This is one of the dark secrets of bootcamps. Some basically let anyone in and that means people who they shouldn’t of let in might have a bad experience and don't get a job, which lowers their outcomes on paper. So the bootcamps that are more selective have more success cases and have stronger outcomes on paper. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that the education is better or worse it’s just one factor. At Formation.dev we haven’t published these kind of outcomes because of this (like a staff engineer making $400K TC isn't really relevant for a bootcamp grad who has contracted and aiming to make $150K TC at a solid company, and aggregating these numbers into medians and averages isn't that useful imo). HackReactor is a great example of this where they are owned by a big company and have pressure to hit numbers and their outcomes for qualified people are actually really good and they ha…
Not all mentors are created equal.
I strongly believe in the idea that people don't need a single dedicated mentor, but rather need the right mentor at the right time for the right reason.
If you can get this just right yourself while doing a Udacity course, you are essentially outsmarting these expensive programs that you are paying 15K to do this.
Now the reason it's hard to navigate because some programs charge 15K to be almost entirely taught by alumni of the program. Alumni can actually be better a teaching some topics! But there are also very rare times you need a $500 an hour mentor as well.... and most things fall somewhere on between.
When you are starting out, you don't know what you don't know and you just have to trust a program to make good use of your $15K.
At Formation, we actually think about our fees as a fee that you could easily pay to mentors directly on your o…
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…
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…
1. Thanks. Yeah just want to help give my perspective on things. It's just one perspective, but so many people in the sub are in bootcamps or choosing bootcamps and it's missing the experienced perspective so I try to comment often.
2. It depends on your goals. You can get an entry level job directly from a bootcamp that is decent. Doing any kind of internship or volunteer work will help. If I were doing a bootcamp I would try to get an apprenticeship at a top tier company. Even the apprenticeships are super competitive right now, but I would try to be a top student and get one of those (e.g. Asana, Dropbox, Twitter).
1. Formation is called a Fellowship, but it's really like having a personal trainer for your technical and career skills and it's not an internship or apprenticeship. Doing something like Formation takes time. Like I said, MOST people at Formation have work experience al…
So I think the actual quality of the work is probably similar. But Codesmith resumes APPEAR much farther along. I've been told 1000 times that Codesmith doesn't tell you to do this, but the vast majority of people I've surveyed (out of 200 graduates) list that open source contribution as "Software Engineer" experience at a real "Company". This gives them a huge leg up with smaller companies that don't check these things well and care more about what you do than what your resume says.
I've audited their flagship projects and almost no one uses them. No one reports bugs. No one reports feature requests. No one outside Codesmith contributes to them. They are group projects that are marketed as big open source tools.
Sorry if this sounds negative, not meant to be. It's a brilliant strategy and it's working to help their alumni get the most out of their experience.
I think both are strong. Neither will prepare you for a strong chance at passing Google though. Both have a handful of alumni ever that go to Google right out of the program in their first job.
At Formation for example, we work with bootcamp grads, and the vast majority of our Fellows get top tier jobs. With many at Google alone, and many TURNING DOWN Google.
So I've seen the transformation needed for most people post bootcamp to be at that level. I would like to clarify that most people we work with have work experience already post bootcamp, so the number that come directly from a bootcamp is smaller, but I'm including all of these people in one bucket, because presumably people who graduated and worked are farther ahead anyways than new grads.
I might get some comments on here saying that all Codesmith alumni are Google-ready because people get jobs at Google, so I want to emphasiz…
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…
The Codesmith tech talks they arrange for each student with "Single Sprout" are copy / paste. I watched 5 videos, all of the people plagiarized from sources and read them word for word or with minimal changes without properly sourcing them. I just googled 10 or so sentences and found the original posts where sentences and paragraphs were pulled word for word. If a college student was caught doing that they could be suspended or expelled.
Don't get me wrong, as people will attest, I often recommend looking into Codesmith as a strong option in DMs. This is just a tiny portion of the process to check off a box on your resume.
I don't want to call anyone out specifically but you can reproduce by watching some Codesmith Single Sprout tech talks, and google sentences here and there.
u/SlowestTriathlete do you know anything more about this? I might be completely wrong, just something I noti…
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…
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…
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…
This is kind of proving my point. All of the 10+ year experience people we work with are talking to recruiters BEFORE starting Formation and they need help navigating the market and making sure they get the best job for them out of all the options.
So a Codesmith alumni who gets contacted days after graduation could be a great person to then go to Formation to talk to people with years and years of FAANG industry experience to help them make the next best steps.
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…
We have a lot of people go to Formation right AFTER going to Codesmith, not INSTEAD of. People who WORK at Codesmith come to Formation. For the large majority of people starting Codesmith, they do not qualify for Formation or meet the bar. AFTER Codesmith, most people are right at the middle or low-middle bar for our full program track. I love working with Codesmith alumni!
No throwaway accounts people, have a real discussion without baseless angry accusations!
‼️ 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.
Oh sorry I've been talking about this elsewhere over time.
SUMMARY: I audited over 200 Codesmith alumni, documenting LinkedIn and GitHub commits, and noting the number of years of "work experience" as a "software engineer" that was claimed at the open source groups projects Codesmith runs, like Reactime and Spearmint. I have a large spreadsheet, but the majority of people claimed 6 to 18 months of "work experience" but commited 2-6 commits over 1-3 weeks on the projects (my understanding is this project is a 6 week unit in the course). The most extreme being someone that claimed 6 months of work experience and their only commits to the project were changing an image file and updating a README. In addition, these projects have no activity outside of Codesmith, no issues or feature requests from outside Codesmith, and it's not clear any of the tools or projects are used outside of Codesm…
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…
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…
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…
u/Cheese12345678901 Yeah I find this sketchy too. I pulled LinkedIn experience and GitHub histories for 200 Codesmith alumni on their flagship projects and diligently made a big table. The vast majority claim 6 to 18 months of experience and actually commits in GitHub over 2 to 6 weeks, most 3 weeks. Speaking with alums it sounds like the project is a 6 week unit and that their leadership actively encourage people to exaggerate this experience because they are "putting in 12 to 16 hour days" so it "counts as months of experience". The more people I talk to, the most frustrated I get, so I stopped haha.
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 all, I wrote a good summary of Codesmith here if you are interested https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/un1cyf/is_there_a_good_bootcamp_besides_codesmith/i85flg0/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3
I’m not saying it’s not a quality education, but I don’t think any current student of any program can comment on the quality of the education until you look back and reflect later on. If you knew what you didn’t know then you wouldn’t be needing training.
When I work with alumni it’s a challenge to retrain people around the fake work experience because Codesmith taught them the ends justify the means and that their project work should count for more credit because it’s so intense - it is not by top tier standards.
Sorry, you’re right that this is focused on Codesmith and not the alternative. I work with many Codesmith people and have a spreadsheet of hundreds of alumni and I went with that because I feel confident based on my research. It’s not a great answer to the question about alternatives. I’ll think about this a bit more overnight.
Formation doesn’t work with people who don’t have experience, sorry if that came across as comparing it to Codesmith. Entirely different things.
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…
Yeah that's a good start! After you are comfortable with the syntax try doing some React hands on practice: [https://reactjs.org/tutorial/tutorial.html](https://reactjs.org/tutorial/tutorial.html)
If you have some engineering background already and some professional experience in a different area you might be able to do a bootcamp to switch careers.
If you are a student and planning on going to college, I would consider a top CS school and focus on internships each year at top companies.
It's definitely possible! Musica.ly (which was acquired by Byte Dance and somewhat morphed into TikTok) kind of came out of nowhere while I was at Facebook and grew to tens of millions of users.
That said, the large companies have too much nuanced knowledge of how to grow and sustain products and it's incredibly hard for a student without any of that knowledge to reproduce this kind of growth effect. Wordle is a recent phenomenon, but the founder worked at Reddit and had some insight into these things.
I think the next big thing is going to be not "social" but something that spawns out of Web3/Metaverse/NFTs and that's why so much attention is in those areas. It's not going to be what we see today, but something new. These ideas are challenging some of the fundamental ways humans interact, so there is room for something big.
I would add two general pieces of advice to 1 and 3 that I always give people as well (I’m the cofounder of Formation.dev which is not a bootcamp, but I worked with a lot of bootcamp grads a few years down the road)
1. Check who the instructors are and if they or the TAs are recent graduates. A lot the programs that have recent graduates teach while their job hunting have a lot of churn and the TAs leave the second they get a job. Second, a recent grad who doesn't have any professional experience might be able to help in some ways having recently gone to the program, but you won't be getting professional level code review from very experienced engineers that you're aiming to work with in the future.
3. I always strongly recommend people try to find alumni as you suggested, but focusing on those with backgrounds similar to themselves. There are always a few people who have prior experi…
So Facebook doesn't even interview new grad E3s who didn't come from internships or the schools they recruit at. They experimented with an E3.5 program but that required 6 months of work. And the E4 rotational program also required more work, just where the experience is not at the normal E4 bar.
Sorry, I geek out over this stuff haha
I have some neutral comments on the project-as-work-experience debate. I was a E7-level Engineer at Facebook for 8 years, interviewed hundreds of people, read thousands of resumes. I'm co-founder of Formation.dev now which does mentoring and coaching and I have worked with many Codesmith grads and alumni and am familiar with their program. We also have recruiters at Formation with 10 years recruiting experience at Facebook as well who review Codesmith applicants to Formation. We also hired a Codesmith alumni who we worked with at Formation as well.
1. If you put something on your resume that says Software Engineer for a "company", where the company is an open source project, it's a little grey area/pushing the limits of what people deem acceptable at top-tier companies. Here's an example of a prolific open source contributor and what their resume looks like with things clearly labelle…
Everyone has a different path. I would look at Formation.dev (disclosure: I am a cofounder) if you are trying to fill in CS fundamentals and your goal is a job. If you are already getting interviews I wouldn’t consider a bootcamp. A masters degree has the advantage of being considered for new grad roles, but is costly and will take the most time. All options are very different.
At Formation, our recruiters are all super experienced former top tier company recruiters (e.g. Facebook 10 years) and they can talk to you about your goals and give you genuine advice based on your specific journey.
I've worked with several alums who got their first job after Codesmith and it can get you there. However, if you are targeting top tier roles with a ton of impact and very high comp I would absolutely suggest a "2nd bootcamp"/more training.
At Formation.dev (disclosure: I'm a co-founder) where we do exactly this kind of additional training, our last ten placements (at time of writing) were at Plaid, 1Password, GitHub, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Google, Snap, Atlassian. And at one of these people was a Codesmith alum, many did other bootcamps in the past. I don't want this to sound like an ad, so please do your own research about [Formation.dev](https://Formation.dev) and other programs that do additional training and make an informed decision.
So people who want to achieve this truly top tier bar absolutely can benefit from more training.
Hi, I’m the co-founder of Formation and specifically for this question of if Formation would be good for someone from CodeSmith… we have worked with a handful of CodeSmith alum at Formation and I would recommend trying to find them on LinkedIn and asking them about their experience. It’s hard to find people that list CodeSmith and/or Formation on their LinkedIns but some recent outcomes were Snap, Facebook x2, and some still job hunting.