Yeah, I mean they are increasing AI based stuff and mods don't have that much control. They collapsed someone's comment about me because she was flagged as a highly suspicious account likely trying to break the rules. I don't know how they determined that whatsoever and cannot do anything about her comment.
This is a totally fair comment so it wouldn't deleted and you shouldn't feel that way. I think it's an excellent comment with a tone open for discussion, I wish more of them were like this!
1. Codesmith's co-founder Alex Zai, told me to clear the record that he is not currently involved in the AI curriculum and hasn't been since DSML shutdown, and specifically that Zoox is not involved in any way in the curriculum either nor has he worked on since working at Zoox.
He told me that he asked Codesmith to not represent that he is working on this currciulum.
I don't have an analogy for you but maybe it's like Juliard saying they have a brand new course created by Adam Driver, when Adam Driver created some materials years ago when he was TA'ing and those materials were used inside of this new course.
I think that's wrong.
2. My data is showing about 45% of people in H1 2023 getting jobs…
I think all three of those programs mentioned are very different and can co-exist rather than fight. Rithm is very small right now and I don't think they are fighting anybody haha. Launch School is heavily run by the founder Chris and is also small and capped size, and I think they will get by.
Right now, from my estimates (no hard numbers) Codesmith is about the enrollment numbers of Launch School (maybe 1.5X larger because of part time) but from my estimates has 5X more full time staff. So I'm most concerned about Codesmith surviving without more layoffs or without a major pivot.
Codesmith is the only one going big on AI, however there isn't any signal from the industry what AI skills they want, and interview processes haven't adapted to test for AI skills either, so they might be betting on 'Web3 blockhain' like Lambda School did. It's entirely possible that the AI skills companies…
I agree that for profit business are companies and they have to make money, and they can make money in a win-win way that improves the overall economy and people's lives, but that marketing isn't something bad or evil or despicable, it's normal.
I have the same advice with reading any bootcamps outcomes. I'm very on top of TripleTen because their stats are carefully worded too (and also not lying or false, just worded well by a marketer).
We need people having reasonable and thoughtful discussions about these things openly to move the industry forward.
The bootcamp industry is barely surviving right now and using marketing to convince more people to join to keep it alive isn't going to solve the systemic market problems that are stopping bootcamp grads.
I've said this once or twice now but Codesmith might have a good angle with getting people into non-SWE technical jobs, or with leve…
So Codesmith genuinely has good intentions, and they do some things incredibly well. They do a lot of things not very well. That's reasonable, no company is perfect.
I believe in every number Codesmith presents is trying to be accurate, while also being marketing and that is maybe a similarity to Lambda School. Austen presenting what he felt was accurate information spun in very interesting ways - ex. 100% of cohort placed with very small sample size (not revealing sample size of 1)
Ultimately it comes down to outcomes. If you have good material to work with, and spin the marketing positively, then you have success. If you don't have good outcomes and spin the marketing, you end up potentially with problems and people being mislead.
Codesmith continues to have good outcomes relative to it's peers in the bootcamp industry, however the elephant in the room is that the INDUSTRY is doing…
2024 Bootcamp Predictions [MIDYEAR CHECKIN AND UPDATES!]
The past two years I've been making bootcamp predictions and [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/18ivago/2024_bootcamp_predictions_mega_post_revisiting_my/) is a link to my 2024 ones from six months ago.
I want to share my background for context in the spirit of openness and transparency. I try to write the best content I can, but everyone has biases and it's important to evaluate ones biases for every post you read.
BACKGROUND: I co-founded a mentorship platform and work with many bootcamp graduates as they progress in their careers and I'm a heavy contributor (and moderator) of this sub. Before this, I was at Facebook from 2009 to 2017, where I grew from intern to E7 principal engineer, conducted over 450 interviews, and participated in hiring committees. I keep in touch with hundreds of my former colleagu…
Yeah extending my views to Codesmith specifically, if they can get people placed in tech, but not SWE jobs, I think they can keep going and rebrand as a "get your first job in tech" as opposed to be "become a software engineering leader"
We're going to need a TON of customer service rep - engineer hybrids to help navigate this evolving world, such as debugging self driving cars for customers in real time, and some of Codesmith's recent placements have been in this area. Great, high paying, tech jobs that are not "software engineering" roles.
They might have a giant market of people who do like customer support, operational logistics, product management, and other jobs where have a "engineer mindset' might help people navigate a world of AI and rapidly changing tools.
And more experienced software engineers can build those actual tools.
If they have enough humility to accept reality I…
The "Modern Software Engineer": Refuting the "lawyer engineer" and instead an argument for Specialization + Collaboration
Hey everyone, friendly neighborhood moderator sharing my person opinions on this topics for all of you getting into software engineering. My background is started programming with QBasic and Lego Mindstorms when I was 12, worked at Meta from 2009 to 2017 (from \~200 engineers to \~10,000 engineers) and was the #1 code committer when I left. And since then have started a mentorship and interview prep platform for people with several years of experience who are changing jobs or want to prepare to change jobs. NOTE: I have some amount of bias because I work with a number of bootcamp grads later in their careers. While my company doesn't compete with bootcamps directly, I want to openly disclose my background so you can interpret my comments better.
PURPOSE: I'm writing…
SWE generalist is the most secure you can be. Which is a SWE who can work in any part of the stack on on any kind of problem.
I wouldn't worry about AI yet. AI is going to create a bunch of new kinds of jobs - which might be amazing for bootcamp grads. We're seeing Codesmith go heavily in this direction trying to push AI skills to students and encouraging them to take all kinds of "tangential" SWE jobs. Those are all one-off jobs right now, e.g. a Lawyer Prompt Engineer (definitely not something anyone going in would assume they would get), but in the future, these will be real entry level jobs to get into tech, and being a Generalist SWE will be the longer term thing you become over time.
Thanks for sharing and hopefully it was also a learning experience good and bad.
A lot of bootcamps are in a similar situation unfortunately, some nicer than others.
When you say that they needed to pivot to ML and AI, was that officially planned and they couldn't pull it off?
I've seen Codesmith (adding on AI) and BloomTech (pivoting to AI) but it still feels like the days of Web3 and BlockChain bootcamps that popped up during the Bitcoin spike.
No one knew what Web3 skills companies wanted and companies didn't have systematic ways of hiring and accessing for Web3 skills so a bootcamp focused on Web3 didn't make sense.
Right now no one knows what AI skills companies want because the companies don't know.
We're in a 1-2 year phase where companies are exploring generative AI internally and we'll see what kinds of skills people need.
The existing senior engineers will have a lot of…
Yeah disclosure my company runs an interview prep and mentorship platform to help people get ready for interviews. We don't solve these problems I'm talking about but we help people on the ground who are in the process of changing jobs. So some overlap, I disclose if I was directly promoting my company to someone :P
Teaching AI or using AI?
BloomTech has a B2B $5000 'using AI' course that's 5 months or something fairly detailed.
Codesmith is working on an AI add on package and had the first session this week and someone who went didn't find it very useful yet. (It's early stage)
Most of the companies I talk to don't really need any AI skills yet and want senior product engineers who will figure out AI. Because it's changing so fast there isn't a way for these companies to consistently and fairly test people for AI so it's not really meaningful yet in hiring decisions.
It might matte…
1. Yeah we'll see, I hope that's what happens too and it's what's broadly expected. A number of bootcamps that are not doing so well though are banking on this happening to avoid further layoffs or shutdowns. If I'm planning ahead for multiple outcomes I would bias towards your view here, but I wouldn't bank the survival of my company on it.
2. Agree to disagree, I don't think my view is the only view here and it does depend on a bunch of personal factors. Agree there are startups that can be fantastic to go to as well.
3. Yeah it's old and it's Galvanize so I assume it's bias. I have a bunch of friends leaving Climate Tech to go to AI companies, so my personal view is bias and I tried to find other resources and couldn't find any showing that Climate Tech will dominate hiring this year.
RE: CODESMITH - long story. But the triggering point is that they are an advanced bootcamp that t…
I'm familiar with all three of those grads actually yeah, but I'm curious what data is backing this narrative. From hearing Will it seems to hypothesis on the idea that "capacities" are all that matters, but no one is giving me hard experimental evidence this hypothesis stands up - it's all anecdotal and quotes from individual alumni. And all you need is single counter examples to disprove a hypothesis so this is not a valid argument and I want to know more!!!
Like I know these people and I wouldn't say these are reproducible paths that any Codesmith student could choose to follow.
For example, if you had a bunch of alumni at OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity and generalized from them and resulted in each person with a unique path, that would make more sense to me.
But if everyone is a unique case not in these large scale consistent AI roles as hiring managers and building orgs of tho…
Hi James! I have some tough questions about the logistics. Codesmith markets itself as the best so I have some tough questions I expect answers to from the best :D.
1. How do systematically measure the impact of curriculum updates on placements and outcomes?
2. Related to 1, how do decide what updates to make based on the job market? For example, I have talked to a bunch of the top AI companies and if you aren't being hired for an ML role with a PhD and 10 years of ML experience, they don't actually want or need any AI experienced whatsoever to hire you for product and infra roles. So I'm curious where the decision to add AI/ML comes from if it's not related to getting people jobs.
3. How do you systematically identify and prioritize "best practices across the software engineering landscape"? I'm aware of a survey that's given to alumni and a curriculum panel of 6 or so alumni in in…
I appreciate the clarification about your personal feelings.
1. I don't think this is fair that you say above:
>The AMA is something I’ve done on my own volition as Codesmith’s Director of Outcomes, to provide an open space to talk about our CIRR reports, reporting standards, and graduate outcomes
Yet this was advertised by your CEO and in you CSX Slack in a giant image as an ["Official Reddit AMA" ](https://files.slack.com/files-pri/T7X3836NN-F06SK9BNY9W/ama.png)
I genuinely feel bad about the personal feelings, but unfortunately you are also the Director of Outcomes who was doing an Official Reddit AMA.
2. Similar to another commenter, I was also offended by this, in my personal opinion:
> Please all - go have a great weekend! Get outside, read a good book, spend time with family and friends.
I stayed up until 1am doing a super important infrastructure upgrade at Formation. The…
In April-May is what Will said last week I think or a few weeks ago. My understanding it was going to be paid and not free, and for current residents and alumni, framed as a "minor", like in college.
In the mean time, you can do this completely FREE online course from Stanford and Andrew Ng, an industry expert in AI and teaching AI: [https://www.coursera.org/specializations/machine-learning-introduction](https://www.coursera.org/specializations/machine-learning-introduction)
**Historical Context:**
- They had an entire Data Science and Machine Learning (DSML) track they experimented with, but it initially failed as they needed people with more experience to go through it.
- Then they forked it off as a separate concept aimed at PhD students/grads, https://www.dsmlresearch.org/. They reportedly spent over $1M on this to get a cohort running and when they brought on their new external…
META COMMENTS:
There's been a lot of suspicious posts regarding Codesmith over the past few days (all over the spectrum, good and bad, and from a lot of brand new accounts, people have gotten banned)
This post is from a brand new account that seems created to write about Codesmith, which is a bit suspicious too.
That said, the factual content about the logistics of Codesmith all reads accurate. I don't work there and haven't gone there, so maybe I shouldn't be the judge of that, but I've seen the entire curriculum, and have private been told of certain little details around "family dinners", the clapping stuff, etc... that either someone is training a on all my public commentary about Codesmith, or this person - if not actually a resident - is pretty close to Codesmith.
OVERALL:
It sounds like you probably shouldn't have chose to go into Codesmith to begin with because your style do…
Yeah I try to explain Formation over and over and each time I have to repeat things not because I'm being annoying but because people might not have seen previous answers and not familiar.
If you are curious how we are doing now, because we have an adaptive mentorship platform model we can adjust in real time and we've therefor adjusted more senior and seen very good placements in February and March so far, this is unedited list other than < 10 person startups removing the name for privacy, and there are a couple Meta and Microsoft offers that haven't been signed yet!
||
||
|Scale AI|
|Google|
|Oracle|
|<STARTUP TOP TIER>|
|JP Morgan Chase|
|Atlassian|
|Meta|
|Meta|
|Netflix|
|JP Morgan Chase|
|<STARTUP 2ND TIER>|
|Google|
|CoreWeave|
|Arista Networks|
|Doosan|
|Withe|
Everyone at Formation has a different timeline, does different things, has different needs, and it's very hard for us…
Codesmith (due to declining enrollment) shutting down NYC in-person, merging remaining full time remote cohorts into one. But also alludes to new Future Code program, co-working spaces and announces new changes! See my line by line commentary and personal opinions.
SOURCE: [https://www.codesmith.io/blog/community-update-doubling-down-on-remote-learning-timeless-pedagogy-frontier-tech](https://www.codesmith.io/blog/community-update-doubling-down-on-remote-learning-timeless-pedagogy-frontier-tech)
DISCLAIMER: The following is my top to bottom analysis and personal opinions. I always disclose this and hopefully it's not boring. These are my personal opinions. I've not new to the sub and I have been giving my opinions on bootcamps for almost two years now, daily, from the FAANG angle, and also having worked with hundreds of bootcamps grads. I'm the co-founder of an interview prep mentorshi…
Hi, I'm happy to answer questions and always like to hear what others have to think. I'll list just a couple of shorter comments to help answer, but feel free to me, I'm very open with people about if I think Formation is a good option to consider or not, and ultimately you have to decide.
1. It sounds like you are somewhat familiar with it at least, but just to clarify that we're not a bootcamp and have no fixed curriculum, lectures, classes, lessons, etc... We are a practice, benchmarking, mentorship, job hunting and mock interview platform. You do practice by yourself in in small mentor-led group sessions, you get feedback in those sessions and through benchmarkings, and you trust us to move you through topics and skill areas at whatever pace you go at, and you trust us to tell you when you are at the top company bar. So you are paying to reliably get your skills (from DS&A to System…
Hi all, I don't want to step on the discussion (I'm the co-founder of Formation) but will share my thoughts too. I think it's very important and healthy to talk openly about the pros and cons of programs so people can figure out what works for them, so feel free to ask me questions and I'll give the most transparent answers I can!
I also post the feedback with the Formation team because there are a couple of points of feedback that we can make improvements on and thanks for sharing that!
My personal thoughts:
1. I wouldn't say you HAVE to be extroverted but you do have to interact with people and one of the selling points is face time in 3-6 person small group sessions, and 1-1 mock interviews with legit industry engineers to get their perspective. The amount of sessions and types of sessions can adapt to you, so introverted people can get by, IMO, but you should expect to interact wi…
2024 Bootcamp Predictions Mega Post. Revisiting my 2023 prediction post and exploring what I see ahead for 2024. 2023 was a rough year for bootcamps and the future doesn't look great for traditional programs - 2024 will be a year of caution, but I'm optimistically excited to see what happens!
Hi all 👋 for those that don't know me, I'm Michael, daily commenter here for about two years. Congratulations to the sub on hitting 40K members today! It was around 10K when I first joined!
**Background**
I'm the co-founder of a mentorship platform and work with a large number of bootcamp grads later on in their careers in their 2nd, 3rd, 4th, job transitions. Before this I worked at Facebook from 2009 to 2017 as it grew from 200 engineers to 10,000 engineers and leveled up from an intern to an E7 principal engineer in about 5-6 years. I did over 450 interviews of everything from interns to dire…
What I've been seeing is a strong demand for senior engineers, and decent demand for mid-level engineers (1 to 3 YOE) that have worked at pretty solid companies for a few years.
I've seen people with experience but not necessarily full time strong experience (i.e. they might have contract work, large resume gaps, lots of job changes, or are bootcamp/CS grads with no experience) get pretty good jobs that in the boom-times, graduates of Codesmith, Hack Reactor, Rithm etc... (i.e. the top bootcamps) were getting - i.e. 100 to 140K great junior positions.
So my advice to top tier bootcamp grads at these top bootcamps is to not try to sneak into those 120K entry level roles that 2021 and 2022 alumni were getting and to aim for apprenticeships and internships. e.g. start with [apprenticeships.me](https://apprenticeships.me). NOTE: I'm sure I'm going to get some people commenting on here that…
It changes constantly. We work with a lot of people who want canonical FAANG and we work with FAANG who want the even "better" tier of companies (FAANG level engineering bar and product but earlier stage with more upside). Notion and Figma (pre acquisition) are that level. Stripe and Square were also that level during COVID. Now it's shifting to AI a bit, like Open AI.
The three criteria:
1. super strong engineering culture and engineering driven decisions
2. product or service is leading edge / best in class and at a fairly large scale / making money / growing fast
3. top compensation and significant equity (on par with the canonical FAANG)
These companies also tend to have very similar levelling systems to each other
Codesmith slowly and quietly shut down the data and machine learning intensive? Anyone know why?
I noticed a few months ago that Codesmith had removed all future cohorts for the data and machine learning intensive from their website but kept the landing page up, and now the entire program is gone (it used to be here: [https://www.codesmith.io/data-science-and-machine-learning-immersive](https://www.codesmith.io/data-science-and-machine-learning-immersive#upcoming_program_dates))
Anyone know why?
I don't think this reflects poorly or is a sign that there are troubles at Codesmith as it was a new program. It's probably a good thing so that they can focus on placing people in the immersive during a really hard time.
EDIT: Someone DM's and I won't share the details because it was a private message, but the program evolved into a separate, more academic, project outside of the Codesmith b…
I think there is a lot of value in this model for people that are already strong to make them better, so it's not a waste for these people but it might limit the ultimate breadth of skill levels of people Codesmith can support long term, which might be totally fine. They are expanding to machine learning so if they can just cherry pick the best people in more and more disciplines that can scale too... it just changes the goal from "I want to get into Codemith so they can develop my skills to be successful" to "I want to get into Codemith because it validates I have the traits needed to be successful based on similar people". Both can work.
I think it's very unlikely they will sell. They have a good thing going and are printing money right now because it's 100% upfront. They have about 80 former students on staff who are paid like 50K a year or with gift cards and have scaled that very well.
I think the only risk is if they scale too large or too broad.
They benefit from being very selective and their weaker students don't have as much success. So they will either have a cap on how many people meet their bar, or they will have to invest in training people beforehand to get them to the bar.
I also think it's a risk that someone catches on to the exaggerated work experience issue. I haven't talked to one non Codesmith industry person who thinks that's ok and if they get large enough and people catch on it may not work anymore. I know this is controversial.
They are experimenting with a machine learning cohort and we'll se…
I don't know the scope of the project, but work on something you are already passionate about. Here are some past examples I've seen:
1. A former wine buyer for a restaurant built a cellar tracking app for restaurants
2. A former professional musician built a machine learning sheet music generator
3. A college student built an iOS game like guitar hero but novel in a few weeks having never know iOS before
Some of the projects I built when self-teaching web development:
1. An "auto-voter" website for a reality TV show competition
2. An itinerary generator for Walt Disney World that told you which rides to go to when based on your group, intensity, ride characteristics and wait times, etc...
3. An internship review website
4. An app for assisting you to draft a minor league hockey team (I'm from Canada, this was common lol)
I also think Codesmith and Launch Schools projects of making a…
Hi! Try a lot of things by building a small few-day-long project (React, backend, web3, machine learning, etc...) and when something clicks, triple down on it and start building a career from it. Once you've settled in, keep exploring more areas.
There's infinitely many things you can do in engineering, and when you start out you don't know what you don't know, so that's why I suggest an iterative approach and starting somewhere.
Great question, I have seen a few standout projects. A few points:
* It has to be something you are so passionate about that this shines through when you talk about it. e.g. a former musician who made a machine learning based tool to generate sheet music based on famous composers music.
* It's better if you launch the thing publicly, e.g. app in app store, live website on a real domain you bought. Real people giving feedback helps you learn and gives you more interesting things to talk about in interviews.
It's very case by case and depending on timing. Right now there is a rumored hiring freeze on E3 and E4 (and possibly more), they haven't said anything publicly.
I can't emphasize enough how unique each person's background and path is, no one could read this and get THE answer for how to get a job at Facebook. That's part of the value we offer, Facebook, or otherwise, we use all of our expertise to help craft your path to YOUR goals (a lot of people really don't like Facebook and don't want to work there). Similarly as you start interviewing, pass/fail, your timing changes, your preferences change, remote vs in person stuff, we adapt to what you want, and we're a shoulder to lean on for advice (and sometimes proactively give advice as a lot of people have misconceptions as well). At the end of the day every person at [Formation.dev](https://Formation.dev) wants to see you in a super imp…