The courses are $1500 each (currently a discount offered)
Formation interview prep? You can get a $2500 a month membership, or you can pay $5000 upfront and an additional fee from $0 to $15000 depending on the increase in base salary over your current (or previous) base salary. The variable fee is currently structured so that if you don't get a job at all and leave, you don't pay anything extra, and the typical person is paying around $5000 additional (i.e. $10K total).
The interview prep does not 'teach' anything so you have to come in with already hirable skills and it's purely focused on preparing you for job interviews to increase your pass rate by practicing on our platform and by getting mentorship and feedback from our hundreds of industry mentors.
So just want to make sure everyone reading this doesn't mistake what we do for a bootcamp alternative given the context. We make mo…
My company doesn't offer training or education.
Our main product is an interview prep platform to help you receive practice and mentorship for your upcoming engineering interviews.
We also offer short and cheap AI training courses for existing experienced engineers.
The typical flow would be Person -> Bootcamp -> Job -> at least 2 years -> Formation.
Hi, thanks for sharing a well thought out argument.
\- Lying on the resume is a tough topic and some blame goes with with the people hiring. The snowball of "6 YOE for entry level jobs" is kind of the result of both sides. Hire a bootcamp grad with no YOE for a job needing 0 to 2 YOE, get burned, list 2YOE+ next time, bootcamp grad lies more, increase again to 4YOE, etc...
They are getting burned because the hiring process inherently is flawed and requires some amount of honesty, but there cost of mis-hiring is you fire the person and move on and it's a rational market. If it was too costly to fire someone, they would spend more vetting the people.
So the way I see it - both sides are optimizing for their market conditions and Codesmith grads lying just enough to get through and doing just good enough on the jobs to not trigger the snowball is the market trying to balance everything o…
It's important to note that Hack Reactor and Tech Elevator and Galvanize are brands that consolidate all under Stride Learning. And this has happened over the past two years so it's really hard to judge anything about the past.
My understanding is that enrollment is not good at all of them and that all of them are fairly low priority for Stride.
Codesmith is not a viable option right now. It's down to like 4 core staff members and then can't even consistently spell their founders name right in blogs and marketing anymore. It's turned into a joke.
Launch School has maintained its team and quality but even they are cutting back a bit in 2026 cohorts and their most recent placements have been lower than historical highs.
But of all the options Launch School is the only one I consider viable right now.
My opinion is you are making a financially irresponsible decision paying $22,500 for…
Checking in on Codesmith a year later. After recommending Codesmith for 2 years I stopped recommending them a year ago because of massive staff loss, program cutbacks, and tanking outcomes. A year later, things are even worse 😭.
I'll try to summarize some history briefly and then get into the updates. I've been following Codesmith (and a handful of other programs) very closely for years now. I've spoken to dozens of students, staff, alumni, their CEO and have a very good idea what's going on. Codesmith doesn't like me. I've offered to help them, I've reviewed their students projects, I've pointed out security flaws, etc... but they see me as a "jealous competitor". I'm the founder of an interview-prep platform that has nothing to do with Codesmith and works with a bunch of Codesmith ALUMNI in the FUTURE job searches - all of whom thing we are very complementary. But nonetheless, I have…
Yeah currently yes, things change quickly though. Launch School takes a long time and isn't a quick-bootcamp, but it could be a viable alternative for career switchers with lots of time to transition. Other bootcamps could still make sense in specific situations, but even the former best ones are falling apart, like I can't recommend Codesmith under ANY circumstances at this point in time.
50% of Codesmith and Launch School grads get jobs within 6 months to 1 year old graduation so people get jobs.
I think the more unique thing about you Is that you were a truck driver and didn't have professional desk job experience before.
I would guess that the percentage of truck drivers that go to bootcamps that then get a job after within 6 months is probably quite low. but I do think that if they have the same persistence you have, they probably would get a job and the percentage of anyone who has that persistence is also quite low.
It's the only place I recommend but it's largely because the process to get into Capstone involves such an extensive vetting period that they have a track record of only admitting people it's likely to work for. If other bootcamps did that, then I would be more open to recommending.
People used to talk about how hard Codesmith was to get into and now they have reduced the number of steps and people get in much more quickly... and I have seen hardly any placements in my analysis in the past few months.... amazing how quickly quality degrades when you lower the bar.
So if Launch School lowered the bar significantly and outcomes dropped more then I would be equally concerned. Right now they are on the border of 50% so they are getting close.
We have some Codesmith and Launch School data.
Codesmith: 2021 grads -> 80% in 6 months, 2022 -> 70% in 6 months, 2023 -> 40% in 6 months, 2024 -> unknown but I estimate (not fact) 25% in 6 months
Launch School: 2021 grads -> 95% in 6 months, 2022 -> 88% in 6 months, 2023 -> 75% in 6 months, 2024 -> \~50-60% in 6 months.
Clearly some people are getting jobs, and you can argue Launch School is still 'more likely than not' getting a job.
It's like going to the hottest restaurant in town from two years ago that was always fully booked. Now you go and the staff all turned over, quality degrading, no one is there, and you are showing up as if it's the best restaurant in town.
Maybe it's still your favorite restaurant, but you have to acknowledge the party has moved on.
Yeah that's also a good point and on my Codesmith comparison, they have been silent in 2025 and my estimates show worse numbers than 2024. So we'll see at the end of the year...
If Launch School's updated project and internships model is working then that would be great to see concrete changes result in better placements.
So bad we've heard a lot of hot air from bootcamps about their changes but haven't seen many changes improve placements.
Launch School H2 2024 grad outcomes. Placement rate within 6 months is lower than 2023 grads (50% versus 75%). Note that the denominator is all people who start, so will do comparisons in the body.
Resharing the original post: [https://www.reddit.com/r/launchschool/comments/1n8s8mr/cohort\_2408\_salary\_outcomes\_6month/](https://www.reddit.com/r/launchschool/comments/1n8s8mr/cohort_2408_salary_outcomes_6month/)
**As usual Launch School is very clear and transparent about their analysis so I really don't have to read between the lines, you should read their original post.**
**INDUSTRY COMMENTARY:**
In the bootcamps world, Launch School and Codesmith are the two remaining bootcamps with consistent six figure outcomes over a decade, so it's really the main comparison.
Codesmith hasn't given any numbers for a while so we'll extrapolate there's based on the patterns.
**Also note that C…
Good question. I don't know anything extra, but it appears they acquired App Academy's "brand" and not the company. The entire website is just a wrapper on Coding Temple and it's entirely managed by them now.
Now how is Coding Temple surviving?
1. PRICE POINT
It's notable that the most expensive bootcamps are the ones that closed, because people aren't paying $22,500 to go to a bootcamp right now. Those expensive bootcamps survive off a small number of people - dozens - joining and paying that and they spend a lot of time woo'ing those people to win them over.
TripleTen, CodingTemple, Springboard, NuCamp, are cheaper programs, people are less upset if it doesn't work, and people who were going to pay App Academy $20K are instead paying CodingTemplate $5K-$9K.
2. CHANGING PROGRAMS
The surviving programs pivot faster to the latest headlines. These places all offer "cyber security" pr…
there isn't any universally recommended boot camp and there never was for me personally at least.
I used to recommend three rithm, codesmith and launch school.
Rithm closed. but it's the program I recommended most broadly because it was pretty well-rounded for most people.
Launch School still doing okay, A cohort cut back but generally they have the resources to keep making improvements. They have a different philosophy, their website talks about being this low way to career change and if you're the right person then it remains the best place for that fit.
Codesmith is like falling apart with like hardly any staff left complaints of disorganization. they just advertised for one of their projects on their LinkedIn page and the sign up is completely broken and I can't even try it out and when I point that out they delete my comment instead of actually fixing the problem. it's like fal…
Everyone has bias but I don't think the channel is biased against bootcamps.
During the boot camp boom every other post was someone with a $100K job telling everyone who would listen to go to a bootcamp.
Now it's the same people telling everyone to not go to a bootcamp.
I personally told tons of people to go to Rithm, Codesmith and Launch School during the peak because the market was open to giving bootcamp grads a job.
I'm bias but I'm just following the data and facts and trying to advise accordingly.
1 YOE is taking a long time right now overall in the market and at Formation but I don't have exact averages because each person has different commitments and goals and it's not meaningful to average all people.
Additionally, we have people that had 1 YOE that joined like 2 years ago that it took 2 years to get a job... but the market when they joined was different then. So it's even harder to try to average people who started at different time because the market has been changing. It's like a bootcamps touring 2023 CIRR number when they very well know things are different now... I feel that kind of thing is misleading.
So to help advise I would need to know:
1. what is the 1-2 years of experience and what kind of company?
2. have you been promoted yet?
3. are you getting interviews either directly from recruiters or from applications?
If you work at a solid company, commit fully to F…
Here is an analysis of my commentary purely about Codemsith "sporadic but consistent"
"Here’s an unbiased summary of Michael Novati’s commentary on Codesmith over the past few years—covering the topics he addressed, frequency, tone, and the overall vibe:
---
Topics & Themes
1. Curriculum Stagnation & Slow AI Integration
Michael pointed out that Codesmith’s curriculum has remained largely unchanged over the years. For example, in early 2024 he noted:
> "Codesmith's curriculum has been the same for YEARS but in Feb 2024 they added 5 lectures on AI… This is 'not changing'… 12–14 weeks of the same structure they did 5 years ago… I guess they think it's enough to raise prices to $22,500 this year."
---
2. Deteriorating Placement Outcomes
He emphasized a steep decline in graduate outcomes. He shared CIRR-based figures showing that six-month placement dropped from ~90% in 2021 to…
Good question and really you shouldn't take only one person's advice because this industry is full of strong but different opinions.
Formation isn't all me and I'm not really involved in the theoretical aspects either - we have people who are better at that stuff working on that haha.
I work on the platform that powers all the practice, sessions, etc ... and I help people 1-1 with support, job hunting strategy, negotiation etc...
Our general model is that you'll have a core team of support staff that's stable, but that all your sessions are run by independent industry engineers . Each has different backgrounds and different strengths and weaknesses so you actually get a wide range of perspectives and personalities. You'll like some mentors and you won't like others, depending on you.
RE: coding machine. At my level I believe in the professional sports analogy. I plan one position rea…
Launch School Capstone announces cutback from 3 cohorts a year to 2 cohorts a year starting in 2026. Acknowledges tough job market, longer job hunts, and new changes to help people get real work experience though internships and open source commitments to to Firefox and large projects.
[Source](https://www.reddit.com/r/launchschool/comments/1moix9n/capstone_changes_announcement_for_2026/)
Note this is unofficial, personal commentary and opinions on these changes:
**SUMMARY OF CHANGES:**
* **Schedule change:** Moving from 3 cohorts/year to 2 (Spring & Fall only) to focus more resources on each group
* **AI Engineering expanded:** Now 2 full weeks dedicated to AI Engineering (model selection, evaluations, ingestion/retrieval strategies)
* **More experience opportunities:**
* Expanded Open Source Initiatives (OSI) - last cohort got everyone patches into Firefox
* New internship op…
Well I wouldn't assume it's doing that well business-wise, I don't think any bootcamp is doing well right.
The thing Nucamp has done very well, leveraging Ludo's strengths from Microsoft experience, is making connections with partners and governments to pay for aspects of the program.
But yeah for some reasons I always felt like Nucamp was advertised as Udemy + live mentors, rather than a legit pathway to a job, but I might be wrong.
Codesmith advertises itself as an 'outcomes of an elite graduate program for 1/10th the cost'.
Springboard is where I would be upset with because they license all their content, which is like Colt Steele's Udemy course + Rithm's original curriculum + mentors but charge like 2-3X Nucamp.
They pivoted to doing this because the next CIRR report for 2024 students will be out in April 2026 and they want to give some idea of what's going on, but their reports are very problematic to me.
Why?
CIRR reports account for people who graduate in a specific time window. 2023 report means people who graduated in 2023 and got offers.
The reports Codesmith is publishing are offers in a specific time window but from any cohort. Meaning people who got those 102 offers could have graduated in 2022, 2023, 2024, 2021 even.
For all you know many of them are 2022 grads who took 1.5 years to get a job?
I actually like salary lift as a metric but they are confusing things by providing these reports side by side with CIRR reports with completely different definitions.
I used to give more benefit of the doubt, but last year this time they were defending against word of mouth of reports of de…
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy· edited★ FEATURED
I dunno, you seem to now want to be collaborative and that's on you. You never mentioned anything about stating that we do this to make money and I hope that's your opinion and you aren't starting that as a fact because it's provably untrue on our side and I can't see how you have facts to prove that yourself. So if you had this opinion the whole time, you are debating disingenuously.
I started the conversation with 'I'll talk to you if you accept the facts' because the facts are important.
The average person we work with has 5 years of industry work experience as a SWE. Why would they put a mentorship community Fellowship on their LinkedIn as a job or resume when they currently work at Google or Amazon?
It makes no sense whatsoever and why would they not do Formation if the name changed?
Like the facts are abundantly clear that very few percentage of people put Formation publicly…
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy· edited★ FEATURED
Here is what AI says to the question: "Is Formation Fellowship a paid job"
"No — Formation is not a paid job, nor does it offer employment. It’s a paid fellowship/training program (focused on interview prep and career coaching), not a salaried position."
Here is what it thinks about Codesmith: "are oslabs engineers paid?"
"Yes - OSLabs does pay engineers in at least one of its key programs"
Like I don't think you'll find anything anywhere that would make a reasonable person think Formation Fellows are paid roles - but acknowledge that edge case people might be confused because of the multiple definitions.
But in Codesmith's case like everything is blatantly twisted to appear that way.
This discrepancy is one of the 3 primary reasons I've been going after Codesmith.
Dictionary definitions aside, what the leaders of these companies do and stand for and their integrity matte…
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
The official on the record answer - we used the word Fellow because our industry doesn't have many competitors: Interview Kickstart and Pathrise. Pathris used the word Fellows so we copied them and used the word Fellow. So that our customers could compare the two familiarly.
I'm not trying to gaslight you but I Googled Fellow and this is the dictionary definition it presented and not any of them say anything about being paid.
The definition for "Fellowship" has two meanings, none of them saying anything about being paid either (I can only attached one screenshot, but pasted:)
1. friendly association, especially with people who share one's interests."they valued fun and good fellowship as the cement of the community"
2. the status of a fellow of a college or society."she held the Faulkner fellowship"
Formation is not affiliated with education/schools/universities and no where in our…
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy· edited★ FEATURED
I'll give you the straight up facts on this if you are willing to accept them. I can prove every one of these statements.
Formation has flaws and this isn't one of them.
FORMATION:
1. A small fraction of Fellows at Formation put it on their LinkedIn.
2. No one says it's paid anywhere. Of the ones that do it's abundantly clear that it's a mentorship program for high performance and not a job.
3. We have not received a single request for a background check for anyone that I'm aware of in the past 5 years for anyone claiming they were employed by Formation.
3. The people who say 2-3+ years have genuinely been at Formation that time and actively participating. Maybe it's terrible they didn't get a job yet, but the timeframe is correct from what I'm aware of.
CODESMITH:
1. In my [reporting end of 2023](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/18cpq98/analysis_of_52_most_recen…
I'm restarting my comment:
Formation is not a bootcamp or generally competing with Codesmith. Codesmith has marketing adds explaining what a for-loop is and assuring you that even if it's too confusing Codesmith is for you. You can't join Formation without industry work experience as a SWE. The closest overlap is the AI program because we're offering AI productivity courses soon and they offer AI leadership courses. But there is very little overlap.
We are harmed if Codesmith declines because because 75%+ of Codesmith grads that join Formation like Formation a lot and it's a wonderfully complementary service.
There's a difference between continuous demonstration of incompetent engineering practices, tons of security issues and such.
I meant that this was the last straw about engineering practices because I had been privately telling them all kinds of problems for a while now and th…
I would do a masters over any bootcamp. Or consider Launch School.
Codesmith and Merit America are entirely different options with no similarities so I would also spend more time trying to understand deeply how these things work if you don't cross them off entirely.
So my personal opinion is to avoid Codesmith at all costs. You can read my history and I'm intimately familiar with their workings for years. I used to recommend people go there all the way up until they had about 50% layoffs and in Feb 2024 shrunk about 75% in their offerings. I was curious then and paused recommendations to see how they adjusted.
Unfortunately they didn't adjust well and instead of just removing my recommendation I changed it to actively recommend not going in fall 2024
The short reason is that they are imploding in my opinion. They have a skeleton crew of full time staff left. All of their full time i…
2/2 Fullstack - they have traded hands from Zovio to SimpliLearn so it's really a front on top of SimpliLearns business. I don't know enough about it but I suspect similar to Hack Reactor it's kind of like floating around with most of the below-surface running generically within SimpliLearn.
Flatiron - they spun back off WeWork and I haven't heard anything either.
General Assembly - they actually are still chugging along and they are focusing more on B2B upskilling than. You can read more about their parent [https://www.adeccogroup.com/investors/annual-report](https://www.adeccogroup.com/investors/annual-report) and they actually ARE mentioned often as a potential business boom. But not as a bootcamp, as a B2B upskilling platform.
Launch School - yeah the only actually honest bootcamp left that discloses 6 months after a cohort graduates how each student is doing and has still done t…
Alright these are my well informed PERSONAL OPINIONS UNLESS FACTUAL DATA IS EXPLICITLY MENTIONED BELOW:
Codesmith is the worst of the worst and their "transparent" data is smoke and mirrors and everyone needs to be cautioned about it. I'm taking a hit to my reputation calling them out so aggressively but I'm so morally against what they are doing I can't stand silent. Share with your friends and carefully review my arguments your self - don't listen to them without doing so.
Hack Reactor - they have been fully rolled into Galvanize with Tech Elevator, which was fully rolled into Stride Learning. My understanding from people there is that Stride Learning isn't putting that unit high on the priority list and it's kind of a drag on the company. You can read the investor updates here and see what you think: [https://investors.stridelearning.com/events-and-presentations/default.aspx](https…
Yeah nothing negative invalidates individual experience - good and bad.
But far too many people are looking for confirmation bias and latch onto an individual success story as justification to do a bootcamp they want to go to.
Bootcamps prey on this, because as you said, you referred someone because it worked for you, and this is a strong strategy. It's why every bootcamp asks for referrals for friends.
But you have to zoom out and look at the market right now:
1. Market disappeared for bootcamp grads
2. Failing bootcamps are cutting back and providing worse services (be in Springboard or even a top three like Codesmith and Rithm (shut down).
3. Almost everything about the programs are equal or worse ( when the students need BETTER support.
4. They don't have the cash to invest in making things better so anything marketed to you as a major change is smoke and mirrors - the "change" wa…
I'm seeing similar cuts at Codesmith (in my opinion in judging their staff disappearing and cost cutting measures implemented) and am equally concerned of an implosion.
I'm not sure why these bootcamps don't just wrap up on good terms and call it a day and resort to cutting back so much to survive.
Like is it a game for their replacement execs to show that they can turn around a falling business to boost their resumes? App Academy didn't make it after trying the new CEO approach.
Bootcamps are expensive and impact people's lives... it's not a $100 Udemy course and it's not a $50 Kickstarter... like these are huge time commitments that mess up people's lives.
Anyways thanks for sharing some perspective.
1. I'm a mod of this sub (and I was made a mod by people I don't know)
2. My company requires several years of work experience as a SWE, we don't accept new bootcamp grads or CS grads struggling to get jobs.
3. I make it clear when I'm commenting on behalf of the company (which is rare) and I make it clear when I'm commenting personally if there is some kind of confusion or questioning.
I take your feedback that it can be more clear because it's important to know who you are talking to.
I'm completely not-anonymous to help people judge who I am - this sub has a track record of people using anonymous new accounts to promote bootcamps with attempts to produce "organic content" that is super sketchy. Better to be able to judge than rely on new accounts you have no idea who they are.
My entire life mission is about supporting people bettering themselves. I'm trying to HELP people. A f…
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
I used deep research and deep research sources some reddit threads but I feel like "serious allegations of unethical practices" is a bit extreme, the content was:
1. discussing outcomes
2. discussing resume practices and applying for jobs for people
I'll update the screenshot - I honestly only looked at the IK column and didn't read the others, including Formation hahaha, I'll give it a look and update in a few mins
This has been up for a while but I feel like Outco is dead anyways. Like I think the founders moved on to something else. A number of people have been sued by them (and threatened to be sued) for not paying them after they thought they were eligible for the job guarantee refund and the collectors they talked to didn't seem that organized.
Pathrise also shut down.
I have a business principle that you ruthlessly have to focus on delivering value to people for what they are paying you or you shouldn't exist.
More bootcamps, interview prep programs, immersive, mentorship communities should follow this advice because far too many offer like a $50 Udemy course, add on recent alumni as mentors/teachers, add on intangible benefits like 'community' and charge $20,000.
You might get by if people get really good jobs and credit the intangibles.
But if you aren't trying to deliver value and are…
Yeah it's very small but they have a few mentors who did Coachable earlier on, legit mentors yeah.
Formation is less 1-1 on demand and we don't have 1-1 on demand technical mentorship. You have 4 dedicated non-technical support members on our team, and you do 1-1 mocks, office hours, but most sessions are 3 to 6 person small group sessions.
Interview Kickstart has even larger group sessions and then has some 1-1 thrown in there.
All very different.
Yeah Formation is costly if you are in Canada, so that makes sense and I think it could be an option but it's not a slam dunk if you are very FE oriented (because I think our SD prep is very strong and it's less relevant for FE). You could try it on the 1 week free trial and see but I would only consider if you are focused on the FAANG-level.
Hi, I'm the founder of Formation and Coachable is a competitor so I want to disclose that bias but I'm trying to answer without considering that.
So first off, Launch School you have to do Core first - which is meant for people starting out generally - and THEN you do Capstone.
It's more of a bootcamp model + a long rampup period.
If you feel like your FE work is like Web 1.0 web-dev or 'shopify store' dev then I would consider Launch School.
If you feel like your FE work was real work (which it sounds like it is) then I would consider an interview/career-accelerator like Coachable.
If Coachable is an option, Formation is an option too and I can explain more about it. Interview Kickstart is the third option. Pathrise used to be an option but it closed down.
All three are different.
If you want to stick to Frontend then I would consider Formation only if you want to do FAANG-Fronte…
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
I agree with this point as of June 2025.
We (speaking for Formation now) use a ton of AI for helping people practice and off the shelf ChatGPT is not perfect for learning right now. We have a lot of unique product applications of AI specifically tuned for helping people have effective practice and feedback and fortunately there's enough judgement and taste and nuance in that that it justifies our existing right now haha.
Do Codecademy, consider Launch School Core, and drop Codesmith and get your money back unless your goal is to go through the $22,500 version with dwindling hope of actually getting a job according to their own data.
The primary goal of it is to get you to show up to more Codesmith sessions so that they can indoctrinate you and get you to join the expensive one.
Their former CEO said in a podcast that these sessions were their marketing funnel and that they didn't run ads at the time (now they inundate you with ads as well).
Not a bad idea to put advertising dollars into courses that offer some value! But they are ads for Codesmith that you are paying for.
That's a fair point so I won't attribute you to claiming you are an industry expert and world class industry, but I will attribute Codesmith to saying it about you.
If you don't think it's true and you are employed by Codesmith than you have a responsibility to tell them because they might be false advertising and they should correct it.
My point about the quality. Formation has 200 or something mentors in the system and some are industry legends.
If you think the program's value is collaboration with those people then come on down to Formation because you'll collaborate with a huge range of people, far larger than in that program.
I posted above, but I was infuriated by your Dog's account and I was very mean about the AI program and I'm going to be more cool headed about it because it's not terrible, I'm just critiquing it like I would critique my own work and I want my comments to…
1. Agree the core team/admin team and the instructor team is hardworking, no question there. But Codesmith's codebase is apparently a giant mess that looks like the largest OSP project - which isn't surprising because the people that work on it just graduated Codesmith. I would say the team has tremendous POTENTIAL but the technical people lack the experience to be called talented. Based on some alumni talk that someone told me about where Will tried to explain the Codesmith architecture (in an attempt to learn it himself) and it literally sounded like the worst code I've ever heard of for a 10 year old company that calls itself a tech company, something like deploying the entire codebase to 32 microservices that each ran one of them???
I know this sounds mean but it's just being real. Like every instructor I know that sees Codesmith defend the quality of the code or the legitimacy of…
I'll try to summarize haha:
1. I used to be on them like anything else, pros and cons, and I recommended people go there with Rithm and Launch School.
I was very consistently hard on three things:
\- marketing mid level and senior placements for people with zero experience (which I felt was wrong)
\- marketing their OSP projects as 'equivalent of months of full time SWE work' when they were full of junior problems and most people worked on them for 3-4 weeks
\- their instructors all went to codesmith itself and were promoted up the tree in a pyramid shape so they don't have SWE experience
2. Codesmith didn't see things the same way and framed me as a villain - which I completely ignored and kept doing my thing as a public service to offer my opinions through my lens
3. Throughout that time, former staff, current staff, students, etc... have proactively contacted me and told me ab…
It's the exception, not because it doesn't have troubles from the market too but because they are marketing themselves as the "slow path" to becoming a Software Engineer.
More people will try and few will succeed but they won't be mislead or burned with it.
Now because of this philosophy it hyper optimizes for people making it through Capstone that are actually good fits and they actually get jobs, but it's relatively small compared to typical bootcamps.
But the fact that they have a 70% six month placement rate (accounting for every student, down from 100%) that is quite high when somewhere like Codesmith has a 40% six month placement rate (when including ghosters based on LinkedIn) shows why this slow and stead approach works.
Financially though it works because Launch School is small and founder run. Their founder teaches and helps people.
Codesmith has a bunch of directors and m…
Yeah sure for starting in 2025: rough non-binding, reasonable estimates:
About \~250 people starting in 2025 so far, about 15% or so leave in the trial week.
We had fairly robust starts in January, then tariff threats in particular caused a lot hesitation, and then May -> June things picked back up again.
I would estimate about 5 to 10 people start in a given week?
The number of people in Formation isn't super relevant because the nature of the program scales up and down dynamically - including all of the mentorship.
So this sounds insane but your session matching is BETTER the MORE people there are.
Our team works on the practice content, benchmarks, etc... but the mentors themselves are contractors and we have a very complex algorithms to manage all of this dynamically without much humans.
So more people, better level matching, better time matching, etc...
All of our full tim…
Yes that's also correct. For 2024 placements, early career = harder, Compensation increase = higher.
Our demographic has been shifting and in 2025, only 3 placements have under 1 year SWE experience.
I believe we're going to do an H1 update as H1 finishes up and we'll be able to comment on the latest.
Read the fine print for the official full details but as a partial note, these calculations we are using YOE prior to starting Formation, full time SWE work experience only, excluding internships, contracts, and adjacent experience.
So someone with 1 year as a SWE might have been a contractor for 2-3 years and if they weren't a W2 type situation and were "contracting" that doesn't count in these calculations.
It's like the opposite of embellishing resumes and really holding a firm tight bar on the definition of experience.
If you don't have 1-2+ years of this kind of SWE experience,…
Do you mind giving her the documented evidence of Codesmith confirming they paid a guy on Upwork to post stuff on Reddit and then that same person posted shit about me and tried to get me banned?
Do you want the messages Codesmith posted to their CSX community of 20K people lying to them that I was on Slack with multiple aliases contacting people to try to get them to go to Formation - which never happened.
Those messages are libelous and I asked Codesmith to apologize which they declined to.
I'm furious at Codesmith and I'm justified in being angry and upset about it and I'm playing by the rules of the game in expressing my anger.
That stat is correct and it's about 45% so far in 2025 so close but a bit lower.
The average YOE for 2025 placements so far is (full time SWE experienceprior to Formation): **5.5 YEARS**
This means that people had bootcamps, self taught, and other degrees, worked for 5 years, came to Formation, and then got a better job.
What is wrong with that?
Here are the 10 or so most placement companies : Udacity, Amazon, Gurus Solutions, Meta, Meta, Meta, Headspace, Stripe, AppleCart, PayPal, Applied Intuition, Meta, NVIDIA
These are stronger placements than 2024.
What is wrong with that?
**I'm happy to take feedback to improve our marketing so please give it but I want to make sure it's clear that the stuff on our website is accurate for starters.**
Will is faking his background yes - he has never really been an engineer ever - and then he spent 10 years focused on superficial appearances…
A) correct, I have equity as an owner and Formation is venture backed. I have not made a single penny from my equity and I have purchased additional equity, but I do own equity.
B) Excellent question. we spent 7 years building a PLATFORM that is completely unique and patended and built from the ground up to enables us to to configure practice and benchmarking dynamically.
This technology has has a number of people contribute to it over the years and will support the AI and ML people contributing to it as well.
My personal expertise lies in AI PRODUCTIVITY - using AI to replace a number of engineers and using it to make me 5X more productive through 20,000 commits and counting.
So I'm not out of the game by any means but I don't have any ML experience - our first product in this space is focused on productivity using AI tools, which honestly doesn't overlap much with Codesmith's AI pr…
Alina is more capable of running the company for sure but it's too little too late honestly.
She needs a capable team around her and almost everyone has left.
The whole industry is changing and the teaching style and pedagogy at Codesmith is dying out and you don't have a team left to invest in building out.AI ways to learn. You have to flip your company on its head. But you don't have the money and you don't have the talent to build that.
Even if Alina has a vision, the team is delivering garbage code (as her and I both know the quality of) and people there isn't even realize it. They celebrate the heroes of the past - who themselves really didn't know what they were doing either.
Will needs to leave the company entirely, which it sounds like might be over time and he floats to academia - where maybe he should be - because he just doesn't have the experience to forge software engine…
The questions I normally ask that specific Codesmith grads have lied about and their story fell apart:
1. What other roles did you work with (e.g. PM, design, operations, support, legal, HR, marketing, PR, release engineering) and give some examples of those
2. What was the engineer - PM ratio
3. How does the company make money and what's the business model
4. What were things that worked well and didn't work well with your manager?
On a resume:
1. if you see the word OSLabs or OpenSource Labs listed anywhere, immediate sign. We had to train our team on this because Codesmith grads were being flagged in the wrong bucket for Formation based on their resumes as team members who were not trained did not know the difference between a job and project and the amount of time specified was 1+ year.
This is normally right beside a section called "Open Source Projects" so it appears more le…
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
I didn't say anything about you. I was responding to that person about the typical grad behavior for why many Codesmith grads defend this behavior.
I had a rant that I deleted because it was not coherent. But time will tell and the truth is catching up with them.
Most people have already figured it out and apparently many remaining staff are one foot out the door.
Maybe the CEO steps down and Alina takes over and maybe brings in some funding to buy out the company for cheap and they try to build something new and sell it off for a profit later on in a consolidation of remaining bootcamp brands?
Kind of like what happened at App Academy. The founder finally left, the new CEO replaced everything with he own AI platform. They stopped doing SWE and kind of floating around as a completely different version of the program before.
Codesmith will probably follow that path and they really sh…
WHEN you went matters a lot.
If you went during "era 1" (2012 to 2016) then it was a great time! App Academy too!
If you went between 2020 and 2022 - Launch School, Codesmith, Rithm School were all that your heard about.
Now - Rithm closed, Codesmith should have closed, and Launch School is the only program to remotely consider (after doing core for a year) and it's the only one that advertises itself honestly as the "slow path" to becoming an engineer.