There aren't any program bootcamps that cover theory sufficiently with your Computer Science hat on.
Some programs, like Hack Reactor and Codesmith spend a week or two on DS&A, and both have ongoing DS&A practice. But it's firehose-style crammed in DS&A focused on passing interviews, not DS&A to learn fundamental patterns and ways of thinking about how computers work.
If you've already done a course, then you'll find even at these bootcamps, 90% of your time will be doing practical work and then the DS&A you do will be you helping the more junior people that don't know the basics.
What are your goals? If you want to get a top tier CS job, then I would consider Formation (disclosure: co-founder), Outco, Interview Kickstart, Coachable, and other "career accelerators" as they are designed possibly more for your case. If you feel you need a lot of practical skills too, and you just want…
I've worked with several 42 alumni, and their former operations manager worked at Formation after leaving 42.
The long story short is having a free school with free housing doesn't really work here and people take advantage of it for all kinds of reasons, from homeless people, to non-work authorized people, etc... At the same time, they were extremely low-staffed in person, as their platform was all online, even though the physical campus and dorms were in-person. So people would show up and sit at the computer doing online work all day, where they didn't really need to be there.
So you have these really hard operation challenges of running an in person school with in person dorms, with extremely low staff, and add the fact that it's free and people from all over are trying to exploit that.... makes it really hard to maintain.
It think all the people I worked with at Formation (and pr…
Coraline gave an amazing answer above/below as well.
People learn differently and at different paces. Bootcamps give you a fixed curriculum "firehose"-style on their accelerated schedule. So it's really not reasonable to expect yourself to absorb everything.
I also agree with Coraline that you (and anyone reading this) should expect to take some time after graduating to fill in gaps, continue projects, find your areas of passion to double down on, etc...
Launch School is one program that calls themselves the "slow way" to learn. The completely opposite of bootcamps is "mastery based learning", where you do the same topic over and over until you "master" it, and then move on, and then you finish the curriculum at your own pace. BloomTech is also moving in this direction of mastery based learning at your pace. Formation (disclosure: co-founder) isn't a bootcamp but we have a hybrid of…
Why do you think people fail to get in?
Also for that question, if they expect you to pass in an index to an array recursively that doesn't show a strong understanding of recursion and how it would be used to solve complex problems in the future, like DP. So I would barely call that testing recursion. That is just "can you write a for loop recursively".
I hope they properly teach recursion in Codesmith afterwards and hwo to use it to solve complex problems. At Formation, recursion alone is something most people spend two to four or more weeks of intense practice to truly understanding and weild as a powerful tool to solve problems with.
I can give you the Formation analogy now haha. We put you in the shallow end without floaties (we don't lecture) and stand behind you and continuously push you towards the deep end. How hard we push you keeps changing depending on how much you push back each step of the way and then eventually you are in the deep end all alone. Each person has a completely unique pushing needs/pattern.
More CIRR H2 2021 results out! Codesmith included - with a lot to unpack! Overall lower placement rates and much higher salaries of those placed, and a few more fun things!
Where to begin, so much interesting stuff in the part 2 CIRR results, focusing on Codesmith as it's the most interesting to this subreddit.
Overall interesting notes (incomplete but tried to select a few things I found interesting):
* By far the most interesting thing in East Coast (EC, formerly NY), salary growths were super large. Median is up to a WHOPPING $140K but more interestingly in H1: 18% of people had salary $140K+ and now \~52% of East Coast grads made $140K+, that's a massive shift! And similar to FTRI there is a dip to almost zero in $150 to $160K with \~20% in the $140K to $150K bucket and \~20% in the $160K+ bucket. So my hypothesis on this adding in my industry knowledge is that \~10 to 20 people g…
I tried to give some reasons above but I don't even like what we have now on the site, because the outcomes vary so so so much by goal and we have to very carefully decide which numbers best represent what we do - which we haven't done yet - so we encourage people to talk to whatever random Formation person they can find with similar backgrounds and chat with them. Like we literally have had 10+ offers over $300K TC in October for whom that is the market rate and we help the people choose between offers. The uniqueness of those situations for those people are not captured in an average salary metric because and we want people to know they are getting a bespoke experience aimed at helping the accomplish their goals.
I've said this before but some of Codesmith's alumni get stock and bonuses as well, excluded from CIRR, and CIRR does not paint an accurate picture of their outcomes as well.…
You’re asking to compare people that get jobs within 90 days of starting so you can compare it with people who get jobs within 90 days of FINISHING. Makes no sense. You are asking to compare people that do 50 hours a week to 10 hours a week. Makes no sense. You are asking to compare people with a goal of getting a job in 8 months with those who want one ASAP. Not everyone wants a job ASAP at Formation. People often get several offers and keep training until they get one they like. All of this makes adds to why it makes no sense to give those CIRR numbers.
I agree with your ask though. I would love to provide better data that can help people estimate how long it might take to get a job given their unique circumstances across over 5 dimensions. So far it hasn’t been a big ask and people talk to current Fellows to get an idea of how it works. Quite frankly we are doing ourselves a disserv…
Again, not a school, no graduates, no end of program, no curriculum and we can’t be compared to a bootcamp head to head. All good questions to ask and also exactly why we can’t possibly report CIRR like metrics.
I think you have a big misunderstanding about what Formation is and it might be helpful to research more instead of trying to make us for your mold for what you think we are.
I feel personally attacked because I repeatedly tell you we don't have a school and we are running something different, and you repeatedly call Formation a school or a bootcamp and repeatedly ask for data the schools and bootcamps offer. You seem so fixed on the fact that you believe we are a school and I've offered at least once to do a call with you to explain what we are. Yet you keep saying it and the I have to keep correcting it.
From my knowledge working with a wide variety of Codesmith alumni I disagree that "they don't teach anything". I see two buckets of people: first are the 2/3 of people with zero experience who self taught enough to get in, and they learn a tremendous amount of practical skills; second are the 1/3 of people with experience who do say things along those lines, and it's likely true because Codesmith's is a bootcamp aimed at helping people with no to little experience. The 1/3 of experienced people probably shouldn't go to Codesmith to learn skills but the 2/3 of not experienced people do find it incredibly valuable.
At Formation (disclosure: co-founder, not a bootcamp, work with experienced engineers) we have seen a slightly increased demand from bootcamp grads who can't find jobs, and our outcomes remain very strong, but we are targeting top tier companies and it's not for everyone. There…
Oh yeah the average time is somewhere 6ish months from starting (?). And the range is anywhere from 1 month to 12 months. I never said it's fast and depends on a lot of factors. Another major one is part time vs full time. Some people spend 50 hours a week on Formation and some 10 hours a week. People can also usually pause depending on their life. It's really drastically different from a bootcamp and much more like a personal trainer analogy.
I don't think anyone here is an idiot, no.
Remember all those sports card price magazines and pokemon card price magazines and beanie baby price magazines, that are all gone... they only survive if the underlying thing survives, and many of them have been accused of inflating the value of the cards and of the beanie babies to keep the hype going.
According to Crunchbase (I can't disclose confidential non-public info): Rithm is backed by Slow Ventures and Codesmith is backed by a serial entrepreneur, film producer, and investor Chad Troutwine.
We publish some salary data of outcomes on our website and have for a while.
Happy to try to answer these questions, they are extremely reasonable questions:
“average percentage of students that finds a job within 3-6 months of program”
\- I'm not sure what this means. Of STARTING Formation or of when? Everyone starts Formation at a different…
First, SwitchUp's "data" intake form hasn't been updated since 2020 according to [archive.org](https://archive.org) ([https://web.archive.org/web/\*/https://www.switchup.org/write-review](https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.switchup.org/write-review)) and still promises a chance to win a $500 / $100 gift card for submitting a review. Who got those and when and how do you have a chance to win them? The Additional Survey they rely on for data hasn't been updated since 2020/2021: [https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/YMTFNWK](https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/YMTFNWK). Their latest major report is from 2018: [https://www.switchup.org/rankings/coding-bootcamp-survey](https://www.switchup.org/rankings/coding-bootcamp-survey)
I never once criticized the validity of the content on these sites. I'm saying the sites themselves are biased... you mention VC funding repeatedly... both of these sites…
BloomTech is formerly Lambda School and changed names as a result of a trademark lawsuit. Their founder, Austen, is a natural marketer and grew the school way too fast. I have thoughts here but they are just opinions and not relevant. BloomTech in its current form is nothing like Lambda School so the past reviews and bad press are somewhat irrelevant.
CourseReport is a supporting member of CIRR and accepts payments from bootcamps to promote them. Switch Up makes money by referring people to specific bootcamps. Career Karma also pays fees to refer people to specific bootcamps. So all three are biased as their success depends on the bootcamp industries success and you have at their content through that lens.
CIRR is another irrelevant source nowadays because no one is in them. If a bootcamp takes part in CIRR you can trust the numbers they report to CIRR. But CIRR's most recent standard…
Formation isn’t a bootcamp with lessons and instructors. Our Fellows do 2 to 6 hours long sessions a week in groups of 3 to 6 people (or 1-1 mocks) and those are led my industry mentors who are mostly independent senior, staff, and principal engineers from top tier companies like Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, over 100 mentors likes this. The sessions are scheduled every week just for you from scratch and on specific topics you need to work on, or 1-1 mock interviews run exactly like real interviews.
Our mentors are well respected engineers and most are doing it to help with our mission of helping people from non tradition and underrepresented backgrounds level up.
I think they are generally similar yeah in that the materials are similar and they move at similar paces, and you should look at the day to day. Codesmith has a very tight community of awesome people as it's a bit smaller than HR. HR has a fantastic alumni network as well and it's much larger than Codesmith's but I feel like Codesmith alumni really "stay in the family".... just look at how many alumni come back in some capacity to teach or help out... almost every instructor at Codesmith WENT to Codesmith. People aside, Codesmith has really figured out the resume/job hunt process that works and has scaled to like 150-200 simultaneous students or so. Launch School's Capstone is in my opinion stronger but they take like 30 people at a time.
When it comes to HR vs Codesmith I often ask people's timeframes and their goals because both are solid options. Codesmith is slightly better if you…
What are you using to judge that Codesmith is the clear #1? Have you looked into smaller programs like Rithm and Launch School Capstone. Rithm has very small class sizes directly taught by seasoned instructors. Launch School Captone projects are very similarly designed but blow Codesmith OSP out of the water in terms of time spent.
Depending on what you are looking for Codesmith is likely a contender for the top choice, but curious what "consensus" you are basing that statement off of. Reddit is full of anonymous people who come and go. Codesmith currently has 50+ previous students on staff as Fellows and many more as instructors, and how do you know a bunch of "alumni" on here aren't also on payroll and leave that out?
Formation hasn't worked with or talked to any Launch School Capstone grads because so I can't compare. They have very small cohorts and are less frequent.
Launch Schools projects though are way more in depth than the Codesmith OSPs (anyone from Codesmith check them out and don't trust me!) but mostly because they spend a long time on them.
\-This is an example: [https://tailslide-io.github.io/#landing](https://tailslide-io.github.io/#landing)
\-Note the pages and pages of proper documentation
\-An entire GitHub company for the project with 10 repos.
\-An extremely thorough case study with pages and pages of well organized write up!
Yeah so my understanding is that Phil confirms the information you provide him about the specifics of what you told the company, and doesn't openly add additional context about Codesmith and what it is etc... or correct the dates/role you claimed.
When I do reference calls for Fellows, which is rare, I always explain what Formation is and people find a lot of value in me comparing someone to the hundreds and thousands of people I've worked with across my career and they don't care at all if the person has a specific number of years of work experience.
Like if a Formation Fellow was like "Michael, I told ABC that I did this OSP for 3 months from Jan to March and I was the lead", and the person worked on this OSP for 6 weeks but I confirmed that... it would be unethical to me and I would never do that. Even if the information was correct, I would feel a duty to check the information firs…
This is not me \^\^. I only post from my real account with my name on it. I have access to Formation's account for ads, and I have one throwaway account to follow people who troll me and then block me (hence I can't see their posts) so I can identify patterns in their posts but I don't post from it. I've also said this many times and if you were around here for long enough you would believe me.
I've seen at Facebook what happens when people jump to conclusions and yell loudly about their unsubstantiated beliefs as if they are facts and it was not great around the last elections and with COVID misinformation (which was after I left but was the same patterns).
We need a world where people give sources, evidence, and actual examples so that other people can then discuss the interpretation of the sources if they disagree with the statements, instead of pointless back and forth yelling pers…
Hi! It depends a lot on your experience and two paths:
One option is the career accelerator bucket of programs. Like Formation, Outco, Interview Kickstart, Pathrise. Disclosure: I'm the co-founder of Formation. At Formation, most people we work with have work experience but have some people with CS degrees (or are graduating soon) who are DS&A heavy and aiming for new grad FAANG roles, and I think it's a good fit for that. Although you should be starting to apply and interview very soon because it's the new grad hiring cycle right now! Formation doesn't have any veteran benefits so it might not be a good fit, but check out these programs.
If you don't have any internships and are not aiming for a FAANG/top-tier company that is CS-fundamentals heavy then I would recommend looking at a bootcamp. A lot of bootcamps start from scratch, so veteran benefits or not, I would consider a program…
I already offered to do a call with you, and suggested you do real research about Formation before defaming me and the company. Instead you are making up things you believe to be true with no evidence whatsoever and yelling more and more loudly about them to make them feel more and more true. Just like this subreddit is a bubble around bootcamps, thought bubbles exist and no one is immune, not me, not you.
What evidence do you have the user was banned from Reddit?
I have a spreadsheet and documentation of 200 alumns and it's pretty clear. Whether they are told to lie or not is seperate, but the raw data is clear. I suggest you do the same exercise before refuting this point.
RE: FAANG I agree there is a problem with inclusivity and that's why Formation's mission is to fix that. FAANG prioritize consistency and calibration. So they are pattern matching you against others to make sure…
Every Codesmith alumni I've worked with at Formation (15+) has been a really fantastic person. Hard working, professional, well rounded, collaborative.
I've spoken to a lot of people and only a handful of loud people on here believe the mid-level senior level thing. They all understand that there is a difference between like mid-level Google vs mid-level Capital One (I think a senior at Capital One is an entry level at Google, and a "Master Engineer" is senior at Google).
They are running through a playbook of "how you create an OSP project", which templates you use for Medium, website, slack posts... everyone knows the "Sponsored talks from Single Sprout" are kind of a joke, but they do what they are supposed to do because they see it work for previous alumni.
Some of the loud people on here are actually just trolls or employees, there are also a small number of people with multiple…
Yeah CIRR does two things:
1. Sets a standard and set of rules and definitions everyone agrees to follow
2. Requires reports to get audited
CIRR is a business league, founded by SkillsFund (now Ascend) and supported by a Course Report.
The results themselves are meant to have high integrity and I trust the numbers. BUT it doesn't mean the whole process and the rules don't have biases in them.
CIRR represents the bootcamp industry, it's a business league with the charter of supporting the industry the members are in. So it's in CIRR's interest for bootcamps to succeed, it's in Ascend's interest for bootcamps to succeed and for students to get loans from them. It's in Course Reports interest for bootcamps to succeed and get page views on their review website and higher valued sponsorships, it's bootcamps interest because more enrollments = more business.
People reading my comments: C…
You can look at [Formation.dev](https://Formation.dev) (disclosure, I'm a co-founder). We aren't a bootcamp and we don't explicitly teach classes... we're more like a personal trainer to work with you on your fundamentals and get you in good shape. We have a pretty strict/high bar to make sure people are ready to work on the fundamentals as a pathway to a top tier job and aren't there for the wrong reasons.
And yes, we pay our engineers FAANG-level/top tier compensation and try to attract the top talent mentors in the industry, so that's a good point about having good mentorship and it does cost a lot.
I have zero affiliation with Codesmith. This subreddit is really Codesmith heavy so the topic comes up on a daily basis disproportionately more than any program for it's size. As one of the top program, this makes sense I think. I'll explain the context for why I know so much about Codesmith in particular after given broader context for others reading... how I know so much about Codesmith is an interesting story though!
My story: I worked at Facebook in California from 2009 to 2017, straight out of school from Canada all the way to E7 principal engineer in 5 years. Company grew from about 200 engineers to 10,000 engineers and I did a ton of interviews, helped grow people's careers and really saw pretty much people of every background imaginable at/interview at Facebook... so after leaving, took a break and then helped start Formation ([formation.dev](https://formation.dev)) to help peop…
Sorry to hear about your experiences. I wanted to add some thoughts at the industry level, not to support or attack the post or to defend app academy but just some thoughts comparing them to the industry because I feel like several complaints are industry wide complaints as well.
- The gender ratio in tech sucks. At FAANG it's about 25% female and non-binary.
- Top bootcamps with super long hours make this so much worse and are really non inclusive. HR and Codesmith have 11 hour days. How can a parent not find that intimidating? How can someone living paycheck to paycheck afford to not have any other time to work? They appeal to unattached, ambitious people who have the savings to do them, or people who otherwise have the supportive life circumstances to do it. And this unfortunately is not a represetative bunch of our society.
- A lot of bootcamps that are operated as schools seem to h…
Yeah it's a good point that with COVID we've forgotten the intensity of the commute in addition to already long hours. Their in-person cohort had applications opened beyond the deadline so I suspect many people feel this way too.
I'm concerned the staff will want to go in person too. I help run Formation and it's been a blessing we can hire some incredibly talented people across the country to help make Formation awesome. And if we were limited to just San Francisco, it would be very hard to find such amazing people in a smaller pool who also wants to commute every day. Very curious if they end of going hybrid with their staff, while requiring students to be in the office 11 hours a a day. At the end of the day the staff are key... you aren't paying $20K to work with some friends through some online materials.
But they leased a nice office in Manhattan (the most expensive real estate…
Some companies are freezing, but at Formation we're seeing people get hired and interviewing at dozens of top tier companies, so while some of the bigger names are frozen, most are not.
There is more of a shift to experienced engineers, and less risk taking with no-experience people (I've heard from students that are recent grads from Codesmith for example that they are having a harder time getting interviews than students in the past for those with no experience, but the people with experience are getting interviews and strong offers still). At Formation, we are also seeing a bit of a shift. For example, a company might interview someone for senior and they didn't meet the bar, but in the past they would down level to mid-level and now they are just not making an offer at all. So a slight "tightening" rather than full blown freezes.
On the no-experience side, at Formation we're surp…
Which sentiments are misleading are why? Sorry for pushing you so much, it's not personal, but just because someone yells loudly "this is misleading", "this is fake", "this is misinformation" it doesn't make it so, and yelling more and more loudly doesn't make that more and more true.
It would be more useful for everyone to go through point by point, provide evidence, provide sources, challenge me and ask me what my sources are and why, etc... I'm very open to debating details of anything you think is misleading and we could have a great discussion about that on the thread.
Sophie makes it a point to have investors and advisors that staunchly disagree with each other on our team at Formation because having productive debates and looking at things from different angles can help the team get to the best conclusions.
I'm not just Googling and declaring my feelings on here... my sources…
There are definitely way more jobs than developers. The economy is very volatile so there are hiring freezes at some companies, and layoffs at others, but overall there are a lot of jobs and more engineers needed than there are engineers.
The problem is that not all engineers are the same and needs are the same. Senior engineers can have 10X, 100X impact over junior ones, but cost maybe 2-3X a junior engineer, so the demand for them is even higher. Whereas there is kind of a log-jam of bootcamp grads with very little experience, ready to contribute 1X for a reasonable salary, all vying for the same junior spots, and on paper all look the same. So it's more like a traffic jam where things aren't moving just because of too much traffic!
My advice right now for bootcamp grad (I'm bias, Formation works with a lot of Bootcamp grads) is to keep working on fundamental skills so that you can b…
I wish I had time to do an AMA or something but last time I did one it went crazy and took up my whole day. I would love to share my advice for bootcamp grads job hunting right now. Maybe people can comment on here with some questions and topics and I'll try to do quick write up of thoughts targeted towards the questions? I think I'm late to the party on this thread so I don't expect anyone to see this haha.
There is hope! There are people hiring! But there are hundreds of millions of people in the country, thousands of miles apart, and wildly different experiences for everyone (which is why \~five anecdotal comments on Reddit mean absolutely nothing to make decisions off of)
My background: 8 years at Facebook, 2009-2017. Intern -> E7 principal engineer in 5 years. Interviewed \~450 people. Mentored dozens. Number 1 volume code committer of all time (and still going strong https://gith…
\+1. Formation isn't a bootcamp but I use my real name. The Rithm folks also always disclose, as does the Launch School founder. Disclosing and being transparent opens you up for attacks, but I would give a little extra credibility to those putting themselves out there :D (bias: I'm patting myself on the back here hahaha). I get attacked by a lot of new accounts out of nowhere and it's really damaging to the community.
I'm here with my real name and my real photo for everyone to see and judge and only comment and post from this account.
I refuse to play games with fake accounts. I worked at Facebook for 8 years and I've see the kind of problems that happen with the world with fake news and all that, and I adamantly believe in being open and transparent and will challenge against any bullies who try to push me around because of it.
I have access to Formation's Reddit account for ad management and I have one new throwaway account I made to follow the accounts that block me to find trends and collect some data for the future... every single one is a Pro-Codesmith new accounts with the same patterns and might even be the same person.... we'll see what the algorithms think after collecting enough data.
I have no idea who the other people here are, even the ones claiming to be currently at Formation 🤷♂️…
Anecdotal salaries do more damage than good. You shouldn't be basing any decisions off of anonymous one-off salaries, especially when most programs publish some amount of aggregated data.
Someone at Formation got a $550K offer a few weeks ago, that doesn't mean Formation is the best for everyone or for you.
Hey! The YOE is years of software engineering work experience. So in this bucket people still typically have a related degree + experience, or a bootcamp, or self taught for \~2 years, it's not zero-zero.
We have a handful of people who truly have zero experience and are only self taught and we decided to accept them in lieu of a bootcamp... this person specifically was looking at Codesmith and went to Formation instead: [https://formation.dev/blog/fellow-spotlight-brian-do/](https://formation.dev/blog/fellow-spotlight-brian-do/) and then this person did Formation AFTER Codesmith: [https://formation.dev/blog/fellow-spotlight-chris-guizzetti/](https://formation.dev/blog/fellow-spotlight-chris-guizzetti/)
I would almost always recommend doing a bootcamp first and you are on the right track... like I said, everyone is unique and we treat you that way.
Hi, I'm sorry you feel that way and hopefully we can continue talking productively and positively. Sophie's life mission is to increase diversity in big tech because for products to work for everyone that have to be represented by everyone and Formation prides itself in having roughly 2/3 of Fellows from backgrounds underrepresented in tech.
I'm more than happy to talk about the reasons for the concerns you brought up, not to counter them, but to add more detail for those reading. Sophie, myself, and our team work constantly on making Formation the best it can be, endless conversations dissecting every detail from the ground up. So when you say we are "hawking a glorified interview prep company" you are personally insulting the thousands of hours we put into our work without a very thoughtful discussion of the pros and cons of Formation.
I'm sorry if my tone was miscommunicated but no…
No worries! I would practice the interviews themselves.
PRAAMP, some Discord channels, are a way to do some free mocks that are not super great, since they are peers and not senior engineers.
[Interviewing.io](https://Interviewing.io) you can pay to do mock interviews a la carte. Definitely not cheap, but cheaper than a more intense program.
Career accelerators like Formation (disclosure, that's me!), Interview Kickstart, Outco, Pathrise, Scalar, are focused on getting interview ready as well and building skills needed to interview - both technical and not.
We are raising venture capital to hire the best people in the industry to help us build the best training platform in the world. We are building something incredibly unique and complex and I would love to share more about as we grow, but it's not easy or cheap and takes large investment with long term returns.
We have several engineers with \~10 years FAANG experience. All of our recruiters are 5+ year ex-FAANG and our head of recruiting was 10 years at FB running the internship program. Our director of career services ran career services at Triplebyte and several bootcamps.
We pay these people competitively and also with stock that will grow in value over time as they build and contribute value to Formation.
When you start from scratch, raising VC funding is a great way to seed the funding needed to accomplish this, and if you are going to raise funding, why not aim for the best inve…
I wholeheartedly agree with you and spend my time every day helping people find the best companies for their personal goals and situations. This above is general advice for most people that I haven't met and I'm always happy to chat through options with people!
I'm happy to talk about Formation and briefly answer the questions, it's off topic.
You are new here (your account is 2.5 weeks old) so quick introduction, Hi 👋, I'm one of the more frequent contributors to this sub and try to give people the perspective of someone with 8 years at FB, E7 level principal engineer, done 450+ interviews at FB - from interns to directors, was the top contributor of all time when leaving and they created an senior engineer archetype for me, and now I help run a training platform aiming to help increase diversity in tech by leveling the field for people from non traditional backgrounds and have worke…
Salaries and compensation will vary wildly based on: location, experience, how people do the math for their offers (trust me... people use different math for stock, bonuses, and benefits and it can be all over the place), and of course: a splash of luck.
I've said this many times now but your salary out of a bootcamp means nothing about your career in tech. The canonical example I give is that a $100K Dropbox Ignite apprenticeship is much better than a mid level job at an agency or bank, and possibly even an entry level job at a top tier company (I would still take entry level FAANG for the highly motivated people).
Let's say you have no experience. An apprenticeship at Dropbox, or another FAANG, will teach you very strong fundamental skills for how to work day to day as an engineer. Then you can apply all your hustle to crushing it, converting full time and loving your job and feeling…
Hi! You can sign up for Formation Day as well if you want, it does legitimately have limited availability and there are already thousands of applicants so there's no guarantees there. It's a unique day of some larger sessions, and some 1-1 pair sessions with feedback and you'll get to use our tools and platform in a much more limited/introductory way. So overall, I would say it's a fairly independent event from day-to-day normal Formation.
I work with many ex-FAANG recruiters directly on my team and many more in the industry. I also did 400+ interviews at Facebook, and work with colleagues that have thousands. So I can give my view, which is obviously biased by that background, but is hopefully useful for that perspective.
1. Many recruiters do immediately ignore bootcamp grads. But the reason is the same as why they ignore a lot of COMP SCI GRADS resumes. They all look the same and they can't figure out how to differentiate them. We would go to a recruiting fair at a college and we would get 300 internship resumes, having to choose 20 people for interviews then next week. All the resumes have the SAME projects, SAME courses, so what do you do? How would you differentiate. There's no time to go through everyone's portfolios. So you look for referrals, look for past internship experience, look for grades sometimes when all…
Thanks for civilly discussing too, like very much appreciate talking about this from different angles!
Yeah my response above was the two things I didn't feel middle of the road on, but I very much appreciate the hustle mentality as well. I don't sit with the "CS degree snobs" that a degree is strictly better than anything.
I also strongly agree with the argument about performance but that Codesmith grads are performing well at what Stanford/Harvard grads would call 2nd or 3rd tier companies. If Codesmith advertised itself as "Get the outcomes of 2nd tier CS school, paying the price of a 3rd tier school and in only 12 weeks!" I think that would still be appealing to MANY people.
Instead Codesmith advertises "Codesmith is a team dedicated to democratizing higher education for a new era - with graduate outcomes of an elite grad school but online and for 1/10th of the cost" [Link](https:…
The Codesmith in person cohort in October looks really interesting. I have ZERO inside info on how it's coming together but if in-person works for you, this might be a great option.
I've also heard about how hard it is for people with zero experience in this recent 2-3 cohorts(?, like the last 2-3 months) to get jobs.
I have many years of industry experience and a deep network across the top companies, and we've been through quite the rollercoaster right now. The end of 2021 and the beginning of 2022 were somewhat crazy times where it was fairly easy to get a job and I expect those outcomes to be very high from Codesmith and others. Lots of people talking about how amazing program X or Y was and how everyone got jobs, etc... and then all of those who read these posts and signed up, are not having the same luck.
Right now we are returning to a more normal market with some changes. This…
Bootcamp Alumni: we are doing the first ever free 🎉 Formation Day open house on October 1st and I wanted to invite you all to join!
Hi everyone, I've gotten to know some awesome people on here over the past six months and it's cool to see them already finishing up bootcamps I recommended to them way back when!
I wanted to invite bootcamp alumni to join Formation Day on Saturday, October 1st at 9am PST! It's a **FREE** jam-packed day of FAANG-level interview prep. Our team is putting a lot of work into creating a really useful day for people and we hope you can attend and get a lot of value out of it!
This event is generally targeted at people who are working already and exploring changing jobs, or are bootcamp or computer science graduates who have been interviewing actively. It is unfortunately not meant for people looking to get into bootcamps, but as always, I'm happy to give my 2…
There are a lot of benefits to this too though, I just want to make it clear I'm not judging this but just pointing it out so you can find a style that works for you.
Springboard for example, has all outside mentors, and they have a lot of weaknesses with that approach too because if the content is a bit dated, and the mentors are not senior enough or experienced enough teaching, it doesn't work great.
Rithm caps classes at 18 because the leaders want to directly teach students personally, but they aren't as aggressive as Codesmith on the job hunting part.
You don't have to pseudo necessarily, are they telling you that?
This is the Formation method. (disclosure: I'm the co-founder there but I am not soliciting you to join or anything, we work with people much farther along in their journeys - after bootcamps and after working, just a relevant resource to help you)
[https://formation.dev/blog/the-engineering-method/](https://formation.dev/blog/the-engineering-method/)
We don't have the word pseudo code anywhere in there, but we also don't suggest to start writing final code until later in the process.
This ^^^
The advice to talk more though isn’t enough on its own though. Talking more about your ideas is a good starting point to go from zero to not zero but if you want to get to 1 you need to approach algorithms problems with a solid mental framework. We (Formation) have one called “The Engineering Method” and there are many others, but following a pattern can help you tremendously instead of whack a mole talking, debugging, and pseudo coding.
Yeah I'm also everywhere at Formation too, I just have no life :P
I worked at Facebook for 8 years and saw a lot of fake news stuff and I believe in transparency and empowering people to have the information needed to judge their sources, so I use my real name yeah. Same name on LinkedIn :D
1. It's unique to you. So like for some/most people a $100K apprenticeship at Dropbox is better than a $130K job at a marketing agency. If you are coming in at zero, don't pretend you are at a mid or senior level. Be the best darn junior engineer you can be and in the right environment you will accelerate your skills quickly and in a supported way. I always want people to ideally align the role with their passions. If you love gaming, try working at your favorite gaming company. If you love photography, maybe on Google Photos, or Pinterest. It will help make your work more fulfilling and your intuit…