Hi! I'm happy to clarify and thanks for being transparent on your views. There are definitely some misunderstandings.
I was the #1 committing engineer at Facebook when I was there and I got a heck of a lot done and I still do. I spend extremely little time on Reddit and Codesmith relative to my day job. I'm on the ground helping and responding to Fellows all day, fixing bugs as fast as humanly possible, and building new features and technology. And my Fellows will back me up on that.
You are also 100% correct that the more Codesmith grads there are the more Formation customers there are in 1 to 4 years from now... it's a bias I try to disclose but I have Codesmith grads insisting I'm still trying to steal Codesmith students or get people to go to Formation instead of a bootcamp... which couldn't be farther from the truth.
I actually recommend a lot of people go to Codesmith 1-1 and he…
So there are a three ingredients, Will Sentance has talked about this in public talks, and I have a hunch Launch School would agree re: their Capstone as well (but don't take my word for it!!)
1. Be a strong engineer to begin with/lots of potential. Good bootcamps test for this by having a challenging acceptance process. People prep for Codesmith for months and often fail their first interview. People have to complete Launch School Core for many months before applying to Capstone.
2. Build raw technical skills. A program has to train these and it's very very hard to do in 12 weeks. A project is one way to apply technical skills, and both of these programs focus on multi-week long group projects that are the highlight of your experience.
3. Be able to communicate and talk about your experience confidently to non-engineers. This includes your resume and recruiter outreach to be impressive…
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…
I've heard people outside of Formation who think we 'gamify the interview process' but I don't know where that comes from and I think it's a weakness in our public content and website if people feel that way.
The core approach to DS&A follows this method: [https://formation.dev/blog/the-engineering-method/](https://formation.dev/blog/the-engineering-method/)
And all of the practice is in applying that and getting feedback and practicing it in 1-1 mocks.
That link is free \^\^\^\^ so clearly it's not as easy as it sounds to apply it if people pay us a lot of money, and some people - even some new Fellows who signed up - have an instinct to fallback to memorization or trying to game the system - and for them the hard part is re-learning how to solve easy problems!
If you try to game the system and go into interviews, it's highly risky - you'll either crush it or fail miserably. That'…
I can say that I had nothing to do with this post, nor did anyone at Formation, have no idea who the OP is and haven't talked to them on Reddit before, but what they say is pretty detailed and aligns with how the day to day is.
The OP didn't say Formation works on those things you mention.... we don't teach anything... we do pretty much as the OP said 'peer and group problem solving sessions'.
The bootcamp market has produced hundreds of thousands of engineers who - firehose style in 10 to 20 weeks - learned basic programming concepts and then have been learning practical skills on the job for a couple years and many hit a wall when trying to level up to top tech jobs because of being rusty, or never properly learning, more fundamental CS concepts.
There are thousands and thousands of people who feel this way and it's not unbelievable or something to shame someone about.
Interviewing.io is currently the best in place to go if you just want 1 to 3 or so mock interviews and nothing else.
If you plan on paying for 5 or more, I would consider an interview prep program like Formation.dev (disclosure co-founder), Interview Kickstart or Pathrise (I've removed Outco because they haven't accepted applications in a month.
Exponent bought PRAAMP (which is free peer to peer mocks) and they offer paid mocks in a number of areas as an upsell but they don't have as many or as a strong mock interviewers as Interviewing.io or the interview prep programs. If you can get a good deal on them then doing a few there is probably fine.
A number of people might recommend various free options, Codesmith also offers alumni free mock interviews for life, but not all mock interviews are the same. If you aren't doing a mock with a person who has either done hundreds of interviews…
I'm biased from my FAANG-ish background but I think the ideal is still a top tier CS program (top 10 or 20 from US World News). After that I'm not sure because those programs are the sure things where recruiters are lining up to hire people. Anything else and it takes a little bit of luck and determination.
Of the ones you mention, Launch School capstone is the most selective and has consistently strong placement rates.There are a lot of people going to WGU but it's unclear that that will result in jobs or not. People primarily go to get a degree for cheap but I suspect they also do other things and are a part of other programs too to get jobs
I have never led Formation and despite being a co-founder, Sophie is and has always been the founder, president, secretary, CEO and face of the company inside and out and she tells me what to do. But you knew that I guess?
Seriously, you all seem passionate about this and maybe you don't want to be open minded about me but you should give Sophie a chance.
This has all the details: https://www.stridefunding.com/formation. You are better off reading the 4 ways the loan ends rather than me trying to summarize.
The new ISA is directly with Stride so we don't have any say or influence over your terms and you need to get the final answer from them directly.
There is some confusion, but a simple answer. We had an old ISA that we stopped offering a few months ago that was forgiven if you left the program without a job and don't have any job paying over 65K. We replaced that with 3 payment options and one of them is similar to an ISA but is not forgiven unless you leave early and make under 55K for several years.
So there are many people at Formation with the old ISA and the new ISA which understandably causes confusion. Many programs have gone through this transition over the past few months as well.
If you are ever confused, DM me or contact someone on the Formation team because it's really important for everyone's sake that you thoroughly understand the payment method you choose and we have 4 different ones right now!!!
It's here and the disclaimers at the bottom explain the methodology of how everything is calculated: [https://formation.dev/blog/2022-formation-fellow-placements/](https://formation.dev/blog/2022-formation-fellow-placements/)
We're working on a mid year update for 2023. Salaries have been a bit lower lately but we're still crunching the numbers for anything interesting!
\+1000 to woman founded, woman lead, diversity focused programs. The only one left I know of is the one I co-founded: Formation (founder and CEO is Sophie, majority of leaders are women), but it's not a bootcamp and it's for experienced engineers. Hopefully some day - when we're confident we can deliver an exception experience - we'll be able to help people get from zero to one as well.
Interview Kickstart is based in India and might be a good option. I'm the Co-Founder of Formation.dev and IK is a major competitor but we don't support many international engineers and IK might be a better option for you at this point in time.
No coding bootcamp places people at MAANG regularly. Codesmith is one of the best bootcamps and they have 10X the number of people ever who have gone there than we do but have about the same number of MAANG placements (excluding contractor jobs) in absolute number... so I think if that's your dream, go with the career accelerator and interview prep bucket.
Yeah as someone said below, this is a strong TRUE mid-level FAANG offer, or low end senior FAANG offer.
Their previous salary was $145K already, so they were probably someone who didn't really need to go to Codesmith.
I've worked with a couple people in this bucket who dropped out in their first week because they really needed something else (like Formation.dev - disclosure, co-founder, Pathrise, Interview Kickstart) and not a bootcamp. but didn't know those existed.
I think it might end up hurting a bit but hopefully not. Hack Reactor's brand was hurt a bit when it was acquired, because it used to be like the Codesmith-level entry bar, and since being acquired they grew to larger cohorts and a lower entry bar.
My completely personal opinion hunch is they will replace the instruction and curriculum in Tech Elevator with Hack Reactor/Galvanize curriculum, and leverage Tech Elevator more for it's partnerships in smaller cities like Cleveland and Columbus.
You should DM me or LinkedIn message me, especially because M2 sounds like it might be Facebook and I worked there 8 years as well.
I can look at your exact experience and try to get ideas, like one of your best options could be to to make a series of hops within a big FAANG company into engineering work.
I would 100% start with self studying with resources like Odin Project before jumping into a bootcamp.
I don't have a lot of data points but if you are already super experienced and comfortable in a field there's a lot more to this decision mentally and I think patience is better to give yourself room.
If you have downtime in this next job hunt, I might consider doing an intense program, while job hunting for your old job, getting your old job type, and then trying to find ways to add in programming at that job on the side in the goal of making a long term internal transition.
Fo…
That's a subjective question and I try to just answer with evidence backed facts so that people can make up their own minds of if it's good or bad FOR THEM.
Do not go there if you need a job ASAP after graduating. No program in fact will do that and the closest thing is a bootcamp like Revature - which comes with numerous catches and down print that many find concerning.
If you can get a job in your old industry that works though for Codesmith, or getting a less intense job now and doing part time. You could definitely get your old job back and job hunt for a SWE job simultaneously after Codesmith.
I've written more details about the market as a whole, but it's terrible for bootcamp grads right now and it's opened back up for experienced engineers... we have had offers at Formation in the past month or two at Google, Adobe, Capital One, Apple, and people currently at on-sites at Meta…
Hi! Yeah send me a DM so I can explain a little more how the new ISLs work. They are very different from these old ones as the payment term is longer and the individual payments are typically smaller and what the typical person will pay back is expected to be closer to the cap.
You have to start making payments after a year, but only if you are making the minimum salary at the time, so if you are unemployed your payments won't start. This is less friendly than the old ISA but it helps solve the problem that numerous programs have discussed where anecdotally, people don't feel motivated to look for a job as aggressively as those who paid upfront.
I say this all the time but it's very important because of the down market that no program, including Formation, hands you a job and you are not paying for a job. You are paying so that you present your best self and become a better engineer an…
We don't have any ISAs that cost exactly $25,000 so I'm happy to explain your ISA better if you ping me internally! There is a cap to make sure your ISA has an upper bound that is meant to be a positive feature for you and that is not the amount you owe necessarily. The amount you pay back depends on your salary so for this specific "full option", $25K is the cost if you get a BASE SALARY of $167K or higher.
In the past few months we have clarified our payment options to help explain this so hopefully this will only be clearer in the future that the ISA option (which is just one of many) is an alternative to paying the upfront cost but with a higher cost for the luxury of deferring payment.
The price of Formation varies by experience and needs, as it is a mentorship platform as opposed to a form of education, so that was an example for making a simplified point, but for anyone reading…
A bootcamp probably doesn't make sense, I think the easiest thing to do would be to try to transition more into SWE at your current company. Try to meet SWE managers and see if you can get a shot at a lower level SWE role.
I would also look at "career accelerators": [Formation.dev](https://Formation.dev) (disclosure: co-founder), Interview Kickstart, Pathrise. These are intended to help you level up your career rather than carerr change entirely. If your gaps are too large for these programs, then I would CONSIDER a bootcamp, but really transitioning in your own company and being supported doing that, is ideal.
Good question:
1. Formation has a frontend track. I need to emphasize that it's not educational and people with no frontend experience find it not good for them. It's the equivalent of how if you can do LC Easy problems then these DS&A programs are good, but not if you haven't done any at all. Our frontend is good for people who know frontend and want practice, not for people with no frontend experience. It's JS/HTML/CS/React
2. Interview Kickstart has a similar view as Formation, where you can do a short amount of practice on frontend but the focus is still classic DS&A. Interview Kickstart also has a lot more modules you can do like Data Science and ML
3. Outco: I don't think they have frontend
4. Pathrise: no frontend
5. Coachable: no frontend
6. Scaler: has frontend and projects in their longer program
I can't speak to IK, but Formation basically covers 14ish interview types, so we…
Hi, full disclosure, I'm the co-founder of Formation which is a competitor for Interview Kickstart, but I'm also a daily active member and contributor to the community and try to give good, fair, advice.
So first off, if you want to consider the "career accelerator" bucket of programs these are the competitors. Note that each one is very, very different but they all focus on the job hunt process rather than building new practical skills:
1. Formation: focuses on fundamental problem solving/DSA/SD/behaviorals, adaptive platform to move you through skills efficiently, small group sessions (2 - 8 people), dedicated support team, unlimited targeted mock interviews with senior top tier engineers as you start job hunting, senior/staff/principal FAANG-level mentors. Most 360 coverage program of the group.
2. Interview Kickstart: fixed curriculum/structured program with larger lectures and mor…
Unfortunately, I can't give one recommendation for everyone because everyone has a different background, life circumstances, personality, goals, and learning style.
I usually recommend you start narrowing down your list objectively: which programs have good outcomes, which ones have good reviews, etc...
Then try to do free programs at each of them, many have some kind of free community or free activities. Keep in mind that these are marketing events in disguise, but at least try to get a sense for what the day to day would be like!
And then focus super hard on which one is right for you by asking questions:
1. What is the day to day schedule and workload like?
2. What is the teaching style (e.g. lectures, self teaching, projects, etc...)
3. How much instructor access do you have?
4. Do you want in person or remote?
5. What cities are people getting jobs in?
6. What kind of background…
They are worse! It depends a lot on the program.
One of the best things to read is this from /u/cglee [https://medium.com/launch-school/evolving-landscape-for-software-career-transitioners-a-three-year-review-of-capstone-data-dbab52b6550c](https://medium.com/launch-school/evolving-landscape-for-software-career-transitioners-a-three-year-review-of-capstone-data-dbab52b6550c) . Launch School Capstone is a top tier program with high entrance bar, small program, but it at least shows the trends.
Ada for example essentially paused entirely because their model was based on internship partners - who all backed out and hence they have no internships for people.
Codesmith's enrollment pace has slowed (they used to be booked for months and are now interviewing days/weeks before new cohorts) but they are fortunately keeping a high bar and their outcomes remain strong (although my information…
Sorry yeah I was aggregating. The 6 weeks is 4 weeks of super fixed concentrated lectures and another 2-ish weeks sprinkled across the other stuff.
You might be the first person to say I've oversold Codesmith!! I always get yelled at for downplaying them and that Eric Kirsten told them Formation is a scam that offers everything Codesmith does for free for a lifetime... although that has subsided a bit since the market has tanked and I've worked with dozens of Codesmith alumni - and the vast majority at best love us (we have several "spotlights" written for people who wanted to talk about their story post-Codesmith) and at worst think it was maybe break even-ish, and not a single person I know of has said we offer what Codesmith offers haha.
Good question! It's about 20 hours a week (say 5 hours of scheduled sessions and the rest of tasks and benchmarking assessments to do). Formation's magic is that we pull your calendar and schedule all of your sessions and workload around your calendar (even weekends are fine), so as long as you're organized you can fit it in, but it will be a lot of work.
You do have to interview but we're working with Waymo recruiters and engineers to prepare you for their interviews specifically and you should expect to have interaction with people at Waymo in different ways along the way. If you do everything you need to at Formation then you should get an interview (assuming the market or hiring doesn't change unexpectedly) and you should be extremely prepare for these interviews.
If you don't pass the interviews you'll also be super setup for other companies that have similar interview styles... you are getting approximately $13,500 of value from Formation paid for by Waymo if you are selected for the program.
Of the super top tier / competitive bootcamps the only in person ones I know are Codesmith (NY) and App Academy (NY and SF).
I totally get everyone is different, but I would advise on finding the right program for you over in person/online, unless there is a particularly strong reason to have a worse fit program because of the stronger benefit to you of an in person program.
In person programs in smaller cities are often a great way to get a foot in the door with local companies in that city. This was the bread and butter for Tech Elevator during the good times.
PSA: Waymo + Formation Program applications opened today - targeting 2024 summer internships (for 2025 grads only)
Hi friends! Waymo and Formation just announced the [Waymo + Formation Program](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7094403935964205056/) and applications are open now through August 23rd, 2023. This is a free program (paid for by Waymo) that will take place online and part time (on your schedule) in the fall. The program provides 2025 grads (undergrad OR masters) rigorous extra CS fundamentals training with the goal of being selected for a 2024 summer internship with Waymo - which is a pretty cool right now to work at!
I'm a co-founder of Formation and want to disclose that transparently, but this program has no catches (other than that it's for a very small number of people and will be very competitive to get into) and is a great opportunity for qualified…
If you are concerned about building, yeah maybe not the accelerators. Codesmith could be an option, Launch School Capstone would be another.
Alternatively, look into things like Hack4LA - where you might want to just volunteer for free and build some stuff. Codesmith's open source partner OSLabs also seems to have free options for people to build stuff without doing Codesmith.
You on the fence of if a top tier bootcamp or career accelerator is right (or nothing at all!). I would consider Codesmith yeah. It's not guaranteed to get you a job but if you feel really stuck it might be worth it for the community. You'll highly likely be coding circles around everyone but their curriculum isn't what you are paying for - anyone can get the material and it's entirely taught by former graduates.
Also consider career accelerators and see if they are right for you - they tend to be job hunt and interview focused instead of learning focused.
Formation.dev (I'm a co-founder) (adaptive learning efficient practice, small group sessions, mock interviews with senior/staff engineers, support until you get a job)
Interview Kickstart (structured DS&A practice, lecture style sessions, mock interviews with senior engineers)
Interviewing.io (a la cart interview practice, or pay f…
Rithm is a place, similar to Launch School, that keeps the cohorts small and gives people a lot of attention. So it's a place for quality of education and time with teachers. However, quality !== job and Codesmith might be a better place for ambitious hustlers who will do push to find a way to get a job. Case in point: Rithm grads proudly post about their graduation on LinkedIn and get cheered on by their friends - Codesmith grads mostly hide the fact they went to Codesmith and half of their resume is 3 weeks of project work written up in 6 bullet points.
Sorry, I don't know them :( I fortunately/unfortunately know a lot about Codesmith because it's a snowball effect of it being discussed so much in this subreddit and then people send me stuff - usually anonymously because I get a lot of pushback from Codesmith insiders in comments and they want to help me and thank me for explaining things more the way they are.
I know a decent amount about Rithm (I know the founder) and HR (I know a number of alumni), BloomTech, but not every single program
Hack Reactor 12 week covers roughly similar materials to Codesmith. Codesmith has as a higher entry bar and 90%+ graduation rate as a result. HR has way more people drop out/get kicked out and not graduate (75 to 80% "graduate") but it's still okay.
Note about the ISAs - read the fine print. You can usually defer payments for some amount of time (I believe 3 month after graduation), but it's not forever (if you have a job making the minimum salary in a current job or any non-tech job).
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…
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…
Hi, I respect all opinions and I'm sorry your experience wasn't what you expected. Hopefully you feel like leaving was the right thing and left on a fair note. While the majority of people successfully get placed (on no guaranteed timeframe) and we try to accept people who are a good fit for what we do, we very much understand Formation is not for everyone and support people leaving who aren't a good fit.
I want to correct some inaccuracies though for others reading this and I hope my response is very fair and transparent.
1. I agree Formation is very intense and I discourage a lot of people from joining who don't seem on the same page. I'm sorry you might have joined with the wrong expectations. You can change your workload and schedule week to week up or down as things change and no other program I've seen allow this but it might be that even with that, we couldn't support your needs…
Yeah we work on fundamental skills and those people that got those jobs mentioned did not have portfolios - they openly showed up as entry level and crushed technical interviews at top companies. In this market it's just almost impossible to get those opportunities and you might end up a bit lost between "I need a portfolio!" and "I need strong fundamentals!".
In think in a perfect world the fundamentals are sufficient to kickstart your career but we'll see if the market agrees or not in Q4 2023.
Referrals are a complex topic and are not all equal, for example:
1. Referral from another Fellow
2. Referral from a mentor
3. Referral from a team member
4. Referral from a partnership/b2b connection with Formation
5. Support in finding referrals from your own network.
Not all referrals are equal and effectiveness depends on the market.
So in summary - we don't guarantee any referrals and…
Hi, Formation isn't a good replacement for a bootcamp for most people. There have been a very small number of people that have done this but the reasons have to be right and we usually reject people without some kind of relevant experience. For example, self taught but contributions to large open source projects might be a good fit.
I don't recommend doing it in this market because almost all of these cases were people who got top tier entry level roles and sometimes from new grad headcount, and the market has tanked for entry level and new grad roles. The same struggles apply with going to a bootcamp, but I'm not also not advising doing Formstion right now in this bucket, UNLESS you have a job already and are doing it part time over a long period of time.
Second giant note: ISAs are great for the reasons you mentioned. But if you end up being one of the minority percentage that give…
Look at Career Accelerators like Formation.dev (disclosure: I'm the cofounder of this program), Interview Kickstart, Pathrise, Coachable, Outco. These programs are expensive and might not be for you, but if you are looking at bootcamps you should also consider these.
These kinds of programs aim to prepare you for interviews and fill in various weaknesses you might have in levelling up. They all work well for highly motivated people by acting like a coach to get you across the line. Most of these programs are also part time and focus on people currently working.
If you are really far behind it's possible an advanced bootcamp like Codesmith could help. A bootcamp is a huge time commitment and somewhat of a waste if you are already a competent coder.
Hey I think we might have chatted long ago (Reddit deleted legacy chats from before Jan 2023) but feel free to ping me. I think you should work with the manager to set yourself up to convert full time, take the position, give it 120% and don't do any bootcamp.
I know I might seem bias here because Formation is intended to help people like the above to get that really amazing second job/third job, but I genuinely think you will accelerate your career by taking trying to convert full time as soon as possible. By the time you would have graduated a bootcamp + 3 months (super conservatively to find a job) you'll have accumulated actual work experience that cannot be replaced by anything.
If you go to Codesmith and give that your 120% instead, you might get a $120K first job but you'll be starting from 0 at that job (don't let "mid level and senior" marketing influence this, you are starti…
Codesmith, Rithm, Launch School are all doing well. Smaller programs with a high bar - while having lower application rates of qualified people - are finding enough people at the bar to keep running.
That said, we'll have to see how 2023 holds. Bootcamps are a great way to accelerate learning for motivated individuals but it's one step of many, and you'll need a lot of time and effort to get a job for the foreseeable future.
I get asked numerous times a day in DMs what IS the answer then. And I don't have one for everybody - it's a different path for everyone and there is no guaranteed single path - which I understand is super frustrating - but it is what it is.
What I've been seeing is a strong demand for senior engineers, and decent demand for mid-level engineers (1 to 3 YOE) that have worked at pretty solid companies for a few years.
I've seen people with experience but not necessarily full time strong experience (i.e. they might have contract work, large resume gaps, lots of job changes, or are bootcamp/CS grads with no experience) get pretty good jobs that in the boom-times, graduates of Codesmith, Hack Reactor, Rithm etc... (i.e. the top bootcamps) were getting - i.e. 100 to 140K great junior positions.
So my advice to top tier bootcamp grads at these top bootcamps is to not try to sneak into those 120K entry level roles that 2021 and 2022 alumni were getting and to aim for apprenticeships and internships. e.g. start with [apprenticeships.me](https://apprenticeships.me). NOTE: I'm sure I'm going to get some people commenting on here that…
Success stories aren't anomalies but they also aren't the norm. It's somewhere in between and that's why they come across so polarizing - because people only talk about one end or the other.
You could be a good candidate for a bootcamp. Especially if you did some CS courses in college (which it doesn't sound like you did) I would say an even stronger yes. You can absolutely do more than web dev via a bootcamp. Bootcamps try to teach marketable skills so their graduates have a resume of buzzwords that overlap with the most jobs possible. Some try too hard and teach 6 languages and you don't end up learning anything. So the best ones end up in the middle, teaching one language / framework, while exposing them to a couple of others in a lighter way.
Anyways, look at Codesmith, Rithm, Launch School Capstone, and the usual suspects and see if they are a good fit for you. Look at the day to…
I've worked with a few people who have this kind of background and got good jobs. I wouldn't recommend Formation though for you because you are looking for practical skills. We do (as of July 2023) a minimal amount of version control and production coding - but we don't "teach" anything, it's all practice + feedback and you have to be the driver.
If you are considering doubling down on fundamentals and applying to to top tier companies, consider Formation. If you want to get practical experience and then a job applying those practical skills, then I would suggest getting involved with a large scale open source project (that has support from a large company) that checks the boxes and contributing fixes over a few months.
The job market is tough right now for someone with your background and there aren't any paths that will make it particularly fast.
Bootcamps enrollment is way down. Codesmith's NYC cohort starting Monday was still conducting interviews as of Thursday and they keep moving back deadlines. They are also doing an "apply-a-thon" to give people prizes for applying.
Rithm has said demand remains strong as has Launch School - but both are smaller programs.
On the plus side, the market is picking up and people are asking me more questions about going to bootcamps so maybe that will change in a few months.
Yeah, I'm playing devil's advocate and I agree it's not THAT hard.
Practically speaking, people advertise their projects loud and clear, with their GitHubs and LinkedIns and you can grab all the contributors from os-labs repos and you can spend a few hours identifying all Codesmith alumni.
I did this like a year or two ago now - after noticing patterns in people applying for Formation - and audited 200-ish people and the vast majority had no signs of Codesmith on their profiles, had 6+ months of SWE experience at their "projects", and contributed 2-3 commits over 2-3 weeks to their projects. I dumped all the data somewhere but I have a ton of real work to do but someone who really wants to see how people do could reproduce this easily.
I comment on many of those threads and get notified for every post in this sub, and it sounds like you are super bias already at the start. I don't see many people selling other bootcamps on Codesmith posts or steering people away from it. I see a few one off comments, but it's not the core content on most posts.
In fact a very large number of alumni from Codesmith who do videos for them, are active here, and write reviews online with their names on them, actually WORK/WORKED AT CODESMITH AND ARE/WERE ON THE WEBSITE AS EMPLOYEES. Reddit is anonymous by default but it's not that anonymous when people give out a lot of information that identify who they are.
I have a following of hundreds of people now - many of whom respect my extremely thorough and balanced view of Codesmith - and many of whom end up going there because of my recommendation after talking to them - and I criticize certa…
I have some insight on this as an outsider that has worked with a few dozen Codesmith alumni later on in their careers or immediately after Codesmith.
This is going to be a polarizing comment thread for sure.
PROS:
- many alumni that get jobs credit Codesmith's job hunt support for helping them. they typically site: mock interviews, weekly office hours, their cohort mates emotional support making it feel less lonely, and Eric Kirsten's negotiation help giving them confidence to ask for $150K offers when they otherwise wouldn't
- compared to many other bootcamps - which hardly do anything post graduation, I think Codesmith does a lot more than most
- they give you "lifetime support", which means you can always go back and ask questions in the future, get resume reviews or even do peer mock interviews anytime in the future and some people have found that useful
- one of the most powerfu…
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.