No, it is not. I worked at Facebook for 8 years and now have thousands of acquaintances at pretty much every company. This has come up a few times in conversations when I've asked people their opinions and responses ranged from laughter to this is fraud.
Sure, a bunch of gatekeepers in our towers laughing doesn't sound so good amongst a lot of people here, but this is not based on skill or ability but purely based on "the scale of systems worked on in previous jobs" needed to be at a senior level mostly in the technical side. Like you have to have worked on genuinely large systems with millions of users to build a patina of experience that is what the company is hiring you to be a senior for. They aren't hiring people able to solve big problems with new solutions. They are hiring people who have actually built products for millions of people and get unspoken nuance about that, or build…
They 1000% advertise it aggressively. I've heard it from their CEO, Lead Instructor, 4 admissions people, three outcomes people.
This was posted on LinedIn just on Friday: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/codesmith-llc_codesmith-career-support-prepares-grads-for-activity-7111061618699968512-mzvP
"Codesmith career support prepares grads for mid- to senior-level software engineering roles — with resume guidance, mock interviews, salary negotiations, and beyond."
Hi, I think this overview is pretty fair from my understanding, and I can summarize what I can corroborate from multiple sources. I have a lot to say good and bad about Codesmith - overall a balanced view, but these specifically are things corroborated by others and the **ALL CAPS BOLD** are my **PERSONAL OPINIONS.**
1. The free lectures and courses ARE the marketing funnel so they are intentionally trying to move people through to the immersive. So they represent a more high touch experience than the actual imersive.
2. I know someone from Oxford who talks about "hard learning" and it's reputation for just meaning "teach yourself" and I think Will is bringing this approach to Codesmith intentionally. That said, it might work for some people - Oxford is a great school and I think their admission process is essentially weeding out people who won't do well in that environment. As a result…
I have many thoughts but am super busy right now to write them up, will go beyond my 60 second normal timebox for Reddit comments.
However, I would look at this report for something more comprehensive: [https://carta.com/blog/startup-compensation-h1-2023](https://carta.com/blog/startup-compensation-h1-2023)
My number one biggest concern that **needs to be called out because it wasn't called out in the report:**
**The report is based on "date of offer" and not placement date.** So this doesn't tell us anything about placements. This isn't a criticism or comment about the numbers themselves, just the methodology.
\- These salaries could be mostly people job hunting for a year. so they were job hunting for a year AND got lower paying jobs than the people who used to job hunt for 6 months and get higher paying jobs. We don't know because it's not mentioned at all. The opportunity cost of…
Hi thanks for sharing your experience. I hear this often from Codesmith grads in DMs and what you said isn't thaaaaaat bad in my opinion. This is a balanced comment so read the whole thing.
I feel like I'm a broken record on here about how important it is to understand how Codesmith works and make sure it works for you before just giving them $21K because of their CIRR reports and strong supporters (a number of whom I know and worked there as fellows or continue to work there part time).
They are very transparent that every single teacher, TA, instructor, lead all went to Codesmith and it's almost a point of pride, so I don't think you can criticize them for that if you expected something else.
Having fellows 6 weeks ahead of you sign off on your resume actually gives them a lot of hierarchical control over the product. It's why almost all Codesmith resumes look the same.
Regarding p…
So it depends on the role but most of the ones I saw were Facebook contractors for anywhere from 3 months to 12 months.
I would have to write an essay haha.
So at Facebook most contractors are "Software Developers" and while paid $150K run rates the role has zero path to SWE and you have to interview like anyone else.
Other companies are different but the common threads are:
1. Higher than normal base salary
2. Lower or no bonus
3. No equity
4. Worse benefits / none of those sweet full time benefits
5. Generally worse vacation policies
6. First to go when there are re orgs or budget cuts
7. Typically let go suddenly with zero notice and it's quite frustrating - even if you are performing well.
Would I take one of these hours of a bootcamp - HECK YEAH! But when you talk about it on Reddit it's just a completely different job than even a full time job at a worse company and no one on…
A lot of commenters don't believe this is real, I do, but I have a lot of words of caution and OP's post is potentially irresponsible in this community because the result is not reproducible at scale and broadcasting it to 33K people without any context doesn't help anyone figure anything out.
1. 1 year ago was Sept 2022, meaning you got he job before then and started then. Amazon was still hiring their last remaining hires in Sept 2022. The hardest time to get hired was the very end of 2022 and H1 of 2023.
2. "Total Compensation" needs clarification. What's the base, what's the signing bonus, what's the performance bonus, how are you valuing the stock, are you including relocation or other benefits in that?
3. Tell us more about the job. I know people who graduated Codesmith with $150K **contractor** role and that's much different than a full time role.... many of those people are not…
Hi, you can trust that CIRR numbers are what they are because the auditing process makes sure the numbers are recording and calculated correctly. But the standard itself was written by Bootcamp marking people to promote bootcamps and it's not legally sound paperwork. For example, there's not description of how salaries are collected, other than they are base salaries, but no description of evidence needed or mechanics of it.
They also have a worksheet with formulas in it that are not explained in the specification clearly, which leads to errors. Codesmith's auditors files the wrong numbers and had to issue a correction!
Some data came out from a Codesmith grad that showed 70 recent placements and the people's starting salary. The median starting salary BEFORE CODESMITH was 70K+ and 20% of people were making 90K+. So the target audience is not the same as programs that have people maki…
Hi! I'm happy to clarify and thanks for being transparent on your views. There are definitely some misunderstandings.
I was the #1 committing engineer at Facebook when I was there and I got a heck of a lot done and I still do. I spend extremely little time on Reddit and Codesmith relative to my day job. I'm on the ground helping and responding to Fellows all day, fixing bugs as fast as humanly possible, and building new features and technology. And my Fellows will back me up on that.
You are also 100% correct that the more Codesmith grads there are the more Formation customers there are in 1 to 4 years from now... it's a bias I try to disclose but I have Codesmith grads insisting I'm still trying to steal Codesmith students or get people to go to Formation instead of a bootcamp... which couldn't be farther from the truth.
I actually recommend a lot of people go to Codesmith 1-1 and he…
Last year's came out mid September for the first wave and first week of October for the 2nd wave.
For Codesmith, Will Sentance said in a public talk this week that the numbers are somewhere 'around $120Ks but need to be audited still and will come out soon'. (No source, but credible)
I personally don't care what the salary numbers are and am more curious about the placement rates themselves, but I know a lot of people care about the salary numbers.
On the other hand, Codesmith describes itself as "Codesmith is a team dedicated to democratizing elite education for a new era - the outcomes of an elite grad school but online and for 1/10th of the cost" [Source](https://www.glassdoor.com/Overview/Working-at-Codesmith-EI_IE1093972.11,20.htm). And I know that elite school new grads I work with are getting about $155K base salaries right now at FAANG-level companies (and $200K+ with equity)…
I do think it's a fair question/comment yeah. It's also one of the reasons we don't publish "CIRR-like" outcomes.
I see day in - day out on here how people just programs strictly by outcomes and the fundamental problem is that a randomly selected person doesn't just get accepted into program X and it's a free ride to $Y salary.
Formation is VERY hard work, so it's not about selecting great people, they get great jobs and we get the credit. But it is both ways. If we select people who we know Formation is more likely to work effectively for, then we're more likely to have more amazing experiences, which might attract more people who it might not work for. I think that's fine if we are honest with individuals when they apply if we think Formation is good or not and that people trust that assessment.
Believe it or not, Formation is NOT good for people who have done all the LC Hard probl…
A couple of notes. They are "legally" associated with OSLabs, a completely separate charity that seems to have a lot of ties to Codesmith but is not Codesmith. OSLabs signs the letters of reference for these people (it's a Codesmith employee too, but he's also a Board Member of OSLabs).
And second, yeah anyone can audit the GitHub projects for OSLabs and see how the vast vast majority have 2-3 weeks of contributions from each member, in these spike patterns following the cohort cycle that you don't see on any real open source projects. One of the projects had console.log(password) in the authentication code - and password wasn't hashed at this point.
But employers - especially the smaller companies that hire Codesmith grads - don't look at this stuff and are just happy to interview people with experience on their resume!
I'll confirm you're not me lol! But I looked up all the people in that screenshot and they all have fairly normal Codesmith-y LinkedIns with exaggerated OSP experience.
Some of those people have a lot of experience before too, that's not super common. I've seen info sessions before and Codesmith is pretty clear that people come from 'a range of backgrounds' and most people haven't worked as SWE's before.
Did they talk about that in the session? I'm sure they chose people that were all saying amazing things about Codesmith was and how they persisted with the Codesmith-way of doing things and it worked, without really saying what that means.
I'm sure Eric K was probably mentioned by everyone too as the reason why they got a crazy high offer. Several people have sent me Eric Ks advice (in various forms from audio/video) and it's very good, standard, bread-and-butter advice you would ge…
I don't want to speak for that person, but that person was thanking THE COMMUNITY ON REDDIT (not Codesmith), they were a member of this community for A LONG TIME and asked a lot of questions and really deliberated the right place to go and for them it was Codesmith, and that's great because they were happy with the outcome. For other people it's not Codesmith!
Interviewing.io is currently the best in place to go if you just want 1 to 3 or so mock interviews and nothing else.
If you plan on paying for 5 or more, I would consider an interview prep program like Formation.dev (disclosure co-founder), Interview Kickstart or Pathrise (I've removed Outco because they haven't accepted applications in a month.
Exponent bought PRAAMP (which is free peer to peer mocks) and they offer paid mocks in a number of areas as an upsell but they don't have as many or as a strong mock interviewers as Interviewing.io or the interview prep programs. If you can get a good deal on them then doing a few there is probably fine.
A number of people might recommend various free options, Codesmith also offers alumni free mock interviews for life, but not all mock interviews are the same. If you aren't doing a mock with a person who has either done hundreds of interviews…
I'm biased from my FAANG-ish background but I think the ideal is still a top tier CS program (top 10 or 20 from US World News). After that I'm not sure because those programs are the sure things where recruiters are lining up to hire people. Anything else and it takes a little bit of luck and determination.
Of the ones you mention, Launch School capstone is the most selective and has consistently strong placement rates.There are a lot of people going to WGU but it's unclear that that will result in jobs or not. People primarily go to get a degree for cheap but I suspect they also do other things and are a part of other programs too to get jobs
We don't right now because auditing requires a framework of rules to check against first. But you can get any data audited that has rules and the auditors just make sure you follow the process! And believe it or not, CIRR data is audited AFTER the fact, not before (which is one of the problems).
Believe it or not but CIRR doesn't even say how salary information needs to be collected whatsoever, so just asking someone and taking their word for it can be considered the golden source of truth!
We collect detailed placement data for every single placement and detailed compensation info following an internal process, and some day we could potential turn that into something auditable to make sure we don't make any mistakes in collecting the data. Right now just have a crazy strict authorization and verification process to touch this data to make sure every pixel is correct, but we could pr…
Update us in a year. I have an analysis of 1000+ Codesmith grads a year into their career and how many have changed jobs already. At Facebook, changing jobs in less than a year was a red flag for recruiters so maybe it means nothing but it's something I'm trained to notice. My working hypothesis is that Codemsith grads mislead smaller companies with the exaggerated resume and get hired as experienced engineers at small companies that don't do their homework and a number don't make it a year when they are found to be less experienced than expected. I have a busy day job but we'll see when I get there time to process the data.
Yeah as someone said below, this is a strong TRUE mid-level FAANG offer, or low end senior FAANG offer.
Their previous salary was $145K already, so they were probably someone who didn't really need to go to Codesmith.
I've worked with a couple people in this bucket who dropped out in their first week because they really needed something else (like Formation.dev - disclosure, co-founder, Pathrise, Interview Kickstart) and not a bootcamp. but didn't know those existed.
This is really hard to extrapolate, I have a lot of data people have shared and I threw it into cohort-based charts.
For CIRR, it's placed within 6 months of graduating. Some of these 73 people are people that graduated more than 6 months ago so they wouldn't even count in the "83%" and some are and would.
So you can't extrapolate anything from the number alone... whoever at Codesmith shared this knows exactly what they are doing and shared no dates and no timeframes to make a point about hiring picking up to motivate people and not a point about actual placement rates
Or as Ludo said below:
https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/162t5y6/comment/jy0n28j/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3
I commented above but it's also interesting to note that the median salary going in was in the $70Ks and 20% of people were making $90K+. So it depends on where you are starting from! If you make 40K across two restaurant jobs, the odds are much lower of making six figures than someone who is an accountant making $90K.
I added these to my comment above that I think are super interesting from this data,
​
>It's really interesting to see "past salaries", the number of people making six figures BEFORE CODESMITH is an anomaly for bootcamps, and one of the things that skews the numbers. 16, or 20% of the people made over 90K BEFORE with and I would say most people on here are hoping to make 90K AFTER. People really need to know this going in... that part of the success is that a number of people going in are already successful.
>
>2. This gives more insight into the split distribution - lots of high salaries, lots of low salaries - which, like 2., is not the norm for bootcamps. You can see personas in the data. Some people with $140K+ salaries started with high salaries anyways. Some didn't, those people are the "all in Codesmith" people who defend it to the bitter death - but it's like 5 peopl…
I mean they are using the full and proper data set for CIRR, but this is the source yeah. I'm just surprised how much Codesmith cares about talking about compensation and pushing people for compensation, yet they don't even collect granular compensation information. With the quality of data they collect, they can't say someone got a $400K FAANG offer. Every FAANG offer needs to be considered in terms of base, signing bonus, performance bonus, equity, vesting schedule, job location, and benefits (e.g. Amazon has much worse benefits than Apple and pays a lot more cash.... you are not smart at all if you compare the base salary one on one and say one offer is better than another.
Anyways, I'm writing up more separately!
So believe it or not but the column titles are the real titles of the official data they collect. Literally from their CIRR collection worksheet. I was shocked too when I saw this because they collect such little information about compensation, e.g. someone put "some stocks" and this is the data that turns into CIRR outcomes.
But yeah, meaningless in this context... doesn't even have the companies or time frames.
Hi! Yeah send me a DM so I can explain a little more how the new ISLs work. They are very different from these old ones as the payment term is longer and the individual payments are typically smaller and what the typical person will pay back is expected to be closer to the cap.
You have to start making payments after a year, but only if you are making the minimum salary at the time, so if you are unemployed your payments won't start. This is less friendly than the old ISA but it helps solve the problem that numerous programs have discussed where anecdotally, people don't feel motivated to look for a job as aggressively as those who paid upfront.
I say this all the time but it's very important because of the down market that no program, including Formation, hands you a job and you are not paying for a job. You are paying so that you present your best self and become a better engineer an…
We don't have any ISAs that cost exactly $25,000 so I'm happy to explain your ISA better if you ping me internally! There is a cap to make sure your ISA has an upper bound that is meant to be a positive feature for you and that is not the amount you owe necessarily. The amount you pay back depends on your salary so for this specific "full option", $25K is the cost if you get a BASE SALARY of $167K or higher.
In the past few months we have clarified our payment options to help explain this so hopefully this will only be clearer in the future that the ISA option (which is just one of many) is an alternative to paying the upfront cost but with a higher cost for the luxury of deferring payment.
The price of Formation varies by experience and needs, as it is a mentorship platform as opposed to a form of education, so that was an example for making a simplified point, but for anyone reading…
It's generally high because it's the easiest way to juice the outcomes. If people who are weaker leave, the best people graduate and placement rates are only based on people who graduate.
Bloomtech has a 50% or so graduation rate and a 90% placement rate of people who graduate.
TripleTen doesn't publish a placement rate but has a 87% placement rate.
Codesmith is one of the stronger programs that has like a 95% graduation rate and 80% placement rate.
It's important to factor both in because your odds of getting a job from day one are the odds of graduation times the placement rate and not the placement rate alone!
This is true for big companies but it's not new. Most big companies do not hire directly out of bootcamps and I can tell you why from my experience 8 years at FB as a principal engineer!
So first off, where do these applications go:
1. Apprenticeships! Big companies often have apprenticeships/emergent talent/etc... programs for bootcamp grads who come from diverse backgrounds.
2. During the boom times, Amazon would interview anyone with an online assessment and passing that would usually get you an interview. So people with very little SWE experience but who had good professional experience to talk about in a behavioral interview, could pass. Google briefly was talking to bootcamp grads via a number of contractor recruiters at Randstad but you had to get connected through them directly.
Second, why don't big companies want to hire bootcamp grads. Unfortunately they DID in the past. B…
I'm intimately familiar with month to month and week to week trends and how many Codesmith people graduate each month and when their 6 month clock starts and ends and then even account for fellows, whose clocks are delayed for 3 months (or however long their fellow contract ends up being)
I know for a fact that outcomes for CIRR H2 2022 are significantly worse than H1 2022, about 15 to 20% worse, being generous.
July through August 2022 saw strong hiring at Amazon and Capital One, whom were filling out remaining headcount.
The market was terrible in November and December as headcount ran out, freezes continued, and people decided to wait until next year.
Because of the cadence, which you understand as well, that means only one or two cohorts from each coast were impacted super bad and had terrible placement rates that were somewhat cancelled out by the stronger earlier ones.
Januar…
Sorry yeah I was aggregating. The 6 weeks is 4 weeks of super fixed concentrated lectures and another 2-ish weeks sprinkled across the other stuff.
You might be the first person to say I've oversold Codesmith!! I always get yelled at for downplaying them and that Eric Kirsten told them Formation is a scam that offers everything Codesmith does for free for a lifetime... although that has subsided a bit since the market has tanked and I've worked with dozens of Codesmith alumni - and the vast majority at best love us (we have several "spotlights" written for people who wanted to talk about their story post-Codesmith) and at worst think it was maybe break even-ish, and not a single person I know of has said we offer what Codesmith offers haha.
I'm going through a dilemma right now myself and I can't give a well sourced, confident answer. I'm focusing on Codesmith because week after week I just get so much stuff sent to me, I know the ins and outs better than any program.
At the end of the day, there's no 12 week program that can turn anyone into a really good industry engineer. I see so so so many people, covering all backgrounds and there are patterns between successful ones and unsuccessful ones but each individual is a unique human that is unpredictable!
I can say it's extremely hard to get entry level jobs right now and there are no shortcuts, loopholes, "get rich quick" ways of doing it.
I can also say that THE JOB IS THE BEGINNING, not the end. This is one of Codesmith's "dirty secrets" - people get highly paying first jobs - that they exaggerate their experience to get - but if you follow the alumni down the road,…
BloomTech has changed A LOT on recent months. The result is that the graduation rate has plummeted, but if you do graduate, the odds of getting a job are higher.
I think the main problem is all of the changes basically turned it into a Udemy course with live sessions where the "self motivated autodidactic" people are the ones that make it through - and the ones that probably would have gotten jobs in any bootcamp.
For those unaware, the changes are:
1. You move the curriculum completely at your own pace.
2. You sign up for "lectures" whenever you want and the same lectures are offered frequently so you can always join the one you need right now, or repeat ones you aren't understanding.
3. There is no longer a sense of community or that you are doing this with other people - people start every week and you don't have cohortmates anymore.
4. You have a support person that you can file…
Hack Reactor 12 week covers roughly similar materials to Codesmith. Codesmith has as a higher entry bar and 90%+ graduation rate as a result. HR has way more people drop out/get kicked out and not graduate (75 to 80% "graduate") but it's still okay.
Note about the ISAs - read the fine print. You can usually defer payments for some amount of time (I believe 3 month after graduation), but it's not forever (if you have a job making the minimum salary in a current job or any non-tech job).
The market right now is not great for bootcamp grads. FAANG hiring is opening up again for people with 2+ years of SWE work experience, but not for people with none. And you can't fake this work experience or stretch your resume - it's either 2 real YOE or not - faking your resume will just piss off hiring managers that will tell the recruiter that sent you over to never consider candidates from your bootcamp again and waste their time.
The only data I have here is from Codesmith. They had H1 2022 CIRR placements of 80% within 180 days of graduation for people who graduated and were job hunting. I've seen Codesmith's placement numbers for H2 2022 and for recent cohorts and they are hovering around 50% +/- 15%ish (these are not official numbers but from primary data from students and alumni) and are about a 20% drop from H1 2022 in H2 2022 and H1 2023 (which still has a lot of time left…
Right, 14.6% of people in pacific time group didn't report salaries so might have been confirmed from LinkedIn or another source.
RE source. Yeah so CIRR has no requirements on how the salary is verified and the auditors for Codesmith said they just ask people to confirm - no offer letter required or anything.
This is the GRAD standard and sounds similar in that it's self reported:
\`\`\`
Compensation Rate
The Compensation Rate includes only annualized base compensation and excludes bonuses, equity, relocation, and any other non-base compensation. If a Graduate has held multiple positions of the same outcomes classification code within the Job Search Period, Galvanize reports on the position acquired at its discretion. If compensation information is known, it must be included. A GRAD Report must indicate the total number of Job-Seeking Graduates as well as the percentage of succes…
Hey I think we might have chatted long ago (Reddit deleted legacy chats from before Jan 2023) but feel free to ping me. I think you should work with the manager to set yourself up to convert full time, take the position, give it 120% and don't do any bootcamp.
I know I might seem bias here because Formation is intended to help people like the above to get that really amazing second job/third job, but I genuinely think you will accelerate your career by taking trying to convert full time as soon as possible. By the time you would have graduated a bootcamp + 3 months (super conservatively to find a job) you'll have accumulated actual work experience that cannot be replaced by anything.
If you go to Codesmith and give that your 120% instead, you might get a $120K first job but you'll be starting from 0 at that job (don't let "mid level and senior" marketing influence this, you are starti…
It changes constantly. We work with a lot of people who want canonical FAANG and we work with FAANG who want the even "better" tier of companies (FAANG level engineering bar and product but earlier stage with more upside). Notion and Figma (pre acquisition) are that level. Stripe and Square were also that level during COVID. Now it's shifting to AI a bit, like Open AI.
The three criteria:
1. super strong engineering culture and engineering driven decisions
2. product or service is leading edge / best in class and at a fairly large scale / making money / growing fast
3. top compensation and significant equity (on par with the canonical FAANG)
These companies also tend to have very similar levelling systems to each other
So for a lot of the people I've worked with - they are awesome, hardworking, driven, and those qualities lead to their success on the job. In some cases that gets misdirected to something Codesmith did - and perhaps confidence-building-as-a-product is the product you are paying for with Codesmith - and it's worth it.
That problem you talk about is a fantastic problem to work through and great in an interview, 100%. That doesn't mean it's "production level" though. I had several notable personal projects I talked about in interviews that were super impressive but the code was not "production quality code". One "project" we actually incorporated a company and it was featured on TechCrunch - and even the code was not "production level", it was a group project with tens of thousands of lines of code, had a ton of fascinating product, growth, and technical problems, and it got me a job at Fa…
I think about this every time I get attacked. These are my THEORIES (no strong evidence):
1. A lot of accounts have no history and are new, so I wonder who the people actually are
2. I know many people privately have problems with specific leadership at Codesmith ("sketchy", "sleezy", "used car salesman", "lied to me", "obsessed with Codesmith's image"). Apparently there are unofficial ways people talk where they discuss their issues with the leaders. Now we haven't seen a leader once use their real identity and respond to things, so I suspect there could be leaders with fake accounts replying sometimes and displaying the behavior of the words above.
3. Codesmith currently has about 100 former students on staff (full time and part time and contracting) listed on their website.And this list rotates constantly. So I suspect 25% of all students end up working for Codesmith in some capacity…
Yeah, no one I talk to has ever heard of Codesmith - and it's why the OSLabs portrayal as work experience actually works at tricking people from companies that don't know any better. And when people I know see examples of resumes and LinkedIn, I haven't seen a single industry person that thinks the portrayal is okay.
But, as you said, no one cares - my friends have crazy impactful jobs to do, the recruiters are hiring super senior people and don't care that much about people tricking their way in on entry level that much.
I truly understand both sides of this and the only reason I talk about it so much is that the view that reflects how the industry feels about this is not represented well in this subreddit and instead people continuously tout their salary outcomes in a way that leads people who don't know any better down what might be the right or wrong path, but for the wrong reasons…
I don't have one answer for everybody.
1. I would consider a bootcamp if you have the time and finances to go all in, e.g. 12 hour days for 3-4 months (or part time where you have no free time outside of work and bootcamp). However, in this climate it's far from a sure bet that it will lead to a job quickly.
2. Consider lower-end apprenticeships/work to hire type programs
3. Do volunteering for non-profits like Hack4LA
This is an extensive set of resources from Vanessa Vun, who learned self-taught but by diligently participating in many different organizations: [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/vanessas-tech-resources-faq-vanessa-vun](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/vanessas-tech-resources-faq-vanessa-vun) (disclosure: while this resource has dozens of things, it does mention the program I co-founded Formation so I want to disclose to avoid it appearing self-promotion)
UPDATE: 2023 Predictions check-in and updates!
Hi all, it's halfway through 2023 and I wanted to quickly revisit my predictions from this post to give some updates based on how the industry is doing: [https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/1226i27/bootcamp\_predictions\_for\_the\_rest\_of\_2023/](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/1226i27/bootcamp_predictions_for_the_rest_of_2023/)
# New: What's left for 2023?
The main thing I want to add is that outcomes for H2 2022 are going to go off a cliff. At first when we saw H1 2022 CIRR results come out they were better than expected, however Codesmith restated their numbers after audit and they were notably lower than originally posted for placement rates and high end salaries ([https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/14341x7/codesmiths\_newly\_posted\_audited\_version\_of\_their/](https://www.reddit.com/r/co…
Thanks for sharing thoughts!
Placement times range from 3 weeks to 18 months and counting.
One of the main reasons we don't publish time to placement data right now is because people don't understand what Formation "is" yet and we don't want people to look at numbers that would compare us to a bootcamp or even our competitors, like Interview Kickstart, Outco, Pathrise, Coachable, Scaler (all of which don't publish much data).
Your program is truly unique to you, the person who is still here after 18 months has done hundreds of sessions, almost a thousand tasks, a few dozen mock interviews, and keeps chugging along. Some people even do contracts and part time jobs and ramp down Formation and then ramp back up again when the contract ends (I can't comment on specific people, but it might contribute to the people who have been here longer).
I completely agree that someone looking at Fo…
How would you answer that given the above restrictions? I would love to answer it but we just can't in a way that is actually clear and transparent?
100% of people adjust their schedules and time commitments throughout Formation (at least once, the majority adjust every week) so what would you do if someone goes on parental leave? What about if they go on a lot of vacation? How do you compare the time it takes for someone training 50 hours a week vs someone training 10 hours a week and the majority of people change their workload several times throughout? If someone is stressed and needs a mental health break, or needs a physical health break, that will impact their training time and unlike a bootcamp we don't kick you out or "defer" you for these cases. As I said, the majority of people fall under these kinds of situations so it's not an edge case that will get averaged out in placeme…
Hi, Formation isn't a bootcamp, doesn't have "graduation", doesn't have cohorts or start dates, doesn't have a expected amount of time you will spend in it, doesn't have a curriculum or topic list you will study. In addition, most people train in Formation part time and have jobs, and ramp up or down their commitments to suit their own needs rather than along our fixed timeframe. Finally, people come from all kinds of backgrounds and start at different places, so it's very hard to look at data and guess what your time and outcome might be like.
So in conclusion, CIRR makes no sense for us at all and we can't even answer basic questions like "how many people graduated" because the question itself doesn't make sense for us.
We have published average outcomes and a list of companies placed at in 2022: [https://formation.dev/blog/2022-formation-fellow-placements/](https://formation.dev/blo…
From my experience, people are very happy and proud to drop their names in the spreadsheet and cheer on their peers outcomes... and a lot more reluctant to talk about how hard it is on the job and the failures that come with it.
I think this is the reason you see so many Hackbright and Hack Reactor and App Academy alumni at FAANG companies 5 years down the road, and while you see a good number of Codesmith alumni at FAANG too there is a greater number 3 jobs in as "senior engineers" at unknown non-tech companies pushing $200K. A mid-level Google offer though is $300K and I reiterate that an appropriate first job -> FAANG mid-level is a much better outcome down the road than what most Codesmith students do.
1. +1 the Lifetime career services at bootcamps aren't helpful because they are meant to help bootcamp grads get jobs. When you have a job and want to get a better job, they don't support you as much as you could. I've heard people say "\[my bootcamp's career services\] helped me negotiate my next offer and it's a gift that keeps on giving".... but what they don't realize is that if they sought help from others that specialize in experienced engineers (disclosure: co-founder of Formation which helps and hence I'm very biased) that you might have made wayyyyy more. The average person placed after Formation increased their first year TC by $96K (see website for how we calculate). So if you are super thankful for "free" help to you increase you compensation by $50K, you could have paid $10K to make almost $100K more... Anyways, this isn't an ad for Formation - Formation has lots of concerns…
I agree with this in general. The CIRR standards have no requirements for verification of salaries, other than asking a person. They also allow LinkedIn verification to be used to confirm employment but without any more qualifications on how to do that. So if someone works as a self employed Uber driver on their LinkedIn and ghosts bootcamp staff, that could as a "confirmed placement" but with "salary not reported".
The one thing they do have more qualification on is the start dates, and the process for verifying with a letter. Even there, they have subjectivity if someone has multiple jobs within the 6 months, to choose a job or the other.
Anyways, all in the spec, don't have time to write all this out yet again, but the TLDR: it was written by bootcamp marketing and outcomes people and not lawyers.
I have it locally and it looks the same to me. It only has about 30 people in it so it makes sense. ONE placement is over 3% of the class instead of 0.3%
But I guess that means swings this large means there were numerous errors in the full time one :S
If this is a submission error of the report itself or the auditors audited the wrong version and signed off that's even worse because it destroys trust in the CIRR ecosystem because it means either Codesmith got away with publishing false data - and might be legally liable - or the auditors signed off on the wrong report and obviously can't be trusted.
So it's actually better if this was human error in the spreadsheets that the auditors fixed.
Codesmith's newly posted AUDITED version of their CIRR H1 2022 show discrepancies from their initial report published a month or two ago (... and a reminder about blindly trusting CIRR)
UPDATE (June 25th 2023): The Auditors re-released a correction and they republished the original report as the final audited report. This is all very confusing how such mistakes and errors could pass audit to begin with, but I believe the "original report" is the final numbers and the "audited reports" contained errors that were originally signed off on.
One of the misconceptions about CIRR is that results are audited before being posted. This is not correct and rather they are audited once a year and then updated after the fact.
Codesmith recently added their **audited** report to CIRR and it has worse outcomes:
[Link to original report](https://static.spacecrafted.com/b13328575ece40d8853472b9e0cf204…