It's not when they told you the 2021 number of 80% in mid 2022 when you signed up for a 2023 cohort . Or they told you the 70% 2022 number at the end of 2023 when you signed up.
When they knew very well that the first half of 2023 grads were trending to be half that at that point but said they couldn't comment because they have to 'wait for the full picture' - i.e. April 2025.
It's a racket in my opinion. I heard of people asking for their money back and it wouldn't surprise me if that starts cascading soon.... things have gotten worse and worse in terms of placement numbers.
Codesmith very well knows that H1 2024 grads had a FULL YEAR OF JOB HUNTING ALREADY and could easily tell us the placement rate for those people but they haven't. They could tell us the FULL 2024 PRELIM SIX MONTH PLACEMENT RATE NOW.
But they keep quoting 70% 2023 12 month placement rate.
Students aren't idiots,…
Launch School H2 2024 grad outcomes. Placement rate within 6 months is lower than 2023 grads (50% versus 75%). Note that the denominator is all people who start, so will do comparisons in the body.
Resharing the original post: [https://www.reddit.com/r/launchschool/comments/1n8s8mr/cohort\_2408\_salary\_outcomes\_6month/](https://www.reddit.com/r/launchschool/comments/1n8s8mr/cohort_2408_salary_outcomes_6month/)
**As usual Launch School is very clear and transparent about their analysis so I really don't have to read between the lines, you should read their original post.**
**INDUSTRY COMMENTARY:**
In the bootcamps world, Launch School and Codesmith are the two remaining bootcamps with consistent six figure outcomes over a decade, so it's really the main comparison.
Codesmith hasn't given any numbers for a while so we'll extrapolate there's based on the patterns.
**Also note that C…
Good question. I don't know anything extra, but it appears they acquired App Academy's "brand" and not the company. The entire website is just a wrapper on Coding Temple and it's entirely managed by them now.
Now how is Coding Temple surviving?
1. PRICE POINT
It's notable that the most expensive bootcamps are the ones that closed, because people aren't paying $22,500 to go to a bootcamp right now. Those expensive bootcamps survive off a small number of people - dozens - joining and paying that and they spend a lot of time woo'ing those people to win them over.
TripleTen, CodingTemple, Springboard, NuCamp, are cheaper programs, people are less upset if it doesn't work, and people who were going to pay App Academy $20K are instead paying CodingTemplate $5K-$9K.
2. CHANGING PROGRAMS
The surviving programs pivot faster to the latest headlines. These places all offer "cyber security" pr…
Here is an analysis of my commentary purely about Codemsith "sporadic but consistent"
"Here’s an unbiased summary of Michael Novati’s commentary on Codesmith over the past few years—covering the topics he addressed, frequency, tone, and the overall vibe:
---
Topics & Themes
1. Curriculum Stagnation & Slow AI Integration
Michael pointed out that Codesmith’s curriculum has remained largely unchanged over the years. For example, in early 2024 he noted:
> "Codesmith's curriculum has been the same for YEARS but in Feb 2024 they added 5 lectures on AI… This is 'not changing'… 12–14 weeks of the same structure they did 5 years ago… I guess they think it's enough to raise prices to $22,500 this year."
---
2. Deteriorating Placement Outcomes
He emphasized a steep decline in graduate outcomes. He shared CIRR-based figures showing that six-month placement dropped from ~90% in 2021 to…
In case anyone is curious, here is what AI said about my last 3 years of Reddit activity:
"Here’s an unbiased summary of Reddit commentary by Michael Novati over roughly the past three years (from mid‑2022 to mid‑2025), covering common topics, frequency, tone, and the overall vibe:
---
Topics & Themes
1. Bootcamps & "Learn to Code" Critique
Skeptical of the bootcamp model. Novati has been notably critical of coding bootcamps—and especially the broader "Learn to Code" ideology. He highlights structural issues like oversupply of CS graduates, declining outcomes, and economic realities often overlooked by bootcamp marketing .
For instance, in /r/codingbootcamp he wrote:
> “The tech unemployment rate now exceeds the national average…” and argued “Learn to Code… ignored basic economics (oversupply depressing value/wages)” .
He has also raised doubts about data reporting by entiti…
Launch School Capstone announces cutback from 3 cohorts a year to 2 cohorts a year starting in 2026. Acknowledges tough job market, longer job hunts, and new changes to help people get real work experience though internships and open source commitments to to Firefox and large projects.
[Source](https://www.reddit.com/r/launchschool/comments/1moix9n/capstone_changes_announcement_for_2026/)
Note this is unofficial, personal commentary and opinions on these changes:
**SUMMARY OF CHANGES:**
* **Schedule change:** Moving from 3 cohorts/year to 2 (Spring & Fall only) to focus more resources on each group
* **AI Engineering expanded:** Now 2 full weeks dedicated to AI Engineering (model selection, evaluations, ingestion/retrieval strategies)
* **More experience opportunities:**
* Expanded Open Source Initiatives (OSI) - last cohort got everyone patches into Firefox
* New internship op…
They pivoted to doing this because the next CIRR report for 2024 students will be out in April 2026 and they want to give some idea of what's going on, but their reports are very problematic to me.
Why?
CIRR reports account for people who graduate in a specific time window. 2023 report means people who graduated in 2023 and got offers.
The reports Codesmith is publishing are offers in a specific time window but from any cohort. Meaning people who got those 102 offers could have graduated in 2022, 2023, 2024, 2021 even.
For all you know many of them are 2022 grads who took 1.5 years to get a job?
I actually like salary lift as a metric but they are confusing things by providing these reports side by side with CIRR reports with completely different definitions.
I used to give more benefit of the doubt, but last year this time they were defending against word of mouth of reports of de…
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy· edited★ FEATURED
Here is what AI says to the question: "Is Formation Fellowship a paid job"
"No — Formation is not a paid job, nor does it offer employment. It’s a paid fellowship/training program (focused on interview prep and career coaching), not a salaried position."
Here is what it thinks about Codesmith: "are oslabs engineers paid?"
"Yes - OSLabs does pay engineers in at least one of its key programs"
Like I don't think you'll find anything anywhere that would make a reasonable person think Formation Fellows are paid roles - but acknowledge that edge case people might be confused because of the multiple definitions.
But in Codesmith's case like everything is blatantly twisted to appear that way.
This discrepancy is one of the 3 primary reasons I've been going after Codesmith.
Dictionary definitions aside, what the leaders of these companies do and stand for and their integrity matte…
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy· edited★ FEATURED
I'll give you the straight up facts on this if you are willing to accept them. I can prove every one of these statements.
Formation has flaws and this isn't one of them.
FORMATION:
1. A small fraction of Fellows at Formation put it on their LinkedIn.
2. No one says it's paid anywhere. Of the ones that do it's abundantly clear that it's a mentorship program for high performance and not a job.
3. We have not received a single request for a background check for anyone that I'm aware of in the past 5 years for anyone claiming they were employed by Formation.
3. The people who say 2-3+ years have genuinely been at Formation that time and actively participating. Maybe it's terrible they didn't get a job yet, but the timeframe is correct from what I'm aware of.
CODESMITH:
1. In my [reporting end of 2023](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/18cpq98/analysis_of_52_most_recen…
I'm restarting my comment:
Formation is not a bootcamp or generally competing with Codesmith. Codesmith has marketing adds explaining what a for-loop is and assuring you that even if it's too confusing Codesmith is for you. You can't join Formation without industry work experience as a SWE. The closest overlap is the AI program because we're offering AI productivity courses soon and they offer AI leadership courses. But there is very little overlap.
We are harmed if Codesmith declines because because 75%+ of Codesmith grads that join Formation like Formation a lot and it's a wonderfully complementary service.
There's a difference between continuous demonstration of incompetent engineering practices, tons of security issues and such.
I meant that this was the last straw about engineering practices because I had been privately telling them all kinds of problems for a while now and th…
It's long but the TLDR is this person posted things in the mod escalation channels and was almost instantly suspended from Reddit because the person was using a network of fake accounts that Reddit has recently cleared out.
It's very much possible this person was retaliating because after going after me Reddit discovered the network of accounts and removed most of them.
So I genuinely saying that Codesmith claims they had nothing to do with this.
But they hired someone who specializes in "reputation management" (which again, they confirmed) and are partially responsible for what that person does.
I would qualify that to say that in 2021 you had a shot if you did a bootcamp for the right reasons. And now even if you go to one of the former-best bootcamps that hasn't closed yet and you go for the right reasons, you have maybe a 50/50 shot within a year (accounting for graduation, placement, etc...), and at Codesmith for example, salaries have been going DOWN EVERY YEAR by like $10K - indicating that people aren't exactly taking as good jobs even if they do get placed.
2/2 Fullstack - they have traded hands from Zovio to SimpliLearn so it's really a front on top of SimpliLearns business. I don't know enough about it but I suspect similar to Hack Reactor it's kind of like floating around with most of the below-surface running generically within SimpliLearn.
Flatiron - they spun back off WeWork and I haven't heard anything either.
General Assembly - they actually are still chugging along and they are focusing more on B2B upskilling than. You can read more about their parent [https://www.adeccogroup.com/investors/annual-report](https://www.adeccogroup.com/investors/annual-report) and they actually ARE mentioned often as a potential business boom. But not as a bootcamp, as a B2B upskilling platform.
Launch School - yeah the only actually honest bootcamp left that discloses 6 months after a cohort graduates how each student is doing and has still done t…
Yeah nothing negative invalidates individual experience - good and bad.
But far too many people are looking for confirmation bias and latch onto an individual success story as justification to do a bootcamp they want to go to.
Bootcamps prey on this, because as you said, you referred someone because it worked for you, and this is a strong strategy. It's why every bootcamp asks for referrals for friends.
But you have to zoom out and look at the market right now:
1. Market disappeared for bootcamp grads
2. Failing bootcamps are cutting back and providing worse services (be in Springboard or even a top three like Codesmith and Rithm (shut down).
3. Almost everything about the programs are equal or worse ( when the students need BETTER support.
4. They don't have the cash to invest in making things better so anything marketed to you as a major change is smoke and mirrors - the "change" wa…
This has been up for a while but I feel like Outco is dead anyways. Like I think the founders moved on to something else. A number of people have been sued by them (and threatened to be sued) for not paying them after they thought they were eligible for the job guarantee refund and the collectors they talked to didn't seem that organized.
Pathrise also shut down.
I have a business principle that you ruthlessly have to focus on delivering value to people for what they are paying you or you shouldn't exist.
More bootcamps, interview prep programs, immersive, mentorship communities should follow this advice because far too many offer like a $50 Udemy course, add on recent alumni as mentors/teachers, add on intangible benefits like 'community' and charge $20,000.
You might get by if people get really good jobs and credit the intangibles.
But if you aren't trying to deliver value and are…
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
Oh ok yeah for sure, people can also get temporary jobs too, I'm just seeing right now people who don't go all in on SWE for the entire job search time having a harder time - it's such a difficult job search that people are just going back to their old jobs.
Talking Codesmith again since I know them so well, they had a huge spike in placements that 'ghosted' and their placement was verified by their LinkedIn instead of officially.
This is a sign of people giving up and going back to their old job or a tangential old job and giving up and not reporting it back as a placement because it's not a full blown SWE job.
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
Hopeless but not impossible yeah.
So look at Codesmith's stats since we're talking about them and they release numbers.
2021 grads: about 90% of grads placed within 6 months
2022 grads: about 80% of grads placed within 6 months
2023 grads: about 40% of grads placed within 6 months (and very notable that there was a huge double digit percentage increase in people who ghosted Codesmith and got counted as a placement because of LinkedIn
2024 grads: no data yet, but based on Codesmith's little bits of data there have been about 250 offers in h2 2024 -> h1 2025, which covers some 2022 grads, 2023 grads, 2024 grads, and then 2024 grads.
Now enrollment has declined because they cutback from 4+1 to 1+1 cohorts in Feb 2024 so it's hard to tell what the placement rates are but they definitely aren't good.
Codesmith also should have plenty of information about 2024 grads now that i's 6 mon…
Do Codecademy, consider Launch School Core, and drop Codesmith and get your money back unless your goal is to go through the $22,500 version with dwindling hope of actually getting a job according to their own data.
The primary goal of it is to get you to show up to more Codesmith sessions so that they can indoctrinate you and get you to join the expensive one.
Their former CEO said in a podcast that these sessions were their marketing funnel and that they didn't run ads at the time (now they inundate you with ads as well).
Not a bad idea to put advertising dollars into courses that offer some value! But they are ads for Codesmith that you are paying for.
1. Agree the core team/admin team and the instructor team is hardworking, no question there. But Codesmith's codebase is apparently a giant mess that looks like the largest OSP project - which isn't surprising because the people that work on it just graduated Codesmith. I would say the team has tremendous POTENTIAL but the technical people lack the experience to be called talented. Based on some alumni talk that someone told me about where Will tried to explain the Codesmith architecture (in an attempt to learn it himself) and it literally sounded like the worst code I've ever heard of for a 10 year old company that calls itself a tech company, something like deploying the entire codebase to 32 microservices that each ran one of them???
I know this sounds mean but it's just being real. Like every instructor I know that sees Codesmith defend the quality of the code or the legitimacy of…
I'll try to summarize haha:
1. I used to be on them like anything else, pros and cons, and I recommended people go there with Rithm and Launch School.
I was very consistently hard on three things:
\- marketing mid level and senior placements for people with zero experience (which I felt was wrong)
\- marketing their OSP projects as 'equivalent of months of full time SWE work' when they were full of junior problems and most people worked on them for 3-4 weeks
\- their instructors all went to codesmith itself and were promoted up the tree in a pyramid shape so they don't have SWE experience
2. Codesmith didn't see things the same way and framed me as a villain - which I completely ignored and kept doing my thing as a public service to offer my opinions through my lens
3. Throughout that time, former staff, current staff, students, etc... have proactively contacted me and told me ab…
It's the exception, not because it doesn't have troubles from the market too but because they are marketing themselves as the "slow path" to becoming a Software Engineer.
More people will try and few will succeed but they won't be mislead or burned with it.
Now because of this philosophy it hyper optimizes for people making it through Capstone that are actually good fits and they actually get jobs, but it's relatively small compared to typical bootcamps.
But the fact that they have a 70% six month placement rate (accounting for every student, down from 100%) that is quite high when somewhere like Codesmith has a 40% six month placement rate (when including ghosters based on LinkedIn) shows why this slow and stead approach works.
Financially though it works because Launch School is small and founder run. Their founder teaches and helps people.
Codesmith has a bunch of directors and m…
That's why integrity is so important.
I have an email chain with Codesmith leaders about literally the math having problems on their California reports on their website and they never responded or acknowledged those concerns and answered other things.
Like if you publish things that were made up for marketing purposes, rushed in a panic because you realized how terrible the numbers were and did a massive LinkedIn profile sprint not so diligently that's fine but don't tell the public that.
If you keep telling everyone your data is audited but you and CIRR don't answer me about where the audited version is (historically CIRR publishes the audit paperwork after they are audited) it's sloppiness.
People make mistakes here and there but almost everything here is a mistake and when I talk to former employees that proactively tell me how clowntown everything is run there... everyone "in ove…
Yes that's also correct. For 2024 placements, early career = harder, Compensation increase = higher.
Our demographic has been shifting and in 2025, only 3 placements have under 1 year SWE experience.
I believe we're going to do an H1 update as H1 finishes up and we'll be able to comment on the latest.
Read the fine print for the official full details but as a partial note, these calculations we are using YOE prior to starting Formation, full time SWE work experience only, excluding internships, contracts, and adjacent experience.
So someone with 1 year as a SWE might have been a contractor for 2-3 years and if they weren't a W2 type situation and were "contracting" that doesn't count in these calculations.
It's like the opposite of embellishing resumes and really holding a firm tight bar on the definition of experience.
If you don't have 1-2+ years of this kind of SWE experience,…
That stat is correct and it's about 45% so far in 2025 so close but a bit lower.
The average YOE for 2025 placements so far is (full time SWE experienceprior to Formation): **5.5 YEARS**
This means that people had bootcamps, self taught, and other degrees, worked for 5 years, came to Formation, and then got a better job.
What is wrong with that?
Here are the 10 or so most placement companies : Udacity, Amazon, Gurus Solutions, Meta, Meta, Meta, Headspace, Stripe, AppleCart, PayPal, Applied Intuition, Meta, NVIDIA
These are stronger placements than 2024.
What is wrong with that?
**I'm happy to take feedback to improve our marketing so please give it but I want to make sure it's clear that the stuff on our website is accurate for starters.**
Will is faking his background yes - he has never really been an engineer ever - and then he spent 10 years focused on superficial appearances…
A) I meant that Founders can sell off stock in secondaries, instead I bought more with cash
B) The platform is genuinely a unique product not offered anywhere else in the world. That doesn't mean it's GOOD haha, it has a lot of bugs and product issues, etc... and it's why I have to do some work still ;), but it's indeed a unique model that lets us adapt faster to things and it's an advantage in many ways.
AI for productivity is about using AI tools, so you need a background in using AI tools. I can do that one.
I don't have a background in ML or LLMs and I can't do anything personally about ML.
Unlike Will Sentance who thinks he can so much that he did a public Frotnend Master's Course on it, I don't want to bullshit the public with smoke and mirrors. I know what I can do and what I can't do.
The challenge for us with AI for productivity isn't the content, but it's that our 7 years…
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
I haven't made a penny of salary for the past 8 years and i'm not selling anything. I'm pointing out how poorly positioned Codesmith's AI program is and how they need to seriously watch out for growing it through milking alumni - who are paying for something that they were promised for free for life.
I've spoken to a number of companies on the B2B side floated different ideas around. The answer - we want our fleet of 100 ML engineers to teach this internally.
Codesmith's AI program is maintained and lead by someone with I think about 2-3 years of industry experience, ZERO prior to Codesmith, has not done AI professionally.
AND IS DOING IT PART TIME WHILE HE WORKS AT MICROSOFT.
There's no way in heck this program can be good. No way.
I'm telling you I will work 16 hours a day to build a much better AI program applying my experience as the number one code committer at Meta and showing…
I hear this about 1-2 times a week. It's frustrating to people as well how delusional their leaders are.
I spoke to Alina directly 1-1 on a call and she seems 50% like a good product leader who tricked into taking this job and is now running a company full of mouse traps, and 50% she was brainwashed by Will as well and perpetuates this bull shit messaging and narratives.
Unfortunately she's not an engineer and while she has more experience than Will did, she still doesn't have the engineering lens to look at things through and her ambition and drive is pushing Codesmith in the wrong direction.
I don't think there's a single thing they can do to save it without throwing Will's goal of an "independent bootcamp" and the rest of their community support into the trash and raising VC funding to build something new OR by getting rid of all of the staff and rebuilding something from the groun…
Sorry to hear that and this isn't that uncommon so you aren't alone. I see a lot of bootcamp grads with a "I will do anything to break into the industry" attitude and the hustle carries them for a a year, two, sometimes a bit longer, but the fundamental gaps eventually come out and it impacts people pretty hard.
I wish bootcamps talked about this more openly. I'm super pissed off at Codesmith for advertising a success case last week 'from Codesmith to $150,000 job' and left out the person graduated in 2018, worked somewhere for 2.5 years, and THEN got the $150K job in 2021.
The journey just STARTS with the first job, but for the bootcamp itself it's the END and they advertise it that way and even places like Codesmith that offer "lifetime support" don't actually offer that and it's a marketing label.
Don't want to play the victim here and I have real advice haha:
1. Do a master's de…
1. I have a reference letter signed by Phil Troutman from a few years ago
2. I have numerous confidential chats of people telling me that Codesmith is aware of this and that everyone is aware.
3. The OSLabs directors was basically laid off a year ago but kept on the website and told to keep her email address for appearances but said that Codesmith runs the show and manages everything. They continue to puppet a fake company to do fake reference checks.
4. I know of two cases where people were asked for W2s or proof of work and both those people exaggerate the OSP experience on their resumes and both ended up getting hired without specifying how it happened. And I believe Codesmith acknowledged and helped one of those.
Conspiring to commit fraud is a jail-able crime by the way.
Puppeting a fake charity (that has no revenue reported at the IRS and is run by Annie's team at Codesmith - a t…
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
A good question is to ask why I'm like this.
Seek first to understand, then be understood is what Codesmith told their staff, and they should action it.
I offered to help Codesmith and some ideas to work with them. Their leaders didn't want to.
Alina confirmed to me that Codesmith paid some guy to post on Reddit and I gave her evidence that the same guy lied and tried to get me banned and that the mysterious missing founder of the Codesmith subreddit was involved with this scheme.
I offered to apologize publicly for any individual person who felt attacked by my commentary if they publicly apologizing for making shit up about me and sending it out to their community.
They declined to apologize.
Then I open up LinkedIn and see all kinds of fake made up stories that seem to rewrite history and promote Codesmith.
I hear about more and more layoffs even as of a month ago.
I hear about…
Codesmith Grads - Stop lying on your background checks. Your OSP is not 'employment history'. I've received a number of couple of people having trouble with background checks because they put their project as 'work experience'. STOP.
I've received a couple of reports over the past few months of Codesmith grads having trouble with background checks, failing background checks / having flags raised, etc... because their "Open Source Project" is listed as months to years of "employment history" and they need Codesmith to sign off on it, and it's too late after you started the background check. These reports were shared with me indirectly from concerned students/alumni.
A Codesmith leader told me point blank to my face that Codesmith does not sign off on background checks for OSPs as paid employment, and if you list it as volunteer work, they will verify the 3 week project for the timeframe…
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
To give you an idea of how things have changed - if you went to Codesmith and graduated in 2022.
95% of people who started graduated, 70% of the graduates got jobs within 6 months of graduating (and 90% of them reported their placement to Codesmith) = 63% "self reported placement"
If you graduated in 2023:
95% of people who started graduated, 43.6% got jobs within 6 months of graduating (only 60% reported their placement to Codesmith - **A MAJOR DECLINE =** 26% "self reported placement rate"
\----------
Codesmith hasn't given any 2024 placement data even though **ALMOST ALL 2024 GRADS HAVE HAD 6 MONTHS POST PLACEMENT AND THEY INTERNALLY KNOW THE DATA**
The reason I'm so enraged here is that in 2024 when they internally knew about that major decline, they told the public that even in a tough market, Codesmith was crushing it. They conveniently pulled all these blog posts from thei…
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
I don't care either way, but if a program is publishing how amazing their outcomes are when they are good and goes RADIO SILENT when they are bad it pisses me off.
Codesmith's CIRR results tanked so they started publishing random time windows of absolute number of placements and then then even stopped doing that because in the past six months it's like fifty or something and a number of them have been looking for over a year.
I criticize them LEGITIMATELY and they come back with garbage data.
I bet their response to this is 'Michael is an asshole our placements are amazing, we had an average increase in salary over previous work of $70K so far this year! who cares if there aren't as many placements it's take people longer that's fine, it's all about average increase.'
My point is that changing the goal posts and each time telling everyone how "transparent" you are is garbage behavio…
Short answer yes. But long answer - Launch School still publishes detailed reports exactly 6 months after the cohort finishes and Codesmith published garbage reports to cover up their collapsing results.
I would put Codesmith worse than the ones that don't publish reports because it's been misleading the public in my opinion and that is worse than if they didn't say anything at all. They keep saying how "transparent" they are and it's a giant performance and bull shit from people with no integrity.
I spoke directly to one of their leaders on a phone call and I really just don't think they understand how messed up their own data is, or they won't admit it publicly because their company is collapsing and this is the nail in the coffin for them.
More details on what that why I feel this way.... I'm a very centrist person and I have been centrist with Codesmith for 3 years. I used to reco…
How many people in your cohort got jobs and in what timeframe? Second, does your resume and LinkedIn reflect that you have no experience? Third, it's important to hear from you in 1-2 years because a lot of bootcamp grads are having a hard time keeping jobs right now.
It's great you got a job but you are making it sound like everyone gets jobs and the entire data backed argument right now is that like half as many people are getting jobs as in the past and it's taking like twice as long to get to the same placement rate.
You would be an idiot not to question going to a bootcamp right now with data like that.
And this is data from Codesmith, one of the top bootcamps.
Staff members have been abandoning ship for 2 years now and almost no one is left. As of last week almost the whole full time company has turned over in the past year so any experience prior to that would be completely di…
They are 100% online already, and they pay their instructors approximately market rate as engineers because if they don't pay them what they claim they would make as engineers in the industry they are admitting the people aren't ready to be engineers. E.g. if they claim an instructor is qualified to be an engineer making $150K they have to pay them $150K or their entire product is a scam.
The CEO puts pressure on the team to improve things but they aren't qualified to so very few changes have been made over the years.
The CEO claims the pedagogy is based on Oxford's teaching methods and has nothing to do with any specific skills or topics - "learn how to learn" so he uses that to justify the fact that nothing has substantially changed in the past number of years.
The CEO training materials for instructors are very performative. Like how to ask people questions to engage them, how to…
It's not about getting the role, it's about the next 5 years and what AI is going to do with that.
Codesmith's results were from people exaggerating resumes and Codesmith looked the other way.
AI will replace you if you were lying and getting by by sheer hustle. AI works 24/7. AI can parallelize 1000 tasks.
The only think AI can't beat yet is the taste that comes through SWE experience.
IMO, there is no alternative right now, just don't change careers and learn programming for free on the side slowly over a couple of years.
I'm very confident in the next 5 to 10 years
1. We'll know what all the new jobs AI created are
2. We'll be able to train people for those jobs quickly with bootcamps - but the demographics might look different than bootcamps today with smaller deltas each time around and people aren't becoming "programmers", they are Accountatns becoming like AI Accountants.…
Codesmith marketing campaign: "you’re not late to tech". Unfortunately you likely are, and this kind of thing is tone deaf and misleading. Instead of making changes in their program structure they are marketing a 10 year old program structure as if it still works and please don't fall for it.
Codesmith sent out a mass email campaign today that I found offensive.
>If you’ve been thinking, *“Is it still worth trying to break into tech right now?”,* you’re not alone… but we will let our latest data speak for itself.
Yes, let's the data speak for itself. For 2021 grads about 80% got jobs within 6 months of graduating, and for 2022 about 70% and for 2023 grads about 40%. We don't know what it is for 2024 grads but word on the street is it's about the same as 2023 grads or worse.
The trend is falling off a cliff so let's let the data speak for itself and run for the hills.
>Despite layof…
That's great for you but even back for 2022 the better bootcamp like Codesmith had something like a 80% placement within 6-month rate.
Now it's like 40%.
The price for that program went up I think $3,000 or so to $22,500.
So I think it's very reasonable for people to ask why they're paying for this now not in 2022.
The $895 was meant for people that did the new SWE immersive because it's the same as the old + the 4/5 AI lectures now. So the $895 would be for the Saturday discussions I guess? I'm not super sure but I get the vibe they are trying to leave the door open for heavily discounted alumni rate because they originally said loud and clear that Codesmith will give you everything you need to be hired for LIFE and by backtracking on that to extract money from alumni, it's a bad look, so maybe if you watch the 5 free alumni lectures you can ask them to qualify for the $895.
I don't want rub salt in a wound, but an alumni could organize their own thing, like slap a calendar invite on your calendar to all watch a lecture recording every week and then discuss it with each other, and then do a project together.
You'll get 85% of the value for free.
Launch School Placement Date - Q4 2024 Cohort, ~70% placed within six months - similar to previous cohort. Lower salaries at $100K mediums - indicating role shifts. Very strong results given the market but very small program so hard to extrapolate.
Results [https://www.reddit.com/r/launchschool/comments/1kzrkyv/cohort\_2405\_salary\_outcomes\_6months/](https://www.reddit.com/r/launchschool/comments/1kzrkyv/cohort_2405_salary_outcomes_6months/)
2024-2025 saw major changes to top bootcamps. Codesmith - arguably the top program alongside Launch Schoo - is down about 80% of it's staff and the founder seems to be moving on to writing a book about AI Ethics and doing a new Front End Masters course while the remaining Codesmith students are taught by recent graduate 'lead instructors' with no SWE experience that their website calls 'engineering industry experts' - most recent 6 month placemen…
I don't say no one, but I do say that it's not systematic anymore - every placement feels like a one off case. Launch School Capstone is small enough that historically each person was a one off case and it never relied on patterns.
Larger programs had hiring partners and common places where alumni pass down back channel referrals and cover up the fact that all the people have zero experience and then help the people ramp up. For example Codesmith -> Capital One is this.... people scheming to lie on resumes and get through interviews and then help each other not get fired after starting.
Launch School is doing ok because its model protects against the market to some degree and the market impact is less severe.
1. You do Core for months so then only people who are perfect fits for Capstone get in
2. The founder is hands on doing most of the work, so there aren't many people to pay. He could personally take lower income for some time to survive. Codesmiths founder uses your tuition money to go to conferences and write books and make lectures for Frontend Masters and students complain they never see him. Fine but you have to pay more people to run the program and when most of those people leave and you are still MIA - math doesn't work out.
3. Launch School's very small, like 20 capstone at a time, 60 a year. Codesmith had like 1000 people in 2023. The founder knows everyone by name and helps them try to get jobs individually.
So yeah Launch School ends up with like a 70…
I dont think this tone is great but it's worse than that.
First, the stats were wrong because they only included people who responded to reach out and submitted salary information at first. The "adjusted numbers" included all the people who never responded but appeared to have jobs somewhere on LinkedIn and count as placements who "did not respond" boosting the rate to 42%.
But the reason it is worse is because the newest numbers don't make any sense.
They published unofficial 12 months numbers but the 2022 numbers are copy paste from the 6 months report so the drop of 2023 12 month from 2022 six months doesn't look as bad.
On top of that, they had to check everyone's LinkedIn to count them as a placement so they are fully aware that all those grads are exaggerating and lying about their experience.
Finally, I proved they paid someone to post on Reddit - a person who posted bullshit…
During the boom times of 2021-2022 it had like a 95% graduation rate and 90% placement within 6 months.
Now in 2024 they have like a 90% graduation rate and 40% placement within 6 months.
HOWEVER, people list like "X to Present" for these fake listings. The bootcamp has like a 60-70% placement within 12 months now and as people hit like 1 year post bootcamp these fake listings look like 1+ years of work experience and help people start getting jobs.
So the TLDR - no - Codesmith is falling apart and I would recommend running for the hills - they are down to a skeleton crew of staff, half of who are looking for work.
The best bootcamps have closed down or pivoted.
Rithm closed, App Academy closed SWE, General Assembly pivoted to B2B according to their annual report, Bloom Tech closed SWE, Turing shut down, Launch Academy shut down, Code Up shut down, Episcodus shut down. Tech Elevat…
Codesmith is the SWE place where 80%+ of graduates do this by stretching their resumes.
How people get away with it all?
1. Companies not verifying employment
2. The person putting friend's contact info and the friend verifies
3. They use fake pay stuffs or offer letters to verify
4. The bootcamp lies for them for background checks
5. They list group projects as work and have peers from the group project do the background checks
6. The list a bunch of stuff on LinkedIn to get recruiters attention but they don't talk about it to the engineers and they don't include it on the background check.
There have been placements, but they keep shedding staff so it could be another thing falling through the cracks.
There certainly aren't a lot of placements.
And a couple placements I've seen and really embellished and made up LinkedIns it's almost like an insult or a joke.
One started working at Codesmith as a TA prior to starting Codesmith as a resident.
One claimed their 3 weeks of commits on their OSP were 1 year 8 months of experience and got a job recently.
I flagged both of these cases to them.
Like I believe one person there is trying to fix things but it's just not really fixable.
Every day people hit me up with their personal experiences there and their engineering system seems like a giant scam now and I'm super annoyed.
Like TAs and instructors who migrated libraries from one React library to another in 20 places and then put down 1 year of SWE experience as a senior…
Well for Formation, the average placement **increases** their first year total comp by over $100K (see our website for how that's calculated).
Now granted most people are non-FAANG ->FAANG and FAANG -> FAANG is different.
But if you are a little lost or struggling on your interviews, then paying like roughly $10K to be handholded through the preparation process and then handholded through negotiations to increase your offer by more than $10K typically can be mathematically sensical.
The reason we don't charge $100K is because it's impossible to know what the same people would do on their own and presumably they can get prepared for free or cheap too, so how much of that is attributed to Formation? I don't know, that's up to you, but if they typical increase is THAT much and the negotiation support pays for it, it's definitely not a scam or insane to do it.
It's more a personal choice…
Hi, thanks for sharing details. The L4 -> 5 promotion in 2 years is good trajectory that should be helping you in job hunting.
1. Yeah, I feel like the life of the engineer for your entire career is just not knowing stuff and figuring it out haha. I theorize that engineers sometimes are so opinionated about odd things because it's what they know - and they shy away from things they don't know, but acknowledging you don't know a lot of stuff is better for you than trying to pretend you do or putting pressure on yourself to.
2. I'm surprised and first tip is to show your career progression on your resume instead of bundling all of Amazon into one item. That progression is the checkbox for FAANG "mid level"/Meta E4 bar. Amazon does have some negative signal some places right now and I haven't dug into why, but it might just be a flood of people looking for jobs from RTO - but I'm not sure…
If that's not the case then maybe bootcamps shouldn't put hiring stats in their prime hero spots.
I just just checked and Codesmith, Hack Reactor, Tripe Ten, Tech Elevator, General Assembly, all have placement or salary info in the hero banner on the homepage.
Fullstack doesn't.
I was in the camp of people need to think about this as paying for school and not paying for a job. When the market crashed and many programs had layoffs and staff reduction it became absolutely absurd to pay $20K for this stuff.
Like at Codesmith now after their cut backs, you pay $22.5K and your cohort has 1 lead instructor with no/little experience, 1-3 mentors who are former graduates of Codesmith with no experience who were TAs that stayed full time as mentors, and then a bunch of fellows/TAs etc... who are part time recent graduates who haven't placed yet or recent graduates who mentor here and there.…