/u/InTheDarkDancing you are a by the books and audit-appreciating person who disagrees a ton with me about most things, so what are your thoughts on this?
Am I wrong in asking this "violation" (i.e. inconsistency with CIRR standards) be disclosed by the auditors in the report because it's not for Codesmith to decide what rules they choose to follow and not disclose in the official paperwork, or do you think this rule breaking is so obviously okay that we shouldn't question it?
I'm fine either way as long as it's consistent. Like we all follow the rules and disclose meticulously when we don't and feel justified, or we get aways with fudging the rules when we feel like it and hope that everyone agrees but it should discredit the trustworthiness (just a little bit.... not entirely obviously) of the outcomes.
The voting on these comments suggests people are in a different camp: 'Whatever…
I'm someone who posts a lot of criticism of CIRR, the most out of anyone, do you think my comments are misinformation or are you talking about other comments. My comments are critical but sourced directly from the CIRR standards, worksheets, the website, and talking to one of the founders of CIRR, and not made up.
Most Codesmith students I talk to get their information about CIRR from Codesmith posts.
Some people do state misinformation about it on here but that doesn't mean that all criticism is misinformation either.
For starters, Codesmith openly doesn't follow CIRR's standard for graduation date as it considers PAID FELLOWS to not have graduated until the fellowship contract is complete and does not count them as placements, even though the CIRR rules are clear than any job after someone meets the consistently applied graduation requirements is a placement and graduation dates ar…
I comment a lot about Codesmith and it's not "a shitshow" internally but it's also not run flawlessly. They don't have a typical company org chart and I've corroborated some of the anecdotes of HR/internal stuff, but every company has things they are doing well and not well and that's not a reason to flip a table because overall it's doing a lot of things right too.
Now in terms of outcomes. First off, CIRR hasn't been updated and is overdue.
They have released some numbers though of offers signed in 2023 and the Q1 median was $110K and Q2 median was $115K and Q3 median was $120K. Presumably H1 was when most of the H2 2022 grads were placed so I don't expect their next CIRR report to be nearly as good.
These are ways the numbers can be steered, but I severely doubt they would be intentionally fraudulently made up.
1.CIRR lets you confirm a placement by external sources including Lin…
I agree that there aren't enough Codesmith grads to make a dent in the system. It's why every time I talk to people about this they are super offended and some say they would never hire anyone who went to Codesmith, but no one does anything about it, because it's just not a significant number of people OR the complexity of training the ATS to block OS Labs is not worth it.
But the motivations are wrong and so think you know that. I had an AMA last week live that you could have come to and Neetcode, Blind75 and Sophie are doing a panel next week if you want to see our story and motivations and what we do and what we believe in, you can do so live and hear it from own mouths instead of inferring from comments I'm making in a minute or two typing like crazy on Reddit.
Anyways, this behavior will catch up to them. NY onsite paused indefinitely now, down to 2 cohorts a month instead of 4, c…
Anyone know what's going on with CIRR? H2 2022 Results delayed, two more board members no longer working for their bootcamps - which leaves potentially just Codesmith and Launch Academy left managing CIRR
Hi all, sorry for posting so much recently, but I hope it's useful!
So we are all waiting for CIRR H2 2022 results to be posted. Last year the first wave came out mid September with Codesmith's results coming out at the very end of September, but now it's October already and I made some concerning observations.
I have made some observations below in trying to collect the facts.
I have been really on top of CIRR because the signs of this decline have been apparent for a while. It was setup as a business league from a bootcamp loan provider, and the standard was prepared by outcomes members for marketing purposes (according to one of the founding members of CIRR in a Reddit comment) .…
We're waiting on CIRR results but Codesmith has provided some info in a report last week and in info sessions.
The placement rate was down from about 80% to "in the 60%s", and the salaries were down about 10% or so to the "$120Ks"
I've also heard anecdotally that they are trying harder to to track down alumni and get every last person into those CIRR reports.
But 60% ish still isn't that bad. It's significant if you are planning your life around a bootcamp right now - might not be the best idea to make any assumptions on outcomes - but it's not like it's ZERO placement either.
Hi, I think this overview is pretty fair from my understanding, and I can summarize what I can corroborate from multiple sources. I have a lot to say good and bad about Codesmith - overall a balanced view, but these specifically are things corroborated by others and the **ALL CAPS BOLD** are my **PERSONAL OPINIONS.**
1. The free lectures and courses ARE the marketing funnel so they are intentionally trying to move people through to the immersive. So they represent a more high touch experience than the actual imersive.
2. I know someone from Oxford who talks about "hard learning" and it's reputation for just meaning "teach yourself" and I think Will is bringing this approach to Codesmith intentionally. That said, it might work for some people - Oxford is a great school and I think their admission process is essentially weeding out people who won't do well in that environment. As a result…
Hi thanks for sharing your experience. I hear this often from Codesmith grads in DMs and what you said isn't thaaaaaat bad in my opinion. This is a balanced comment so read the whole thing.
I feel like I'm a broken record on here about how important it is to understand how Codesmith works and make sure it works for you before just giving them $21K because of their CIRR reports and strong supporters (a number of whom I know and worked there as fellows or continue to work there part time).
They are very transparent that every single teacher, TA, instructor, lead all went to Codesmith and it's almost a point of pride, so I don't think you can criticize them for that if you expected something else.
Having fellows 6 weeks ahead of you sign off on your resume actually gives them a lot of hierarchical control over the product. It's why almost all Codesmith resumes look the same.
Regarding p…
Hi, you can trust that CIRR numbers are what they are because the auditing process makes sure the numbers are recording and calculated correctly. But the standard itself was written by Bootcamp marking people to promote bootcamps and it's not legally sound paperwork. For example, there's not description of how salaries are collected, other than they are base salaries, but no description of evidence needed or mechanics of it.
They also have a worksheet with formulas in it that are not explained in the specification clearly, which leads to errors. Codesmith's auditors files the wrong numbers and had to issue a correction!
Some data came out from a Codesmith grad that showed 70 recent placements and the people's starting salary. The median starting salary BEFORE CODESMITH was 70K+ and 20% of people were making 90K+. So the target audience is not the same as programs that have people maki…
I do think it's a fair question/comment yeah. It's also one of the reasons we don't publish "CIRR-like" outcomes.
I see day in - day out on here how people just programs strictly by outcomes and the fundamental problem is that a randomly selected person doesn't just get accepted into program X and it's a free ride to $Y salary.
Formation is VERY hard work, so it's not about selecting great people, they get great jobs and we get the credit. But it is both ways. If we select people who we know Formation is more likely to work effectively for, then we're more likely to have more amazing experiences, which might attract more people who it might not work for. I think that's fine if we are honest with individuals when they apply if we think Formation is good or not and that people trust that assessment.
Believe it or not, Formation is NOT good for people who have done all the LC Hard probl…
Not OP, can't speak for them, but I think both are a problem haha,
a) is a problem with Codesmith - even though I've seen materials that clearly say not to do it, I've seen other materials that clearly guide people to do it without telling them to do it... It's like DO NOT LIE!!!!! Use this example though of how we recommend doing it: <link to example that exaggerates 6 months of experience>
So many people message me about this, I get the vibe that all of the staff at Codesmith GENUINELY feels the OSPs are a magical project that is GENUINELY worth month and months of senior engineer experience that they do this on purpose, but this is just proposed to me in theories. One person said a staff member went on a rant and had to pause the session to cool down after someone asked if OSPs we're being exaggerated and you'll see in the tone of many Codesmith employees in public talks an arroga…
We don't right now because auditing requires a framework of rules to check against first. But you can get any data audited that has rules and the auditors just make sure you follow the process! And believe it or not, CIRR data is audited AFTER the fact, not before (which is one of the problems).
Believe it or not but CIRR doesn't even say how salary information needs to be collected whatsoever, so just asking someone and taking their word for it can be considered the golden source of truth!
We collect detailed placement data for every single placement and detailed compensation info following an internal process, and some day we could potential turn that into something auditable to make sure we don't make any mistakes in collecting the data. Right now just have a crazy strict authorization and verification process to touch this data to make sure every pixel is correct, but we could pr…
Sure happy to answer:
1. We are not a bootcamp or educational program and we don't have the data CIRR requires. We don't have end dates, we don't have a program length, we don't have a curriculum, even though the pace is dynamic - we don't have any even theoretical length of the content itself to benchmark against, people ramp up or down hours as they please and we have no control over that, people pause for weeks and go on vacation, people have no expectation of what work they will do going in, people don't "graduate", roughly 2/3 of people are ALREADY CURRENTLY WORKING. So it just doesn't make sense and trying to manipulate our data to fit into CIRR would be extremely misrepresenting and misleading and not what you think it would be.
2. We published some outcomes on our blog and plan to every year with extremely fine details of how every single thing is calculated. This goes WELL BEYO…
This is really hard to extrapolate, I have a lot of data people have shared and I threw it into cohort-based charts.
For CIRR, it's placed within 6 months of graduating. Some of these 73 people are people that graduated more than 6 months ago so they wouldn't even count in the "83%" and some are and would.
So you can't extrapolate anything from the number alone... whoever at Codesmith shared this knows exactly what they are doing and shared no dates and no timeframes to make a point about hiring picking up to motivate people and not a point about actual placement rates
Or as Ludo said below:
https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/162t5y6/comment/jy0n28j/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3
ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY. I think people know me around here well so I won't introduce but I have a lot of comments. Most important point is in bold, the reset is just commentary.
1. **IF CODESMITH HAS THIS DATA SO EASILY ACCESSIBLE - BE TRANSPARENT ABOUT IT AND TELL PEOPLE THAT SALARIES ARE DOWN $20K (median/mean) FROM LAST YEAR.** I've seen a few info sessions where employees say that outcomes are "similar" to last year but at "different types of companies". Second, I've seen numerous documents shared with me where Codesmith ties it's "excellence" with the high salaries compared to bootcamp and CS degrees, so they have to take a hit with this kind of drop, when the best CS grads from Stanford and Harvard are still all making $150K base salaries at Figma, Asana, Palantir, etc...
2. The columns of this data align with their post-graduation CIRR collecting intake form so I think this is r…
I mean they are using the full and proper data set for CIRR, but this is the source yeah. I'm just surprised how much Codesmith cares about talking about compensation and pushing people for compensation, yet they don't even collect granular compensation information. With the quality of data they collect, they can't say someone got a $400K FAANG offer. Every FAANG offer needs to be considered in terms of base, signing bonus, performance bonus, equity, vesting schedule, job location, and benefits (e.g. Amazon has much worse benefits than Apple and pays a lot more cash.... you are not smart at all if you compare the base salary one on one and say one offer is better than another.
Anyways, I'm writing up more separately!
So believe it or not but the column titles are the real titles of the official data they collect. Literally from their CIRR collection worksheet. I was shocked too when I saw this because they collect such little information about compensation, e.g. someone put "some stocks" and this is the data that turns into CIRR outcomes.
But yeah, meaningless in this context... doesn't even have the companies or time frames.
I'm intimately familiar with month to month and week to week trends and how many Codesmith people graduate each month and when their 6 month clock starts and ends and then even account for fellows, whose clocks are delayed for 3 months (or however long their fellow contract ends up being)
I know for a fact that outcomes for CIRR H2 2022 are significantly worse than H1 2022, about 15 to 20% worse, being generous.
July through August 2022 saw strong hiring at Amazon and Capital One, whom were filling out remaining headcount.
The market was terrible in November and December as headcount ran out, freezes continued, and people decided to wait until next year.
Because of the cadence, which you understand as well, that means only one or two cohorts from each coast were impacted super bad and had terrible placement rates that were somewhat cancelled out by the stronger earlier ones.
Januar…
Both of these are solid bootcamp programs, I would also consider Launch School Capstone in a similar bucket.
I've been rabbit holing this weekend a bit on Codesmith because I received some interesting information a while ago and additional information last week that I finally looked at, and I may or may not continue recommending them in the future. I'm going to wait for their H2 2022 CIRR results - so see if the information they present aligns with the information I received or not before I make a call here.
They are in additional doing some very shady stuff with OSLabs, Parallels, and Codesmith. I received evidence directly from an employee, documented, that 'OSLabs will sign letters of reference for 3-4 months of work for a 3 week OSP project'. While I have long complained about the majority of people exaggerating their experience on resumes and LinkedIns - despite Codesmith's docume…
Rounding up: 7 cohorts X 4 timezones (east, central, west, onsite) + 3 part time is 31 cohorts a year times 35 people is about 1000 as an upper bound.
That said there are about 2000 grads total ever so and from CIRR last year I would peg it at 700 for 2022.
Which makes me realize that Codesmith is actually growing quite fast by adding the NYC onsite.
Enrollment for cohorts has been way slower, numerous people interviewing to start a week later whereas last year it was full months ahead of time.
A cohort has 1 lead instructor, 1 instructor, 1 mentor, and 4 part time TAs. At 150K for lead for 12 weeks and 120K for instructor and mento and $25 an hour for 80 hours a week of TA time. I get $125K a cohort in people cost plus career support, overhead and leadership, etc.. that's shared across cohorts.
But they probably need only 10 people in a cohort paying $210K upfront for a cohort to b…
The market right now is not great for bootcamp grads. FAANG hiring is opening up again for people with 2+ years of SWE work experience, but not for people with none. And you can't fake this work experience or stretch your resume - it's either 2 real YOE or not - faking your resume will just piss off hiring managers that will tell the recruiter that sent you over to never consider candidates from your bootcamp again and waste their time.
The only data I have here is from Codesmith. They had H1 2022 CIRR placements of 80% within 180 days of graduation for people who graduated and were job hunting. I've seen Codesmith's placement numbers for H2 2022 and for recent cohorts and they are hovering around 50% +/- 15%ish (these are not official numbers but from primary data from students and alumni) and are about a 20% drop from H1 2022 in H2 2022 and H1 2023 (which still has a lot of time left…
Question. It's a fact that the auditors use LinkedIn to verify employment. Someone puts their OSP as a "job" why hasn't this caused more problems with their audits or been discussed transparently? I've audited 200+ Codesmith LinkedIns and have a beautiful spreadsheet showing 2/3+ representing their OSPs as "Work Experience" as a "Company" (whether the company is open source or not is irrelevant from the way it's presented on their LinkedIn to an auditor who has to follow strict rules). I can give you hundreds of LinkedIns that from the "LinkedIn verification" standard in CIRR would be flagged as jobs to an unsuspecting auditor.
So based on what you are saying, either:
1. Auditors flagged to Codesmith discrepancies and Codesmith is aware of this problem and not doing anything about it to stop it.
2. Codesmith has instructed the auditors to ignore all of these companies on their LinkedIn…
\+1 this, a lot of people misunderstand what auditing means. After I called out Codesmith's auditors/and-or Codesmith for signing off and publishing the wrong report to CIRR that contained incorrect data, Codesmith published a video AND blog post about what auditing is and why it's important in validating their results and I think that it further re-iterates this notion that auditing = "better results" instead of actually explaining what auditing is.
I will keep being loud about auditing is but appreciate this haha.
Right, 14.6% of people in pacific time group didn't report salaries so might have been confirmed from LinkedIn or another source.
RE source. Yeah so CIRR has no requirements on how the salary is verified and the auditors for Codesmith said they just ask people to confirm - no offer letter required or anything.
This is the GRAD standard and sounds similar in that it's self reported:
\`\`\`
Compensation Rate
The Compensation Rate includes only annualized base compensation and excludes bonuses, equity, relocation, and any other non-base compensation. If a Graduate has held multiple positions of the same outcomes classification code within the Job Search Period, Galvanize reports on the position acquired at its discretion. If compensation information is known, it must be included. A GRAD Report must indicate the total number of Job-Seeking Graduates as well as the percentage of succes…
Finally someone who reads the standards line by line!! Hello and nice to meet you!
I would love if people ready CIRR line by line too - it has many loopholes.
One of the auditors who does Codesmith said, quote, "LinkedIn is almost as gospel as anything else. So we use that to help us validate and verify as much as we possibly can" ([link](https://www.codesmith.io/blog/codesmith-outcomes-reporting-a-conversation-with-james-white-of-banks-finley-white-company))
Anyways, this is a tangent lol
I was going to spend about 10 minutes doing a deep dive but Monday mornings are very busy for me so I will come back and edit this later.
It definitely caught my eye last night!
The right thing to do here is to compare it to Codesmith's H1 2022 but since this is a different standard than CIRR you have to compare it properly and accurately.
In no particular order these are generally good, but each is different and depends on you: Codesmith, Rithm School, Launch School Capstone, Hack Reactor, App Academy.
I wouldn't judge too hard from CIRR reports - they are useful to identify if a school is legit or not - in order to investigate further, but CIRR is a business league established by bootcamps and it's not a super well written specification - with little details that steer in favor of bootcamps.
Talking to recent alumni and figuring out which program day-to-day is a good fit for you is most important, and using data to identify which programs to investigate is step 1.
Plus 1 to market improving. Something subtle you said is also something I'm seeing myself which is that newer members are getting jobs sometimes faster than people who started in H2 2022.
My theory is people who applied for jobs then basically had their resumes go into a black hole and ignored. And the people are so demoralized they aren't in a great place for chugging along. Whereas people applying fresh now have a better chance to get seen.
For CIRR companies (i.e. Codesmith) I'm seeing some people get placed post 6 months so they will be excluded from CIRR even though they got jobs, which is another thing that can make CIRR not align with perception.
BTW if you know why Codesmith's CIRR was restated, I'm dying to know, I thought they would publish an explanation because they are extremely proactive about defending Codesmith's stance on CIRR in their blogs.
UPDATE: 2023 Predictions check-in and updates!
Hi all, it's halfway through 2023 and I wanted to quickly revisit my predictions from this post to give some updates based on how the industry is doing: [https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/1226i27/bootcamp\_predictions\_for\_the\_rest\_of\_2023/](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/1226i27/bootcamp_predictions_for_the_rest_of_2023/)
# New: What's left for 2023?
The main thing I want to add is that outcomes for H2 2022 are going to go off a cliff. At first when we saw H1 2022 CIRR results come out they were better than expected, however Codesmith restated their numbers after audit and they were notably lower than originally posted for placement rates and high end salaries ([https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/14341x7/codesmiths\_newly\_posted\_audited\_version\_of\_their/](https://www.reddit.com/r/co…
Thanks for sharing thoughts!
Placement times range from 3 weeks to 18 months and counting.
One of the main reasons we don't publish time to placement data right now is because people don't understand what Formation "is" yet and we don't want people to look at numbers that would compare us to a bootcamp or even our competitors, like Interview Kickstart, Outco, Pathrise, Coachable, Scaler (all of which don't publish much data).
Your program is truly unique to you, the person who is still here after 18 months has done hundreds of sessions, almost a thousand tasks, a few dozen mock interviews, and keeps chugging along. Some people even do contracts and part time jobs and ramp down Formation and then ramp back up again when the contract ends (I can't comment on specific people, but it might contribute to the people who have been here longer).
I completely agree that someone looking at Fo…
Hi, Formation isn't a bootcamp, doesn't have "graduation", doesn't have cohorts or start dates, doesn't have a expected amount of time you will spend in it, doesn't have a curriculum or topic list you will study. In addition, most people train in Formation part time and have jobs, and ramp up or down their commitments to suit their own needs rather than along our fixed timeframe. Finally, people come from all kinds of backgrounds and start at different places, so it's very hard to look at data and guess what your time and outcome might be like.
So in conclusion, CIRR makes no sense for us at all and we can't even answer basic questions like "how many people graduated" because the question itself doesn't make sense for us.
We have published average outcomes and a list of companies placed at in 2022: [https://formation.dev/blog/2022-formation-fellow-placements/](https://formation.dev/blo…
I agree with this in general. The CIRR standards have no requirements for verification of salaries, other than asking a person. They also allow LinkedIn verification to be used to confirm employment but without any more qualifications on how to do that. So if someone works as a self employed Uber driver on their LinkedIn and ghosts bootcamp staff, that could as a "confirmed placement" but with "salary not reported".
The one thing they do have more qualification on is the start dates, and the process for verifying with a letter. Even there, they have subjectivity if someone has multiple jobs within the 6 months, to choose a job or the other.
Anyways, all in the spec, don't have time to write all this out yet again, but the TLDR: it was written by bootcamp marketing and outcomes people and not lawyers.
I have it locally and it looks the same to me. It only has about 30 people in it so it makes sense. ONE placement is over 3% of the class instead of 0.3%
But I guess that means swings this large means there were numerous errors in the full time one :S
If this is a submission error of the report itself or the auditors audited the wrong version and signed off that's even worse because it destroys trust in the CIRR ecosystem because it means either Codesmith got away with publishing false data - and might be legally liable - or the auditors signed off on the wrong report and obviously can't be trusted.
So it's actually better if this was human error in the spreadsheets that the auditors fixed.
Codesmith's newly posted AUDITED version of their CIRR H1 2022 show discrepancies from their initial report published a month or two ago (... and a reminder about blindly trusting CIRR)
UPDATE (June 25th 2023): The Auditors re-released a correction and they republished the original report as the final audited report. This is all very confusing how such mistakes and errors could pass audit to begin with, but I believe the "original report" is the final numbers and the "audited reports" contained errors that were originally signed off on.
One of the misconceptions about CIRR is that results are audited before being posted. This is not correct and rather they are audited once a year and then updated after the fact.
Codesmith recently added their **audited** report to CIRR and it has worse outcomes:
[Link to original report](https://static.spacecrafted.com/b13328575ece40d8853472b9e0cf204…
1. Codesmith has a bimodal distribution, so there is a chunk of people making on the low side and a chunk of people making on the high side, and few people making in the middle.
2. But that $137K was Q2 2021 when a ton of people went to Capital One and Amazon, both companies with high base salaries (which is the only thing reported to CIRR) which bump that up significantly. It fell by $10K in Q1 2022 as those companies slowed down.
3. That is the median of PEOPLE PLACED WHO REPORTED SALARIES, not the median of all Codesmith grads, add in the 10 to 20% of people without jobs who have $0 salaries and that's not the median anymore.
I commented this above but copy pasting because it's important, I agree with the qualitative arguments, just an important note for the CIRR data:
Standard disclaimer: several people are mentioning average salaries, it's super important with CIRR data to recognize that the numbers at NOT averages, they are medians, and they are NOT the "average Codesmith grad" it is the median salary of PLACED CODESMITH GRADS, not ALL CODESMITH GRADS.
So it's the 50th percentile base salary of the 80% of people placed of the 95% of people that graduated. If you put $0 for the other 20% that didn't get jobs, the "average Codesmith grad" is making FAR less than this and the median would be shifted down to about 100 to 110K based on the CIRR distribution.
Just important to note, because I'm constantly on top of people who misrepresent CIRR outcomes.
CIRR outcomes don't include stock and bonuses so the…
Standard disclaimer: several people are mentioning average salaries, it's super important with CIRR data to recognize that the numbers at NOT averages, they are medians, and they are NOT the "average Codesmith grad" it is the median salary of PLACED CODESMITH GRADS, not ALL CODESMITH GRADS.
So it's the 50th percentile base salary of the 80% of people placed of the 95% of people that graduated. If you put $0 for the other 20% that didn't get jobs, the "average Codesmith grad" is making FAR less than this and the median would be shifted down to about 100 to 110K based on the CIRR distribution.
Just important to note, because I'm constantly on top of people who misrepresent CIRR outcomes.
CIRR outcomes don't include stock and bonuses so the actual median and average compensation is probably a lot HIGHER than what CIRR says, so I'm not saying this to bash Codesmith, I'm saying it to pro…
I think their representation on CIRR doesn't jeopardize the reliability of their data, but rather it's a conflict of interest because the specification itself is written by the people who have a vested interest in their data looking the best possible. And the issues with CIRR lie in the lack of clarity in the spec and reporting requirements that mask things (i.e. reporting percentages vs absolute numbers, lack of clarity on gathering salary data).
I think the bigger conflict of interest is with OSLabs - which is a legit-donation-accepting charity that offers letters of reference for students that make it look like they were involved with a separate entity without disclosing that the student was PAYING to do said work for CODESMITH's immersive program.
This summary is fairly consistent with what I hear from most people as well, that overall Codesmith is a great program, very consistent, and the community is fantastic.
The big change is the job market since 2020 is the job market.
In the time period of 2021 and into 2022, people were getting like 150K jobs (which you can see in CIRR) at Amazon and Capital One by using exaggerated resumes (or have recruiters proactively reach out on LinkedIn without even expanding to see "Developed under OS Labs") to pass recruiter screens + practicing Leetcode on their own and with each other.
These people then were all over this subreddit in mid to late 2022 created an impression that Codesmith was a magical place with a magical formula and getting in will be the ticket to a $150K job. No one was explaining HOW it happened, just "Codesmith is the best", "Codesmith changes your life", and a bunch of…
I'm in the CIRR is super flawed, why doesn't Codesmith improve it or replace it, but that is' not a fraud camp.
I'm concerned about the OSLabs stuff though. They made an official charity out of OSLabs in the middle of last year that pays mentors to mentor students. If they are collecting money from the charity to pay mentors to mentor Codesmith students only, that may be criminal, or may be a tax law violation. There's no way they aren't smart enough to figure out a way to make this work legally, but it's playing with fire.
Like if I, representing Formation, approached OSLabs about a collaboration to provide mentors and to work on projects or something, would they act in the best interest of OSLabs or would we get rejected because Codesmith leadership hates me? Eric Kirsten was advertising a job posting at OSLabs for the Executive Director saying to ping him if interesting.... I worked…
Hi 👋!
What feels like years ago but was about a year ago I spent two hours on a Sunday cmd+clicking and collecting info on the LinkedIn vs GitHub OSP representation that really peaked my interest in Codesmith outcomes. I did similar math to you and was also confused in who was included in the "graduates included" number, versus the percentages underneath. More recently I looked at the formulas in the CIRR worksheets (because they weren't spelled out in the spec like they should be) and it added some clarity but I still have questions about how they extend how fellows are included (they admit to not following CIRR and delaying those people's clocks by the length of their contract) but I don't know if that impacts "number of graduates" or graduation rates, or what not. And would love the absolute numbers. But I was a kid who memorized cereal box nutritional labels and the exact details…
CIRR outcomes should be relied on as as legit yeah. The ways that games can be played are very sneaky. I've written a lot about this and have to timebox my time on Reddit so I'll try to quickly summarize and you can ask me more:
1. The spec was written by bootcamp outcomes managers and not lawyers. So it has some flaws. For example, there's no explanation of how salaries are recorded and what evidence is needed. They allow reporting a person who ghosts to be reported as employed if their LinkedIn says they have a job (no matter what the job is) and they exclude them from the salaries only.
2. The only absolute number on a CIRR report is the number of graduates included in the report. The rest are all percentages off of percentages off of percentages. The salaries are only for people who got jobs AND reported income. 90% being placed in 180 days means 90% OF GRADUATES were placed, but on…
Relatively speaking yeah :( lol. I have a traditional engineering background and there were good classes and bad classes in college. There were good TAs and bad TAs. Overall though I would say my college program was really good. But that doesn't mean it was flawless.
Codesmith is a good bootcamp. They control their growth, they care about having good outcomes, they keep the bar high, I genuinely think Will and others love teaching.
I'm not here to judge if it's worth $20K, of if it's good for you, me, your friend, etc.... and I have been relentlessly attacked for critizing Codesmith on:
1. All in support of CIRR without trying to improve the standard and make it better
2. Over-representing OSPs and doing fake background checks/references for people
3. Not being inclusive because only very driven people with $21K, and 11 hours a day + 7 hours on Sunday can attend.
4. Making people thi…
I can give my 2 cents on this, which is as usually fairly middle of the road.
1. I'm well aware of the coordinated Reddit interference initiated by leadership, specifically on me and my comments. I never talk about this because it's childish and I want to focus on what's important.
2. Running a program is hard. Not everyone will have the best experience, scheduling is a nightmare (we have so much software to do scheduling and there are always last minute surprises because humans are human). So while it's easy to pile on and criticize how it's run, I do think it's overall run well relative to other programs. Codesmith should obviously minimize session issues and I would be concerned if scheduling problems happen the majority of the time.
3. I believe their CIRR numbers are legit. There are a lot of things people can do to maximize their outcomes and spoke at length and I think Codesmith…
My hunch is the outcomes are stronger than reported because people who go missing don't tell cohort mates anything, but might report to Codesmith and they can only be higher than anecdotal reports. But how much higher? I still think 50% is reasonable and hopefully around 60%.
I'm going to make a call now and you can tell me if I was right in 6 months. I think we're going to see a fairly high placement rate on the next CIRR report, like 60% maybe even 70%, but we're going to see an increase in "% of people not looking for employment" and in "% of people not reporting salaries". One of the CIRR loopholes is that employment can be verified via LinkedIn if a person goes missing, but their salary will be excluded. So if someone gets a job in a completely unrelated field, but is "employed" on their LinkedIn, then they count a placement in the percentage placed. I think they will work a lot h…
Yeah I think Codesmith for the most part treats the fellow job reasonably with CIRR, but the loophole to watch out for is that they can "delay the clock indefinitely" by 1) extending contracts, and 2) hiring more Fellows. e.g. hiring 20% of a cohort back (7 people) is a MASSING clock delaying event for CIRR results. It pushes back 20% of people who might have otherwise not gotten a job, into the next report.
Thanks for sharing details as well, I suspect many programs have similar results and it's expected, but it should help people in navigating the tough market!
Again, I think they handle this reasonably, but they should disclose in a footnote on their reports how many people are fellows in each cohort as it manipulates the data.
This is another problem with CIRR, it's not crystal clear on layoffs, promotions, job changes, etc... that could happen in the six months. It assumes people just get one job and they don't specify any requirements on how salaries are collected.
So if I was Codemsith I would
1. Include anyone who got a job, regardless of layoffs
2. If people got multiple jobs or promotions, use the highest salary within the six month period.
Here is my detailed analysis, neutral look at the data (some points might seem boring, but just writing it up thoroughly). I tried to put the more controversial points first as I doubt people will read all of this.
# SUMMARY: Not much change from H2 2021, slight downshift in salary buckets, but overall very similar numbers.
# 1. Median salaries continue to be super misleading because of multiple cutoff points (a CIRR issue I describe often is pronounced here)
So the part time program exemplifies these the best, explaining via example.
37 people included in report. 10% of people were excluded because they said they weren't job hunting when starting Codesmith.
Now 31 people were placed. 21 people salaries, and 3 people did not report salaries. So of the **\~40 people who started, 21 people reported salaries and the median of those was $137K**.
For the full time program, 301 people…
u/ludofourrage might have some comments about NuCamp, which relies on satisfaction and effectiveness ratings over placements outcomes.
I feel pretty strongly that bootcamps shouldn't be judged by job outcomes and should be judged by education quality value for the cost. It will improve the quality of education, which is what most of the employees at the bootcamp work on.
CIRR encourages bootcamps to be judged purely by placement rates and salaries and I think that not in a great direction. I think it's a piece of the puzzle and useful information, but not the sole way to judge a program.
I also think bootcamps play a part in this by having the "wall of logos" on their websites and advertising the placements in bold. Stanford doesn't have salary numbers of graduates on their homepage in giant numbers like BloomTech does.
I don't think career accelerators like Pathrise, Outco, Intervie…
Thanks for the context, I'll absolutely edit ASAP and make this very clear and please let me know if you feel it still isn't clear. I have zero intention to make Tech Elevator look good or bad just want to talk the market the way it is.
To be quite blunt these are numerous reasons why CIRR is flawed. I know something is better than nothing, but at the same time, every program is different and unique, and you can't capture all of this context in a CIRR report.