1. I don't make a personal income and haven't for 5 years
2. About a third or so people at Formation did a bootcamp in the past, it's far from the majority right now.
3. Are you able to prove that I DM'd you and promoted Formation and told you to go there? I've done it very rarely - like 2 or 3 times, while I've had 100s of conversations telling people to go to bootcamps like Codesmith (which I no longer do), Launch School, Rithm, grad school, Tech Elevator, etc... based on their circumstances. If I DM'd you from my account and out of the blue told you that you need Formation, then that was a one off that rarely happens, was probably a very legitmate reason to do so, and I probably mentioned other options too like Interview Kickstart rather than just saying "go to Formation", it was probably like "you should consider interview prep programs because you have a lot of experience alrea…
Just a note for others reading, Launch School's Capstone projects are one level better than Codesmith's OSPs and follow a similar idea of building a developer tool.
I love the spirit of the OSP but they went about it all wrong. They responded to my criticism about OSLabs being a fake entity by establishing a charity only recently.
The director of the charity is now 'on leave' and it's my understanding from her that Annie and Phil run the day to day of the projects
Like instead of building a fake charity that's practically run by Codesmith people, put effort into making the OSPs better. Less effort on appearing legit and more effort on being legit.
Launch School is leveling up their projects by having paid mentors work on large open source projects like Firefox and mentoring students to work on those projects without distracting the core contributors (who otherwise don't have the time…
I'm very fair about potential conflicts of interest. In my opinion, the conflict of interest is that about a third of people at Formation did botocamps in the past, so it's a good chunk of people who come to us in the future. And no, these aren't recent grads who can't get jobs but people with real work experience post bootcamp. I think I disclose.and manage this well and that it's a relativrly minor conflict.
You know what's worse, anonymous accounts that could be run by bootcamps, manipulating discussions, and they shouldn't get a free pass just because they are anonymous. I shouldn't be villainized because I'm not anonymous.
There is a happy medium.
I don't own this sub and there are two other mods with different views.
I was made a moderator after demonstrating for two years that I could manage my biases well and be fair and reasonable.
Reddit permanently suspended about a dozen…
Bootcamps work for a specific slice of people.
Launch School is the only program I know that systematically tries to find those people though a multi step, months long process of getting through to Capstone.
And surprise, it works better! But you don't know if it will work for you until you try getting through, and you might be capable of getting a job through a bootcamp, just not through Launch School.
Launch School has like under 100 capstone students a year.
The problem with bootcamps, which particularly hit Codesmith hard and they haven't fully recovered is that they scaled from 100 students a year to over a 1000, thinking that if it worked for so many of their students when they are small, it would work for everyone who passes the bar.
While Launch School has maintained a relatively high placement rates. Unofficially reported Codesmith placement rates have gone down drasticall…
Why do you think it's a conflict of interest?
Codesmith's unhinged post is libelous as I have officially informed their leadership about this in the past and have the records to prove it and they decided to intentionally lie to mislead the public.
I have always made it extraordinarily clear my commentary is my personal opinion and nothing to do with my company.
I stated that there are a handful of unique edge case people that could go to either Formation or Codesmith but that our records show it's a very small number and not our target demographic.
They decide to lie anyways with zero evidence presented to support their claim.
An institution that behaves like this is rotten at the core and won't survive, just don't get caught up in it.
A couple of alumni have sent ME their complaints because they said YOU personally don't do anything about them and were defensive receiving them.
Word are words. Actions are actions.
Don't gaslight your alumni when placements for people starting LAST NOVEMBER have been terrible, not one recent cohort 3 months ago.
Work all week, every week, for a few years straight fighting tooth and nail for those graduates like Launch School's CEO.
Don't make alumni wait weeks for resume review sand mock interviews.
Actually LOOK AT THEIR OSP projects and review them so your students don't ASK ME TO REVIEW THEM because the people reviewing them at Codesmith has never professionally written code.
When I report a huge security issue with one of your projects, don't ignore it for 8 months.
Do better with your actions, not your words. People aren't falling for your words anymore.
We do not compete with you. Our marketing and recruiting team have not mentioned a single person that they can remember in the past year even mentioning considering Codesmith, but many are asking about Interview Kickstart and Pathrise. Do you guys think you compete with Pathrise and Interview Kickstart as well?
I'm not sure if you are delusional or have incompetent internal communication processes but I explained in detail to Eric Kirsten on your team via email a number of months ago.
I full on recommend Launch School at this time. Do you consider them a competitor? Why would I recommend them if I'm here to take down competitors?
As usual you all are big on words and small on details and execution.
RE: Reducing Prices
That's a fair argument to make it more accessible. Why didn't you make it more accessible in 2022 or 2023 and why make it accessible now then?
Launch School Core Liv…
2. I think instead of assuming it should be easy, trying to cooperatively understand why it's not and imainge the scenarios I'm describing would help. Like if you can propose metrics that handle the cases I throw at you, I'm all ears. If you were only going to put in 5 hours a week at Formation you would want to be misled by averages sped up by people doing 40 hours weeks. If you have a bunch of interviews in the pipeline and you are intentionally delaying them for 4 months, then you both bring down the average for others without interviews on the horizon AND don't care about the average because you already have a plan. Like I said, we would like to normalize for amount of effort put into Formation, and have some ideas there, but they can't be computed in a spreadsheet.
3. The post had 1/10th the views of a normal post but your comment (deep in the threads and requiring manual expansion…
Yeah I would say it's relatively reasonable picture. I just did a search myself and it's quite a mix of people:
- mentors
- early career people with jobs that just haven't started yet
- early career people who got entry level jobs listed
- people who are doing well and chugging along just fine at their expected pace, regardless of what their time is at Formation (which is why again - placement time is really hard to figure out)
- people are are severely struggling to get any interviews
I'm not sure what the point is, like I'm extremely open that there are a small number of people we admitted when we required less experience (6mo to 1 year) who have been with us a very long time and we keep supporting and we've spent more money mentoring them they they will even pay us... I think this evidence that we stick to our promises and means a lot to people.
That's correct, people who list Formation on their Linkedin are:
1. generally people with less experience and the group of people struggling the most.
2. generally people not working right now
3. generally many of the people who haven't placed yet
They represent a minority of people we work/worked with and we're proud to keep supporting them as we promised.
The typical engineer (FAANG mid-level/senior)+ engineers don't list Formation on their LinkedIns and are way more low key because they don't want their current employers knowing they are job hunting. We have CURRENT Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft software engineers, for example, who aren't going to advertise they are doing Formation publicly.
After people place, some people opt into being on our network page: [https://formation.dev/network](https://formation.dev/network)
And some people want to do a write up, like these 5 people r…
Pathrise supports people in many different jobs. You can see the distribution in their report from last year. Very wide range of technical and not technical. Your primary contact is a career coach who is trying to help you unlock your application funnel. They have way less materials and less legit mocks.
Formation is all focused on preparing for and passing interviews. We have unlimited resume reviews and tons of recruiters call prep. We have an in-house job hunt tracking tool. We source thousands of jobs a week and suggest them to based on your background. But we do NOT do a great job debugging the funnel and forcing you to document everything to get enough data to debug the funnel like Pathrise forces you to do.
For example, Pathrise will try to proactively recognize a low application conversion rate. Formation will be more qualitative and give you more resume reviews or one off advi…
1. I do so for bootcamps because I work with a bunch of bootcamp grads later on in their careers and feel like I can combine that with my FAANG experience to give solid advice to peple looking at bootcamps. Formation isn't a bootcamp. If you are going to keep putting in that bucket despite my repeated attempts to explain the difference then that's on you, but I see no problems talking about BOOTCAMPS that have nothing to do with what I do.
2. Yeah we could come up with some kind of aggregated 'amount of time to get a job' data I think, but we have to account for week to week workload adjustments people meet (which is very frequent, vacations and pauses, offer times vs interview times, which topics people were working on and weren't at which times, time to first offer versus time to offer accepted (since people can get multiple offers and intentionally DELAY THEIR JOB HUNT to create a co…
1. There is a thread about removing "guarantee" in that page header and we'll probably change it yeah, thanks for the feedback because we didn't ralize how confusing it might be.
2. This is the post I'm referencing: https://formation.dev/blog/outcomes-report-first-half-of-2024/. It's substantiated data, but it doesn't talk about non-success cases. These are the numbers I'm talking about that are insanely strong in 2024 compared to 2023.
3. You might not be happy if you are in the minority who didn't get a job and can't come to an agreement about paying for the value you think you got from Formation with us, but we do exit surveys, interviews and all kinds of user research and many are, so to each their own. If it's a concern for you upfront then you should talk about it with us and try to map out all of the scenarios and if it doesn't work for you, don't join!
4. Fair enough re: retir…
DIRECT ANSWERS TO POINTS/QUESTIONS:
Generally speaking about the word "job guarantee", I flagged this earlier for our team to think about, so we'll see but it's a uncommon phrase we use in one place with limited spacing that I can see, and there are way more common phrases, slogans, and thousands of other words in our contract to read that are much more important to understand. I standby the accuracy of that in the context, but I think the hundreds or thousands of words, and phone calls, and emails, make it clear to people what that means contractually before signing up.
I take the feedback that you think we should only use that phrase accompanied with stronger data showing that guarantee turns into a job and I've shared that feedback.
1.“**Don't be blinded by their marketing**..." Formations' 2024 numbers are insanes so far. 75% top tier placements, average first year comp gain of 1…
We do not have a lifelong guarantee and we don't say that anywhere? Where does it say that?
Yeah unlimited support in some packages (like the main one we're offering) is cutoff at 15 months and we have the option to keep supporting you at our discretion. We are experimenting with that term but you are right just I should have mentioned that and you are also right that it's a bit confusing.
If you are considering Formation well go over your personal contract after determining which packages are appropriate for you and make sure you are good with all of the terms.
Can you give me more context? You are throwing out a lot of assumptions about my past commentary, my wealth, what our company does, why I am here.
Like are you a bootcamp student, bootcamp grad, industry person, looking at Formation, a competitor?
I'm happy to list all of the problems with Formation directly as someone aware of all the things we do well and things we can improve. You have good questions to discuss fairly but throw in some assumptions that are crossing the line and aren't remotely true about me, my wife, and our mission.
I'll give feedback to our marketing lead about the wording. We change our wording often and I stand by the wording. No one who has joined has mentioned finding this confusing. But if we're losing people from applying because they think it sounds like a scam then we should change it! But our marketing lead has to deep dive and make a call first.
We officially do not consider Codesmith a competitor at this time and in the past and do not market to the same people. Definitive answer on the record. I've emailed the same thing to one of their leaders and explained why.
Launch School is not at all a competitor to Pathrise.
It's extremely important that the record is extremely clear we aren't a bootcamp and don't work with people with less than 2 years of experience. Struggling bootcamp and CS grads are banging at our door and we have a small team and it's wasting time explaining to each of…
They also have "company interview guides" that sound equally authoritative. It's for raw SEO. I mean I know a lot of people there, I know the founders second hand, I think they have good intentions and don't overpromise anything and are fairly reasonable. We just have a different opinion on what the gaps are preventing people from getting jobs.
Their opinion is optimizing your resume and recruiter pitch in the job hunt funnel, our opinion is you need to have a strong technical toolbelt full of tools you know how to use well to step into your interviews. As a result, Formation is weaker on the raw job hunt funnel optimization side, and Pathrise is weaker on interview prep.
PART 2:
2. Yeah I comment on those. I'm aware of two Reddit posts. One is a person who left and ended up going out of SWE for their career and it was the right thing. The other person I don't know who they are but I do know someone who commented on that thread in support of the primary person recently tried to come back to Formation a second time, so maybe their opinion changed haha, but I want to go through the points.
**MOST IMPORTANTLY - we make hundreds of changes (literally) a week and Formation today is not Formation a few months ago, is not Formation a year ago.** I'm going to answer these as they would be TODAY, and I stand by my previous comments on those posts at the time they were posted.
-------------------------
1. "**Don't be blinded by their marketing**...". We absolutely have people that are still with us and very low morale. There are a number of people who joined us…
Happy to keep discussing yeah, we're not perfect and some of our reasons might not be good enough but I can at least explain what those reason are directly from one of the founders 🙂.
PART 1:
1. I hear you on clarifying what "guaranteed means", because there are qualifiers that I explained, and maybe there is a better one liner for it. The support is guaranteed until you get a job is how I would respond/state it given your framing.
RE: " lifetime career support, job hunt help", my gosh some bootcamps promise this and it's not remotely the same as what any of these four programs offer and not nearly the same as what Formation offers. I don't want to write paragraphs here but to put it one way, a number of "DS&A career support engineers" at a top bootcamp like Codesmith have come to Formation themselves to work on their skills and get their next job.
Years ago I had debates on people…
1. Yes, if you join the Unlimited option we will work with you for however long it takes and you aren't forced to take your first offer. So as long as you keep job hunting, applying, interviewing, and accepting our feedback and guidance (and don't have to withdraw for personal reasons, unexpected emergencies, or change your goal and don't what to job hunt anymore) then we keep supporting you. We have some people with us for two years and counting haha. We don't have strict requirements to meet to maintain this either. We have a two way trusting relationship and as long as you are continuously intending to job hunt we do our part. We don't hand you a job though and it's not a place to sign up expected to be handed interviews and a job on a plate.
2. Yeah sounds like you've read my views on this. It makes a lot more sense when you do Formation and see how individually unique each person's…
I'm the co-founder of Formation so I'm really biased.
I would say that none of these are boot camps, so the perspective you get from here is probably skewed to boot camp grads that then went to some of these programs. Which could be really useful if you're also a boot camp grad but less useful if you're not.
All of these are really different.
Outco, I got the vibe was shutting down or isn't really running because you can't apply on their website and their founders seem to have moved on and there's been a number of people being threatened to be sued by them who didn't get jobs within 12 months. I haven't heard firsthand from the company directly so I can't say anything definitively but I'm not really considering them right now when I talk about competitors.
Pathrise, they publish some annual stats and the number of people who go there as a software engineer is has been decreasing s…
Codesmith kind of pushes you out the door and alumni and older alumni kind of use their ambitiousness to hustle into a job. Leaders aren't super involved in individual people's job hunts.
Launch School's Founder personally gets involved in people's job hunts and tries to use his network to hustle you into a job. This is impossible to scale, so keeping Launch School small makes this possible.
Codesmith Immersive and Launch School Capstone have relatively similar formats. Focused on a delivering a big group project and leveraging that as internship-like experience.
Launch School is also working on setting up mini internships and contributions to giant open source projects like Firefox and is leagues ahead of Codesmith right now!
Hi, thanks for sharing, I've heard similar things. Interestingly, Codesmith isolates each cohort so it's actually fairly hard to figure out how others are doing. People know their own cohort and the ones before and after who they interact with as junior/seniors.
Do you have any comments on how Codesmith staff have communicated to you? Like if they have told you it's not good or there, or they say things are fine instead?
But yeah, the 6 month placement rate for end of 2023 and early 2024 grads has tanked and Codesmith isn't saying a word - instead they are saying things that make it sound like everything is fine and Codesmith is doing great.
Launch School transparently had a 75% 6 month placement rate and because of Codesmith delusion above I've actively recommended not going there and actively recommended Launch School.
Anyways, if others in your cohort feel the same, share this pos…
Yeah for $59 it's a great way to test things out for sure! I'm speaking more at a company strategy level and zoomed out view. I'm on a remote cruise right now and my analogy would be watching all the cruise ships big and small come in and out of the harbor from a top a nearby mountain and trying to gauge where everyone is going. Is the ship sunk? About to collide with an iceberg and just won't move out of the way? Or seems to be doing everything right.
My view on Codesmith is that it's hit the iceberg and stubbornly not acknowledging it. But I might be wrong and they can try to change and do a 180, the CEO could step down, they could sell off, merge, or maybe they find a way to creatively keep the ship floating (e.g. Future Code) and then after reasoning their footings, make changes to avoid the iceberg in the future.
If this are at the CSPrep phase then consider all your free and chea…
I think they have far too much price to drop tuition. I expect them to raise it again in January like they did this year despite tanking placements and outcomes.
If anything they will start to give out "scholarships" to effectively lower the cost but maintain a high sticker price.
Following the ivy League model. Stanford is $60K a year but most people (who don't come from rich families) pay much less or nothing.
So taking a step back....
Codesmith, like Launch School, is for a certain person. There aren't magically more of those people in the world who just aren't going because of the cost. If it's the right program, the cost is irrelevant because the long term impact will be so much more than anything.
So lowering the cost won't do anything at all.
If they relied on anyone with a pulse paying them whatever spare change they have, then lowering the price would result in more people…
Launch School is experimenting with Launch School Core Live, which is entirely free and might have prompted Codesmith to discount CSPrep.
Launch School works well for specific people, just like Codesmith still works for a dwindling number of specific people.
The main advantage Launch School has if it's smaller. They run 4 cohorts a year or so, and then the founder is more directly involved in the day to day, keeping costs way down. As a result they have a decent placement rate in this market.
So I am recommending Launch School but only if it's the right place for you and you can explore their free options to try to figure that out.
Outco is a competitor to my company so I'm super biased about talking about them.
Personally, I thought they were shutting down because their website is half broken and doesn't let you apply, some founders moved on to new things, and they are threatening to sue a bunch of people (search Reddit) who didn't get jobs in a year and thought they were getting their money back.
I would compare Outco to Formation (my company), Interview Kickstart, and Pathrise.
These are all different approaches and entirely different day to day, but all are focused on helping you get interviews and pass them.
I have always had pretty fair assessments on here despite my bias, so I'll give my PERSONAL OPINIONS trying to be as fair as I can be:
Formation: dynamic and adaptive mentorship, unique, unlimited mocks, small group sessions (3 to 6 people), 3 dedicated non technical support team members, only focused…
I'm currently recommending Launch School but only for the right people and you should do their free stuff to see if they are the right school.
The other best ones I'm no longer recommending for various reasons. Codesmith I'm suggested to not go to. App Academy, Hack Reactor, I'm more neutral on. Tech Elevator was amazing when they had in person partnerships but those have been dwindling.
These are just my opinions. There isn't a correct answer for everyone though. Happy to talk through based on your own background.
What credible employment reports are you going off of?
The only recent one I know of is Launch School, which while still has a 75% placement rate it has dropped from 100%. So clearly things are not the same anymore there.
Codesmith has a CIRR for people that graduated 1.5 to 2.5 years ago which is useless. The six month placement rates I'm seeing for 2023 abysmal. Codesmith won't let us know the official numbers until March 2025 and we won't see 2024 numbers until March 2026. So people who graduated 6 months ago in Jan 2024, even though Codesmith knows their 6 months placement rate and could give a great heads up to people about the changing market, they won't say even one hint of it until March 2026, almost two years from now.
That's absolutely garbage and they need to do better if people like you are relying on these reports to judge the market.
My 2 cents as someone who knows a lot about Codesmith.
I wouldn't not go because of shady practices. It's a fake it til you make it and if you subscribe to that philosophy it might be a good thing.
I wouldn't go because they have demonstrated an inability to adapt to the market. They have been hit with layoffs and lower enrollment and don't seem to have to budget needed to invest in all of the changes they want to, or to that quickly enough. They promised a bunch of improvements 5 months ago, and we haven't seen most of them, or some people who perceive ones they might have done on paper as underwhelming.
In this market you need someone fighting for you. Launch School's Founder in that recent video said that he has personally had to refer and vouch for students way more than ever else to help them get jobs. We're also seeing Turing's Founder pushing hard for individual people.
Codes…
There are no explicit requirements or quotas and the rule in the contract is broader that you have to be actively job hunting and intending to get a new job.
We are so adaptive to each person, having exact quotas doesn't make sense.
We see our role like a coach or personal trainer and we need to have a trusting partnership with ways. Meaning if you are seeing Formation as a transactional way to get a job for the lowest cost you can, it's not the right mindset. You have to trust us and our advice that we are trying to help you achieve your goal, and we have to trust that you are showing up and working with us.
If you aren't ready to interview we don't want you applying to jobs. If you are ready we want you applying to jobs. The advice depends on you and your progress, traction, strengths and weaknesses, feedback etc....
Typically around 5 companies yeah, but you have to be open minded and.not limited to just them, because we have no control over the market. We can prepare you the best we can for those companies but if you interviewed at them all and didn't get an offer and you give up then you can leave Formation, but you won't get a refund.
If you are targeting just 5 companies I would recommend the 3 months package we currently offer. It's the month to month subscription with a discount if you pay for 3 months upfront for $6000 (as of July 2024). We prepare you the best we can during that time and then you either get an offer and leave or you leave and wrap up your job hunt on your own.
Yeah It's very intense community, I think because they spend so long in the ecosystem and then they see it working so they believe. Codesmith is a similar kind of community. It's extremely powerful when the results are really good, but then the community will fall apart when the results are not good and ultimately it's what the graduates see in their own cohorts and their previous cohorts and how the company explains that to them and presents themselves.
Launch school's outcomes have gone down a little bit, but the way that the team has explained it has maintained trust with the students.
Codesmith is losing their students right now from the people that I talk to who are either current or recent alumni and people aren't buying the message. They have no visibility into outcomes and are judging based on their cohort and the previous cohort they work with.
Ironically the Codesmith CEO…
NEWS: Code Fellows has ceased operations and shut down. Ending an 11 year legacy.
Source: https://www.codefellows.org/
The message they shared is really bittersweet and you can see the passion and impact they had over the years but they just couldn't make it work as the market has permanently changed.
They tried to adapt and innovate but at some point it's time to look elsewhere to have impact the world because the market is the market.
"Achieving greatness at the scale we’ve reached at Code Fellows requires exceptional people working together tirelessly toward a shared mission, under shared values. It has been a privilege and an honor to be part of this journey and to witness the incredible outcomes of our mission-driven work. From the beginning, our mission at Code Fellows was to provide transformative, career-focused education that opened doors for people from all backgrounds. Our…
Yeah having to complete Core first is akin to people doing CSX first for Codesmith, but even higher bar. It helps Launch School Capstone be very sure about the people they let in. Core isn't free, but it's also a lot cheaper than if you went straight into a bootcamp.
Definitely need to understand the whole picture, no shortcuts in the bootcamp world.
NEWS: Launch School Official 2023 Outcomes: 75% placement in 6 months but time to placement almost double peak year at 14 weeks (still blows away competition). Impressive transparency. Described changes in response to market in detail and their impact 👏
DISCLAIMER: these are my personal opinions and feelings, when I state numbers or data, it is based on the source provided or other data that I have internally to inform my comments, by I'm human and not perfect, and welcome any corrections.
Source: https://public.launchschool.com/salaries
Video: https://youtu.be/_v1fccQ7OGM?si=s-Utxc4kdJVHkq7S
Launch School has great transparency so I don't really need to interpret things.... just read the data and see what happened to every person. It's like one of those farms where you can track the carrot you ate from seed to table lol.
Commentary:
1. Placement rate within 6 months is crushing at…
We don't have any discounts right now. We have a number of ways you can pay that can help defer the cost but not outright discounts or scholarships. We occasionally have small (a few hundred dollars off) discounts for people applying via different organizations like Women Who Code and Techaria, but I don't think we have any active right now - possibly for Taro Premium members).
We have a special program we run for companies where they pay for Formation for people, but that's for current college students preparing for internship interviews.
I commented below, but yeah it's not a "bootcamp" so happy to talk more about how it works day to day as well. But the people that have posted in here that I've seen, are people who went to bootcamps in the past and were more junior. I don't know the identifies of all of them, but the ones I can tell from their posts.
If you our blog here: [https://formation.dev/blog/outcomes-report-first-half-of-2024/](https://formation.dev/blog/outcomes-report-first-half-of-2024/), you can see we do have less experienced people (... 0 YOE can include contract work, internships, etc... so it's not necessarily NOTHING, but it's "junior".
Every single Meta placement was Senior or Mid-Level and you can see a ton of them in that post as well, and it's help boost those 3+ YOE numbers.
A senior Meta offer is in the ballpark of $500K first year TC and we have a number of those in there. Based on your Linked…
Hey, I'm the co-founder of Formation and can give the company's stance on this but encourage others to share their views and experiences.
Our base case is FAANG senior and mid level engineers - people with 2 to 10 years of experience.
Some recent placements from the past 6 months we wrote up:
https://formation.dev/blog/success-story-how-drew-bartlett-landed-a-role-at-atlassian/
https://formation.dev/blog/success-story-mike-clarke/
https://formation.dev/blog/fellow-spotlight-sofie-graham-three-offers-from-faang-companies/
Of the new Fellows who introduced recently in order the last five we have:
- 4 years at Microsoft
- 4 years at Atlassian
- senior engineer at consultancy
- returning Fellow from 3 years ago: mid level / senior
- 8 years at Nordstrom
Now that said, there we do work with people more junior and during the boom times we do more often, so you would interact with mo…
NEWS: Rithm School is shutting down - the doom and gloom is real - and it pains me to say so 😢. An update on bootcamp closures as of July 2024.
An update on recent closures, layoffs, and pauses.
This is not a doom and gloom post but a wake up call to realize that things are not running smoothly right now and to be cautious about dropping $20K on a bootcamp because they told you things are great.
Marketing might be slick, CEO's might promise a rebounding market, but the fact of the matter is that clearly bootcamps are not doing well. Course Report can no longer be trusted - doesn't want to do anything about evidence of reviews being paid for.
Those that are surviving are questioning if it's the thing they want to do with their lives. The Codesmith CEO's dream is to become a [Lego Youtuber](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4O8XsX7YCbM) for example. The long item App Academy founder an…
Not App Academy student and no information right now, but this wouldn't surprise me whatsoever.
The CEO stepped down [four months ago in March](https://www.appacademy.io/blog/mari-nazary-joins-app-academy)
To me this was a signal that the promises the CEO made needed to be reset, and a new new 'business-focused' CEO was needed.
Mari, the new CEO, comes from BloomTech. Her LinkedIn, as of 7/13/2024 says the following for Bloomtech:
>Revolutionized the product and learning experience by introducing a proprietary platform and digitizing all learning materials and touchpoints, resulting in a significant reduction of the cost per learner from $15K to $1K.
So I presume that was a reason she was hired by App Academy - if she can reduce the cost per student from $15K to $1K all over again!
How do you reduce costs? Well people are the number one cost of most bootcamps so you have to remo…
So the way I see it, again this is my personal opinon and I don't have any formal relationships with any bootcamps, is that the smaller, founder-led programs: Rithm, Launch School, Codesmith, some others, tend to be smaller, higher bar to get in, more expensive, and a lot of positive qualities. App Academy and Hack Reactor fall in the more "big business" bucket of companies that are run like real companies. With that comes some amount of accountability in that they have legit lawyers to review stuff, career professionals doing finance, HR, etc... With that though you lose some of the personal touch of the founders.
I'm currently not recommending Codesmith because they appear to me to be imploding. Bunch of pro-Codesmith accounts, including two moderators of their sub, got suspended from Reddit, a couple more staff left, they are going all in on "the modern engineer" and losing focus. I…
Thanks for sharing.
Based on my broad experience with Codesmith I would +1 the recommendations there on who should go.
I like how you also broke up successful people into two buckets: those who needed Codesmith to get there and those who would have done well anyways. This is a key thing to directing what a program offers. It's something at Formation we think about all the time - what would people do without out and what value are they getting, and we constantly need to give people VALUE to justify our existence. We're not perfect but we spend all of our time trying to do this to and will keep doing so. And we've seen incredible results in a hard time as a result. If you aren't generating true value, then you get hammered in a tough market.
RE: OSP reviews. It's sad to me to hear you still aren't getting reviews. A few months ago right around the layoffs a number of groups asked me t…
Scam is a blurry word haha. You can argue that any kind of "marketing" is trying to sell you on the program so it's at a minimum biased, but whether it's a scam is a higher bar.
Nucamp isn't fantastic but it's cheap. The materials are similar to much cheaper courses, but you have live instructors and code reviewers to get feedback and that's very useful.
Coding Dojo is a classic bootcamp and most of them have been struggling in this market. I don't recommend going to any classic coding bootcamps right now and would recommend going as cheap as possible, then re-evaluating. If you have a natural ability and you are 100% committed to becoming a SWE no matter how long it takes, then a top bootcamp (generally the $20K+ ones like Codesmith, Rithm, Launch School Capstone, etc...) could be justified. It's still quite hard to get a job even at those programs, which is why it's important to comm…
I can give my 2 cents. I know a lot about both programs. Very different options.
I'm currently not recommending Codesmith (in my personal opinion/capacity - I need to mention this because it's in my company's interest for more people to go there) for three reasons, but you might feel differently:
1. They had large layoffs and promised coworking spaces, more curriculum and more three months ago and haven't done any of that, other than add 5 ML lectures (of which only 2 I think have been done)
2. They have a subreddit that is full of propaganda. I asked Reddit Corporate to look at our subreddit here and theres, and roughly 10 prominent accounts + 1 moderator were suspended from Reddit. I don't know if this was just one person or a coordinated effort but those people were working with Codesmith for "official AMAs" so whatever was going on it, Codesmith has visibility of this behavior jus…
Don The Developer: "Coding Bootcamps ARE Still Viable in 2024".... with caveats 😉
Don released this video today with a realistic take on Coding Bootcamps. Despite the title coming across as "pro bootcamp", it's a balanced take on bootcamps in 2024.
[VIDEO](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIFd5nuhvhs)
Would love to discuss in the comment!
SUMMARY OF DON'S ARGUMENTS:
1. **Coding Bootcamps' Viability**: Don believes coding bootcamps are still a viable option in 2024, despite their mixed reputation. They can effectively prepare individuals for entry level developer jobs, provided that students have the right preparation (many months) and timeframe expectations (\~2 years).
**2. Misleading Marketing**: Don believes many coding bootcamps have a bad reputation due right now due to continued misleading marketing that promises unrealistic outcomes and makes it seem like you will get a job…
If people were getting jobs then bootcamps wouldn't be shutting down/laying people off
1. [Launch Academy ](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/launch-academy-announces-strategic-pause-immersive-pamjc/)(indefinite pause)
2. [Epicodus](https://www.epicodus.com/blog/epicodus) (shutdown)
3. [CodeUp](https://www.ksat.com/news/local/2024/01/09/codeup-shuts-down-suddenly-leaving-students-staff-frustrated/) (shutdown)
4. App Academy ([layoffs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmIBwP6tBh4), [ceo step down](https://www.appacademy.io/blog/mari-nazary-joins-app-academ))
5. Codesmith ([shrinking](https://www.codesmith.io/blog/community-update-doubling-down-on-remote-learning-timeless-pedagogy-frontier-tech) - left out was 1/3 layoffs and reducing from 4+1 cohorts to 1+1 cohorts since 2023)
6. Tech Elevator ([merge](https://www.galvanize.com/blog/galvanize-and-tech-elevator-announce-operational-conso…
Hi, This sub stil has a lot of activity and has grown 5X over the past couple years in membership. BUT the tone is a lot more negative.
First: why no success stories?
The top bootcamps have had lower placements rates for 2023 grads. The odds of getting a job are lower, and the odds of getting a SWE job, rather than a SWE-adjacent job, have gone down as well.
So if you are one of the lucky ones, it's likely you had an arduous journey and it's likely may of your cohort that you found just as talented as you are seriously struggling to get a job, and you aren't going to Reddit to brag about your job.
To make it worse, I've been seeing more layoffs of bootcamp grads down the road, compared to CS grads. So just getting a great job out of a bootcamp isn't the end, but the base of a taller mountain.
... and those a few years out and in good shape, graduated in the boom times and it's hard…