Hi!
RE: Update. Things seemed to get worse in October/November, and have since gotten a bit better. Seeing more people getting FAANG interviews again - with generally longer time frames (e.g. scheduling onsites for over a month from now). We've seen mid-level and senior engineers (based on FAANG standards, not Codesmith standards) get hired and get interview more easily. Zero experience people definitely have a harder time with FAANG. We've seen people go to Palantir, Amazon, Bloomberg, but in general having some kind of genuine connection to the company is key. Something about your background that aligns so much better than most other people, that by trying every angle from referrals, to recruiter pings, to networking events, something works to get that interview. Google specifically has hired a few experienced engineers at the L4 level and has slowly resumed some entry level interview…
Hi, sure, happy to respond with thoughts.
RE: Formation. It is absolutely harder to get FAANG interviews right now than in the past. The goal of Formation is to increase the chances of passing these interviews and to help you get these interview. When the companies are hiring, it's easier for us to send over some profiles to a recruiter and get you in the pipeline. When recruiter jobs themselves are at risk it's harder to do that. But we help you find the right path to companies given the market, and occasional one offs happen and occasionally a recruiter will respond to you.
RE: OSP. Honestly the projects are not good and everyone knows it. They are open source and anyone can look at the code! Non functional, commented out code, reviewed and mentored by someone who just graduated Codesmith and has no experience. I know the vision of the projects is much greater, but in reality they ar…
I'm extremely biased, but I would recommend looking at Career Accelerators, which focus more on practicing than teaching. Some to look into are: [Formation.dev](https://Formation.dev) (I'm the co-founder), Interview Kickstart, Outco, Pathrise, Scalar, Coachable, and then also [Interviewing.io](https://Interviewing.io) for one off interview-practice.
I'm the co-founder of Formation.dev which obviously I would recommended looking at. About 1/3 of people we work with have no full time SWE experience, and of those 1/3 are self taught. We work on filling in a lot of fundamental CS knowledge that's missing and get it up to a top tier bar.
Anyways, I don't want to promote Formation too much here, but look at those options above to at least consider this kind of approach because it might be a better fit.
Hi! Yeah happy to explain more or answer questions over DM that pertain to your specific circumstances.
What you wrote summarizes exactly my overall stance on Codesmith and also what Formation is trying to do so I'm happy you pieced that together from your experience and from my posts.
I really admire Codesmith leadership for scaling the program that they have, they just don't have the experience needed in the tech industry to really solve the right problems that the industry needs, and if they did, maybe they would be more on the right track instead of the rabbit hole they've gone down focusing on going through the motions to put things like a "tech talk" (which are big jokes among students) on your resume.
At Formation, we think we need to get the most experienced people in the industry who are passionate about mentoring to answer the question of what it means to be a truly great…
I hear you and appreciate your ongoing pushback, it's why I keep such a close eye on this.
I understand your position is both similar and different from others. I've heard from people that agree with you and people who haven't, who have sent over anecdotes of talking to Eric. Or anecdotes of talking to a career support engineer to make their resume qualify for certain jobs
I don't have all the answers but Triathlete I assure you two things: 1. I have shown OSP resume snippets to industry friends who think the way OSP are portrayed, even when disclosed on fine print, is lying. 2. we have done recruiter training at Formation to identify Codesmith resumes because they were repeatedly flagged as industry experienced engineers at application time because of the OSP portrayal as a work experience, repeatedly.
I understand pushback on second hand accounts when you have first hand experience…
Hack Reactor is a relatively good program that has scaled pretty well post-acquisition where a lot of other programs that scale have lost some of their steam. I think their size and parent company growth pressures have resulted in them have a lower entry bar than Codesmith in order to take on more people, but they keep a reasonably high bar and the result of a lower graduation percentage (\~75%) and they have kept the outcomes for graduates strong.
The people I've worked with from Hack Reactor and Codesmith are all fairly ambitious, hard working, driven people where ultimately any of the top programs might have good enough for them.
If you look 3 to 5+ years down the road, there are many many Hack Reactor alumni at top tier and FAANG companies in their 2nd, 3rd, 4th jobs. I think this is a result of them being San Francisco focused pre-COVID where once you get your first job in person…
A lot of the online best bootcamps resources sadly are sponsored to various degrees.
CourseReport is one that has several tiers of sponsorship package and they do videos and blog posts for sponsorship that is not disclosed. But Codesmith sponsors them so they show up there. Similarly Switch up gets paid if you join sponsored bootcamps through their website.
A lot of blog posts you read are sponsored as well.
Codesmith doesn't do much traditional marketing other than CourseReport, and Career Karma sponsorship. They invest their marketing dollars in the above and in developing public content that will get people to show up to a live session as the goal. There's a good podcast with Will Sentance where he talks about Codesmith's growth and marketing strategy (which is pretty interesting because the extremely strong word of mouth is the goal of their marketing and it clearly works) that y…
I'm not a recent grad so won't answer the question, but zooming out, why to do you get more confused the more research you do?
If you feel like you can see yourself as a good fit in either, then either route will probably be great. One is not objectively better than the other.
A lot of high level outcomes and marketing is great for narrowing down your choices, but at this stage in the decision I would go with the only you wake up in the middle of the night feeling like is the right call... i.e. your gut.
Some warnings I've seen others do:
1. Don't compare exact outcome salaries or placements rates obsessively.... too much wiggle room here, just use them to narrow down in the first place.
2. Curriculum on paper. Don't obsess over every line of the curriculum and compare program to program and/or think that a curriculum with more things is better
3. Don't worry about the stack or lang…
At Formation I just pulled upcoming interviews in Jan/Feb of all experience levels which have more than one person interviewing at: Airbnb, Bloomberg, Palantir, Uber, Microsoft, Google, Realtor, Flatiron Health, Travelers, Upwork, Autodesk, Reddit, Patreon, Expedia, Flexport, Hashi.
For people with zero experience: Palantir, Bloomberg, Realtor, Google, Reddit, and numerous people interviewing at smaller companies.
Sorry don't have great data for just this but I tried, timeboxed to a few minutes.
I've been yelled at for not disclosing my affiliations before. I talk about Formation as a reference because I don't know anyone else here that his worked with hundreds of bootcamp grads from all kinds of bootcamps at all stages in-after-much-after. Nor are there any other E7-principal FAANG engineers here that helped grow a FAANG company from 200 engineers to 10,000. I've been here for almost a year now, giving all kinds of advice and telling dozens of people to go to specific bootcamps... Codesmith lines seem longer than ever to me!
I'm obviously super biased and I try to disclose that, but I also have a unique point of view that many find valuable!
I don't pretend I don't have biases, and don't mind some criticism, but I appreciate a kinder calling out if you find me annoying :D
Hi, yeah can answer!
* We published a little breakdown here: [https://formation.dev/blog/2022-formation-fellow-placements/](https://formation.dev/blog/2022-formation-fellow-placements/). Most people have some experience coming in (2/3 of people) and the 1/3 that didn't, were equally split across bootcamp grads, CS grads, and self taught developers.
* No upfront payment or deposit currently
* Yes open to Canadians but we administer the ISA ourselves, and payments are based on and made in CAD if you get a job in Canada.
I edited to clarify that, I meant both employed SWEs and not yet employed SWEs, I know more than a handful of mock interviewers and coaches with no experienced at all except at Codesmith itself as a paid employee.
I also consider graduates who are employed as "peer support" imo. At Formation we have senior engineers at FAANG companies as normal Fellows looking to change jobs believe it or not who will be peer with each other, but also peers to bootcamp grad Fellows with no job yet. Those are just standard peer sessions and interactions. The actual mentors/mentorship is from very senior engineers (or from 5 to 10+ year FAANG recruiters) who are experts at 1-1 and small group mentoring and they are paid very well at their day jobs and we pay them well as well.
Again sorry for the tangent, I just talk about this a lot to people 1-1 and this is meant more for others who might read this.
This still feels like you graduate and go in "support mode" where some other students/graduates (edit: graduates can be employed SWEs or not yet employed) hired as coaches (i.e. peers) check up on you. It's a wonderful and amazing community but it's still peer based. At Formation.dev we have a bunch of people who are/have been Codesmith coaches or mock interviewers and they are just graduates themselves without jobs or with minimal work experience. So the support is more like "enhanced peer support" and not the full weight of Codemsith behind you. Maybe over time it will be stronger as graduates many years into their jobs give back.
Codesmith experimented with a DSA course for alumni and they charged them for it at a heavily discounted rate so I would expect them to charge for any true future support.
At Formation we give people lifetime access to our version of slack and to some commu…
I do. I think it's going to be much harder this year for bootcamp grads to get jobs without any additional advantages. For example, Ada Academy has built in 5 month internships, and I consider that an "additional advantage". Some programs have connections for apprenticeships with good companies. I also work with a small number of bootcamp grads who haven't gotten jobs yet at Formation and that gives people an "additional advantage" as well.
There are a lot of very strong entry level engineers from top CS schools who were laid off or had offers rescinded and they will be very competitive for those entry level jobs.
Hard !== Impossible! Grit, discipline, accountability, and time, and you will get a job... but these things are not easy when a lot of bootcamps take the foot off the gas the day you graduate and put you into "support mode".
If you have really good data-engineering experience to talk about, you should highly look into some career accelerator options like [Formation.dev](https://Formation.dev) (I'm the co-founder), Outco, Pathrise, Interview Kickstart, etc... These options are more part-time. Formation is completely scheduled around your availability. Most people we work with have day jobs and take about 6ish months to find a new job. If you have decent fundamentals already, transitioning to a SWE, or at least a SWE-like-data role is feasible at Formation at least. I can't speak to the other options for this, e.g. Pathrise is focused more on staying in the same vertical, but maybe Scalar would be useful too. Anyways look at these options as well to compare and constrast.
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…
1. You want to build (or apply) a framework for problem solving. There are different ones around, we created the "Formation Engineering Method" as one such framework.
2. You want to be extremely comfortable with basic concepts before moving on to harder ones. People jump too fast into LC Mediums to feel like they are making progress. Someone I worked with got a job at Google and did about 150 LC problems focusing on LC Easy the week before, for example.
This question has been coming up a lot more often recently. I would suggest looking into interview prep and career accelerators instead of bootcamps.
I'm the co-founder of Formation (.dev), which is one option, and other things to look into are Interview Kickstart, Outco, Pathrise, Scalar, Exponent, Coachable....a lot of very different options here!
Specifically at Formation, 11% of engineers who got jobs in 2022 were CS grads with no experience, so it's a smaller case for us but a reasonable option.
The idea is to work on bringing your fundamental skills to the top tier tech bar through adaptive practice, benchmarking, several sessions a week with senior engineers and tons of feedback, and mock interviews.
All of these programs cost the same as a bootcamp but are much more useful IMO than doing a bootcamp. I work with all kinds of people from all kinds of backgrounds, many who did…
Hi, this sub is extremely Codesmith heavy, and there are several Codesmith students, alumni, and employees, who are extremely active on here, so it comes up a lot.
That said, I know many bootcamp founders, talk to some regularly, and I've worked/work with hundreds of bootcamp alumni, mostly from top bootcamps, so I have a unique view of many programs.
I have extensive knowledge of BloomTech/Lambda School as well and have a similar depth of understanding of their program but it's rarely talked about! I'm like the only person who read their trademark lawsuit legal documents in real time and discovered that they acquired a company in Florida to use that's company's trademark to bolster their claims - no journalist even reported on this.
I aim to be middle of the road on everything, which doesn't mean neutral, but it means talking about the pros and cons.
Codesmith alumni in particular a…
I'm a bit sour from someone who was claiming I was trying to steal Codesmith students and that Codesmith offers the same thing Formation does and then blocked me and the person has quite a good reputation on Reddit (not a fake account). But that kind of job hunt support is nowhere near what we offer. We continue technical training indefinitely until you get a job, 2 to 6 sessions a week with mentors, continuous practice tasks and benchmarks, ongoing mock interviews with senior engineers and recruiters. A team of 3 non-technical people and a private channel to talk with them about your strategy and progress, and they keep on top of your work if you are slipping.... all until you get a job, as long as you don't proactively stop doing your part.
Anyways... unrelated haha, thanks for the context as always!
Sharing a post from CSCareerQuestions that shows why your first job matters!
DISCLAIMER: I do not endorse any bootcamps and can't tell you which are "good" or "bad" and think every program should be looked at from all angles. I'm sharing this post as an example of why the day to day of your first job matters so much more than the title or numbers that come along with it. Additionally, I'm the co-founder of Formation (.dev) in case that could have any biases.
Link:
https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/zwocj0/my_revature_horror_story/
Lots of people here with no industry experience and bootcamp grads with very little industry experience.... after working with hundreds of people from bootcamp backgrounds and from top tier CS backgrounds, and from conducting hundreds of interviews myself I feel like I have a valuable perspective to share in this sub. I spend anywhere from 5 mins to 30 mins a day on Reddit, mostly commenting on push notifications I get while on the go, so I don't "live here" 🤣
Also, while 11% of people at Formation graduated a bootcamp and hadn't found a job that way, more than half of the people have a non-CS degree background, so I also want to connect with people who might come to Formation years in the future.
Finally, we are a for-profit technology company, and some day we're going to expand and offer more options for more people and it's useful to keep a pulse on the bootcamp community in genera…
We have this guide that collects resources for different topics and was curated by three engineers on our team (myself included) with over 40 years of top tier industry experience running interviews at Facebook, Microsoft, Nextdoor, etc...
https://formation.dev/guide/
Disclosure: Formation is not a bootcamp but we work people to level up their careers later on. Only 11% of people we worked with who got a job in the past year we're bootcamp grads without a job so I want to make it clear that I'm sharing this to help and not to solicit you to look into the training, as you sound a bit too early in your career.
And yes they are fairly common at larger companies. As companies become larger they want to standardize their interview processes which means having really consistent topics and types of interviews. Data structures and algorithms interviews are about as general problems as you can…
I'm the co-founder of Formation.dev and I would strongly suggest looking into it as an option, alongside other career accelerator type programs, rather than bootcamps. For example, Interview Kickstart, Pathrise and Outco, maybe Scalar and Coachable.dev. All of these don't start at the beginning and rather are focused on getting you interview ready and finding a good job. Most are part time as well.
At Formation, we don't teach anything lecture style, it's purely practice, benchmarking, small group problem solving sessions with mentors, feedback from a wide range of senior industry engineering mentors, mock interviews. Every Friday, all your practice tasks and sessions for the next week are selected based on how you've been doing so far and based on your schedule and availability for the next week.
A lot of these programs will support you until you get a new job in some fashion as well.…
I'm sure you've seen me around in here but [Formation.dev](https://Formation.dev) might be a good number 3. We were running the numbers for an upcoming outcomes thing, and about 2/3 of people have work experience already but about 1 in 10 people have come from bootcamps with no full time SWE experience yet. So it could be an option and is almost exactly like what you said in #3 above. It's very expensive though so I wouldn't consider it lightly unless it's the right thing for you.
EDIT: I'm getting downvoted a lot in one of those weird situations where the count keep changing wildly and the comment is ranked high for something with downvotes (which is usually from people who spam downvote and their votes stop counting), so let me know why in the comments. I feel like this is a very reasonable answer to the question and wouldn't be offended if a leader at a competitor said the same thing…
Yeah it's [Formation.dev](https://Formation.dev). If you think you are a good fit, you can checkout the study guide, apply and do the assessment, read the blog, and try to ping some people with backgrounds like yourself that you can find. Note that most experienced people don't list that they went to Formation on their LinkedIn because they already have jobs and want to be discrete... so you can also ping people from out network tab on our website (which people that opted in to being listed on the site).
There are also some sample schedules on the "How it Works" tab to show what a typical week could end up looking like.
Sorry, lots of info, but we're still fairly small, and the day to day is pretty unique compared to anything else so trying to throw it all out there for you haha.
So Formation isn't a school or bootcamp because we don't have a curriculum, we don't teach anything like lectures/presentation or tutorial style, and it's kind of a more unique type of training. It's all practice based from day 1. The sessions with senior engineer mentors are 3-6 people and highly collaborative around going through a problem together. You are given problems to work on and then various resources to help unblock.
There are infinite problems to solve and really you could train for anything on Formation in theory, but it's currently focused people with work experience (and in some cases, people with prior education but no formal work experience yet).
So if you don't have any work experience, you have to be able to have some decent understanding of fundamentals, like arrays, strings and be able to solve "LeetCode Easy" level problems as a benchmark and maybe dabble in hard…
I'm not sure about bootcamps specifically, but at Formation we have seen more people than expected interested all across the spectrum in the past month. I think it makes sense that people who are more experienced and nervous about their job, or were laid off, or are trying to get a leg up in the super competitive market would come... that one's easy. But we're also seeing more people who are already at a LeetCode "Easy" level of DS&A problems, asking about Formation INSTEAD of going to a bootcamp (i.e. forgoing our 'we work with you until you get a job' promise and paying much less than a top tier bootcamp in return).... it's something we are pondering.
We are WAY TOO SMALL to generalize from, but I do think a lot of people just really like programming and didn't realize it until later in their careers, and if they have the passion, stick with it, they will get jobs eventually. Life's a…
I'm working on Formation and there are endless things that are interesting about what I'm working on.
I was thinking about this for a few minutes after I got the notification about this post and I could comment on so many interesting engineering challenges that I'm trying to work on and solve with my team, but I actually think the most interesting part is a lot more ambitious.
So I believe that everyone learns at a different pace and in different ways. And a lot of us don't know how we learn best or with who? but a lot of us want to learn and improve our lives and have a positive impact on everyone else's life.
I'm working on building out a platform where people get the right mentorship at the right time on the right topic that they need to work on. And I don't think there's anything else in the world that exists like this right now.
It's really hard. every week we're scheduling hund…
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…
\+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.
This is really hard question to answer.
The majority of engineers I've seen grow form zero to N over their careers haven't grown linearly... they grow exponentially.
So what you perceive as mind bogglingly hard during a bootcamp, will come across as trivial later on. But what you perceive as mind bogglingly hard as a junior engineer, will come across as trivial when you are senior.
Now how you "feel" is a lot about you. The work ethic to succeed in a top bootcamp like Codesmith, HackReactor, Rithm, etc... is higher than most jobs, and even FAANG jobs would need to meet expectations.
If you want to coast as a junior engineer for a long time then you might even find the work "intellectually" easier.
If you want to always grow, learn, and improve, then you will always feel like everything is hard. Over time those things might shift to "people skills" rather than just raw coding skil…
There is often philosophical discussion amongst bootcamp founders about their pedagogies. Bootcamps exist that are aligned with your thinking! But along the lines of what you said, they tend to be very small and no one knows about them, because it's 1 to 3 experienced developer + educator backgrounds teaching tiny classes. You might want to talk to the Rithm School people as they are fairly aligned with the idea of have small classes taught by experienced educators and aren't that small either. I don't know enough about your background but I'm the founder of [Formation.dev](https://Formation.dev) and you can checkout our mentor listing to see if you are qualified and interested in mentoring to see how we approach things. We're not a bootcamp or school and we don't teach anything! We run small sessions with 3 to 6 engineers and a mentor, solving a focused problem as a group (on one of man…
Yeah I should clarify that I’m the co-founder of a program for experienced engineers called Formation and not looking to attend a bootcamp. I worked at Facebook for 8 years as an E7 engineer and have interviewed hundreds of people and trained interviewers as well. I just keep a very close eye on many bootcamps because I work with a lot of people who did them in the past. I hang around here to try to give perspective when I can as most people
here have no industry experience.
AlgoExpert and Neetcode are two good resources, some people are Formation also like Structy.
People learn different ways so if you are going it alone, you should try to find one that resonates with you.
A lot of people I work with from Codesmith are DS&A focused and I imagine you'll find a sub community of people you can work with too on the side when you start.
For backend roles at non-top tier companies, DS&A isn't super important. It is used at large top tier companies as a way of consistently and fairly evaluating people and that's it.
I can't give an answer but I normally suggest looking into the breadth of teaching styles to make sure you are considering a broad set.
Super intense bootcamp style: Hack Reactor and Codesmith
9 to 6 with personal teaching from experienced instructors: Rithm
Self paced mastery based: Launch School Core and then Capstone
Focusing on specific demographics: Ada Academy
In each of those buckets there are more options but you want to cover your bases instead of looking for objective goodness.
Big tip is try to talk to people with similar backgrounds as yourself to hear how they found a program target than higher level metrics or reviews (use those to initially filter your list instead)
Yeah I'm pretty sure after 2023, FAANG as a term is going to end and we'll see something else arise from the turbulence. There will always be some hot place to work that has tremendously interesting and impactful work, and compensates at the top of market.
That said, even now, at Formation, we see many people chose companies over traditional FAANG on a weekly basis. We tend to call all these companies "top-tier companies" and the bar is very high, and often higher, for some of these other companies.
Not to sound too condescending but it's a lot of the "not knowing what you don't know" coming into play. Like a typical person in America who dreams of going to Hollywood, probably thinks of blockbuster movies and household-name actors. But the reality is that it's a complex industry where being in a leading role in a blockbuster movie might not be the best outcome for you. Maybe you are…
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…
Hi, someone tagged me as I'm the co-founder of Formation, which is a program for experienced engineers to help them work on fundamentals and prepare for interviews.
So the topics you mentioned, we cover System Design in general, which is high level architecture and API design, and several of our competitors, like Interview Kickstart, also cover this topic. We don't go into specific hands on practice in specific tools because typically experienced engineers will learn that on the job in some way, and the more important things to learn is fundamental abstract thinking around these systems. Most companies have such complex internal frameworks that knowing specific tools is less useful for experienced engineers.
I'm not sure if Formation is right for you or not, but I'm fairly sure a bootcamp isn't. Some bootcamps will flash those words around, like Codesmith for example, but the depth is…
\+1 to everyone else. If you have a legit CS degree then you probably don't need a bootcamp. You'll be much more advanced then everyone else, and mainly benefit from networking, and the confidence boost that you'll get from basically unofficially teaching all your peers.
Codesmith is the most prominent bootcamp that attracts people some people with degrees and experience and I hear the above \^\^\^ as the primary issue. But some people are so lost in the job hunt post graduation that having a network and community might be extremely valuable and worth the cost, it's a personal call.
Also look at career accelerators. I'm the co-founder of Formation.dev (we tend to work with people with 1+ years professional experience, so might not be a good fit, but look into it!) as well as Outco.io, Interview Kickstart, Pathrise, Coachable.dev, and Scalar. These programs might be way more inline wit…
I've worked with a very small number of people with no college degree and no experience at Formation who are very talented. They are still job hunting but at the same skill level now as other entry level top tier engineers. Can't go into personal details but I'm confident they will get very good jobs at the same pace as no experience college grads.... which has been slower than experienced people in this market but it happens!
It's a challenge, but true raw skills at the end of the day cannot be denied. The challenges tend to be confidence related about not having a degree.
I think Launch School Capstone by itself is the only thing you can compare to a bootcamp head to head. The actual "capstone" projects blow Codesmith OSPs out of the water. I think they are what the Codesmith OSPs aspire to be. A big difference is the documentation... Launch School Capstone projects are documented like open source projects SHOULD be. They are fantastic though in part because of such tiny cohort size that has been growing, so will keep an eye on the next waves of them. And they also want you to do Core first, so it's hard to recommend to someone who is already chosen Codesmith. You should probably be choosing Launch School Core before you even start CSX months ago if you want to do Capstone.
Launch School Core is pretty hard to compare to anything. It's maybe more comparable to Nu Camp. Both are fairly async. Nu Camp also doesn't have outcomes because self-service, lower…
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.
Definitely not. You can always exclude the bootcamp from your resume if it was harming it, so focus on what skills you are missing from your next step and if how a specific bootcamp will address those.
Tech Elevator is great in the non tech large cities they focus on. But cast a wide net and consider options. Look at Codesmith, Rithm, Hack Rector, and look at career accelerators like Pathrise, Outco, Interview Kickstart and Formation (disclosure: I'm the co founder).
So I’m just basing this of the hundreds of LinkedIns I documented and the dozens of people I’ve worked with directly or indirectly from Codesmith. Things change, but you need to survey your whole cohort to kind of counter this rather than one case. You can always do whatever you want on your resume. It’s pretty frustrating to have super diligent data and people tell me I’m wrong because of one off cases. I’m not sharing the spreadsheet because it’s a privacy violation in my opinion but I’m happy to share the methodology and you can repeat it on your own.
Similarly. At Formation, the majority of people we work with are experienced industry engineers and we worked with them 10 to 20 hours a week as they have full time jobs elsewhere. Yet just because we have a small number of people with no experience at all - either no bootcamp or straight from bootcamp - and combine with the fact that…
1. People practice how to talk about OSP in depth without lying and without identifying it as a it is. This public video describes what I've heard from alumni and staff members, and what I've seen in alumni that I've interviewed myself, and specifically who talk to Erik Kirsten (a senior board advisor) as well: **"there's this one guy in particular his name is eric kirsten uh and this guy has a silver tongue and he will teach you how to say anything like you know you tell him hey um this is my background how do i present it to an employer to where it doesn't look like i just decided to switch careers because you want to avoid that stigma and he will give you a great way to say it you know"** 33:03 from [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkWYanfkfCY&t=1983s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkWYanfkfCY&t=1983s)
2. I totally agree there should be additional checks and bounds to catch people m…
Well Formation is a Delaware Corporation, but you have to register in any state you are physically located in (and in some cases if you just have customers or employees in!). So just physically living in California means we have to have register here and pay taxes. People do try to avoid these things with "stretching" the laws, but we are trying to run things by the books.
My wife had a CA LLC in the past which is why I know a lot about that.
On a weekly basis, in my personal experience only, people are mistaking these resumes for experienced engineers. The blame might be entirely on the people making these mistakes, but I'm stating that I'm seeing it happening almost all the time.
I would like to emphasize what I repeatedly said in the past, MOST people working on real, legit Open Source projects ARE PAID for it. So Open Source !== not a real job and instantly make something that looks like a company not a company. Anyone reading, happy to talk more what Open Source really means because there is a lack of understanding in this sub about it.
In auditing 200 GitHub commit histories, over 75% of people had 2-3 weeks of commits on their projects, far less than even 1 month, never-mind multiple months. I have a nicely organized Google sheet from around May when I did the analysis. This is not two sides, it's a continuous spectr…
Sorry if it comes across that way, I work with Codesmith alumni daily to sort this out and they will attest how complex and case by case this is, and how middle road I am... I work with people to help them get the best outcome and sometimes they use their Formation resume and sometimes I advise them to use their Codesmith resume for a role.
I'm bias but I would self-teach and then do Formation :) but that's because even though I have a degree, it was a broad engineering degree and I self taught myself web programming and started a web-based company in college that forced me to self-teach with real users.
Bloomtech's results were not great unfortunately :( I don't want to judge but by moving to the flex, much fewer people graduate now.
58% of full stack web people "graduated" and 90% of them got jobs.
They used to have 75% of people graduate with 75% job placement.
So of the people that sign on day one, it remains to be about 50% of them getting jobs at the end within 6 months of graduating.
The median salaries haven't changed much.