let you down. We have been so focused on delivering value to the community we make a rookie mistake with keeping our AWS account up to day, and we lost access. Not only did we lose access, but the our website, email, and all backend services are down as well. We don't know when we will regain access, and we will communicate daily updates.
==== HYPOTHETICAL MESSAGE - NOT A REAL POST ====
In the meantime, we purchased [codesmith.org](http://codesmith.org) \[it's available for $10K\] and we will be moving our operations there ASAP, keep an out for more about that.
==== HYPOTHETICAL MESSAGE - NOT A REAL POST ====
Most importantly, we are conducting a thorough activity log of what happened and what we will do to change our engineering team to pr…
1. CSX is not there
2. This is not AWS shenanigans whatsoever. Whatever drug your on, where can I get some, I've been having a rough week and need some delusional juice.
It's 100% their fault
1. Using a phone number for 2 fac
2. Not having other 2 fac backup options
3. Losing the phone number 8 years ago
4. Not having a monitored email on the account
5. Not updating a credit card for apparently 8 years because they haven't logged in for 8 years?
6. Not have multiple backup payment options provided (AWS allows for many)
7. Not having proper information on the account to recover it
8. Not separating accounts and systems for separation of concerns.
If they did ANY ONE OF THESE THINGS, they would not lose their account.
That is SHEER INCOMPETENCE and not AWS shenanigans.
It took them 4 DAYS (which is absolutely absurd) to relaunch their marketing page on their previous temporary domain yeah. It's a .dev which AWS doesn't support so must be registered somewhere else.
But they should have fully moved over to a new domain on day 1, put the issue loud and clear there to explain, and redirect all inbound organic links at their source (or change url redirecting services) to point to the new domain.
I can't state enough how much incompetence is being demonstrated here.
I made a list and it was 15 things they did wrong and I wasn't even done and I gave up because it was just like so ridiculous.
Codesmith is done. Even if they get the domain back there is zero they can do to rebuild credibility now.
I even called them out on DAY ONE and pushed them to make a report of what happend.
The "report" was a set of MARKETING SLIDES that didn't explain at all what h…
They have not been transparent at all in explaining the problem at all and shame on them. Their founder would rather choose now to call me on LinkedIn instead of doing anything about the problem.
They made a number of failures but the length and escalation of the outage are consistent with the problem being that someone else's identity is on the AWS account and without their cooperation it could be impossible to get it back.
Instead of dealing with this like a real company would, they have had zero mitigation plans. Zero communications in a week after repeatedly saying they will get access back soon.
Zero ownership of the problem.
Icing on the cake is they have this fake account manipulating the arguments I'm having with them on LinkedIn and whoever is responsible will probably get their real LinkedIn suspended too.
It's indeed a disaster at a time when they were already on thin ice…
Codesmith's website is still down and recovery is not guaranteed. But the company claims to be operational and that they will be around forever.
It's been 9-10+ days now and the situation is unacceptable.
Since their reputation is built on engineering excellence and they teach people to be engineers, how can anyone trust anything they say if they can't take responsibility for what happened and be transparent. Like if the founder was like "I'm an idiot and I completely screwed this up. I let down the team, alumni, and everyone and I'm ashamed of myself. This doesn't reflect the contributions of hundreds of engineers and the great things we've done and we need to reflect on what went wrong, leave no stone unturned, and implement a comprehensive 3rd party audited set of changes to our infrastructure. We will let you know when those implementations are complete in two weeks."
So far their…
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
Oh so it's Meta then. Yeah Meta doesn't take bullshit, and maybe that's why I'm equally firm about calling out bullshit.
Meta is particularly sensitive about levelling and people who are mis levelled are generally laid off instead of adjusted or supported.
Also most of the people were contractors via 3rd party and those are throwaway at Meta and not a path to full time work.
I wrote a letter to Codesmith about this because one student lied (he apparently APPARENTLY STARTED WORKING AT CODESMITH BEFORE HE EVEN WENT TO CODESMITH on his LinkedIn) and I suspected this was to meet the YOE requirement at Meta.
Codesmith defended it and wrote a blog about him.
I both agree and disagree. So first off, the highest performers are ALWAYS KEPT. Just think about it. You have a company. You spent a ton of time getting some amazing people. You have to layoff a team. You will keep these top people and move them ANYWHERE. It would be ridiculous to keep (or resume) hiring outside people who are probably worse performers than keeping your top talent.
So people who are laid off might not be the worst but they generally are not the top 10% either.
Now lets say you are a manager and you have to remove 2 engineers out of 10 on your team. Who do you choose?
The lowest performers.
Let's say they ask you to get your budget down to $X instead. You fire the people with the worst pay : performance ratio.
Let's say the entire team is cut. You director/VP of the org will hand pick the top people and move them.
Finally, the term "performance base layoff" is bei…
I know the people that exaggerated their resume to enter as seniors had trouble there. Their titles are non standard but
Associate is FAANG apprentice
Senior Associate is FAANG entry level
Senior Engineer/Principal Associate is FAANG mid level
Lead Engineer is FAANg senior
The people who had trouble were grads with zero experience who got Senior Engineer titles who should have been Senior Associates.
I mean I audited dozens of Codesmith grads to see where there are later on a small majority still has jobs as SWE but a large number did not and many had changed jobs frequently.
Napkin math, illustrative only. Of the 4000 grads, several hundred have been employed by Codesmith in some capacity and I'm excluding all of them.
This analysis supported me writing a letter to Codesmith encouraging them to try to be the Stanford of Bootcamps that produces the top ENTRY LEVEL talent in the ind…
1. Agreed. And the fact that they can't recover through an ownership claim leads me to believe the account also isn't setup properly with proper ownership info and such.
2. Their email is also down which is even more crazy because that might be more critical than the website in terms of business impact
3. Someone send me a screenshot that they are telling their community how transparent they're being and what happened and they're absolutely not and I don't want to hear any freaking defense on this, there's an industry standard that top-tier tech companies have for disclosing technical incidents and they are not following that standard. and if you went to codesmith and you worked at a real company then you know this too. e.g.https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-1-1-1-1-incident-on-july-14-2025/
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
Let's start with looking at an AMA I did 3 months ago: [https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/1jz5i0h/ama\_im\_michael\_exmeta\_principal\_engineer\_1\_code/](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/1jz5i0h/ama_im_michael_exmeta_principal_engineer_1_code/)
Normal comments, normal replies.
Now let's look at a Codesmith AMA from 3 months ago:
[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/)
Notice how **EVERY SINGLE COMMENT IS DELETED OR COLLAPSED BY REDDIT** except for the OP's comments and ONE question.
Most of their other AMAs - similar thing.
I'm not saying it's a fact that Codesmith is responsible, but like something they are doing on Reddit is very sketchy.
I have reems of similar documentation of this kind of…
You have a brand new account and you have suspicious voting patterns on your comments.
Even this post has a really odd view count given that it was completely blocked. so either you're refreshing the page like crazy or you've shared this with a bunch of people offline because the view stats are very odd and we get detailed view stats for posts.
Everyone's treated the same and you have no f****** idea the s*** that comes through this every single day that's also banned and nothing to do with this.
Reddit has these filters for a reason and as I said, I'm perfectly happy to continue this conversation in DM.
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy· edited★ FEATURED
I dunno, you seem to now want to be collaborative and that's on you. You never mentioned anything about stating that we do this to make money and I hope that's your opinion and you aren't starting that as a fact because it's provably untrue on our side and I can't see how you have facts to prove that yourself. So if you had this opinion the whole time, you are debating disingenuously.
I started the conversation with 'I'll talk to you if you accept the facts' because the facts are important.
The average person we work with has 5 years of industry work experience as a SWE. Why would they put a mentorship community Fellowship on their LinkedIn as a job or resume when they currently work at Google or Amazon?
It makes no sense whatsoever and why would they not do Formation if the name changed?
Like the facts are abundantly clear that very few percentage of people put Formation publicly…
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy· edited★ FEATURED
I'll share your feedback with our team to consider it, that's what I mean about gaslighting, like I'm not saying you are crazy and I see where you are coming from and I'm arguing that I don't agree and I don't think it's a problem and why I think that.
Like it's a good debate and if a lot of people feel that way we might change it so your feedback is important to share and note so we can pay attention to it.
We improve through feedback and accept it.
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy· edited★ FEATURED
Here is what AI says to the question: "Is Formation Fellowship a paid job"
"No — Formation is not a paid job, nor does it offer employment. It’s a paid fellowship/training program (focused on interview prep and career coaching), not a salaried position."
Here is what it thinks about Codesmith: "are oslabs engineers paid?"
"Yes - OSLabs does pay engineers in at least one of its key programs"
Like I don't think you'll find anything anywhere that would make a reasonable person think Formation Fellows are paid roles - but acknowledge that edge case people might be confused because of the multiple definitions.
But in Codesmith's case like everything is blatantly twisted to appear that way.
This discrepancy is one of the 3 primary reasons I've been going after Codesmith.
Dictionary definitions aside, what the leaders of these companies do and stand for and their integrity matte…
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
The official on the record answer - we used the word Fellow because our industry doesn't have many competitors: Interview Kickstart and Pathrise. Pathris used the word Fellows so we copied them and used the word Fellow. So that our customers could compare the two familiarly.
I'm not trying to gaslight you but I Googled Fellow and this is the dictionary definition it presented and not any of them say anything about being paid.
The definition for "Fellowship" has two meanings, none of them saying anything about being paid either (I can only attached one screenshot, but pasted:)
1. friendly association, especially with people who share one's interests."they valued fun and good fellowship as the cement of the community"
2. the status of a fellow of a college or society."she held the Faulkner fellowship"
Formation is not affiliated with education/schools/universities and no where in our…
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy· edited★ FEATURED
I'll give you the straight up facts on this if you are willing to accept them. I can prove every one of these statements.
Formation has flaws and this isn't one of them.
FORMATION:
1. A small fraction of Fellows at Formation put it on their LinkedIn.
2. No one says it's paid anywhere. Of the ones that do it's abundantly clear that it's a mentorship program for high performance and not a job.
3. We have not received a single request for a background check for anyone that I'm aware of in the past 5 years for anyone claiming they were employed by Formation.
3. The people who say 2-3+ years have genuinely been at Formation that time and actively participating. Maybe it's terrible they didn't get a job yet, but the timeframe is correct from what I'm aware of.
CODESMITH:
1. In my [reporting end of 2023](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/18cpq98/analysis_of_52_most_recen…
I'm restarting my comment:
Formation is not a bootcamp or generally competing with Codesmith. Codesmith has marketing adds explaining what a for-loop is and assuring you that even if it's too confusing Codesmith is for you. You can't join Formation without industry work experience as a SWE. The closest overlap is the AI program because we're offering AI productivity courses soon and they offer AI leadership courses. But there is very little overlap.
We are harmed if Codesmith declines because because 75%+ of Codesmith grads that join Formation like Formation a lot and it's a wonderfully complementary service.
There's a difference between continuous demonstration of incompetent engineering practices, tons of security issues and such.
I meant that this was the last straw about engineering practices because I had been privately telling them all kinds of problems for a while now and th…
It's long but the TLDR is this person posted things in the mod escalation channels and was almost instantly suspended from Reddit because the person was using a network of fake accounts that Reddit has recently cleared out.
It's very much possible this person was retaliating because after going after me Reddit discovered the network of accounts and removed most of them.
So I genuinely saying that Codesmith claims they had nothing to do with this.
But they hired someone who specializes in "reputation management" (which again, they confirmed) and are partially responsible for what that person does.
It's a good question because I'm not normally like this and it hurts my personal reputation.
I'm so so so so professionally upset at Codesmith's lack of integrity on the matters. Gaslighting me and the public when I criticize their competency.
I'm personally upset because a person that they paid to post on Reddit (which they confirmed), coincidentally (which they deny being involved with) posted negative things about me and tried to get me banned.
I'm not a happy camper here.
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
Google wasn't down because the team has incompetent engineering practices.
CIRR also has incompetent processes and deserves equal criticism.
In my opinion Codesmith is full of liars and exaggerators. For god's sake the founding advisor's own sign had a LinkedIn and resume full of lies and exaggerations.
I meant that this was the last straw about engineering practices because I had been privately telling them all kinds of problems for a while now and they keep telling me how great their engineers are.
If you are going down, just blame everyone else on your way down!
Their Founder needs a close friend or family member to give him a wake up call that these problems are HIS PROBLEMS for NOT KNOWING WHAT HE'S DOING, and it's not imposter syndrome, or gatekeeping or AWS's fault, etc... He needs to authentically own up to this stuff, or his company literally will implode, like it seems like it literally is.