Right, think of it like the IRS put $118M into a special bank account, and that account can be used to "buy things" over 5 years. Each time they want to buy something, the 5 recipients can offer their product. Like if they want 100 cars, each of the 5 can pitch the car they offer and the IRS chooses one.
If there is money left in the bank at the end it goes back and the account is closed.
I think it comes down alignment.
Codesmith has like no staff left and none of them have extensive AI experience. They hired random people on Upwork to manage this thing, from marketing to program management to working on the contracts. I don't see students in 2026. I don't see placements in 2026. The "CIRR Audited Outcomes" haven't been updated this year, and CIRR has not responded to why. Their website doesn't even have a privacy policy. A 2024-2025 lawsuit said that their financials required six months of forensic accounting to assemble and could not be provided on demand. Codesmith's AI curriculum is minimal and created by recent alumni. I'm not an expert but I would guess they would have trouble with the most basic government audit.
Additionally, the AI "Lead Engineer" on the IRS stuff is a full time engineer at a top tier bank. I also suspect that's problematic to have them on c…
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
I don't want to share the raw link because there is A LOT Of stuff on there. Seems like he hires all his lawyers, interior designers, all the people for their IRS thing.... you can try to find it on your own, it's all public and not hard to find.
I don't really understand why the IRS would pay Codesmith a bunch of money if all these people are just Upwork contractors that ANYONE could hire for $40 an hour. Maybe that's how the government works, but we need more integrity and value creation and not people selling off the work of Upwork contractors with a huge markup to the government.
Court documents indicate his compensation could have been $500,000 base per year plus up to 50% of profits.
I don't really care what his compensation is, but my point is about the transparency of that and the messaging he had around Codesmith's mission, etc...
For example he continuously claimed Codesmith was independent, when court records it was 70% owned by investors and that those investors got millions $3.9M paid to them.
Nothing wrong with business in America, I just push coding bootcamps for transparency because every time a white knight shows up they end up being a manipulative, money-hungry person in disguise.
So the partners that have been around for 10 years doing government contracting have expertise in this.
The new people who have like 3 employees and chatgpt heo to do it have zero value to offer
Which is my point in another thread. I think Codesmith and Gauntlet benefit more by making it seem like they are partnered with the IRS for legitimacy and they probably won't make a lot of money from this.
The people who have taught five other government agencies about COBOL already have an edge, even if Codesmith or Gauntlet could do a better job... the cost of them developing the COBOL expertise to teach it at the bar they want might not even break even for them financially.
Like I said, maybe Gauntlet has the cash to burn to build that position. Codesmith doesn't appear to given the public appearance of no or few non-Future Code students there recently.
BREAKING: IRS $118M BPA for Hiring and Training - 3 more companies including Gauntlet AI added to join FedStack and Lantec/Codesmith. More companies coming soon.
SOURCE: [https://orangeslices.ai/treasury-dept-ocio-awards-118m-technical-workforce-development-and-training-bpa/](https://orangeslices.ai/treasury-dept-ocio-awards-118m-technical-workforce-development-and-training-bpa/)
Some news broke earlier this year with a press release from Codesmith: "Codesmith Selected for $118M IRS Contract" and a number of people felt this meant that Codesmith received a check for $118M. That's not the case.
The $118M is a ceiling for training and hiring for the IRS, and the IRS just added three more partners to the contract, with more expected to be added.
Super interesting to see the pie being split up and fought over by competing companies and it seems they want as many contenders as possible.…
BREAKING: IRS $118M BPA for Hiring and Training - 3 more companies include Gauntlet AI added to Joining FedStack and Lantec/Codesmith. More companies coming soon.
SOURCE: [https://orangeslices.ai/treasury-dept-ocio-awards-118m-technical-workforce-development-and-training-bpa/](https://orangeslices.ai/treasury-dept-ocio-awards-118m-technical-workforce-development-and-training-bpa/)
Some news broke earlier this year with a press release from Codesmith: "Codesmith Selected for $118M IRS Contract" and a number of people felt this meant that Codesmith received a check for $118M. That's not the case.
The $118M is a ceiling for training and hiring for the IRS, and the IRS just added three more partners to the contract, with more expected to be added.
Super interesting to see the pie being split up and fought over by competing companies and it seems they want as many contenders as possible.…
Well the "leadership" has minimal AI experience. Of the three people: one has product experience, one has like no tech experience for 10+ years, and one has never worked full time for a real tech company.
Like who the heck would hire tis group of people to overhaul AI at a Fortune 500 company?
I'm not trying to be mean but just realistic.
Like lots of companies ask me to do talks and stuff because I'm one of the highest output engineers in the world but I'm not the right person to overhaul AI tooling at a Fortune 500 company... I know what I'm good at and what I'm bad at.
I think they are going to die even faster with this pivot in my opinon.
You don't get points for good intentions in this industry.
You don't get a trophy for trying.
You don't build credibility by paying somebody on Upwork to write Twitter content for you.
Their homepage hero right now that seemed that changed o…
I can clarify that, sorry I have a felling this will be long but it's important details IMO to make sure my opinions are clear.
So "fuzzing the numbers" doesn't mean intentional deception, but it means representing the numbers in a better light than they are. So by that definition - yes, CIRR was created through a marketing lens to promote bootcamps and it was designed to be rigorous enough to build trust, but also marketing-tilted enough to present numbers in a good light.
For example, there is a number that's like 'median salary'. But the only absolute number of people is the number of graduates and you have to chip away at that to get to the actual number of people in the people. E.g illustrative numbers: 100 people considered in the report, 90% graduated, 10% self employed, 5% not looking for jobs. 60% of what's left actually report income. So right off the bat the salaries only in…
No CIRR 2024-25 reports? Never taken this long for them to come out, and CIRR did not respond within 2 days to my request for comment prior to publication of this.
I'm going to call it a wrap on CIRR, the self proclaimed "gold standard" of bootcamp stats.
I'll I'm going to say it that I think it's ridiculous how when the times are good, bootcamps are throwing around CIRR as proof of their excellence.
And then when times are bad, they are fuzzing the numbers (Codesmith's report has so many people who did not respond with placement information and they counted because of LinkedIn, that the integrity of the reports is garbage now in my opinion.... or Codesmith publishing a press release that CIRR verified "85-90% of graduates placed within 12 months" - which isn't even verifiable with CIRR).
I hope all of you who yelled at me over and over and over, with anonymous now-banned accounts, j…
Here is a list of the problems to show that i'm not being sarcastic. You could feed this into AI and fix all of these in an hour.
This doesn't include CSX.
1. Footers inconsistent across site, one says 2025, one says 2026
2. Alignment in 2026 footer is not centered properly
3. Header, hover on the final item in each list has no radius and bleeds onto the page
4. Home -> Join Us -> Train Your Team -> Enterprise -> Enquire -> hello@codesmith email. Felt like I was going in circles.
5. Programs say "more dates available" but the other dates are the exact same ones in the header I clicked from
6. The dates make no sense and Jun 1 should be July 1
7. Median Salary & Employment Rate overflows in one box, inconsistent
8. It looks like their loan providers is gone but now the payment options have a gap missing a block that looks weird
9. The Terms and Privacy policy are dated…
We're on the same page that Will genuinely cares about improving education and genuinely cares about each Codesmith student and outcome.
The problem is he's not capable on the ground and his vision doesn't justify sharing thousands of students information in a call, losing the credentials for their AWS account, or his website leaking sensitive info like application gender and disability status. You shouldn't have to sacrifice anything to support that.
He allegedly sold 70% of his company in 2015/2016....
Court documents allege an agreement to make $500K a year and up to 50% of profits (not sure what that is for $23.5M of revenue)...
It's not an excuse for sharing "Landman Season 1 Web Rip" repeatedly alongside a "U.S Treasury" folder on this computer.
It's terribly sad because he hired a ton of people from Upwork to address his deficiencies and they arguably made it all worse. The s…
Codesmith launched their new website and it shifts focus to "enterprise" AI consulting, burying all their individual programs.
Codesmith updated their website in the past week and it appears to me in my personal opinion that their individual programs are being de-emphasized significantly.
Note: there are numerous references to being the Forbes #1 bootcamps, which is false and they should remove that. Forbes updated their rankings April 1st (3 weeks ago) and while they used to be last year, that is not correct anymore and the link they provide themselves no longer has them as #1. Forbes now assigns "Best at X" awards in a number of categories and Codesmith has 'best outcomes'... but does not have best for experienced coders, not best career support, not best for portfolio, not student support, not professional development, so that seems like a slip up or mistake.
What are they pivoting…
Well I can give my personal opinion on that and I have been researching for a while.
I think Will is a gifted explainer. He said he wrote the Hard Parts originally because he didn't really know how to code well. I think he said in an interview he didn't know what a JS "Map" was when he wrote them. He has additionally said that he does talks when he wants to learn something because it forces him to learn in order to then present it to people as an expert.
So given that it's absolutely fascinating how well he can explain things he literally just learned.
He has additionally said that he never wanted to teach, but both his parents are teachers and he said that as a kid he would force his sisters into doing classes on the weekends at home where he would lecture to them on things....
So it sounds like he's a gifted lecturer and it's just his superpower.
My opinion is the situation is qui…
I don't think so intentionally. Maybe I'm naive, but the bootcamps I know the founders do really care and want to do good. It's more of a symptom of the psychology of the founders.
I have been doing a 4 year study of Codesmith and it exemplifies this.
Like Codesmith for example, the founder went from NOTHING to $25M a year. He was allegedly (according to court documents) making $500K a year + up to 50% of profits. Like that kind of overnight success could go to someone's head. Codesmith's founder hired a ton of people on Upwork to support him and they all just back up this vision of a genius who made $25M out of nothing.
And that's a big accomplishment right!
But in reality Codesmith was benefiting from the founder's natural teaching ability and a popular Frontend Masters course + and the very hot job market for SWEs. Many materials were allegedly copy-paste, the instructors just gra…
Two things to watch out for in that slide deck of outcomes
1. It's from 2024 and AI changes month to month. A number of industry engineers report not writing code anymore as of 3 months ago, so it's basically irrelevant what happened in 2024.
2. The 88% figure has some crazy fine print. If I'm reading it correctly, 88% of the people WHO GOT JOBS got them within six months and 12% took longer to get the job. But it's not the percentage of people that got a job.
TripleTen does a similar metric, but for TripleTen the weakness in the data is more that a huge number of people remain "active" by not graduating and not dropping out so they don't count in the stats and they are there too long to get job guarantee refunds.
I don't know if Hyperion is self paced with a similar gap but I would ask for clarity on the placement rates.
No program is perfect and any program that looks amazing in t…
The Extinction (or Execution?) of The Junior Engineer - from your friendly neighborhood former moderator
Hi all, it saddens me the sub that I put 4 years of my time into providing honest and from the heart advice in is dying. Coding bootcamps have been dead for months now. Codesmith's GitHub repos look like a ghost town. Launch Academy never came back from their 'pause'.
So I started written very thoughtful essays about what's going on and this one is particularly relevant:
[https://michaelnovati.substack.com/p/the-extinction-of-the-junior-engineer](https://michaelnovati.substack.com/p/the-extinction-of-the-junior-engineer)
**SUMMARY:**
* Entry-level software roles are disappearing because the “training work” (simple, bounded tasks) is increasingly automated or absorbed by senior engineers using AI, reducing the need to hire juniors.
* Employers now prioritize “judgment” (real-world…
I can give me personal opinion on this comment only that is unrelated and not an statement regarding Codesmith and or its leadership.
I hate others say "this time is different" but I feel like that's the case...
If an engineer produces 10X the raw output (and potentially more) for the same salary, then even in a world where there is demand for the skill of programming, we might just not need as many.
Like if the productivity output is so much higher, I think it can be enough to both see an expansion of the need for code-writers but not a need for many more engineers.
Maybe 50% of the engineers we have now can write all the code humanity needs, and the others need to do a new job.
One of the points the founder makes against this is that new people to the industry were effectively being paid to learn and develop tacit knowledge and eventually they do and are a valuable engineer. And he is concerned that with AI there will be no reason for a company to hire someone in those early phases because the math doesn't add up anymore (AI replaces all of their value for $100 a month instead of $10K a month). I believe he mentions he thinks the government needs to step.
I have to disclose bias because my company works with engineers later in their careers to help prepare for interviews and about 1/4 of people were bootcamp grads in the past.
But I'm very curious how you even came up with the idea of going to App Academy because they sold their brand to Coding Temple and it's their course now as of about a year ago, so anything you heard about App Academy before then is completely irrelevant.
If you are asking if you should go to a bootcamp in general, there are a very small number of people who have industry experience that go to bootcamps and my opinion is that placement depends more on you than the bootcamp. Meaning the people that get placed didn't need the bootcamp, they needed a self confidence boost that the bootcamp gave them... like doing a 3 week project and framing it as 2 years of work to help get interviews and feeling confident in framing…
I can't disclose what Formation makes but I can say that we have hundreds of engineers doing interview prep at a given time and several thousand ever. But we're really not making that much money in revenue if you ballpark it and we have losses since day on.
I personally make $0 salary, have made $0 from equity, no sketchy backchannel compensation, and even put more money into the company when I can. I do it because I feel like the world will be a better place if people land the right role for them and everyone is more impactful than they were.
One of my hobbies is studying scams and fraud, and if all those scammers spent their energies on something value add for the world, we would be so much better off. If the bootcamps spent more energy with people getting outcomes then figuring out how to "creatively market" their poor outcomes, it would be better off. So I call out this behavior a…
I don't think it's going to pop the way people talk about it popping with circular investments all a giant scam about to implode, etc...
The efficiency gains are real. Every day I save hours of people's time. If someone spends time on something manually I offer to use AI to replace it. And over time I think we do 3 to 5X more output than we used to without AI with a smaller team.
That is undeniable value add and the companies are undercharging for that value creation right now.
Meaning there is a ton more room for AI to grow and REAL cash flow.
That doesn't mean there will be some investment mistakes that pop along the way, but I don't think it will implode the entire market like some think.
I'm seeing all junior roles of all areas being impacted with no short cut. I'm kind of annoyed that bootcamps keep pivoting to the short term hot area. There was this big pivot to Crypto, then to cyber security, now to medical areas that aren't even programming.
It's hard for all juniors because the day to day of what you do is replaceable with the leading age LLMs and tools and bigger companies are still catching up and it's only getting worse.
I've given this advice in other answers, but you need judgement through experience to get hired and if you don't have coding experience, leverage the non-technical experience you have.
Maybe you played a musical instrument for 15 years, did figure skating, ballet, soccer, collect stamps or pokemon cards, played video games. Whatever you spent more time doing than most people, start by plopping yourself down there and networking.
The NPR podcast references sources from a stanford study showing that SWE jobs are likely to be replaced sooner than later, and federal government stats on unemployment rates of CS grads. They state that they are 2X the unemployment rate of history majors, but I didn't read the source.
They also discuss anecdotally with examples from 'talking to people for research' how top tier CS grads always had it easy and now they are just barely getting jobs, whereas 3rd tier CS grads always had it hard and now find it impossible.
Like Codesmith has 6 month California data for 2024 students and the number of people placed who reported a salary and weren't self-employed or employed by schools can be estimated at 12%. Which is a massive cliff from 2023 which was a massive cliff from 2022.
It's an example that demonstrates a complete and utter collapse of the bootcamp grad market, going from like…
Well if you become a freelancer or self employed.or go back to your old job, you'll count as a placement for your bootcamp and they'll be happy
Codesmith's 2024 California government data showed that of their placements about 2/3 were non responsive to report their salary and counted as a placement from LinkedIn, and a surge in "self employed" people this year too, and more "hired by school" than last year.
So it's kind of sad but if you get any kind of job the bootcamp is happy and you are kind of left for yourself.
Facts and accountability are foundational. You can troll all you want, but facts are the facts and your assumptions about my intentions are not facts.
The press release I quoted says that "Federal selection followed rigorous evaluation of Codesmith's independently verified outcomes: 85-90% of graduates placed within 12 months, two-thirds promoted within three years, and an average starting salary of $130,000. Unlike competitors, Codesmith relies entirely on word-of-mouth referrals rather than advertising, with all outcomes verified by the Council on Integrity in Results Reporting."
Website: "Codesmith has proven this thesis true with 5000+ alumni. 90% of graduates get hired within 12 months, most land leadership roles within big tech & AI labs and many directly contribute to the world’s largest open source projects"
**There is nothing at CIRR that says that 85 to 90% of the 5000 gradu…
In my opinion, these numbers wouldn't encourage me personally to go to a bootcamp, but it's also a fact that some people get SWE jobs via bootcamps as well.
The conditions are important. I agree on more transparency about what jobs, where and what backgrounds people is critical for any individual who is trying to figure out if they are one of the few it will work for.
However I have to be careful because Codesmith published an official press release on the wire that claims they have a "85% to 90%" placement rate of the "5000" graduates, "$130,000" "average" salaries, "all outcomes verified by by CIRR". So that has to be assumed as fact because stating incorrect information on a press release is a whole other can of worms to deal with.
So you can't make assumptions really.
I would guess that most of them are SWE jobs or SWE adjacent jobs (like Sales Engineer). Generally the people placed from Codesmith are solid placements. But if the vast majority of people aren't reachable to confirm the placement, it's hard to judge from LinkedIn alone.
My opinion is that I think the 12% are solid mostly SWE or SWE adjacent placements yeah, and you can see a good number of those in the $100K+ bucket in the report.
The report that's coming out in April-ish is the 2024 report for CIRR, which includes nationwide students, not just California (which was about 200 students) and CIRR also has 12 month placement numbers.
The 'did not respond' rate for CIRR last year was similar to the 2023 CA report (about 40% did not) but this year's CA report had an increase in non responders.
So that's the number to watch.
This is a rough example, but if you have 100% students start, 90% graduate, 63% had jobs in a year, and 34% (of starters) approximately reported a salary.
So the 'median' salary of $110,000 includes about a third of the students, which is fine, but it's not a median salary of 'students' or of all 'graduates'. Since the data is pretty clear on this, if people feel like this representation of 'the typical grad makes $110,000' is reasonable then I think it's important to call out the qualification…
DEVELOPING: Codesmith 2024 California Government Outcomes report is out today. Only 12% are placed within 6 months with reported salary (50% including 'no salary information available') but press release also out today says '85% to 90% placement rate within 12 months' 'CIRR verified' (no time frame)
SOURCE: [https://bppe.ca.gov/webapplications/annualReports/2024/document/98d87f0e-23c1-4af7-aabf-7c91d4ea7312](https://bppe.ca.gov/webapplications/annualReports/2024/document/98d87f0e-23c1-4af7-aabf-7c91d4ea7312)
I can't legally comment much on this so instead I ran it through a neutral AI with the following prompt:
"Summarize this document and compare it to information about Codesmith you can research and flag any good things and flag any concerning things. Summarize in 5 bullet points."
* **Completion is very high, but placement is not.** Codesmith’s Software Engineering Immersive show…
That blog post presents a one-sided framing and selectively quotes material to support a conclusion I do not agree with.
Claims such as: “Codesmith has proven this thesis true with 5,000+ alumni. 90% of graduates get hired within 12 months, most land leadership roles within big tech & AI labs, and many directly contribute to the world’s largest open source projects” are extraordinary marketing statements. Evaluating them using publicly available sources like LinkedIn and GitHub is both lawful and commonplace when assessing public claims about outcomes.
Reviewing publicly available professional profiles and repositories is not stalking or harassment. It is standard practice in hiring, investing, journalism, and market analysis, and it is often the only way to contextualize broad promotional claims.
I also reviewed summaries of my own comment history using automated tools and reached co…
We'll see when their next CIRR report comes out. I periodically look at OSLabs-Beta and OpenSourceLabs GitHub projects and check if the students have jobs and the number of people with jobs about six months after graduation seems lower than it historically has been.
The next CIRR report though is people who graduated in 2024, not 2025, so the information will already be outdated. It would be really useful to get six month numbers for H1 2025.
The Codesmith Federal website says 90% of the 5000+ graduates get jobs within a year. Their own CIRR reports dispute that so I'm not sure if that's a preview of the 2024 outcomes or if it's just a mistake.
There also appears to be a new Codesmith FULL TIME program from August 7th, 2026 to November 9th, 2027, which is a whole 15 MONTHS!!! I'm very curious about that option.
Launch School though is crushing Codesmith on six month placement data…
Do they have open source projects? I know for places like Codesmith and Launch School you can just go through the open source projects that every student does and figure out placement rates. Anyone can do this and see raw information - with the caveat that LinkedIns could be out of date. However CIRR and Codesmith's auditor considers LinkedIn "LinkedIn is almost as gospel as anything else" (quote) so if you go off of LinkedIn you can figure out the placement rates.
I can't comment on that right now but encourage people to spend like an hour digging into it themselves and correlating it with public messaging if they are curious about this, and if they don't care then don't! haha.
Bootcamps work for a lot of people!
Look at CIRR data and the latest for Codesmith showed like 40% of people getting jobs within 6 months of graduating.
Launch School has like a 70% ish placement rate within 6 months.
These are the source of the massive negativity right now;
1. Trends are tanking and down. The trend is more important than the absolute numbers.
2. Salaries are down in these reports, despite inflation and SWE base salaries being up. This indicates more people taking worse jobs or tangential jobs instead of the SWE jobs.
3. Ghosts. Launch School doesn't have this problem but Codesmith's data shows about half the people NOT RESPONDING TO SALARY REQUESTS. Meaning that of the 100% of people who start, 90% graduate, 40% get a job, and 50% actually submitted a salary, so the "median graduate salary" for 6 months includes 18% of students. Historically far more people got pl…
DEVELOPING: FedStack and Lantec won up to $118M government contract for non-IT training for the Federal Government/IRS - Codesmith will be involved (conflicting reports)
Source: https://app.g2xchange.com/FedCiv/posts/smoothstack-obtains-118m-treasury-ocio-non-it-technical-workforce-development-and-training-bp
FedStack is large government contractor.
Lantec is a training company with three locations in Louisiana.
This is a blanket maximum contract and it's unclear what specific services are provided or expected, and what "non-IT training" means.
Codesmith claims here that they won the contract https://www.codesmith.io/federal and made the following statement
"Codesmith now extends its mission to driving tangible impact across the US economy, with the potential to return billions of tax dollars.
Codesmith has proven this thesis true with 5000+ alumni. 90% of graduates get hired with…
I'm going to caution with the premise of the question.
So first off, check for yourself because one off examples of jobs or no job don't mean much in isolation. A small number of people get jobs from all bootcamps. Both Codesmith and Launch School work on open source projects and you can review the projects, see the contributors, check their LinkedIns and see if they got jobs or not. Launch School has provided a report for 2024 grads that accounts for every single person that started and you can see that without doing the work.
Second, it highly depends on the person. People with a engineering background, or experience at a tech company in a non software role, and who take adjacent roles have a much better short.
For example, a 15 year salesperson at tech companies -> "Sales Engineer" is a massively different placement from no-degree no-experience line cook -> FAANG Software Engineer…
Current price: Codesmith: $22,500 (14 weeks). Launch School "18% of your first year salary, or $18k (USD)" (16 weeks), Hack Reactor: $19,480.
Enrollment at Codesmith based on OSLabs Github projects appears to have dropped from about 1000 people in 2023 to about 100(?) people in 2025 and like a dozen in the past 3 months?
Launch School had 71 people in 2023 and 76 in 2024, so it's maybe capturing the market share since that's actually higher.
So not that many people are paying that much no more.
BREAKING: Launch School Capstone 2024 Outcomes
SEE ORIGINAL: [https://www.reddit.com/r/launchschool/comments/1q2cvsx/2024\_capstone\_salary\_data/](https://www.reddit.com/r/launchschool/comments/1q2cvsx/2024_capstone_salary_data/)
Launch School is one of the remaining top programs, that announced a small cutback from 3 to 2 cohorts in 2026. These outcomes are very strong though still.
Overall for 2024 grads they had 66% placement rate for ALL ENROLLEES in six months (74% if you exclude non-job-hunting)
Early 2025 cohorts have a lower placement rate but a little above 50% so far.
Overall this is a good sign as the only CIRR reporting school that competes directly with Launch School is Codesmith and their 2023 data had a 42% placement rate (excluding non job hunting) in 6 months, which is almost HALF that of Launch School.
This isn't magic, Launch School's program takes a long tim…
My comments are too boring to write an article about. This is the type of commentary I had for 2.5 years until the market collapsed and Codesmith hired this Reddit guy that completely screwed up their Reddit presence and left me very personally upset.
The good old days were much better.
I wish that guy would tell a fair story from both sides.
1. I spend most of my time coding not on Reddit: github.com/mnovati
2. Copied over first response
I'm going to focus on the MODERATION ACCUSATION first since that seems to be the main issue.
What moderating r/codingbootcamp actually looks like:
I don't own the sub - I report to the owner who asked me to help after I'd been one of the most active and helpful contributors. The coding bootcamp industry is absolutely infested with astroturfing. Brand new accounts, manufactured conversations, fake testimonials. It's constant daily spam trying to manipulate people making $15K-20K decisions.
My job is to support authentic discussion. We have above-average Reddit AI filters. We generally don't review flagged content because we can't tell who these suspicious brand new accounts are. Occasionally we approve legitimate posts caught in filters.
The accusation that I delete Codesmith's posts:…
I can't summarize here because it's long and I have like an 8 page press briefing doc lol but you're right that there is more to the story. Like how they hired a Reddit hitman and the guy got dozens of accounts suspended. All of their instructors are a pyramid of graduates from the school itself. They lost their AWS root phone number and their website and email were down for 3 weeks. And dozens of other relevant facts.
There are two sides to every story and both sides should be heard.
Bootcamps are failing. Codesmith did very well in the good times but their grads were systematically exaggerating their Codesmith projects into average of 11 months (my Nov 2023 analysis of 50 grads). I still recommended people go there during those times, but I was cautioning the 'right people' should go there who know how it works and what they are in for.
Unfortunately even in 2024-2025 those tactics…
We do lose some people who can't afford upfront but we have solutions to mitigate. You can split up the payments of the upfront portion, or get loans (sometimes interest free). This reduces the lost customer problem to a smaller set of people. But honestly, some people can afford it and only want to sign up if they can defer because they just don't want to pay anything upfront and those people tend to be ones that don't job hunt as intensely and aren't a good fit because they aren't serious about the job hunt to begin with.
We thought that if we give you a team of 4 staff members constantly checking in on you and pushing you along that people would keep the momentum going but if power didn't pay anything upfront it's very easy to be like "meh I'll apply to more jobs in two months after A, B, C happens".
We don't line people up with guaranteed jobs. We have a strong network and great co…
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…
Yes look at my account history please. Are you delusional? I had three different independent AI engines analyze my entire account history for the substance I talk about and it's all aligned with my representation of myself.
Some Codesmith people are so brainwashed they only see Codesmith stuff and these 100 comment back and forth threads that I refuse to back down on, and completely miss the substance of what I talk about that actually gets VIEW COUNTS.
Codesmith people, go "under the hood" instead of being so superficial.
Like i said in the other comment, entrenching on the Codesmith side without talking to me just makes me shake my head. You'll see in the future when you wake up.
Many alumni have and it's one of the reasons their community has completely and utterly fallen apart. The only Codesmith people I hear from now are on payroll in some capacity. Your alumni are gone because…
I feel like I'm transparent about it, but I will summarize here my arguments that have been consistent for a period of time. I'm extremely transparent about these reasons, so either people think I'm lying or they think that there's some like secret motivation. I don't know.
Codesmith thinks I have all kinds of motivations that they are just incorrect about, and believing them is only harming them even more and making their situation worse. So I don't really know why they're doing that, but it might make them feel better than accepting the truth.
I have been consistently clear that Codesmith was one of the top bootcamps, that their number one strength was in helping ambitious and driven people build self-confidence in their programming abilities, and that they had three things that I didn't like.
1. They were consistently marketing placements as mid-level and Senior roles, and in my op…
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
I can't disclose exact things nor do I proactively reach out to people about it. From what people told me the numbers aren't good.
They removed all their highest paid employees and pay very low now. They fired the most expensive people and hired people in their place and paid them a lot less for the same job.
Codesmith is $22,500 so if you have 10 people every 8 weeks, thats $225,000 or about $100,000 a month.
Their staff right now:
1 instructor: $10,000 (they are paid a lot less now)
3 mentors/combined fellow: $30,000 (fellow is multiple people part time)
1 coordinator: $6,000
1 admissions: $6,000
1 outcomes: $6,000
Marketing/Career Support: $6,000
Overhead = 20% $13,000
Total: is like $80,000 or so?
I think this is why they are clinging to life, they convince loyal alumni to work for a fraction of what they should be paid... like those MLMs that run off of the labor…
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…
Bootcamps aren't an alternative to college because most bootcamp grads have college degrees (just in different areas). Codesmith's data they shared in a public talk maybe 1.5 years ago or showed that the vast majority of people had college degrees and most went to pretty good colleges to, like the UC system in California, etc...
Second, when I go to Codesmith's homepage I see a giant $110,000 as the first thing I see and a a banner of where people got hired 6+ months ago.
When I go to Stanford's homepage I see a photo of Stanford, followed by it's mission and news.
Different goals and vibes.
One is luring you in with big numbers and then having terrible placement rates. The other is luring you in with brand and prestige and being a part of an elite community and delivering on that to every single student.