A BPA is a "blanket purchase agreement", which means the IRS budgeted/allocated $118M to a large umbrella of AI training/upskilling/hiring.
There are 5 companies that received this BPA.
When the IRS has a specific task/contract within this budget, e.g. "a 10 week AI bootcamp for 20 level 31 engineers" then they create a task with a price and the 5 companies can compete/propose solutions and one is chosen for that task.
I think it comes down alignment.
Codesmith has like no staff left and none of them have extensive AI experience. They hired random people on Upwork to manage this thing, from marketing to program management to working on the contracts. I don't see students in 2026. I don't see placements in 2026. The "CIRR Audited Outcomes" haven't been updated this year, and CIRR has not responded to why. Their website doesn't even have a privacy policy. A 2024-2025 lawsuit said that their financials required six months of forensic accounting to assemble and could not be provided on demand. Codesmith's AI curriculum is minimal and created by recent alumni. I'm not an expert but I would guess they would have trouble with the most basic government audit.
Additionally, the AI "Lead Engineer" on the IRS stuff is a full time engineer at a top tier bank. I also suspect that's problematic to have them on c…
NEWS: First wave of contracts totalling $4.4M under the $118M IRS BPA were awarded to Fedstack, Gauntlet AI, Fearless, and Sokat. Codesmith with no reported contracts.
Details below. Interesting to see Gauntlet AI take the 10-week training program.
# 1. Fedstack (Smoothstack): $1,623,840.00
* **Task Order ID:** `2032L226F00064`
* Fedstack secured the highest-value award to scale highly governed training pipelines that transition existing personnel into specialized AI engineering roles.
* [https://orangeslices.ai/fedstack-secures-department-of-the-treasury-artificial-intelligence-engineer-workforce-development-task/](https://orangeslices.ai/fedstack-secures-department-of-the-treasury-artificial-intelligence-engineer-workforce-development-task/)
# 2. Gauntlet AI (BloomTech): $1,420,654.80
* **Task Order ID:** `2032L226F00062`
* Gauntlet AI received funding to deploy intensive 10-week…
All false. Stop making Reddit a place of untrustworthy garbage and focus on the truth.
By the way, I guess you aren't an engineer or didn't have a solid computer science education, but monitoring sitemaps is a common thing. Any AI tool can even do in on a schedule without any code or any service.
You sound just like those dozens of accounts that got banned from Reddit.
You are experiencing what I've experienced for four years: I don't understand why people downvote the truth. I can guess ideas, but just like I don't want to people to make assumptions about me, I try to not make assumptions about other people. If I do based on the evidence in front of me, I will correct and change it if new evidence comes to light.
Like people might not like you calling out an obvious contradiction: someone calling themselves a Karpathy-like AI researcher when they have never actually published any research. They might not like you rubbing salt in a wound that Will Sentance said he was publishing a book last year that doesn't seem to have ever come out.
Like calling out someone who repeatedly warps the truth, with public sources, former staff, and dozens of examples, might be mean.
But if you are Will Sentance, a public figure, who signs his DM's '1,000,000 students…
Maybe some people do, but this is vote manipulation. When I was moderator there was maybe one or two times I saw this on content about two other bootcamps, yet it happens on every controversial Codesmith post.
There is no evidence that Codesmith themselves are doing it, they have denied that. But someone or some people are and there are unique patterns here.
I similarly get downvoted to like -10 and then an hour later it's wiped back out to like +3.
And no one else has that happen to them.
Maybe these people feel justified in their actions, but all it looks like is suppressing negative facts instead of actually disproving them.
And that makes Reddit AI algorithms think Codesmith is very sketchy.
I honestly haven't seen this pattern in other places on Reddit either because like this sub has such little activity relative to other places these strategies might be less obvious.
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
Well the team isn't any more qualified than anyone else to do AI consulting so we'll see if they are successful at it. Will Sentance has never worked full time at a real company.
The IRS contract means nothing as there are 6 companies and counting in that contract and they have to compete on actual work and haven't seen any receipts yet for that.
It's possible they didn't want to shut down the Codesmith brand so this is just like a holding company, shell/home for the briend.
Will Sentance seems like he's completely moved on to physical AI, manufacturing plants in the mid-west, robot hackatons, Oxford Fellow, Stanford Fellow.
Amazing how quickly he moved on from Codesmith and abandoned everything after personally making millions of dollars (based on court filling estimations) off of Codesmith.
The sad problem is that out of the $50M Codesmith approximately/estimate made in pure stude…
Well the team isn't anymore qualified than anyone to do AI consulting so we'll see if they are successful at it.
The IRS contract means nothing as there are 6 companies and counting in that contract and they have to compete on actual work and haven't seen any receipts yet for that.
It's possible they didn't want to shut down the Codesmith brand so this is just like a holding company, shell/home for the briend.
Will Sentance seems like he's completely moved on to physical AI, manufacturing plants in the mid-west, robot hackatons, Oxford Fellow, Stanford Fellow.
Amazing how quickly he moved on from Codesmith and abandoned everything after personally making millions of dollars (based on court filling estimations) off of Codesmith.
The sad problem is that out of the $50M Codesmith approximately/estimate made in pure student tuition, millions of that went into Will Sentance's pockets and…
1. Formation is a technology platform that support practice and mentorship in pretty many any information area, and we have been exploring other areas, like this one [https://formation.dev/ai-native-ea](https://formation.dev/ai-native-ea)
2. For SWEs - we're seeing more and more senior, strong background engineers coming to us because there is fierce competition for those senior jobs. We have thousands of pieces of content and are constantly adapting to the changing landscape.
It's not like the movie War Dogs haha!
The IRS has had so many cuts and freezes I really don't think they are dishing out millions for garbage. I think they are creating a highly competitive process to get all the services they want for the cheapest possible price.
Gauntlet claims to be doing well so they might have the money to underprice but being in a competitive business is not the way to make money.
Mom&Pop corner restaurants often don't make it.
Having a monopoly is how you make money.
I feel like this is probably a trap.
Codesmith's press release about "being selected" was fully of blatant manipulations of the truth and given then full pivot to "enterprise" and the fact that they made a Case Study document of all of their IRS work they claim to have done (which government sources still show as $0 paid out), it seems like the play here is to leverage the IRS branding to try…
This isn't a loan at all no.
The way it works is the IRS has earmarked $118M of budget towards a huge bucket of AI initiatives.
As they carve out specific projects with specific dollar amounts, the partners will be able to pitch themselves and one or more will take the project.
It's possible the $118M won't be used up. In fact, historically, most BPAs do not use up anywhere near the allocated amount. It's there so that it's preserved on paper. But if priorities change or government shuts down or shrinks the IRS, etc... then its possible they pay out $0.
So in reality individual companies might get $0.
Codesmith said they had a huge vetting process and being selected was a sign of how good Codesmith is, but looking at the growing list of companies... it seems like everyone with their paperwork in order will get a chance and that the real competition is for delivering future results,…
BREAKING: IRS $118M BPA for Hiring and Training - 3 more companies including Gauntlet AI added to join FedStack and Lantec/Codesmith. More companies coming soon.
SOURCE: [https://orangeslices.ai/treasury-dept-ocio-awards-118m-technical-workforce-development-and-training-bpa/](https://orangeslices.ai/treasury-dept-ocio-awards-118m-technical-workforce-development-and-training-bpa/)
Some news broke earlier this year with a press release from Codesmith: "Codesmith Selected for $118M IRS Contract" and a number of people felt this meant that Codesmith received a check for $118M. That's not the case.
The $118M is a ceiling for training and hiring for the IRS, and the IRS just added three more partners to the contract, with more expected to be added.
Super interesting to see the pie being split up and fought over by competing companies and it seems they want as many contenders as possible.…
BREAKING: IRS $118M BPA for Hiring and Training - 3 more companies include Gauntlet AI added to Joining FedStack and Lantec/Codesmith. More companies coming soon.
SOURCE: [https://orangeslices.ai/treasury-dept-ocio-awards-118m-technical-workforce-development-and-training-bpa/](https://orangeslices.ai/treasury-dept-ocio-awards-118m-technical-workforce-development-and-training-bpa/)
Some news broke earlier this year with a press release from Codesmith: "Codesmith Selected for $118M IRS Contract" and a number of people felt this meant that Codesmith received a check for $118M. That's not the case.
The $118M is a ceiling for training and hiring for the IRS, and the IRS just added three more partners to the contract, with more expected to be added.
Super interesting to see the pie being split up and fought over by competing companies and it seems they want as many contenders as possible.…
Looks like their individual programs are toast? The SEO tags now say:
TITLE: Enterprise AI Engineering Training \& Workforce Transformation | Codesmith
DESCRIPTION: Build AI-ready engineering teams with Codesmith. Trusted by leading organizations and awarded a $118M US Treasury contract, we train engineers to design, build, and scale AI systems faster.
Zero mention of their normal programs - 100% enterprise.
Well the "leadership" has minimal AI experience. Of the three people: one has product experience, one has like no tech experience for 10+ years, and one has never worked full time for a real tech company.
Like who the heck would hire tis group of people to overhaul AI at a Fortune 500 company?
I'm not trying to be mean but just realistic.
Like lots of companies ask me to do talks and stuff because I'm one of the highest output engineers in the world but I'm not the right person to overhaul AI tooling at a Fortune 500 company... I know what I'm good at and what I'm bad at.
I think they are going to die even faster with this pivot in my opinon.
You don't get points for good intentions in this industry.
You don't get a trophy for trying.
You don't build credibility by paying somebody on Upwork to write Twitter content for you.
Their homepage hero right now that seemed that changed o…
Here is a list of the problems to show that i'm not being sarcastic. You could feed this into AI and fix all of these in an hour.
This doesn't include CSX.
1. Footers inconsistent across site, one says 2025, one says 2026
2. Alignment in 2026 footer is not centered properly
3. Header, hover on the final item in each list has no radius and bleeds onto the page
4. Home -> Join Us -> Train Your Team -> Enterprise -> Enquire -> hello@codesmith email. Felt like I was going in circles.
5. Programs say "more dates available" but the other dates are the exact same ones in the header I clicked from
6. The dates make no sense and Jun 1 should be July 1
7. Median Salary & Employment Rate overflows in one box, inconsistent
8. It looks like their loan providers is gone but now the payment options have a gap missing a block that looks weird
9. The Terms and Privacy policy are dated…
Codesmith launched their new website and it shifts focus to "enterprise" AI consulting, burying all their individual programs.
Codesmith updated their website in the past week and it appears to me in my personal opinion that their individual programs are being de-emphasized significantly.
Note: there are numerous references to being the Forbes #1 bootcamps, which is false and they should remove that. Forbes updated their rankings April 1st (3 weeks ago) and while they used to be last year, that is not correct anymore and the link they provide themselves no longer has them as #1. Forbes now assigns "Best at X" awards in a number of categories and Codesmith has 'best outcomes'... but does not have best for experienced coders, not best career support, not best for portfolio, not student support, not professional development, so that seems like a slip up or mistake.
What are they pivoting…
Two things to watch out for in that slide deck of outcomes
1. It's from 2024 and AI changes month to month. A number of industry engineers report not writing code anymore as of 3 months ago, so it's basically irrelevant what happened in 2024.
2. The 88% figure has some crazy fine print. If I'm reading it correctly, 88% of the people WHO GOT JOBS got them within six months and 12% took longer to get the job. But it's not the percentage of people that got a job.
TripleTen does a similar metric, but for TripleTen the weakness in the data is more that a huge number of people remain "active" by not graduating and not dropping out so they don't count in the stats and they are there too long to get job guarantee refunds.
I don't know if Hyperion is self paced with a similar gap but I would ask for clarity on the placement rates.
No program is perfect and any program that looks amazing in t…
The Extinction (or Execution?) of The Junior Engineer - from your friendly neighborhood former moderator
Hi all, it saddens me the sub that I put 4 years of my time into providing honest and from the heart advice in is dying. Coding bootcamps have been dead for months now. Codesmith's GitHub repos look like a ghost town. Launch Academy never came back from their 'pause'.
So I started written very thoughtful essays about what's going on and this one is particularly relevant:
[https://michaelnovati.substack.com/p/the-extinction-of-the-junior-engineer](https://michaelnovati.substack.com/p/the-extinction-of-the-junior-engineer)
**SUMMARY:**
* Entry-level software roles are disappearing because the “training work” (simple, bounded tasks) is increasingly automated or absorbed by senior engineers using AI, reducing the need to hire juniors.
* Employers now prioritize “judgment” (real-world…
Studies don't mean anything when newer models that change the game come out every two months.
I'm pretty in the middle on this, I agree on the expansion, I disagree on the skills that will be needed.
I think that AI has changed the nature of programming so much that it will not be the same going forward, and the "expansion" will be a titanic shift of ALL WALKS OF LIFE towards more technical skills to 'develop', 'configure', 'manage' these AI tools, where the engineering work is for the building building the underlying frameworks.
I don't think this is a bad thing for learning to program, programming skills (or at least the thinking skills behind the code) might become table stakes for a lot of jobs that currently aren't considering 'engineering' roles.
Engineering might eat the world, not software.
One of the points the founder makes against this is that new people to the industry were effectively being paid to learn and develop tacit knowledge and eventually they do and are a valuable engineer. And he is concerned that with AI there will be no reason for a company to hire someone in those early phases because the math doesn't add up anymore (AI replaces all of their value for $100 a month instead of $10K a month). I believe he mentions he thinks the government needs to step.
Codesmith Founder on becoming a SWE in the world of AI: "I don't know what the route is to that level [of tacit knowledge] for people not already in the system".
Source Podcast (March 12th, 2026): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eggWeDjCFdA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eggWeDjCFdA)
I’m currently researching a 2024 lawsuit involving Codesmith and its investors, so I’m not sharing opinions on Codesmith right now.
Other direct quotes from the discussion:
“domain knowledge is built by experience”
“if more of the programmatic building is done by AI, how do you build the tacit knowledge?what's the route in for people”
Anthropic's research indicates AI is indeed replacing human programmers already and likely will replace far more soon: [https://www.anthropic.com/research/labor-market-impacts](https://www.anthropic.com/research/labor-market-impacts)
Codesmith's blog and Bloomtech's blog are marketing blogs and not a source of fact. Anthropic's research is academic research.
1. Both are good languages to learn the common programming concepts without too much language specific unique things that could distract. AI is making languages less relevant over time.
2. Either. JavaScript is used in all parts of the stack so I would choose it as my first language.If I was more on the data side/analytics and wanted to superpower my job I would do Python.
3. It always depends on you and your situation and I don't blank recommend a bootcamp for everyone. Heck even after all the crap I've been through with Codesmith, there are specific people for whom it could be a good fit still, and I would recommend it to people if it's the right choice for them. My main advice in 2026 is not read too much into past reviews and performance because most bootcamps have changed unrecognizably... whether notable staff changes or changing programs (where reviews apply to older programs),…
Yeah I pinged our marketing person :P
Here is an example of Friday's:
# Engineering Digest — February 13, 2026
[Scaling LLM Post-Training at Netflix](https://netflixtechblog.com/scaling-llm-post-training-at-netflix-0046f8790194?source=rss----2615bd06b42e---4) (*The Netflix Tech Blog*) stands out today. The team details a migration from standard SPMD loops to a hybrid actor-controller architecture on Ray to support on-policy RL. The most interesting engineering nugget is their solution for model portability: using coding agents to automaticallt port Hugging Face architectures into internal optimized kernels, strictly gated by logit equivalence tests to catch tokenizer skew.
For systems engineers, [Shedding old code with ecdysis](https://blog.cloudflare.com/ecdysis-rust-graceful-restarts/) (*The Cloudflare Blog*) addresses the classic problem of dropping packets during binary upgrades.…
Hmm it's tough but I would frame it as personal project/exploration time, or a personal break. It depends on exactly what you did and how it all relates. If you have projects during that time you can generally list them.
The leveling will depend on the company and how they level. I advise to apply to entry and mid level and let the companies figure it out.
And if you still have some expertise in fintech the average person doesn't then it's a legal up at companies like Stripe and Intuit.
You might want to check out Gauntlet AI which is Lambda School reincarnated for the second time, with less puffery and more transparency: if you have like a 130+ IQ then you can probably get in and do 16 hours a day of AI :P
Their cohort starts Monday.
Yeah I actually have a few dozen and have AI process them all daily and write a daily newsletter, we post it at Formation to all the Fellows :D. I've put in a lot of work and iterated on this for months but it's completely internal and not sharable. Sourcing from TechMeme, and then dozens of top tech company blogs individually.
Checkout something like [Feeder.co](http://Feeder.co) and they have a lot of build in blogs.
Good question and I don't know, we need more academic research into it haha.
AI is a tool. And like any tool, use it as much as possible and build deep intuition.
The problem is the time window is small because AI is powerful enough tool to fully supplant juniors.
I think you have about 1 year maybe until the end of 2026 to either master AI or be left behind.
No offense but juniors need to fight to strap themselves into the luggage storage area on the rocket ship but that's better than not getting on at all.
I haven't experience ageism myself so I can't speak for others, but I can give my 2 cents having worked with people of a large range of experience levels, regardless of age.
I have two points.
1. Dunning Kruger. when you have decades of experience you are on the real expert side of the curve. But you have do deal with the bootcamp grad a couple years out who calls themselves an 'industry leader' at peak Dunning Kruger. Those people are hyping AI right now and the more experienced I get the more I roll my eyes at the peak BUT you have to also take AI seriously. So my advice is to look at AI through your experience and 1+1 = 3.
[2.Be](http://2.Be) open minded. Kent Beck is one of my mentors over the years and he's an example of someone who inventing testing frameworks, signed the Agile Manifesto, and still voluntarily went to Facebook - which had basically zero tests when he joined, and…
Hi, good question...
So first off, use it. Most of the FAANGs have limitations on AI use (wether its models, or cost, or tools) but I would recommend using low level tools that are either publicly available or very similar.
Now, if you are learning you have to fail to learn.
So ,second, put in extra time and fail and don't give up.
Look for low hanging fruit, like deprecated code and use AI to refactor it, numerous times and in different ways, and pay attention to each step.
Use different techniques and models to redo the same thing and compare.
I personally broke a ton of stuff and Q4 was really bad for Formation, lots of bugs, lots of angry team members. I fix things fast so the overall product was fine, but just a lot more bugs than there should be.
But I sure of heck learned a hell of a lot about AI and I have a strong intuition now and Q1 has been absolutely insane building o…
Q1: Find WHAT and WHERE you are a top 10% person at and go there. Video games + Amazon Games. Ice Hockey + The NHL. Languages + Duolingo. If you feel average, you have to put in more hours than anyone and you'll put in those hours in an area of passion. If you spend 5 hours a day playing video games and that's what you want to do you have to figure out how to connect that to a company and job.
Q2: I don't have a good answer for this one. I can give my personal answer which likely doesn't work for others and has costs, but when things don't go well I build. If I cause a bunch of bugs and feel bad, I don't mope, I fix them all as fast as humanly possible. If I take down the site, I don't freak out, I fix it as fast as humanly possible. So my answer is to build, but yeah, not for everyone.
Q3: I think AI is turning testing on its head, see this: [https://engineering.fb.com/2026/02/11/deve…
I don't think it's going to pop the way people talk about it popping with circular investments all a giant scam about to implode, etc...
The efficiency gains are real. Every day I save hours of people's time. If someone spends time on something manually I offer to use AI to replace it. And over time I think we do 3 to 5X more output than we used to without AI with a smaller team.
That is undeniable value add and the companies are undercharging for that value creation right now.
Meaning there is a ton more room for AI to grow and REAL cash flow.
That doesn't mean there will be some investment mistakes that pop along the way, but I don't think it will implode the entire market like some think.
Hi, yeah my 2 cents through the lens I mention my OP.
I don't have a pulse on the ratio so I'm not going to guess, but it feels like every entry level engineer, if you didn't go to a top 10 CS school, is a battle right now.
My advice if you have a previous career/training/expertise is to stick to your lane and learning programming to do something more technical in the same space. Instead of aiming for a SWE job, you might take 3 years to become a Support Engineer.
Many of the bootcamps that haven't shut down are offering some kind of AI thing now and transitioning away from pure SWE programs.
An example is let's say you studied nutrition in college and are a personal trainer, this is a realistic trajectory in an AI world:
\- learn to program for free for 1-2 years. build a website/app related to your business
\- integrate payments, build data analysis etc..
\- launch an app for tr…
AMA: 👋 I'm Michael. Former-moderator of the sub, Facebook top performer, "the Coding Machine", junior -> principal / 2009-2017, helper of bootcamps students and grads, founder of Formation for experienced engineers preparing for interviews.
Hi all, I've been one of the top five most active members in here for 4 years (!) ask me anything about anything and get official answers! I'll keep this open all evening and respond to lingering questions when I can.
Just because you can ask me anything, it doesn't mean I'll have good answers.... the areas I'm particularly knowledgeable about:
1. Getting a job at a FAANG company
2. AI's impact on day to day engineering
3. Reddit bad actors / content manipulation / social engineering attacks
4. Coding bootcamp history and industry news and trends
I give blunt and direct advice and opinions. I use my real name on Reddit.
My comments are…
Facts and accountability are foundational. You can troll all you want, but facts are the facts and your assumptions about my intentions are not facts.
The press release I quoted says that "Federal selection followed rigorous evaluation of Codesmith's independently verified outcomes: 85-90% of graduates placed within 12 months, two-thirds promoted within three years, and an average starting salary of $130,000. Unlike competitors, Codesmith relies entirely on word-of-mouth referrals rather than advertising, with all outcomes verified by the Council on Integrity in Results Reporting."
Website: "Codesmith has proven this thesis true with 5000+ alumni. 90% of graduates get hired within 12 months, most land leadership roles within big tech & AI labs and many directly contribute to the world’s largest open source projects"
**There is nothing at CIRR that says that 85 to 90% of the 5000 gradu…
DEVELOPING: Codesmith 2024 California Government Outcomes report is out today. Only 12% are placed within 6 months with reported salary (50% including 'no salary information available') but press release also out today says '85% to 90% placement rate within 12 months' 'CIRR verified' (no time frame)
SOURCE: [https://bppe.ca.gov/webapplications/annualReports/2024/document/98d87f0e-23c1-4af7-aabf-7c91d4ea7312](https://bppe.ca.gov/webapplications/annualReports/2024/document/98d87f0e-23c1-4af7-aabf-7c91d4ea7312)
I can't legally comment much on this so instead I ran it through a neutral AI with the following prompt:
"Summarize this document and compare it to information about Codesmith you can research and flag any good things and flag any concerning things. Summarize in 5 bullet points."
* **Completion is very high, but placement is not.** Codesmith’s Software Engineering Immersive show…
BREAKING: Gauntlet AI (BloomTech, f/k/a Lambda School) launched Government Training Program, free program to prepare you for government AI/SWE roles.
SOURCE: [https://gfa.gauntletai.com/](https://gfa.gauntletai.com/)
I'm sure this will get a lot of popcorn because BloomTech had some past issues but Gauntlet seems to be a lot clearer on what it does, how it does it, etc... it takes top 2% IQ people, trains them for 80 hours a week for 12 weeks, and gives them $200K job and there aren't really any catches (at this time) and it's free because companies pay hiring fees.
It works because they transparently filter for top 2% IQs, makes sure they have the hustle needed through 80 hour weeks, and there is a huge demand for productive engineers.
They are launching a program to prepare you for government and they have a very transparent explanation for what it is. Four steps, very clear.
Gau…
That blog post presents a one-sided framing and selectively quotes material to support a conclusion I do not agree with.
Claims such as: “Codesmith has proven this thesis true with 5,000+ alumni. 90% of graduates get hired within 12 months, most land leadership roles within big tech & AI labs, and many directly contribute to the world’s largest open source projects” are extraordinary marketing statements. Evaluating them using publicly available sources like LinkedIn and GitHub is both lawful and commonplace when assessing public claims about outcomes.
Reviewing publicly available professional profiles and repositories is not stalking or harassment. It is standard practice in hiring, investing, journalism, and market analysis, and it is often the only way to contextualize broad promotional claims.
I also reviewed summaries of my own comment history using automated tools and reached co…
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…
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'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.
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…
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…
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…
1. Thanks for clarifying the relationship with him, I will drop that. Do you know why he didn't request a comment? Journalism ethics 101.
2. You are seriously wrong about the "removed by moderator" thing. Many posts don't even show up in the mod queue. Once they do, they show internally removed by a moderator in addition, but publicly they all show the same message all the time.
The moderator is Reddit AI I guess.
1. I spend most of my time coding not on Reddit: github.com/mnovati
2. Copied over first response
I'm going to focus on the MODERATION ACCUSATION first since that seems to be the main issue.
What moderating r/codingbootcamp actually looks like:
I don't own the sub - I report to the owner who asked me to help after I'd been one of the most active and helpful contributors. The coding bootcamp industry is absolutely infested with astroturfing. Brand new accounts, manufactured conversations, fake testimonials. It's constant daily spam trying to manipulate people making $15K-20K decisions.
My job is to support authentic discussion. We have above-average Reddit AI filters. We generally don't review flagged content because we can't tell who these suspicious brand new accounts are. Occasionally we approve legitimate posts caught in filters.
The accusation that I delete Codesmith's posts:…
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
Codesmith gives away all of their CSX content in a single JSON file so you can turn it into anything with AI trivially.
The fact that they haven't updated it when I can grab this and improve it with AI in minutes is major incompetence.
Other places have open source content you can grab too.
But that fact is also why you won't get anywhere doing it yourself either.
It just goes to show you why bootcamps are failing and not even doing anything about it.
Icing on the cake is Codesmith is producing all these high production value marketing videos and patting everyone on the back for them and entirely missing the point....
My company doesn't offer training or education.
Our main product is an interview prep platform to help you receive practice and mentorship for your upcoming engineering interviews.
We also offer short and cheap AI training courses for existing experienced engineers.
The typical flow would be Person -> Bootcamp -> Job -> at least 2 years -> Formation.
Hi, thanks for sharing a well thought out argument.
\- Lying on the resume is a tough topic and some blame goes with with the people hiring. The snowball of "6 YOE for entry level jobs" is kind of the result of both sides. Hire a bootcamp grad with no YOE for a job needing 0 to 2 YOE, get burned, list 2YOE+ next time, bootcamp grad lies more, increase again to 4YOE, etc...
They are getting burned because the hiring process inherently is flawed and requires some amount of honesty, but there cost of mis-hiring is you fire the person and move on and it's a rational market. If it was too costly to fire someone, they would spend more vetting the people.
So the way I see it - both sides are optimizing for their market conditions and Codesmith grads lying just enough to get through and doing just good enough on the jobs to not trigger the snowball is the market trying to balance everything o…
Yes look at my account history please. Are you delusional? I had three different independent AI engines analyze my entire account history for the substance I talk about and it's all aligned with my representation of myself.
Some Codesmith people are so brainwashed they only see Codesmith stuff and these 100 comment back and forth threads that I refuse to back down on, and completely miss the substance of what I talk about that actually gets VIEW COUNTS.
Codesmith people, go "under the hood" instead of being so superficial.
Like i said in the other comment, entrenching on the Codesmith side without talking to me just makes me shake my head. You'll see in the future when you wake up.
Many alumni have and it's one of the reasons their community has completely and utterly fallen apart. The only Codesmith people I hear from now are on payroll in some capacity. Your alumni are gone because…