Awesome thanks for adding details.
I have posted extensively elsewhere but you can't get mid level FAANG SWE jobs (e.g. Google L4) with no experience. I worked at Facebook for 8 years, did a ton of early career recruiting, observed hiring committee reviews. The levels are calibrated company wide and sacred, based on people's previous scope of responsibility and not on your skill level. If your skill level is super high, you come in entry level and then get incredible performance reviews (making more comp the you would at mid level anyways). So someone with no experience trying to be a "official" mid level FAANG is doing the wrong strategy. Happy to explaon this more. People have said "but I know someone I swear"and every case is a miscommunication or misunderstanding of the level (Google's entry level is L3 for example), or based on salary (since entry level FAANG can hit $200K), or a…
Yeah there are a small number of people who get FAANG jobs out of Codesmith and I would strive for that over a higher title, or even higher base salary.
We're splitting hairs because both paths are better than a lot of other paths haha.
The benefits of FAANG-level over other companies:
1. Generally higher talent bar and experience level of coworkers, so you learn from stronger engineers.
2. More structured ramp-up. A lot of FAANG level companies have bootcamps/onboarding/very structured rampup, so you learn more faster.
3. Exposure to some leading edge infrastructure and industry leading ways of solving and scaling that you might not see at smaller companies.
4. Generally more users and larger scale products. You can't learn how to build product for a billion people without having a billion people using something.
5. Engineers have more influence over decisions. It's just more fun wh…
Hi! I'm combining my take on things into a top level comment. I started working at Facebook in 2009, right during the end of the great recession. I started interviewing and doing university recruiting in 2010, shortly after the great recession. I know some some people might have also lived through that time, but I can share my view working in tech during that time. I also have hundreds of colleagues and former colleagues who worked through both that recession and the dot-com crash of 2000. I also work with a lot of experienced engineers now, helping them get jobs at top tier companies and am very familiar with the market, and know people at almost all the top companies.
I know a lot of people have opinions in the other comments, I'm just presenting my perspective for a different point of view for anyone reading.
1. Tech is not going away. The efficiency improvements to all aspects of l…
I'm sorry you feel that way.
I understand and acknowledge that there's a reason/"agenda" for me to be active on this sub. My life's mission is to help software engineers from non-traditional and underrepresented engineering backgrounds break into the top tier impactful roles. I was at Facebook for 8 years, from 2009 to 2017 and saw such hard working people were building products for billions of people but lacking a more diverse set of voices in doing so. This is an industry wide issue. Sophie first created a free bootcamp called Buildschool to help people get their first jobs. In getting to know bootcamps and meeting their founders, she realized that the broader bootcamp industry has already helped tens of thousands of brand new engineers, from diverse backgrounds, get started in their careers with their first jobs, but most lacked fundamentals, rigorous practice, and interaction with t…
So there are paths for bootcamp grads, like top-tier apprenticeships (Dropbox, Asana, Twilio, etc...) but it is hard. The top bootcamps after widdling down people who actually graduate, have 70 to 90% placement within six more months.
I don't know about the outcomes of a short degree from WGU. Having a legitimate degree can help your resume get past screens. But a few years down the road, I'm not sure.
If you have a natural propensity for coding, are super ambitious and hard working, I think a bootcamp can accelerate things.
cc: u/Yak_Overflow as well, RE: ISAs.
I can give my perspective on ISAs in general (they aren't unique to coding bootcamps), this might be a bit long and boring but it's a very interesting topic and a lot of ISAs are full of problems.
TRANSPARENT DISCLOSURE: I am the co-founder of a non-bootcamp training and mentoring program that successfully offers ISAs.
"Scam" is a strong word, but most bootcamps that offered ISAs have stopped offering them because they are absolutely terrible for the company, especially when a lot of bootcamps don't have great placement rates. Lambda School (BloomTech) used to be a pioneer of ISAs and recently stopped offering them. About 50% of people who start BloomTech get a job within 6 months of graduating, so 8 months + 6 months = 14 months for HALF of the people that started to even START paying for their education. Meanwhile BloomTech has to pay its staff…
Thanks for this candid feedback! I appreciate it a lot.
Lot of stuff I will reflect on and try to incorporate into my responses. I got feedback I didn't disclose Formation so maybe I went too far haha.
I'm extremely thankful you gave that example of the two quotes because I didn't realize that came across that way.
Yeah I don't know what to say but I'm here to help people. I joined Facebook in 2009 and my stock 100x'd so I originally semi-retired a few years ago. The lack of diversity and people from nontraditional backgrounds in tech is such a huge factor contributing to the problems that big tech is facing today, so I came back with Sophie to give 150% on helping solve this problem. I have made $0 from Formation (no salary) and while I'm a partial owner, we lose money every month right now.
I want to help more people get into the industry and find the right path for them. This is…
Hi there! What kind of job are you aiming for?
In general, having a CS degree without internships/experience can be tough: hundreds of applications and few responses. At FB we would go through piles of resumes and people who didn't have several top tier internships were instantly skipped over (this was when I was involved in 2010). Unfortunately bootcamp grads have it pretty similar, so I don't know how much a generic bootcamp will help at this point.
Georgia Tech Master's is good. The downsides are it will take longer and it won't necessarily help with getting a job. It might reset the clock and you can reconsider new grad jobs and hopefully have more direct access to recruiters is GT is a good CS school.
I would only go to a bootcamp if you feel like your skill level is not at an entry level bar yet. If you have the CS fundamentals to get hired and need job hunt help look at these o…
I strongly recommend just pinging people on LinkedIn, no specific people, just ask anyone!
I have two responses to this:
1. The main reason the outcomes are so great is because the timeframe is variable and the outcome is fixed. I don't know any program/bootcamp/school that is like this, which is why we are our own type of thing. You get the result you want and you get there on your own timeline rather than working on someone else's fixed timeline and getting whatever result you can get. All of the logistics I've already described are 100% accurate and talking to people should confirm that (if it didn't let me know and I will reword something)
2. Our team is legitimately experienced and senior compared to anything else out there. We have 3 ex-principal FB engineers (E7+), we have 3 more ex-senior FB/FAANG engineers (\~8 yrs each) who have done many hundreds of interviews each (Amazon B…
Hi, yeah I'm the co-founder (Sophie is the CEO and founder) and hang around this sub as Derek said :D. As Derek kind of said as well, Formation isn't a "bootcamp" and roughly 80 to 90% of Fellows (approx) have some kind of professional engineering work experience (typically 1 to 3 years) and are working full time while they do Formation. A lot of people did bootcamps in the past so I took an interest to this sub, and a ton of people have been asking me questions about bootcamps (we have Formation Fellows representing many different bootcamps in the past) and the industry since I became active, so I stuck around to help.
I also highly doubt past Formation Fellows are in this sub, I know a few people in this sub who are doing Formation now and are on the more junior side and they might be able to comment on their experiences to help you get a better picture. Try contacting people on Linke…
I know the founder of Rithm and they are very focused on quality of education because of negative experiences at other bootcamps. They run very small cohorts with lots of face time. They care a ton about the quality of curriculum and education. I haven't talked to them since they went remote though.
We have a few Rithm alumni who we worked with a Formation.dev and they were a pleasure to work with.
I can't reply to RobSteinsVoice, a current Codesmith student, because they blocked me. But I'll add some notes here.
If you go to Codesmith's website about page, and look at the LinkedIn for all the instructors (junior, mid, senior, lead), they all went to Codesmith. They either graduated and stayed on for sometimes many years, or they worked somewhere and teach part time. I'm not sure if this is what was meant above about hiring back students. From what I understand "Fellows" are hired on…
I can give my thoughts on this. I'm the co-founder of Formation.dev and I want to be very upfront that I do not think Formation is a good fit for you yet (we work with experienced engineers to get top-tier roles), but I do have extensive experience with mentoring as a result of Formation and can highlight the pros and cons in my opinion.
**Personal Mentoring**
PROS:
* Goes at your pace
* Focused on your strengths and weaknesses
* Content can change and adapt as you go
* Always have a helping hand
CONS:
* Only get one person's point of view. If you hire an army of mentors it will cost you a fortune.
* Relying on one person's teaching style working all the time
* Different people are good at teaching different things, you are overpaying for some things for worse quality
* It's hard to find a good mentor and hard to judge if they are good, when you don't know what you don't know
**Str…
So they get FLOODED with applications. Which is why that Google recruiter was brave to post the other day haha.
Most of them send out some essay style questions in the application and more importantly a hackerrank or codesignal test. The tests I've seen (second hand through Fellows) are classic DS&A/leetcode and medium-hardish. The problem is because there are so many applications, you basically have to be perfect or very close to perfect to not get filtered out. I've heard of some people cheating (and they detect that too) and trying to really "pass the test" mentality... which is actually the opposite of what these apprenticeships want.... there are just so many applications it's the best they can do to filter.
You can try a sample test we offer at Formation: [https://formation.dev/join/assessment](https://formation.dev/join/assessment)
You'll get your score after completing. Since…
Hi all, I've gotten a lot of DMs about my comments asking for more advice. I work with a lot of bootcamp grads a bit down the road in their journeys to achieve roles at the top companies including Google. I probably don't have as many messages as Mike has thought ;) but I'll share some thoughts on here.
1. Google is one of the top companies in the world and has one of the hardest hiring processes and highest bars for data structures and algorithms. This post isn't about a special program for bootcamp grads. This is an opportunity to connect with a recruiter who is supporting the "Early Career" (a.k.a. "New Grad") L3 pipeline. The bar hasn't changed and remains very high.
2. The interview process is the normal L3/Early Career process. You'll do 1 technical screen covering 1-2 medium to hard data structures and algorithms problems, not much talking. Sometimes you'll do a second one if th…
1. Yes for that specific person, without knowing their skill level, they should look into Formation. If their skills are at our bar, it would be a better choice than a bootcamp. For reference, the comment thread: [https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/viw3bd/switching\_from\_civil\_engineering\_to\_swe/idhm08u/?context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/viw3bd/switching_from_civil_engineering_to_swe/idhm08u/?context=3)
2. 80K is the increase in total compensation over people's previous job engineering, not the compensation itself (and we exclude people who don't have a previous job from the calculation as it would be very unfair). I've been trying to crunch more recent numbers and my rough calculations for median base salary is $138K for salaries submitted (not job start dates but when people submitted a form with the info) Sept 30th 2021 to May 29th, 2022 (…
80K is the average INCREASE in compensation for people that had jobs prior. Not the average compensation.
I think that's kind of proving the point, we are not competing with them and there's nothing to be put to rest. A bunch of people have messaged me here about bootcamps and I've recommended they go to Codesmith given their situation, it's not either or. Others have messaged me about Formation. No one has said "I'm choosing between Codesmith and Formation"
Again, people typically talk to us about Outco, Interview Kickstart, Scalar, Exponent, and Pathrise - some of whom don't have pricing on their websites, let alone outcomes, but have had thousands and thousands of engineers go through their programs nonetheless. We're playing different games here and I'm sorry if my involvement in this subreddit is causing this confusion.
This is the best I got for raw outcomes: last 50 offers acce…
RE: career change. How much experience do you have already coding? We have a civil engineer at Formation.dev right now with a similar background but who has been self studying for some time now and crushing it. It could be a good path to consider if you are already at our bar and I can ask them if they would talk to you to give you advice. If you already have your plans set then ignore me and keep going.
RE: job market. I can comment on what we've seen at Formation. We have seen zero offers rescinded or layoffs. We have seen a very small number (under 10) of cancelled interviews (specifically at the headline companies that have rescinded offers/hiring freezes). On the other hand we've seen a lot of companies aggressively hiring and compensation has been increasing. If anything we've seen a pickup in hiring. We've had more people got to Google, Amazon, Microsoft than ever.... 15 out of t…
I'm very familiar with this process in the United States at least. It's called "team matching".
So if you do well on the onsite, the recruiter will send your packet to the hiring committee review. If that committee "recommends hiring", you passed the interviews! You will go into a big pool of people who passed to get matched with teams and the recruiter can also help you match.
During team match, the goal is for a team to see if you are a good fit for their needs and then if they want you, you will get an offer officially with numbers shortly after.
This process will vary depending on you and the teams. An earlier career candidate might have an easy time because the teams they are marching with are looking for someone junior who seems good to work with.
If you are very senior, the team might be more selective about who will join because you will be a leader with more influence and…
Adding this for future reference as well to show how drastically different we are. Codesmith posted a blog announcing their CIRR results that explains the job hunt differences quite well
The TLDR: this reinforces how Codesmith is a bootcamp program to teach people using structured lectures and curriculum and Formation is a program to give you unique "personal trainer"-like development and mentoring.
THIS IS AN ENTIRE QUOTE FROM SOURCE BELOW WITH INLINE COMMENTS IN BOLD MARKED "FORMATION" TO HIGHLIGHT DIFFERENCES
During Codesmith’s **Hiring Program**, you can expect:
* Tailored Resume Guidance and Feedback
* Residents attend lectures covering resume best practices and are pushed to craft their experiences in a way that is both technically sound and authentic to them. Residents receive three revisions with specific feedback from an engineering fellow to ensure the content and quali…
Apologies if this sounds like product placement but you should consider Formation.dev to see if it’s a good fit or not. You may or may not need it but we have worked with a couple of people in this bucket (one is on our formation.dev/network page in the top row) and had very strong results. Again, not meant to be salespitch, check it out on your own and do your research but you should know all your options. Some other programs that exist to help get interview ready are Outco and Interview Kickstart. They all cost about the same and Outco and Interview Kickstart have fairly similar fixed training models. At Formation, we work with you full force for however long it takes to get a top tier job and your training will adapt personally to you week to week to efficiently get you there, but it’s fairly intense (10 to 20 hours a week minimum up to full time 40 hours).
Companies have nothing to do with ISAs so I would be curious to know what’a really the problem. At Formation, we have ISAs for a different purpose - we aren’t a bootcamp, but we train and mentor people (many who went to bootcamps and are now working at their first job) until they get a new job and then they start paying back their ISA. Because we keep working with people until they get that job, no matter how long it takes, everyone has been happy with this model and not once have people been turned away from jobs because of this. People are going to Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Dropbox, Figma, and dozens more and not once has an ISA come up.
So I have some follow up questions:
1. Why is this even coming up in conversation, no one should know or care about how the person paid for their program?
2. Perhaps the person’s resume hides that they went to a bootcamp? and it’s the r…
I have a lot of thought on them and have been following for a while. They have audited outcomes that are really not great (something around 50% of people who start get a job within 6 months of graduating and the median salary is quite low compared to the national averages for engineers).
So this is a bit of secret but they use to have this webpage where they listed all of their new grads who were available to hire. I was monitoring that page month to month and something in the low dozens out of many hundreds were hired every month. Their CEOs tweets make it seem like a lot more people are graduating and getting top tier jobs.
I have a minor beef with them personally. One of their alumni came to Formation 2 years and 2 jobs after leaving Bloomtech. We helped them very briefly to interview and negotiate their top tier offer and then Bloomtech shouted out this offer as a success case for…
Hi Ilias, we currently support people in United States and a small number in Canada.
To be transparent, there are two challenges:
1. We work with people as long as it takes to get a really really good job so the job market in your country has to be similar to the USA so we can expect you to get that job in a reasonable amount of time. Similarly, we can’t typically support deferring based on your income (you can pay upfront) because the salaries have to be similar to here for the economics to work. If you are somewhere with a similar market to the USA it might be possible, otherwise we need to made some changes and offer a specially design program for specific countries. We currently don’t offer immigration or visa support if your plans are to move to the United States for a job. If you are authorized to work in the USA already, than this wouldn’t be a problem even if you are currently…
Formation doesn't have public any "reports". We don't aggregate a lot of numbers either internally. We are focused on meeting or exceeding each person's individual goal. I'm more than happy to try to answer questions you might have.
Some notes about why. The summary is that since we aren't bootcamp, course, or anything like that, it's very nuanced to summarize numbers and we would need to invest a lot of time and energy in figuring things out:
1. Bootcamps have a consistent A starting point and a report is a way to measure how well they develop people from starting point A. Formation is focused on someones goals, so our outcomes are relative to that. For example have Senior Microsoft engineers who want to go to top tier smaller companies. We have new grads who want to go to FAANG. We have self taught people looking for apprenticeship. Our most common Fellow will have 1-3 years of exper…
Hi, what are your job goals for your first job?
You can self teach backend. You can't really self teach scaling backends but you can make solid backend progress on your own.
I've worked with people who are self-taught/cheap courses (at Formation.dev, which is paid "personal training" and quite expensive, but not a bootcamp or course) and they have gotten top tier FAANG-level jobs with zero experience. If you have the raw skills and a strong alignment to the right company, then the right referral to the right person can get you in the door. It's extremely personal and nuanced but it's worked and I've seen it happen. Here's one of the best cases who is public on our website: [https://www.linkedin.com/in/mpay/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/mpay/) (this is a full blown SWE role and not a contractor or adjacent non-SWE role). Some of these people have had stronger outcomes than people who we…
I do think down the road we will compete head on but still disagree we do now. Our technology right now works for taking a range of A to a range of B outcomes in C time (which is the variable). We have a few hundred different micro sessions, and a few thousands different tasks, a few hundred assessments, a few dozens types of mock interviews. And every week we pull out a set of things that fit your schedule that you need to work on to improve that week. This is all the stuff to get from "1-3 years industry experience at decent company" to high performance top tier company. But if we expand this library of tasks and sessions we can really support a much wider range of transitions.
I'm happy to go over more details about what we do specifically or maybe chat with Chris G or another person you can find that went through the full gamut.
Maybe on paper these words sound similar but our bar…
Thanks for sharing. Yeah we lose a lot of context on Reddit and my writing might come across more mean than it's meant. I love that Codemsith has helped so many people and had a major impact on people's lives. We need way more people working to make tech a better place. Thanks for writing this out and I'll be more cognizant of this in the future.
100% compared to other bootcamps, there are so many bad apples out there that are genuinely not great intentioned. Sophie, the founder of Formation was a mentor at different programs and wanted to do better, which is why she started Buildschool all by herself - a free iOS bootcamp. That evolved into Formation when I joined on and we realized we needed to raise funding to hire top tier engineers in the industry (mostly from Facebook, so we can debate that haha) to help scale out truly one-of-a-kind approach to training. I think we need more peop…
Hi Crafts :D Thanks for adding the info again, appreciate civil conversations haha.
I totally agree with understanding who is posting information and understanding where they are coming from. Reddit is a tough place because everyone is anonymous (and it's easy to attack people anonymously) and I insist on using my real identity, have an open mind, stand behind my statements, and engage in good discussion.
Now for the expected reply hahaha:
I disagree about competing with Codesmith. If someone at Codesmith told you this it means they are probably concerned about us competing with them but not the other way around. I don't think I've interacting with anyone who said "I'm choosing between Formation and Codesmith", whereas I've interacted with many people who have done Formation AFTER Codesmith (either right after or a few years later), or who wanted to talk about if it was the right thi…
‼️ CIRR is audited but it's far from unbiased. The board of directors and founders are all affiliated with bootcamps. It's not a 501 3c non profit because that's a conflict of interest. It's registered as a "business league/lobbying organization". Now I'm super middle of the road person, and don't judge those groups, but lobbying groups are not unbiased.
I wrote a long post about Formation's data will paste here because believe it or not I spend most of my time helping Fellows and making Formation great. **We are not a school or bootcamp. We compete with things like Pathrise, Interview Kickstart, and Outco.** Talk to any current Fellow or alumni. We are not perfect, but care about every single outcome, we have by far the most experienced team, we work with people with full technical training as long as it takes to get there, and it works really well.
We are a mission driven organizatio…
I agree that if the people perform well, which they are, then you could argue that it doesn't matter.
At Formation, before we hired dedicated ex-FB recruiters, I used to interview every Fellow. We handful of Codemith people, the ones with industry experience didn't even talk about it because they already had a job, and the ones that did not have industry experience were quite covering up the fact that it was open source but not lying, and it very quickly unraveled that it was not real work experience. We hired a Codemith alumni went through our own program so it's really not meant to be a criticism of the program, so I don't mean that it necessarily reflected poorly either.
I'm going to write up my free flow thoughts as I'm reading through it. I'll focus on Codesmith because it's the most talked about bootcamp on here and I don't have much time. 5 minute recap!!
1. CIRR is basically dead. Only four schools in the USA reported. Only one school in SF/NY reported.
2. Codesmith's numbers don't including an auditing report. I'm assuming they were audited.
3. Codesmith LA:
1. Similar graduation and placement rates
2. Solid increase in median compensation
3. They changed the buckets but it looks like a $10K increase in salaries across the board.
4. Increased number of graduates by 40 is almost 40% and maintained strong numbers, which is a good sign
4. Codesmith NY:
1. Similar number of graduates from previous report, no growth
2. Large jump in percentage placed within 6 months from 80 to 90%
3. Kept same salary buckets, easier to compare tren…
We aren't a bootcamp but we offer ISAs at Formation and reasons people can get rejected are:
1. Low credit score
2. Past loan defaults
3. Other existing ISAs, such that you will owe too high of a percentage of your income
4. Too high of a debt load
5. Other reasons: bankruptcies, educational loan problems
6. Failed identity check: wrong birthday or SSN
The program has the ability to override these criteria, but if they are selling off or financing your ISA, it won't be eligible to be financed.
So you might be able to try other bootcamps that might be willing to take a risk. To be completely honest the biggest problem with failing the above is not that they don't trust you, but that you might have creditors on your back higher up on the list and might not be able to pay the ISA back.
If your problem is something in the past that you have mostly resolved, you might be able to find a pr…
Awesome, thanks so much for this write up!
I can give quick open answers to these:
​
>time from "completion" to landing a job \[maybe shown as % of fellows who find a job within X months (3,6,9,etc.) after completing the work, for example\]
I forgot to mention another thing, which is that the amount of training you get changes week to week depending on your availability for the next week. So we bucket people in to "full time" and "part time" but that quickly gets more granular down to the number of hours and can change week to week depending on your schedule (you can also pause for vacations, etc...). I do think with all of these caveats though we could give some numbers based on different average commitment levels.
​
>% of job applications/interviews/etc. performed before landing a job
I think this one we could do. So you can apply for jobs whenever you want and we…
Hi! We just have some base comp + stock averages we computed last year on our website and no other statistics. We've been discussing how to publish outcomes though and if you have suggestions on numbers, would love to hear!
To reiterate our purpose: we work with you as long as it takes, full force, until you hit your goal and are happy with the outcome. Period. So at the end of the day, if you sign up, put in the work and you have the time, you will get an outcome you are happy with. We won't accept people that have goals too narrow or who we don't think we can help achieve their goals in a reasonable amount of time.
If we were to invest in making a robust report of statistics and outcomes we have a lot to think about. The guiding principles are:
1. We want to be fair and unbiased in reporting outcomes. Far too many programs throw around cherry picked numbers.
2. We want to ensure the…
I haven't attended either, I've coached and mentored alumni from both, either right after or later in their careers.
I hope you get other responses answering your specific questions but just want to pre-emptively discuss outcomes because in the past people have said for similar questions 'Codesmith has the best outcomes choose Codesmith'.
First, will put the best numbers at flagship locations for both.
Codesmith (H2 2020): New York median salary $120,000, 80.2% placed within 180 days (CIRR)
HackReactor (H1 2021): San Francisco median salary $107,500, 73% placed within 180 days (self reported audited)
HackReactor has a slightly lower bar to entry so more people drop out.
I believe both have people with experience attend, but a Codesmith exec reported about "a third" of people at Codesmith have a CS degree or work experience or another bootcamp (source Course Report interview with…
I can share my answer to this. Context, I did NOT do a bootcamp, I did traditional CS and have been working in the industry for 13 years since graduating (first 8 years at FB). However, I now work with a lot of people from a lot of different bootcamps a year or two into their careers to help them level up to top tier roles.
So a few controversial points:
1. Outcomes are hard to judge and often skewed. The reports people produce are a good starting point to narrow down the handful of bootcamps with better results. But there's a lot of reading between the lines. A Codesmith executive in a Course Report video about two years ago that about 30% of people have a CS degree or prior experience 1. (not sure if this is still the case), and their median salary is one of the highest. But people tend to have more experience going in, so the results for people with no experience might be different…
Not about money no. We operate at a loss right now and I don't make a salary or any money from Formation. I own a large amount of equity and if it becomes a very successful I plan on using the proceeds to invest and help others. Made enough money from the evil large scary corporation. We pay mentors so they take sessions seriously, just not $300 an hour and a lot don't want to get paid, but we have to pay people fairly for compliance and doing things by the books.
Yeah +1 to helping people find what they want and supporting them. See we can agree on that!
HackReactor is another program with audited results (not following CIRR because of some drama with CIRR, but audited), where some cohorts have six figure medians as well. Other than Codesmith's fake project work framed as months of experience and the whole mid level claim that I can talk about for days, I think Codesmith had better results than HackReactor for a lot of people who haven't done much coding yet.
Formation isn't a bootcamp or school and doesn't have a "program", fixed dates, cohorts, etc... so we haven't figured out the best way to talk about results. The median base salary of the past 12 months (since May 1, 2021) is $138k and TC is much higher when factoring in stock (usually in the tens of k per year) and bonuses (5 or 6 figures). But many people start Formation making a good salary (sometimes 6 figures already) already so apples and oranges. If you want to research, tal…
Hey u/aetrides
Codesmith full bootcamp program is 12 weeks and is upfront $19,950 paid over 8 months or so. But they have various loans and scholarships to look into to spread it out further.
Formation doesn't have a bootcamp program, it's kind of like a personal trainer program. So we work with people however long it takes to get a job, typically 4 to 6 months. Our price varies from 9% to 15% of your new base salary (deferred until after you start your new job) depending on how much work you need and experience you have. Our median BASE salary for the past 12 months (since May 1, 2021) is $138K, so about $12,420 to $20,700?
So the programs are entirely different and we actually work with people who both come DIRECTLY FROM Codesmith to us and people who get jobs after Codesmith (amongst many other bootcamps) and then come to us.
People starting at zero fall in the bucket that have do…
This is also an in person bootcamp in Punjab which is a specific market for a group that's primarily US based bootcamps.
I think we're on the same page here about Code Camp, but would love to chat about CIRR audited results seperately because I've seen you post a few time about how important audited results are. The TLDR: it was founded and is run by primarily bootcamp executives and while it's fantastic to have at least some audited data it was also crafted to make you need to do a little extra work to read between the lines. Like Codesmith's report says the median salary for NY on 2020 is 120K. Now if you actually crunch the numbers in the report itself based on graduation rates, number of people who supplies information, and number of people employed, it's not the median salary. It's the median salary of people who graduated, people who got jobs, and people who reported their salarie…
Hey thanks for the thoughtful reply.
regarding GitHub, I’m speaking specifically about the fake work experience project contributions. People also often have separate "open source" experience with 3 other projects. I have all the raw data carefully logged and can share with you but it's specifically the fake company experience listed on LinkedIn and contributions to those specific projects.
That said I do agree with you about the ends justify the means argument. Like I said, I work with some awesome Codesmith alum that I love and support dearly (AND HIRED ONE MYSELF). The people are performing well then is it really so wrong?
I do have anectodal evidence that people have challenge Codesmith leadership about it being implied, but not directly told, to fake the experience, as well as to pass background checks. Not going to mention who, but I'm sure Codesmith alumni reading this know a…
I'm not sure in interviews actually. I had interviewed E6s and M2, D1, but never E7s. Back when I was there there were very E7s and most rose from within. At the time, some of the E7+ that were hired in, left after no too long. Part of the problem was that this level is paid so highly at other FAANG and the people have a lot of respect and influence, so it was incredibly hard to get them to leave their companies. Not sure if that changed since 2017... a lot has haha.
So for me, they created coding machine for me and I pushed on my side to have that impact recognized. I have friends who had more naturally recognized superpowers. One person wrote very few lines of code but when he did, it saved tens of millions of dollars. Another was just brilliant. The most straightforward path was archetecting infrastructure that was industry leading (in terms of performance or feature set at scale)
A…
I'm pretty sure this is Codesmith and a posted a very long summary below. They do have an audited median salary in NYC from 2 years ago of 120K, but they also muddle that up with "mid level" titles. No one can go from zero experience to mid level FAANG. I worked at Facebook for 8 years and it's impossible there. So they are combining people who get $150K CONTRACTOR jobs at Facebook (not SWE, and not "mid level") with people who go to startups and get mid level titles but are compensated less... but 1 + 1 does not equal 2 here.
The mid level titles at smaller companies is a result of a bit of a sketchy behavior and you can read about that in a long post I did here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/un1cyf/is\_there\_a\_good\_bootcamp\_besides\_codesmith/i85flg0/](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/un1cyf/is_there_a_good_bootcamp_besides_codesmith/i85flg0/)
This is probably Codesmith because they make these promises.
I did a deep dive on 200 Codesmith students/alumni that I will repost here. The summary is that 120K is their median salary in NYC from 2 years ago, and that is legit, but that they also mislead people into thinking they can get mid level roles right out of the bootcamp. They base these claim on salary and it’s impossible to get a mid level FAANG role out of a bootcamp with no experience.
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I'm not affiliated with any bootcamps but I work with a lot of people who have gone to bootcamps in the past. I was also an E7 level principal engineer at Facebook, where I worked from 2009 to 2017, and interviewed hundreds of people. I run coaching and training for experienced engineers to help them level, but I've heard a lot of problems with bootcamps from people I work with and started hangout in this subreddit. I can give my asses…
Hi, I'm from Toronto but have been in SF for about 13 years now. I know the founder of Rithm and did an investigation in Codesmith because of some concerns that I heard about their students lying about work experience.
First, Codesmith is LA/NY based and has very few ties to SF.
I can help the best I can here:
1. For remote, both work for EST to PST so you'll be fine.
2. I have zero credibility on this one, but Toronto comp is so much lower than SF in general. An entry level decent but low end SF junior engineer is paid more in CAD than a mid level engineer in Toronto. So I wouldn't extrapolate anything from the outcomes of these bootcamps in the US.
3. I could totally be wrong but I can't imagine employers in Toronto knowing about Codesmith and Rithm, or knowing enough to hold them to a higher bar. If you obsess over bootcamps you would know of both, they both have generally positive…
Hey, I'm the co-founder of Formation and stumbled upon here. I don't want to mess with the vibe of the thread because there is a good discussion here about cost and outcomes that I don't want to interfere with, but I wanted to add that that percentage is taken off of your base salary and at top tier companies (where most people end up) you receive equity and bonuses that add on to that. So most people don't have a problem paying. The last time we crunched the numbers people on average INCREASED their compensation by $80K. An example case based on numbers would be someone entering Formation making $110K with no bonus or equity, and leaving they are pushing $140K base + $25K/year equity + 10% annual performance bonus + $20K signing bonus.
Contractor roles are entirely different from the SWE pipeline, I should have mentioned this in more detail. I have definitely seen some misunderstandings happening because of contractor vs full time, software developer vs SWE, etc... There is no way that's it's possible to get an E4 SWE offer without system design nor can anyone say you are at the E4 SWE bar without doing a system design interview. I've sat in on dozens of VP level final offer review meetings and it's just not possible.
I'm not affiliated with any bootcamps but I work with a lot of people who have gone to bootcamps in the past. I was also an E7 level principal engineer at Facebook, where I worked from 2009 to 2017, and interviewed hundreds of people. I run coaching and training for experienced engineers to help them level, but I've heard a lot of problems with bootcamps from people I work with and started hangout in this subreddit.
I can give my assessment of Codesmith, the good, the bad, the warnings. Overall, for a bootcamp it's think it's a solid consideration, just look for this level of detail in any bootcamps you consider.
GOOD:
1. Instructors are good teachers and care a lot about teaching. They publish a lot of videos and run a lot of free sessions, and they get really great feedback.
2. They've scaled pretty well. Like most bootcamps, recent grads immediately teach the current students, but…
Hi, at Formation you need to have some experience right now. Most people have 1-3 years of professional experience and we focus on amplifying your strengths and filling in your unique gaps. When people are starting out, you tend to need a little more experience to start figuring out those strengths. Experience can come in the form a real job, but could also be a related job, internships, previous bootcamps, freelance work, or \~2+ years of self study with projects. We don't overpromise anyone anything, so that's why we focus on what we can deliver on and we haven't invested yet into developing the materials and support for helping people a little earlier on in their journey.
Ok long paragraph haha, but the second thing you said is very important to look at. Don't trust any "job guarantee" for any bootcamp, period. That's not to say they are a scam, or they are all misleading, but someth…
Nope, the ISA is just a convenient way for people to pay. We often advise people to turn down offers for all kinds of reasons. Our ISA is only based on your base salary and people will very often accept offers with lower base salaries but with way more equity and higher total compensation. Sometimes people just accept straight up lower offers because of company fit (i.e. someone's dream company, and another company tries to compete and outbid them with a larger offer). I've seen time and time again (even to myself at Facebook) where while these FAANG-level offers sound absurdly high in the moment, your long term income will be dictated by choosing the right company that you succeed at.
It's actually a challenge because we work with a decent amount of bootcamp grads later in their careers who had ISAs with like crazy fine print (5 year paybacks, onerous requirements for job guarantees,…