Pulse Check? I'm not seeing any signs of life from these bootcamps, and I wanted to do a check if anyone is a 2026 student/grad of these programs.
These are on Course Report's "top bootcamps of 2026" list that do not have a single review IN 2026 and I'm struggling to find people who actually went there in 2026.
Codesmith (excluding Future Code)
Fullstack
Coding Temple
Codeworks
Icon Hack
1. Formation is a technology platform that support practice and mentorship in pretty many any information area, and we have been exploring other areas, like this one [https://formation.dev/ai-native-ea](https://formation.dev/ai-native-ea)
2. For SWEs - we're seeing more and more senior, strong background engineers coming to us because there is fierce competition for those senior jobs. We have thousands of pieces of content and are constantly adapting to the changing landscape.
</BOOTCAMPS> ❤️ OFFICIAL MEMORIAL POST: share this around and tell your old bootcamp stories in the comments. So we can close the bootcamp chapter on a positive note.
I asked **CIRR 30 days ago** where the 2024-25 **missing reports** are. I did not get a response. This tells me CIRR is dead and its flagship Codesmith is dead. Other bootcamps we've lost are: Rithm, Turing, Codeup, Kenzie, Launch Academy, Momentum, Alchemy, Epicodus, Lighthouse Labs, 2U/Trilogy, Lambda School, and more.
Unlike the embarrassing end that CIRR and Codesmith are experiencing - too ashamed to end on a positive note and instead end in layoffs and utter silence, I want things to end on a positive.
If you graduated from a coding bootcamp in the past, and it changed your life, TELL US YOUR STORY. No selling or shilling, just tell us how coding impacted your life and in the right time and right place your bootcam…
You are hitting in the fundamental truth of why bootcamps make no sense unfortunately.
Places like Codesmith, where they teach you how to talk about your project without making it sound like a project and you put more effort into how to do that than the project itself. They convince you you are actually a senior engineer so you arent lying, just getting the 'credit you deserve'. One leader repeatedly told the cohorts that the 3 week project is equivalent of 4 months of full time senior engineering work (which is not true).
This approach worked during the good times but completely fell flat ok its face and Codesmith's immersive doesn't have many signs of life anymore.
Launch School and Triple Ten frame the projects more as internships. Triple Ten calls them externships. Launch School has some slots where you can work on some of the largest open source projects, like Firefox, under supp…
I can clarify that, sorry I have a felling this will be long but it's important details IMO to make sure my opinions are clear.
So "fuzzing the numbers" doesn't mean intentional deception, but it means representing the numbers in a better light than they are. So by that definition - yes, CIRR was created through a marketing lens to promote bootcamps and it was designed to be rigorous enough to build trust, but also marketing-tilted enough to present numbers in a good light.
For example, there is a number that's like 'median salary'. But the only absolute number of people is the number of graduates and you have to chip away at that to get to the actual number of people in the people. E.g illustrative numbers: 100 people considered in the report, 90% graduated, 10% self employed, 5% not looking for jobs. 60% of what's left actually report income. So right off the bat the salaries only in…
I mean the claims they make about training leaders at the best tech companies in the world are a bit dubious given their own website says of the "5000" people only 76 FAANG offers.
Their website also has bar charts that aren't even accurate (like the bars looks made up and are identical on two unrelated charts).
Like I know their founder went to Hack Reactor himself and is not STEM but it just feels like no one there knows what they are doing in a STEM industry to me but they are trying incredibly hard regardless. After so many fuck ups over and over the recilience is insane... if only they would learn their own role in those fuck ups and improve.
Ultimately the failure is in taking my criticism as attacks instead of as a useful perspective to think about whether they agree or not.
The blog post does not even mention this lawsuit and the examples it uses attributes incorrectly to causing millions of dollars of revenue loss are out of context comments that received dozens to hundreds of 'view counts' compared to negative Codesmith posts **from other people** that received tens of thousands of views.
It's up to you to decide if the lawsuit was relevant during this period of decline, but leaving it out of that blog post does not give you the information needed to do that.
That is clearly tunnel vision blog post that started with a narrative around motivations that I believe is false and then worked backwards. In middle school that's how you fail essay writing.
Codesmith's CEO emailed me several months before that blog post when we discussed it and said: "I do not consider Formation a competitor, it is quite clear to me that our products are different."
If you want…
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
The blog post does not even mention this lawsuit and the examples it uses attributes incorrectly to causing millions of dollars of revenue loss are out of context comments that received dozens to hundreds of 'view counts' compared to negative Codesmith posts **from other people** that received tens of thousands of views.
It's up to you to decide if the lawsuit was relevant during this period of decline, but leaving it out of that blog post does not give you the information needed to do that.
That is clearly tunnel vision blog post that started with a narrative around motivations that I believe is false and then worked backwards. In middle school that's how you fail essay writing.
Codesmith's CEO emailed me several months before that blog post when we discussed it and said: "I do not consider Formation a competitor, it is quite clear to me that our products are different."
If you want…
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
The blog post does not even mention this lawsuit and the examples it attributes incorrectly to causing millions of dollars of revenue loss are out of context comments that received dozens to hundreds of 'view counts' compared to negative Codesmith posts **from other people** that received tens of thousands of views.
That is clearly tunnel vision blog post that started with a narrative around motivations that I believe is false and then worked backwards. In middle school that's how you fail essay writing.
Codesmith's CEO emailed me several months before that blog post when we discussed it and said: "I do not consider Formation a competitor, it is quite clear to me that our products are different."
If you want my opinions about the lawsuit, I have many, and I'm not sharing them.
Do you know how many people have signed up for cohorts since then? If any?
Like I've been researching Codesmith for 4 years and their student GitHub repos have very little signs of life relative to before. And they did a 3 month pause on new cohorts, breaking their years long tradition of overlapping cohorts and junior/senior model.
I know Launch School cut back from 3 cohorts for 2026 to 2 cohorts, which is their first reported decline, but they also aren't really a "bootcamp" and have never had a ton of students.
Yeah lawyers are involved and my stance is incredibly strong.
Do you know about Codesmith's investor lawsuit in 2024-2025? There are claims of millions of dollars of unauthorized transfers there (which are allegations and not proven). Maybe that has some kind of impact on them.
If you think I'm one sided on here you would be better off chatting with me to try to understand more.
The biggest impact I had was encouraging people one on one to go to Codesmith, Rithm, Launch School and others when the time was right.
I have to disclose bias because my company works with engineers later in their careers to help prepare for interviews and about 1/4 of people were bootcamp grads in the past.
But I'm very curious how you even came up with the idea of going to App Academy because they sold their brand to Coding Temple and it's their course now as of about a year ago, so anything you heard about App Academy before then is completely irrelevant.
If you are asking if you should go to a bootcamp in general, there are a very small number of people who have industry experience that go to bootcamps and my opinion is that placement depends more on you than the bootcamp. Meaning the people that get placed didn't need the bootcamp, they needed a self confidence boost that the bootcamp gave them... like doing a 3 week project and framing it as 2 years of work to help get interviews and feeling confident in framing…
1. Both are good languages to learn the common programming concepts without too much language specific unique things that could distract. AI is making languages less relevant over time.
2. Either. JavaScript is used in all parts of the stack so I would choose it as my first language.If I was more on the data side/analytics and wanted to superpower my job I would do Python.
3. It always depends on you and your situation and I don't blank recommend a bootcamp for everyone. Heck even after all the crap I've been through with Codesmith, there are specific people for whom it could be a good fit still, and I would recommend it to people if it's the right choice for them. My main advice in 2026 is not read too much into past reviews and performance because most bootcamps have changed unrecognizably... whether notable staff changes or changing programs (where reviews apply to older programs),…
Yeah I actually have a few dozen and have AI process them all daily and write a daily newsletter, we post it at Formation to all the Fellows :D. I've put in a lot of work and iterated on this for months but it's completely internal and not sharable. Sourcing from TechMeme, and then dozens of top tech company blogs individually.
Checkout something like [Feeder.co](http://Feeder.co) and they have a lot of build in blogs.
Hi, good question...
So first off, use it. Most of the FAANGs have limitations on AI use (wether its models, or cost, or tools) but I would recommend using low level tools that are either publicly available or very similar.
Now, if you are learning you have to fail to learn.
So ,second, put in extra time and fail and don't give up.
Look for low hanging fruit, like deprecated code and use AI to refactor it, numerous times and in different ways, and pay attention to each step.
Use different techniques and models to redo the same thing and compare.
I personally broke a ton of stuff and Q4 was really bad for Formation, lots of bugs, lots of angry team members. I fix things fast so the overall product was fine, but just a lot more bugs than there should be.
But I sure of heck learned a hell of a lot about AI and I have a strong intuition now and Q1 has been absolutely insane building o…
I can't disclose what Formation makes but I can say that we have hundreds of engineers doing interview prep at a given time and several thousand ever. But we're really not making that much money in revenue if you ballpark it and we have losses since day on.
I personally make $0 salary, have made $0 from equity, no sketchy backchannel compensation, and even put more money into the company when I can. I do it because I feel like the world will be a better place if people land the right role for them and everyone is more impactful than they were.
One of my hobbies is studying scams and fraud, and if all those scammers spent their energies on something value add for the world, we would be so much better off. If the bootcamps spent more energy with people getting outcomes then figuring out how to "creatively market" their poor outcomes, it would be better off. So I call out this behavior a…
Quick correction: For newer agreements, our contract allows Formation to end the program after 15 months. That isn’t an automatic cutoff, and it’s not something we’re looking to use against people who are actively and honestly job searching.
**Important:** If you’re on an older contract that does *not* include a time limit, that agreement remains valid and we fully intend to honor it.
**How we handle the 15-month clause in practice:**
If someone is **still actively engaged** (showing up, doing the work, applying/interviewing in good faith, communicating with the team), we can and often do **extend** support beyond 15 months when there are reasonable circumstances.
**Why we added the 15-month term (3 reasons):**
1. **Clarity for accounting/finance.** An open-ended service period is unusual and creates ambiguity; having a defined term makes planning and accounting more standard.
2. *…
AMA: 👋 I'm Michael. Former-moderator of the sub, Facebook top performer, "the Coding Machine", junior -> principal / 2009-2017, helper of bootcamps students and grads, founder of Formation for experienced engineers preparing for interviews.
Hi all, I've been one of the top five most active members in here for 4 years (!) ask me anything about anything and get official answers! I'll keep this open all evening and respond to lingering questions when I can.
Just because you can ask me anything, it doesn't mean I'll have good answers.... the areas I'm particularly knowledgeable about:
1. Getting a job at a FAANG company
2. AI's impact on day to day engineering
3. Reddit bad actors / content manipulation / social engineering attacks
4. Coding bootcamp history and industry news and trends
I give blunt and direct advice and opinions. I use my real name on Reddit.
My comments are…
Hey, I'm very familiar with this area, the transition (note, my company started because we saw gaps in people with non traditional backgrounds so that's how I know a lot about this, but we **do NOT accept bootcamp grads with no experience and I am not recommending at all to you).**
I have a FAANG lens and that's my bias, 400+ interviews conducted at Meta, trained interviewers, helped create interviews, candidate review, recruiting trips, juniors, interns, seniors, directors, etc.....
So first off, almost all bootcamps promise 'career support' and all these words on their websites, that basically we're not accurate. I got into many Reddit arguments 3 years ago with staff from a particular bootcamp that insisted it provided all the support you need for your lifetime (where the people conducting the mock interviews were mostly recent grads with minimal or no work experience).
The fact is…
We'll see when their next CIRR report comes out. I periodically look at OSLabs-Beta and OpenSourceLabs GitHub projects and check if the students have jobs and the number of people with jobs about six months after graduation seems lower than it historically has been.
The next CIRR report though is people who graduated in 2024, not 2025, so the information will already be outdated. It would be really useful to get six month numbers for H1 2025.
The Codesmith Federal website says 90% of the 5000+ graduates get jobs within a year. Their own CIRR reports dispute that so I'm not sure if that's a preview of the 2024 outcomes or if it's just a mistake.
There also appears to be a new Codesmith FULL TIME program from August 7th, 2026 to November 9th, 2027, which is a whole 15 MONTHS!!! I'm very curious about that option.
Launch School though is crushing Codesmith on six month placement data…
Do they have open source projects? I know for places like Codesmith and Launch School you can just go through the open source projects that every student does and figure out placement rates. Anyone can do this and see raw information - with the caveat that LinkedIns could be out of date. However CIRR and Codesmith's auditor considers LinkedIn "LinkedIn is almost as gospel as anything else" (quote) so if you go off of LinkedIn you can figure out the placement rates.
I can't comment on that right now but encourage people to spend like an hour digging into it themselves and correlating it with public messaging if they are curious about this, and if they don't care then don't! haha.
I have a THEORY, but this is just my person opinion/thoughts and not a fact.
This sub tends to talk about the most expensive bootcamps (including former ones now closed), Launch School, Codesmith, Hack Reactor, App Academy, Lambda School, because these programs are so expensive that it's a huge commitment. When you spend $20K on a bootcamp you are also more included to self-justify that investment. You are also not paying for nothing, and those bootcamps could have more robust communities, more staff, more marketing dollars to pay for "reddit support", etc...
The audience for these programs are people who are seriously committed, put in a lot of effort to choose a bootcamp, and want to make sure they are confident in the decision.
The programs like Triple Ten, NuCamp, Springboard, Coding Temple are: 1) much cheaper, 2) focus on advertising to a large audience, a lot of them have 'X% o…
You also don't have all the information on Codesmith and this is what lawyers can look at.
For example, this is from a private email from Codesmith's current CEO from March 21, 2025: "I do not consider Formation a competitor, it is quite clear to me that our products are different." This was well after I started commenting on Reddit.
Bootcamps work for a lot of people!
Look at CIRR data and the latest for Codesmith showed like 40% of people getting jobs within 6 months of graduating.
Launch School has like a 70% ish placement rate within 6 months.
These are the source of the massive negativity right now;
1. Trends are tanking and down. The trend is more important than the absolute numbers.
2. Salaries are down in these reports, despite inflation and SWE base salaries being up. This indicates more people taking worse jobs or tangential jobs instead of the SWE jobs.
3. Ghosts. Launch School doesn't have this problem but Codesmith's data shows about half the people NOT RESPONDING TO SALARY REQUESTS. Meaning that of the 100% of people who start, 90% graduate, 40% get a job, and 50% actually submitted a salary, so the "median graduate salary" for 6 months includes 18% of students. Historically far more people got pl…
I'm going to caution with the premise of the question.
So first off, check for yourself because one off examples of jobs or no job don't mean much in isolation. A small number of people get jobs from all bootcamps. Both Codesmith and Launch School work on open source projects and you can review the projects, see the contributors, check their LinkedIns and see if they got jobs or not. Launch School has provided a report for 2024 grads that accounts for every single person that started and you can see that without doing the work.
Second, it highly depends on the person. People with a engineering background, or experience at a tech company in a non software role, and who take adjacent roles have a much better short.
For example, a 15 year salesperson at tech companies -> "Sales Engineer" is a massively different placement from no-degree no-experience line cook -> FAANG Software Engineer…
Current price: Codesmith: $22,500 (14 weeks). Launch School "18% of your first year salary, or $18k (USD)" (16 weeks), Hack Reactor: $19,480.
Enrollment at Codesmith based on OSLabs Github projects appears to have dropped from about 1000 people in 2023 to about 100(?) people in 2025 and like a dozen in the past 3 months?
Launch School had 71 people in 2023 and 76 in 2024, so it's maybe capturing the market share since that's actually higher.
So not that many people are paying that much no more.
BREAKING: Launch School Capstone 2024 Outcomes
SEE ORIGINAL: [https://www.reddit.com/r/launchschool/comments/1q2cvsx/2024\_capstone\_salary\_data/](https://www.reddit.com/r/launchschool/comments/1q2cvsx/2024_capstone_salary_data/)
Launch School is one of the remaining top programs, that announced a small cutback from 3 to 2 cohorts in 2026. These outcomes are very strong though still.
Overall for 2024 grads they had 66% placement rate for ALL ENROLLEES in six months (74% if you exclude non-job-hunting)
Early 2025 cohorts have a lower placement rate but a little above 50% so far.
Overall this is a good sign as the only CIRR reporting school that competes directly with Launch School is Codesmith and their 2023 data had a 42% placement rate (excluding non job hunting) in 6 months, which is almost HALF that of Launch School.
This isn't magic, Launch School's program takes a long tim…
I would recommend getting 2025 numbers from all options. Codesmith's last published numbers are from 2023 students and Launch School has some 2024 data.
But the market really fell apart in 2025. My personal numbers observers are so bad overall that any bootcamp you join needs to be transparent.
Some school bought some time by saying 'numbers are getting better don't worry' back in 2024, but the students that accepted that, joined, graduated, and are jobless, are feeling quite pissed off I imagine right now and the market now is even worse for bootcamp grads.
There are valid reasons to go to a bootcamp but you really need to be going for the right reasons.
I just asked it and there wasn't a single [Reddit.com](http://Reddit.com) source in the results and most of the cons came from their defunct competitor's blog post: [https://www.rithmschool.com/codesmith-vs-rithm-school-2/?utm\_source=chatgpt.com](https://www.rithmschool.com/codesmith-vs-rithm-school-2/?utm_source=chatgpt.com)
I'm not saying you got something different but it is completely unproven and unfounded that I intentionally manipulated LLMs through Reddit as a moderator and it's defamation per se to spread that as a fact.
Learn about the space before trolling me.
I want to restate using a different past example I've said before:
One of the things I spoke about was the git contributor graphs on all the open source projects being like spikes. There are no 'legit' open source projects that have these patterns. That makes Codesmith's open source projects very different from say Firefox or React or Angular, etc...
The same analogy applies here. How Formation people represent their resumes is completely different than how Codesmith people do fundamentally because the underlying goods are different.
I'm sure there are rogue Formation people and rogue Codesmith people that have out of date LinkedIns and who classified things wrong.
Even the fact that the boxes are under "experience" itself is irrelevant to my point.
There could be problems with A and not B, with A and B, with not A and not B, A and B need to be independent and not compared in my opi…
I hear your feedback and it will be heard in thinking of names for future programs.
Like I said earlier, a small minority of people have even put Formation on their resume for the past 2-3 years (a lot of the people you find are not current active members of Formation) so it's not a high priority thing to change across the board that will have a lot of impact. That doesn't mean it's not heard, I disagree that it's a misleading word, but I hear you and it's noted because if potential customers are confused about the naming all the time that doesn't help us whatsoever and we have to listen to feedback.
Resume representation is nuanced argument that you probably understand but most people outside the industry wouldn't.
The vast majority of people are working engineers that don't even think about putting Formation on their resumes. Some people who have been with us a long time - like years - have it on. Some of those people aren't even at Formation and they abandoned the job hunt.
The representation is clear. I have never heard of a recruiter or company thinking that Formation was a job. I can't think of background check someone ever had for Formation as a job.
Codesmith, the vast majority of people put their projects down as a work experience directly adjacent to an Open Source Projects bucket, making it look more like work. The description buries the 'accelerated by OS Labs' in the footer collapsed - if it's there at all.
Part of the mental trick is that they tell you 'Don't lie ab…
1. The person 'exposed' is a person who put on his LinkedIn what he said he did and was doing that during that entire time window.
2. That person was at Formation 2021 and half the stuff he did doesn't exist anymore because we have a dynamic platform with a few thousand things and it changes every day.
In 2022, Codesmith -> Formation was an adjacent decision that the time and I would say up to 10% of people could be at the top end of the Codesmith side or the bottom end of the Formation side, but that there was a best decision on one side or the other that required zooming in to see which side they fall on.
I'm arguing that 3 people I know of were right on the border and could have gone either way.
I support reasonable and respectful, fact-based discussion about if I should be a mod or not so that the discussion is transparent. My opinion is that anonymous mods with power are more dangerous than transparent ones because we all have biases.
I have email chains explaining the following to Codesmith leadership from Spring 2024 explaining all of this as well. Codesmith has yet to explain directly why they disagree with this framing, but continue to call my company a competitor.
This is my stance on my biases:
1. For the record. Formation is not a coding bootcamp and it doesn't compete for coding bootcamp students. We work with experienced engineers later on in their careers, about 1/3 of which were bootcamp grads in the past. The average work experience now is about 4-5 years of SWE work experience.
With regards to Codesmith, I'm aware of 3 people who were deciding between Codesm…
You should talk to your cousin because he'll confirm that I'm on the ground. extremely responsive. almost 24/7 to pretty much everything that's happening at formation that I'm I'm writing a s*** ton of code and that no one talks about codesmith or really cares about it whatsoever internally. and he'll probably be like absolutely shocked that there's you in this situation going on.
When I interviewed Codesmith grads and they flat out lied about their projects being work. One said his manager was "Phil Troutman" who was the lead instructor at the time. I've never seen this before and when it happened a second time I got interested and Googled and found this https://www.reddit.com/r/TechLA/comments/b7xl98/codesmith_coding_bootcamp_scam_beware/
The polarization was notable.
So then I started digging.
I started looking up the GitHubs for the companies I was seeing on the people's resumes who were applying to get into Formation.
The GitHub projects all had these very odd spiky kit patterns where there are these spikes for 3 weeks and then absolute emptiness. I started clicking through the various projects and they all had these same very weird patterns.
Then I look up the outcomes and I see that people are making over $100,000 a year salaries.
I'm a person that d…
My question is where did that money go then? It didn't go to Formation sure as hell. It didn't go to defunct Rithm. Didn't go to Launch School. Didn't go to Hack Reactor with it's single digit cohorts. Didn't go to EdX that shutdown its bootcamps. Didn't go to App Academy or BloomTech or Launch Academy that paused indefinitely. Epicodus maybe? Shut down. Code Up? Shut down.
Answer: it went no where because the industry collapsed.
This is the plain and simple answer that the author didn't look into and that it's absurd for Codesmith to claim and severely damages my reputation with what any reasonable person in the industry would know makes no sense.
Maybe it was taken out of context by the author. 40% decline of a smaller number maybe? Codesmith leaders have been celebrating the article so I assume it's correct.
1. We compete on new AI stuff programs for existing engineers, that came out a month or two ago for us, I acknowledged that, and it hasn't impacted any of the 3-4 year long drama going on, but it could impact future stuff. This sub has minimal discussion about AI programs as it's focused on coding bootcamps. I will continue to be transparent about biases.
2. Formation used to help people do portfolio building projects and stopped many years ago. The author called though out too. It's not completely irrelevant, but it's not at all what Codesmith was doing. When we accepted people right out of bootcamps back then, Codesmith grads came to Formation directly and saw it as a complementary continuation of their journey. For a couple of years now though we don't accept those people and work mostly with 5+ year engineers so naturally the need for portfolio projects is almost zero. The platform…
I know 3 people off the top of my head that did Formation that could have done Codesmith, out of like thousands or so.
They are completely different programs for different people, but everyone is unique and there are some edge cases that overlap.
I explained this all to Codesmith leaders for years (Eric via email, Alina via phone) and I would love nothing if we could get on the same page about what Formation is relative to Codesmith.
PART 10
1. Given your ongoing ownership in Formation, do you accept that your actions could reasonably be viewed as financially motivated?
I don't accept that whatsoever no.
1. Has Formation’s pivot away from bootcamp training coincided with your campaign against Codesmith, and if so, is this related?
Formation never had a bootcamp training model, and never pivoted away from it. We've had the same platform since day one. The target audience has shifted more and more senior. We used to years ago have like 1/3 people bootcamp grads post graduation without work experience, 2/3 of people experienced software engineers. Now we have 99% of people with 2+ years of work experience. Nothing has actually changed internally, same platform, same interview prep, same mentors.
1. How do you respond to the observation that Formation students list their own training on LinkedIn in the same way you…
PART 7
1. How do you reconcile your position as a Reddit moderator for [r/codingbootcamp](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/) with your financial interest as co-founder of Formation, a direct competitor in the same industry (at one time, at least)?
My company is not a direct competitor and was founder after our founder ran an actual bootcamp and say more opportunity helping bootcamp grads from all bootcamps instead of competing. We in fact have positive relationships with Codesmith's direct competitors Rithm (now closed) and Launch School (who recommends us to their grads).
1. Have you disclosed this conflict of interest to Reddit administrators or the community you moderate?
I'm transparent about who I am on here, I use my real name, and I was very active here for a year or two with the same content I have now before I became a mod.
1. Between 2024 and 2025, you posted hundr…
I need a blog post of equal length to explain that and am deciding if I should or not.
Formations's founder Sophie started a bootcamp in 2017.
In 2019 I joined her to start Formation after deciding bootcamps are not a good business model and we wanted to build an interview prep platform to help bootcamp grads land better jobs later on, rather than compete with bootcamps.
The explicit goal and reason we raised funding was to NOT BE A BOOTCAMP.
PART 6
* Independent data from the Council on Integrity in Results Reporting (CIRR) verifies Codesmith’s student outcomes, showing around seventy percent of graduates securing relevant employment within one year and median salaries of approximately $110,000.
CIRR is not independent. It's a 501 6c business group/like a lobbying agency. It's charter is to represent bootcamps.
* Reddit’s Moderator Code of Conduct prohibits moderators from using their position for financial or competitive advantage.
I don't believe I am competing with Codesmith and my commentary hasn't changed from before and after being mod.
* As a co-founder and equity holder of Formation, Novati stood to benefit financially from reputational harm caused to a rival institution. This represents a direct conflict of interest and a potential breach of the moderation code.
I don't agree with this at all. We work with boo…
PART 5
* Prospective students withdrew applications after encountering the negative threads on Reddit.
* Codesmith’s revenue declined by approximately eighty percent, with about half of that attributed directly to the sustained Reddit campaign.
I can't comment on the number of applications because I don't know the exact numbers, but I'm curious how many this actually is.
The article grossly overstates the impact of Reddit on their funnel and understates the impact of the market. Their main competitor entirely shut down and their other main competitor is scaling back. For all I know all the talk about Codesmith kept their numbers UP when they would have shut down otherwsie.
* The company’s headcount fell from seventy to fifteen employees.
I believe this is true and the entire industry has experienced huge layoffs of similar magnitudes - and entire shutdowns.
* Founder and former C…
PART 4
* Formation students have been shown to list their own training in a similar fashion on their CVs, which undermines the basis of Novati’s criticism.
They do not in general. The example used was from 5 years ago when someone who did project based work at Formation that hasn't been offered for a while. Of the small number of people that list Formation, the vast majority, it's clear from the descriptions what it is. Codesmith students are crafted to appear like jobs and it's so bad we had to train our team to recognize Codesmith experience and not count it.
* Across numerous threads, Novati used overlapping or contradictory accusations to generate confusion and impede fact-checking.
This is a generalization. I protect the individuals that talk to me so I don't show their DMs.
* He deleted comments, including his own, to distort the visible record of conversations and to suggest…
PART 1 (there are comment length limits so going to reply in pieces)
HISTORY:
* Novati left Facebook in 2017.
In 2009, Novati joined Facebook as a software engineer, progressing rapidly to the level of Principal Engineer (E7). He has publicly recounted a story about a game of Risk in which he deliberately betrayed Mark Zuckerberg, framing it as an example of “strategic thinking.” The anecdote offers an early insight into his competitive approach to professional relationships.
The Risk story is true. I don't agree with the characterization.
* Novati left Facebook in 2017.
True.
* In 2019, he co-founded the coding bootcamp Formation with his wife, Sophie Novati, who assumed the role of Chief Executive Officer. Novati became Chief Technology Officer.
Not true. Sophie started a free coding bootcamp in 2017 called Buildschool. She realized that coding bootcamps were not a scalable bus…
There was a fake account on LinkedIn liking all their stuff that is now suspended as well.
With my moderator hat on, I'm being accused of bias while actively protecting Codesmith from the consequences of their own marketing decisions. I approve posts that should probably stay filtered. I give them more leniency than other bootcamps. I've consistently tried explaining how Reddit works and how to fix their reputation signals.
On my criticism of their program:
Yes, I've been critical of specific Codesmith practices since 2022 - whether bootcamp grads should present 3-week projects as "4 months of mid-level experience" or market themselves as "mid-level engineers" with zero professional experience. I have strong opinions backed by outcomes data and CIRR reports.
But that has nothing to do with how I moderate. I've been equally critical of other bootcamps like TripleTen, BloomTech, App Ac…
I can't summarize here because it's long and I have like an 8 page press briefing doc lol but you're right that there is more to the story. Like how they hired a Reddit hitman and the guy got dozens of accounts suspended. All of their instructors are a pyramid of graduates from the school itself. They lost their AWS root phone number and their website and email were down for 3 weeks. And dozens of other relevant facts.
There are two sides to every story and both sides should be heard.
Bootcamps are failing. Codesmith did very well in the good times but their grads were systematically exaggerating their Codesmith projects into average of 11 months (my Nov 2023 analysis of 50 grads). I still recommended people go there during those times, but I was cautioning the 'right people' should go there who know how it works and what they are in for.
Unfortunately even in 2024-2025 those tactics…
We do lose some people who can't afford upfront but we have solutions to mitigate. You can split up the payments of the upfront portion, or get loans (sometimes interest free). This reduces the lost customer problem to a smaller set of people. But honestly, some people can afford it and only want to sign up if they can defer because they just don't want to pay anything upfront and those people tend to be ones that don't job hunt as intensely and aren't a good fit because they aren't serious about the job hunt to begin with.
We thought that if we give you a team of 4 staff members constantly checking in on you and pushing you along that people would keep the momentum going but if power didn't pay anything upfront it's very easy to be like "meh I'll apply to more jobs in two months after A, B, C happens".
We don't line people up with guaranteed jobs. We have a strong network and great co…