Everyone's Favorite time of the half-year! H1 2022 CIRR Reports are starting to roll out! TechElevator, CodeUp and LaunchAcademy are live, Codesmith not live yet. First look at 2021 vs 2022 hiring climate stats and things don't look good :S
(will update as more results released)
IMPORTANT EDIT. See Tech Elevators comment below about an error on their CIRR worksheet that resulted in lower placement percentages. They claimed the percentages are actually very similar from 2021 to 2022 and the CIRR report has now been updated officially. I've stated numerous times about flaws with CIRR, for example that results are not audited before posting, or that auditors make mistakes.
**OVERALL: After Tech Elevators data correction, placement rates for H1 2022 are holding up and didn't crash that much yet! I expect H2 2022 to be much more impacted and we'll see in October.**
Notable changes Tech El…
It's a crazy tough job market right now and you can't invent jobs that don't exist.
Even with an optimized Codesmith resume, you are competing with multi-year ex-FAANG engineers and it's not enough anymore.
My team is working around the clock to figure out ways to get early career people opportunities and we've really had to be creative: house-built job hunting tool, sourcing jobs for people, having FAANG recruiters as mentors, direct referrals, resumes books, even a partnership with Netflix, and people are still getting frustrated with the job hunt and not getting many interviews. So I can only imagine what it's like being a bootcamp grad in this market where you are mostly job hunting on your own.
I'm fairly connected in the industry and 8 out of 36 in 4 months isn't bad, It will hopefully end up being 40% or so. We won't see the impact on CIRR until results come out in Sept 2023 t…
So almost 1/3rd of the people in H2 2022 have already hit the 6 month window (or fellows from H1 with 9 month window) and from what people have said, the placement rates for those cohorts are hovering around 50% and a number of people have ghosted and disappeared. I'm sure the top 20% will get jobs quickly and proudly fill out this spreadsheets with how great they did, but it's the silent people to watch out for.
When CIRR comes out I'll look with a fine tooth comb because there is one giant loophole: the auditors can use LinkedIn to validate if someone has any job listed and mark the person as placed but not have any salary to report.
So if someone ghosts the program and becomes a salesperson at BestBuy, they can be a placement but not bring down the salary metrics.
The number of people in this bucket has to be reported in CIRR and if we see this number go up from previous cohorts,…
This is pretty spot on, I don't have anything to add!
Edit: actually I have one thing to add...
The fellow program does impact the numbers a bit. You'll noticed that Codesmith's time to placement isn't particularly fast, and about 10% of people become "fellows" (kind of like a TA role) on 3 month contracts, and Codesmith delays the graduation clock for these people. So they are actually job hunting for up to 9 months to be included in the "6 month" window on CIRR.
This combined with number 6 (and to some extent 5 and 3), that Codesmith tends to attract people that had moderate to high success in another career, with substantial savings, and lifestyle support to make the 11 hour days + 6+ month job hunt work, while taking your time only aiming for "mid level and senior" roles.
Edit 2: one more thing.... related to 4.
The medians reported on CIRR are 1. of people placed only, and 2. o…
Sorry, I don't have time to write a lot and will try to come back to it, but two big ones:
1. It tells you the number of graduates included as an absolute number, and that's it. All other numbers are percentages, which can hide the underlying truth. The salaries are only for graduated and for people who report them, and exclude people who did not. So saying that X program has a $120K median salary is great except it's the median salary of the 95% of people who graduated on time and 85% of those people who got a job and 95% of those who reported salaries... the people who are excluded from the salary data are slowly shaved off the numbers.
2. There's no indication of number of people who started the program in absolute numbers.
3. Not everyone follows CIRR properly, Codesmith doesn't follow CIRR guidelines and "fellows" extend their their "clock" on CIRR by 3+ months. Which makes it even…
It's possible but I highly doubt CIRR would shutdown and go offline without any notice. They would probably keep the website running with the standards documents so that others in the future could continue their work.
I also think the bootcamps remaining in CIRR are the ones most serious about the process and would probably want to continue publishing data even if it's bad. If everyone's data is bad and yours is better, it looks less bad for the best ones... even if overall fewer people go to bootcamps because of the results, the ones that do will be more likely to go to the best ones.
Based on anecdotal evidence from \~10 people at HR and Codesmith, results will indeed tank for H2 2022, but H1 2022 might not be that terrible.
So it might help Codesmith to have H1 2022 published and people might mistakenly think the market is still good. And when H2 2022 comes out and the results are…
I think the bigger point here is the auditing doesn't matter. I don't know where "audited" became synonymous with integrity. The CIRR process auditors just make sure humans input data correctly, and they don't do much investigating to dig into if that data is correct. For example, if a human put Susan's salary as $50,000. They will ask Susan, "was your salary $50,000?" and if she says yes, they are done. The CIRR spec doesn't say much about what auditing means, which is one of the flaws... they just throw the label on their to make it sound more legit... and it doesn't hurt, but it's a flaw. They don't even say clearly how salaries are verified! All they say is that start dates need to be pulled from an offer letter, but they say nothing about salary, so it can be entirely reported by a student incorrectly.
All of this to me is much more important that slapping "audited" on there and ca…
I want to clarify that I don't have an axe to grind here with CIRR or with Codesmith and please don't try to add drama to a non-dramatic situation.
I worked at Facebook for 8 years and saw how misinformation spreads and this subreddit is a misinformation breeding ground. Every day, I see leading questions, one person answer confirming the question, and then the OP being like "I knew it!". This is straight out of the misinformation 101 textbook. No one here has bad intentions, it happens because people make generalized conclusions from one off data and when many people you see in your online community support your ideas. Just because 1 person says something and 5 people back it up it means absolutely nothing, but people take that point, spread it to others, and before you know it, everyone thinks something that is not based on anything valid.
If you hear "trust the process" too many tim…
I don't think I questioned the integrity of the results in my post. When you have been calling CIRR the "gold standard" if you meant the specification itself or the auditing process was industry leading you are extremely mistaken and every bootcamp leader I've talked to agrees. And I take all of their words over a Codesmith alumni who has no context there.
I have read the CIRR standards doc (which I can't link anymore because the site is still down) many times and there are many problems due to lack of attention to detail. And they have similar problems attention to detail in managing their domain name.
The reason I mentioned Codesmith, is that if you are telling your students "studies show that Codesmith is better than Harvard and MIT" (this is a quote a few people shared with me), and in your own description calling yourself competitive to "elite grad schools", then the bar is high a…
CIRR's domain expired 2 days ago, no one renewed it, and the website is now offline
CIRR's website (cirr.org) is completely down for 2 days and counting because they didn't renew their domain name. Their registrar, Google Domains, has put an auto-renew on it, to give them up to 45 days to pay up and renew before it goes to auction.
The reason I'm posting this is that I repeatedly caution those against using CIRR as the "gold standard" (as several people have quoted here). Codesmith touts CIRR in all of their public sessions and has doubled down on it in their marketing.
I understand their positive motivations of trying to help consumers weed out "bad bootcamps", and that something is better than nothing. But the amount of personal insults and attacks I've taken for suggesting that CIRR is just one source of information amongst a sea of information and opinions, is just unwarranted.
I…
1. The reports are audited annually after the fact
2. The CPA who signed the last audited report said "Direct request of confirmation from Graduates regarding Employment outcomes andobservation of LinkedIn profiles" [Link](https://static.spacecrafted.com/b13328575ece40d8853472b9e0cf2047/r/eb6e615ccddf47e9a891a9c69f223025/1/Codesmith%20Los%20Angeles%20Full-Stack%20Software%20Development%20Audited-AUP%20H2%202020.pdf)
So sure it's audited but it's also self reported by people and uses LinkedIn as a source to see if people have jobs or not. The auditing is to make sure humans put the right numbers in the right boxes, not to audit that people's salaries are what they say they are.
Read through the entire [CIRR Standard](https://static.spacecrafted.com/b13328575ece40d8853472b9e0cf2047/r/aa1e118858a548ec9484b7b714e694c6/1/CIRR%20Standards%202021%20%28rev%202020-07-07%29.pdf) and it's extreme…
You don't need a degree or even a bootcamp certificate to get a good job. Having relevant experience of any kind does help, but even something like accounting can be a good bridge.
The thing with Codesmith CIRR results are they have an interesting distribution curve with bunch of people on the low side, and a bunch of people on the high side. Their low side is still good, but there are many people who do Codesmith and make under $100K as well. That could still be a solid first job even if it's not the flashy too-good-to-be-true numbers people share.
The other problem with CIRR is it excludes stock and bonuses. A lot of those higher paid engineers are even HIGHER than they appear on CIRR because of that. On the other hand, Codesmith has a lot of alumni placed at Capital One and Amazon over the past year, which are very heavy on base salary and the bulk DOES show up in CIRR.
Anyways if…
I post criticizing using CIRR as the "gold standard" often :D. But you should trust their reported numbers as reliable.
The issues lie more in 1. the way the data is presented and trying to understand the outcomes for someone like you versus someone with work experience already. 2. they borderline sketchy ways people can be excluded... however these are edge cases and not the bulk of the data. 3. data is too slow -> need more real time data on outcomes
All of that said., the reports trail graduation by 6 months, so the next report will be for H1 2022, which was a GOOD HIRING HALF. H2 2022 -> present has been terrible. Amazon has stopped hiring and Capital One has slowed down hiring for and those accounted for a large chunk of the > $150K salaries you see on there.
We won't know the implications of that until June 2023 at the earliest and you'll be done Codesmith by then! From people i…
What is Codesmith doing about the 50% of people disappearing?
I have a few notes about this from my CIRR analysis:
1. In 2021 some cohorts had a fairly high percentage of people placed who did not report salaries. This was explained as people that auditors can confirm are employed by LinkedIn but who ghosted and won't report salaries to Codesmith. The reason this is important is that if the hardest working and most ambitious people hang around and get super high salaries to make the medians higher and then the overall placement rate appears high because of this LinkedIn loophole, if can look like more people are placed and making high salaries, when it's not the case.
2. I know Codesmith doesn't offer a job guarantee and is transparent about that, but it feels kind of crappy to shoot you with a firehose and then just leave you be with minimal check in. Leaves people dazed and confus…
Thanks for adding more examples, I said it was not that reliable so would love to hear more examples yeah or more cases that they haven't increased that number. I also heard there are flex fellows who are not assigned to a specific cohort, but it might be a confusion of terms.
EDIT: they currently have 4 locations running at once with 2 simultaneous cohorts = 8 cohorts and on their website they have 56 current fellows (excluding instructors etc... JUST fellows). Which is about 7 per cohort. Lets be conservative and add in 2 part time remote with the same number of fellows and bring cohort count to 10. That's 5 to 6 fellows per cohort. So maybe you only see 3-4 but there are some fellows on the books doing other things, like interviews and career support, etc... (/u/bootcampben)
Yeah fellows don't show up on CIRR at all, they are basically students in a 12 week + 3 months program who "…
My non-data-backed hunch based on anecdotal reporting is it's around 50% within six months for recent cohorts. Every 3 fellows hired per cohort could boost that by \~10% and the way they describe fellows as being hired is completely invisible to CIRR (based on their explanation in their blog post about CIRR)
Their salary stats could be much higher if only experienced people are getting placed at high salaries. Salary stats are only based on people hired and don't account for all the $0s from people not hired. You could have a 1% graduatio rate if 1 out of 100 people graduates and a 100% placement rate if the person is placed and a $500,000 median salary if that was the person's base salary.
EDIT: I have no problem with CIRR or Codesmith using CIRR. But I'm very concerned when people tout it as a "gold standard", "only trustworthy source", "independent audit" or other statements on Redd…
I feel like a lot of people don't read CIRRs actual spec word for word. CIRR doesn't require audited results before reporting. They required you to audit your reports once a year after they are submitted. I assume most people audit them before, but let's not throw the word "audit" out there like it's a gold standard. FTX was "audited" as well.
The CIRR spec also makes you promise to only use specific numbers in marketing, and those numbers are maneuvered to look in the best light possible, like the placement rate within 180 days of graduating. BloomTech has a 90% placement rate, but around a 50% graduation rate. One of those numbers is in giant letters all over the place - but it's manipulatable. (EDIT: BloomTech is not in CIRR, but I'm stating an analogous point based on their audited results. And it's not in giant letters, but it's in their main banner on their homepage.)
Codesmith u…
\+1 to this. We're working on some form of outcomes reporting at Formation. It's so hard to try to communicate outcomes. Not just trying to showoff big numbers to win some imaginary contest, but to show numbers that help a prospective engineer figure out if the program is right for them or not, like outcomes by incoming engineer experience levels, and outcomes by location.
CIRR assumed everyone in a bootcamp would have no experience and so it doesn't differentiate people at different experience levels. And CIRR standards were last updated before COVID played out and a lot of jobs moved to remote.
CIRR has ways to be manipulated. For example, Codesmith hires back a small number of their students for a fixed 3-month contract and they have publicly stated that they push back the graduation date for those people but don't count them as placements. So what that does is it lets them hire back whatever number of people they want to push back those people's graduation dates and give them three more months of job hunting while they're doing this contract.
The less sketchy way that CIRR itself makes numbers look better than they are is that the only absolute numbers are the number of graduates included in the report, and then everything else is a percentage. So first the percentage of people that graduate on time, but without having the total number of people who enrolled. Then the percentage of people who graduated on time who got jobs within time frames. But the percentage of people who…
From what I've observed it's the following reasons, some good, some bad, and not in any order:
- Recent grads just went through the curriculum and might relate more to the struggles you went through. It's additionally good practice for those grads to reinforce their learnings.
- Some programs count people who are hired by the program as "placed" to boost their placements stats. Codesmith is bootcamp that hires back a lot of grads, currently about 50 to 60 of the 150 or so staff are former grads but they explicitly do not count these people as placed. They do however not consider them graduated either so they don't count at all on the CIRR stats until their 3 months contract is done. Most other bootcamps hire people back indefinitely while they are job hunting, which might result in them leaving suddenly and is a bad experience.
- If there are too many former students teaching, you do…
I believe they include that same information in their enrollment agreement as well and a few people have pointed that out to me, that it seems much worse than CIRR and that the it forces them to show salary buckets under $100K and that they go pretty low below $100K whereas in CIRR "under $100K" comes across as a higher amount.
So my understanding is that this is a result of different standards. I constantly say this and constantly get attacked by throwaway accounts, but CIRR HAS FLAWS. It's setup by bootcamp insiders to have a common and clear standard, but it's also setup with little small nuances to make the top level reported numbers look the best possible and in the best light.
The regulatory information probably has stricter guidelines because people can be heavily fined for not complying, but it might not tell the full story behind the numbers either. For example, they regulato…
It's interesting how that's a similar ratio to Codesmith but there are so many Codesmith students and alumni on here that talk like Codesmith is in a league of it's own.
Consider your options everyone and figure out which programs are the right ones for you because finding the right program will yield the best personal result, rather than choosing the program that you think is objectively the best.
I understand this is why we have CIRR and audited results and what not. Hack Reactor is larger and let's in people at a lower bar, who have lower outcomes, but for the right people it works really well too. And unfortunately non of the outcomes reporting schemes take into account background before starting.
CIRR's "percentage employed in 180 days" is accepted offers / graduated, correct. And is 100% misleading not accounting for people who don't graduate.
As I said above, "Percentage of job obtainers who reported salaries" also lets you remove people from the salary counts, which still including them as placed. Why would this happen? I'm not accusing Codesmith of this, but Tech Elevator is 100% and I don't know why Codesmith is missing salaries for people counted as placements. My theory is people who ghost but can be confirmed as employed from trustworthy data.
Ah yes, the CIRR ambiguity and you have to do some math on your own.
So the only hard number is "Number of graduates included in the report: 91"
The rest of the numbers are all percentages and honestly the numerators and denominators aren't specified super clearly in the reports. Even the CIRR spec isn't 100% clear.
"Graduates included in report" in their worksheet is based on a column "Included in placement data?" which is an AND formula of 1. intended to get new job within 3 days of starting program and 2. has work authorization 3. "effective" graduation date was within the six months window of the report. So I'm interpreting that this actually means someone graduating late, might be included in a later report.
So my formulas above are estimating when someone signs a contract what percentage graduated on time and then getting a job within the expected 180 days. Basically trying to…
More CIRR H2 2021 results out! Codesmith included - with a lot to unpack! Overall lower placement rates and much higher salaries of those placed, and a few more fun things!
Where to begin, so much interesting stuff in the part 2 CIRR results, focusing on Codesmith as it's the most interesting to this subreddit.
Overall interesting notes (incomplete but tried to select a few things I found interesting):
* By far the most interesting thing in East Coast (EC, formerly NY), salary growths were super large. Median is up to a WHOPPING $140K but more interestingly in H1: 18% of people had salary $140K+ and now \~52% of East Coast grads made $140K+, that's a massive shift! And similar to FTRI there is a dip to almost zero in $150 to $160K with \~20% in the $140K to $150K bucket and \~20% in the $160K+ bucket. So my hypothesis on this adding in my industry knowledge is that \~10 to 20 people g…
Codesmith is somewhat split on outcomes. There's one contingent of engineers who have experience, don't really need the curriculum and benefit from mentoring others, the accountability, and the network. This group is aiming for top tier jobs. I believe this represents about the under 40% of people who make salaries over $130K.
Then there is another contingent who end up making under $110K which is about 20% plus I would include the people who don't get jobs in 6 months (another 10%) and then the people who don't graduate (5%) (all this based on 2021 CIRR reports). I'm making a BIG ASSUMPTION that the people who don't graduate and don't get jobs are on the less experienced side but I'm sure there are people for whom this isn't the case.
Anyways, that means APPROXIMATELY BASED ON CIRR 35% of people who are weaker or have no experience get jobs under $110K or no jobs within 6 months of g…
Yeah I totally think the percentages are very clear and the 20% under $110K and 20% over $140K is a lot more interesting than the median in the middle but I meet a lot of people who almost always say "but Codesmith grads make $125K" and the data, which is very different from all other programs that report, looks more to me like people with experience have made $140K+ (which is actually market rate a mid-tier companies for people with experience) and people with no experience tend to make under $110K. Most people in this Reddit have no experience, but they believe they will make $125K. I wish they had data for experienced and non-experienced people but that's not part of CIRR.
You are straight up wrong about CIRR. The median salaries are of people who reported salaries and got jobs only and exclude everyone else. So drop off 1 is the graduation percentage. People who don't graduate are not included in the median salary calculation. Then there's people that don't get jobs. They are not included in the median salary calculation. And then outside sources can be used to confirm employment for percentage employed but without a salary to include the median calculation. You said you do a lot of research so read the CIRR and it's very clear in the Excel worksheets they provide... complete with examples showing exactly this
This is exactly what I'm talking about how CIRR has built in vagueness to make this happen and help paint programs in the best light.
I tried to give some reasons above but I don't even like what we have now on the site, because the outcomes vary so so so much by goal and we have to very carefully decide which numbers best represent what we do - which we haven't done yet - so we encourage people to talk to whatever random Formation person they can find with similar backgrounds and chat with them. Like we literally have had 10+ offers over $300K TC in October for whom that is the market rate and we help the people choose between offers. The uniqueness of those situations for those people are not captured in an average salary metric because and we want people to know they are getting a bespoke experience aimed at helping the accomplish their goals.
I've said this before but some of Codesmith's alumni get stock and bonuses as well, excluded from CIRR, and CIRR does not paint an accurate picture of their outcomes as well.…
You’re asking to compare people that get jobs within 90 days of starting so you can compare it with people who get jobs within 90 days of FINISHING. Makes no sense. You are asking to compare people that do 50 hours a week to 10 hours a week. Makes no sense. You are asking to compare people with a goal of getting a job in 8 months with those who want one ASAP. Not everyone wants a job ASAP at Formation. People often get several offers and keep training until they get one they like. All of this makes adds to why it makes no sense to give those CIRR numbers.
I agree with your ask though. I would love to provide better data that can help people estimate how long it might take to get a job given their unique circumstances across over 5 dimensions. So far it hasn’t been a big ask and people talk to current Fellows to get an idea of how it works. Quite frankly we are doing ourselves a disserv…
Again, not a school, no graduates, no end of program, no curriculum and we can’t be compared to a bootcamp head to head. All good questions to ask and also exactly why we can’t possibly report CIRR like metrics.
I think you have a big misunderstanding about what Formation is and it might be helpful to research more instead of trying to make us for your mold for what you think we are.
I feel personally attacked because I repeatedly tell you we don't have a school and we are running something different, and you repeatedly call Formation a school or a bootcamp and repeatedly ask for data the schools and bootcamps offer. You seem so fixed on the fact that you believe we are a school and I've offered at least once to do a call with you to explain what we are. Yet you keep saying it and the I have to keep correcting it.
First, SwitchUp's "data" intake form hasn't been updated since 2020 according to [archive.org](https://archive.org) ([https://web.archive.org/web/\*/https://www.switchup.org/write-review](https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.switchup.org/write-review)) and still promises a chance to win a $500 / $100 gift card for submitting a review. Who got those and when and how do you have a chance to win them? The Additional Survey they rely on for data hasn't been updated since 2020/2021: [https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/YMTFNWK](https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/YMTFNWK). Their latest major report is from 2018: [https://www.switchup.org/rankings/coding-bootcamp-survey](https://www.switchup.org/rankings/coding-bootcamp-survey)
I never once criticized the validity of the content on these sites. I'm saying the sites themselves are biased... you mention VC funding repeatedly... both of these sites…
BloomTech is formerly Lambda School and changed names as a result of a trademark lawsuit. Their founder, Austen, is a natural marketer and grew the school way too fast. I have thoughts here but they are just opinions and not relevant. BloomTech in its current form is nothing like Lambda School so the past reviews and bad press are somewhat irrelevant.
CourseReport is a supporting member of CIRR and accepts payments from bootcamps to promote them. Switch Up makes money by referring people to specific bootcamps. Career Karma also pays fees to refer people to specific bootcamps. So all three are biased as their success depends on the bootcamp industries success and you have at their content through that lens.
CIRR is another irrelevant source nowadays because no one is in them. If a bootcamp takes part in CIRR you can trust the numbers they report to CIRR. But CIRR's most recent standard…
Yeah CIRR does two things:
1. Sets a standard and set of rules and definitions everyone agrees to follow
2. Requires reports to get audited
CIRR is a business league, founded by SkillsFund (now Ascend) and supported by a Course Report.
The results themselves are meant to have high integrity and I trust the numbers. BUT it doesn't mean the whole process and the rules don't have biases in them.
CIRR represents the bootcamp industry, it's a business league with the charter of supporting the industry the members are in. So it's in CIRR's interest for bootcamps to succeed, it's in Ascend's interest for bootcamps to succeed and for students to get loans from them. It's in Course Reports interest for bootcamps to succeed and get page views on their review website and higher valued sponsorships, it's bootcamps interest because more enrollments = more business.
People reading my comments: C…
I think the OP is referring to the fact that if you lookup students by those projects to "find them on LinkedIn" (because otherwise it would be hard to find them) that a significant amount of people have no new job after the open source projects. I've also found this the time a few months ago when I audited 200 graduates and the percentage with jobs was low (it's REALLY hard to get start dates for people because people tend to ambiguously list the start as "2021" or "2022" rather than the exact months so I assume most of the people I looked at that appeared to have 6+ months of experience were current students). I've also seen some people entirely scrub their LinkedIn after getting a job and removing all those projects so that makes it further harder.
I think the answer to this is to look at CIRR and trust the graduations rates and placement rates! Look carefully at what the numbers mea…
Ping alumni and ask! You ideally want to learn about the experiences of people who had a similar background to you and how they felt about the program.
It's really hard to trust any kind of "ratings" overall.
Course Report is a supporting member of CIRR and accepts sponsorships from bootcamps.
SwitchUp has a disclosure that they get paid by bootcamps that they send people to.
Career Karma gets paid by bootcamps to send people there and has sponsorships.
CIRR itself is founded by a bootcamp loan company and supported by a bootcamp review company (Course Report).
Reddit is full of anecdotal experiences from anonymous people without much context.
And bootcamps do all kinds of tactics to encourage positive reviews and discourage negative ones. In fact all businesses do.... like I saw at a bank even: "If we weren't a 10, talk to a manager first to work out any issues you had with your…
Which sentiments are misleading are why? Sorry for pushing you so much, it's not personal, but just because someone yells loudly "this is misleading", "this is fake", "this is misinformation" it doesn't make it so, and yelling more and more loudly doesn't make that more and more true.
It would be more useful for everyone to go through point by point, provide evidence, provide sources, challenge me and ask me what my sources are and why, etc... I'm very open to debating details of anything you think is misleading and we could have a great discussion about that on the thread.
Sophie makes it a point to have investors and advisors that staunchly disagree with each other on our team at Formation because having productive debates and looking at things from different angles can help the team get to the best conclusions.
I'm not just Googling and declaring my feelings on here... my sources…
I would say we "wouldn't reject", we still have to benchmark your current skills and talk to you about your timeline and goals.
For example, we are currently focused on top tier companies, and in most cases the fundamental programming skills and being a good teammate are the only thing that matters.
One of the main reasons I'm here is because people new to the industry don't really know what they don't know, and people quickly latch on to things. I fight tooth and nail against blindly following CIRR for example because Codesmith has an employee hierarchy of 50+ former students reinforcing the importance of CIRR.
It's in their CIRR report. 20% of graduates who get jobs make over $140K and 20% who get jobs make under $110K or so, and not including all the poeple who don't get jobs make zero.
Their admissions contract can't me shared but if you singed one or have an offer, they are obligated to disclosure certain numbers and outcomes and the numbers don't add up to CIRR without further explanation.
Don't get scared about this but if you get an offer... spend 20 minutes doing the math between CIRR and the contract your are signing.
Codesmith isn’t a cut above the rest, but it is one of the top bootcamps. One of the reasons why their outcomes are higher is because about a third of people have some amount of relevant experience before going in, and those peoples outcomes skew the distribution higher. Codesmith doesn’t publish outcomes for people who had no relevant experience going in but there are plenty of people making under $100,000 from there and they tend to lean to the inexperienced people. The CIRR results put this in the 20% of people making under like 110K. I believe their application contract you signed, had some legal disclosure that has more of a breakdown with the people at the lower buckets.
There are too many cases to go over all of them but some factors to evaluate for each offer before being able to compare are:
1. Company's engineering reputation
2. What team you will be on/department/team matching process
3. Who will be your manager, if it's known
4. Career trajectory paths at the company. e.g. Microsoft requires like 2-3 promotions for every 1 promotion at Google. e.g. Can you progress as an IC in your career or will you be "forced" into management to grow as the only option.
5. Base salary
6. Signing bonuses
7. Performance bonus targets
8. Equity, type, amount, and vesting schedule (equity is most complex to understand usually)
9. Other benefits/perks that are impactful for you
10. Startups: need to be evaluated on
11. Leadership has 5+ years of FAANG-level strong career experience
12. Investors are "top 10"/"top tier"
13. Understand the funding stage and how much fu…
I have the same questions and the distributions based on experience, but I can give objective answers to some of those other questions.
1. 120K is the median, not the average, so it doesn't mean you are likely to get this salary. It means of all the people who join there is a 50/50 shot making over 120K and a 50/50 shot making under 120K. But it's more important to narrow it down by people of a certain background. Like I know at Formation, the average first year TC for people with 0 experience is $134K and for 1 - 2 years is $181K, so I have to hypothesize that people with less experience are on the lower end, but need data to test that.
2. The Codesmith numbers in CIRR do not include any kind of options, bonuses, etc... they are just base salary. This is a criticism of CIRR, but it's also very hard to compute TC fairly. At Formation, we EXCLUDE all TC that is not objectively measurabl…
Yeah to be clear, this isn’t really talking about Codesmith so much as people who are fighting tooth and nail with me that Codesmith is the the “best bootcamp” because of CIRR and any data that’s not from CIRR is not to be trusted.
I think i just fall victim to engaging with trolls because most people are a lot more reasonable…
cc u/InTheDarkDancing, I commented on this today elsewhere and adding here for consistency.
I also appreciate the blog post explaining how Codesmith supports CIRR. I don't have a problem with Codesmith's position on CIRR, but what I have a problem with is people blindly supporting Codesmith as the "best bootcamp" because of their CIRR outcomes and regurgitating their marketing as unwavering fact. These are smart people, who want six figures jobs levering their problem solving and critical thinking abilities and regurgitating marketing without thinking critically about it is not demonstrating that ability.
Codesmith directly comments about how important equity and bonuses are in compensation. Yet they continue to market their CIRR results (which explicitly only include base salary and exclude stock and bonuses) solely as a marketing strategy to make a claim they are better than other b…
Yeah if someone starts, as long as they have the intention of job hunting after, they are included in the report and impact the graduation rate. The placements rates and medians are all based on the number GRADUATED and not the original number who started. Finally, if someone is unresponsive to CIRR requests but they can confirm they got a job, they person is included in the "placed" count but not in the salary counts. So the way CIRR is designed is it tries really hard to make sure the salary stats are only counting successful people and have the highest medians possible.
This doesn't change the fact that Codesmith has very strong outcomes, but their outcomes don't include equity and bonuses and hence are somewhat meaningless, other than as a marketing tool. They are well aware how important equity is in outcomes and would make their outcomes even better but they support and promote CI…
CIRR H2 2021 is out! [Discussion Thread] Same schools as H1
[https://cirr.org/data](https://cirr.org/data)
No new schools added, so same ones: Hacktiv8 (Indonesia), Juno (Canada), Launch Academy, Tech Elevator.
Codesmith and Turing are missing, but I'm sure will show up soon.
Feel free to comment in this thread to discuss! I'm busy but will add edits later!
1 minute glance looks like Tech Elevator and Launch Academy's results all improved for placements and salaries. End of 2021 was certainly a faster hiring period from my observations as well.
Stats are real but there's more to the stats. For example, CIRR doesn't include equity and bonuses which means the numbers are actually only equal to or HIGHER than in the reports.
The key thing here is "median", i.e. the 50th percentile.
20% of people make under $110K and 20% of people make over $140K.
An “average" is most useful when you have a normal distribution and this data certainly is not. A “median”, which is used often for data sets to remove the influence of outliers, is, but it loses a lot of information in the calculating. Let’s say one bootcamp has 3 alumni with salaries 0, 100, 200, and the other 100, 100, 100. Same median, same average, completely different stories.
Which is why you have have to look at the outcomes for people who are starting with a background like yourself.
It's very likely that people with zero experience and a few months of CSX before joining a…
Sorry u/Swimming_Gain_4989, I have to disclose that as the co-founder of Formation.dev I have a following on here and I try to answer questions more broadly for everyone and sometimes a too broad lol.
So the CIRR data is audited and Codesmith follows the process. Now CIRR is a business league non-profit, and auditors are not perfect, there are some small loopholes in CIRR but I don't think it's enough to invalidate the results.
I think some of it is perception. People who get jobs before graduation might be out the door and it feels like for SIX MONTHS it's the same old crew trying to get jobs.
That said, Codesmith cohorts have fairly consistent sizes and they have been "fully booked" for a long time. Yet the number of people included in each report doesn't add up to 36 \* a whole number +/- some wiggle room, it's been like all over the place. Now Codesmith countered this with "cohort…
I can give some thoughts on this, TLDR: CIRR results are real and Codesmith has very high outcomes on paper, but there are two sides to everything yes, nothing is perfect. I talk often to Don (disclosure, Formation.dev, company I co-founded, has sponsored one of this videos - as he doesn't accept bootcamp sponsorships, this is one of the only non-bootcamp sponsorships he's ever done but it could be a bias)
So first of all, I believe it was hard for him to find Codesmith alumni for a few reasons:
1. People don't list it on their LinkedIn's often because Codesmith suggests people exclude it from their history so their skills can shine, rather than any credentials.
2. To remain unbiased he won't include people who reach out to HIM first wanting to be on his podcast.
3. There are a lot of vocal Codesmith supporters that have worked either part time or full time at Codesmith in some capacit…
So the 90% placement rate is of people who graduate, but about 95% of people graduate as well, so the actual placement is a little lower.... this is one of the downsides of CIRR, that it breaks apart the two, but nonetheless, Codesmith's results are strong.
So there was a Course Report talk a few years ago where an exec, Philip Troutman, said 'a third of people have a degree or relevant experience' but I also would love to hear concrete numbers. Codesmith pointed this out recently as well, but showing results by background is really important missing information.
If you look at CIRR, 20% of people make under $110K and 20% over $140K. So I would suspect the people making over $140K have relevant experience and under $110K don't.