My personally opinion, I currently actively recommend avoiding Codesmith no matter what your background for two reasons. First, because of their morals and ethics and this view has changed in the recent weeks. Second, because a few more long time staff left recently and the haven't delivered on most of their promises in February last time there were layoffs. So I don't take their word to mean anything both morally on a personal level and practically on a deliverables level.
I'm currently only recommending Launch School (but under the caveat that it's not for everyone and has to be a good fit).
Note: I have no affiliations with any bootcamps.
Hiring is back to the way it was back in 2008. Experienced engineers have options in big tech. The only entry level pipelines that are reliable are the top-tier CS school new grad and intern pipelines.
174 isn't haven't a huge impact with big te…
Wow there is a lot of just like blatantly wrong facts there.
There are a few people who don't like Codesmith and maybe that's them but you should make sure you have evidence of what you are saying because if you don't you are defaming me with facts that are wrong.
1. I have a written statement from the person in that blog post that another prospective Codemsith student told him about Formation, not a team member.
2. 2 year fixation on Codesmith, yes that's true.
3. I mention Codemsith a lot because there are these extremely long threads of back and forth with these anonymous Codesmith people who are mostly suspended from Reddit now. My proactive commentary leans Codesmith but is much broader.
4. I never hired a private investigator or anyone to look into Codesmith. That is weird and not me.
5. I have two main spreadsheets that I created. One for OSP tracking, one for Alumni. I hav…
Why do you consider me personally your competitor or Formation your competitor? We don't consider you a competitor and I've stated that for like over 2 years now.
Not only that, but I've tried to explain in numerous ways why we aren't your competitor, in writing, in detail, to your leadership, which you haven't refuted and just keep calling Formation your competitor passive aggressively.
Are you seeing a bunch of people applying to Codesmith and asking about Formation? And if so, were those people OFFICIALLY ACCEPTED BY FORMATION or they just mentioned hearing about it or wanting to go there in the future?
I really want to sort this out, all of the alumni that have come to Formation that have talked to me about this (which is probably bias sample) have asked me to try to make sort this out with you because Formation is an amazing complement to Codesmith. These people have fully been i…
These are **first offers only!**, based on the date reported though and not when they started the job. I asked for clarification on that because someone who graduated in 2022 and got a job end of 2023 and submitted the form in August 2024 would count.... and two alumni reported being promoted to update or re-submit their data in August.
COMMENTARY/UPDATE: Codesmith updated their accepted stats today, 168 offers accepted between March and August 2024 VS 53 in March and April alone. Average base salary in those ranges down to $117K from $119K.
Disclosure: I'm presenting my analysis as my personal opinions and commentary on the data provided. If anything commented is incorrect, I'm happy to make corrections and updates.
Codesmith updated their recent offer stats sometime today and I spent 15 mins throwing together my top of mind thoughts below.
Source: [Previous](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_CPn4TtghvS4UDvkZ9pD6G4JYItLODd3/view) and [New](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1d7IGbYdtYPoI5Jbr4OxPwVgKyXhMTpI1/view?__hstc=109711322.0e322342ee14294aff502ad66630cdf2.1651003824655.1725406413979.1725413866740.756&__hssc=109711322.8.1725413866740&__hsfp=3801953514&hsCtaTracking=5fa5766f-6dea-46ee-b25d-ecf7276ecee9%7Ceed80937-e…
I haven't seen a concrete trend myself. The instructors haven't worked in industry (only a handful ever had but all but one were return Codemsith alumni) and Codesmith's codebase can best be described as a big OSP project and in some cases, some OSP projects have had more people touching their code than the Codesmith codebase. Based on the problems with some of the largest OSP projects which have their history plain for all to see, you can imagine the problems with Codesmith's codebase.
I haven't seen Codesmith's codebase but just heard casually from people who worked on it and from people who saw this system design talk and approached me about it.
If you've talked to alumni about the big OSPs you'll hear about how each new group tends to fail to understand the existing codebase and instead just builds something new. For example, a project containing 2 primary UI frameworks because a n…
I'm fairly familiar with this and can offer my 2 cents, in no particular order:
1. I heard that instructors, mentors, and fellows (TAs) were listing Codesmith as their recent job, but it was becoming less effective, because people recognized it as a bootcamp and it makes sense that people would perceive "Senior Software Engineer at Codesmith" as really just a bootcamp STUDENT embellishing their resume. It wasn't made clear to me who's idea this was, but someone came up with the idea of creating a "CS Engineering" brand that these people could list to differentiate their REAL jobs from coming across like a student.
2. In all fairness, I think that's reasonable because people actually had jobs with Codesmith that they should get credit for. My opinion is the need for "CS Engineering" as a brand is a very clear sign of the problems of appearing to work at a bootcamp and how you get writte…
I dispute almost all of those "facts", but I don't care personally if they get posted and I need to evaluate everything super fairly and consistently as a mod or I don't deserve the position.
Personal opinion rant: Codesmith has dug a really deep whole for themselves with their own community and it's entirely on them. The more they go after me with statements I can prove are false, the deeper the hole. The more their placements are terrible and they gaslight alumni, the deeper the hole. The more they post in their slack about me (who RECOMMENDED PEOPLE IN 1-1 CHATS GO TO CODESMITH UNTIL THEIR RECENT LAYOFF ROUND), the deeper the hole. When an alumni, who I recommended go to Codesmith, actually went, and then is pissed off because they didn't feel like they liked it, and that alumni sees what Codesmith is saying about me to their alumni in slack, that absolutely **DESTROYS** their credi…
Where are you getting your information from?
1. We had one Bootcamp Grad Open House and it wasn't that popular so we didn't do it again.
2. This subreddit isn't a "massive funnel", and what makes you think that? We put all of Reddit traffic under 'socials' and we don't even distinguish this sub because it's not a significant source of people.
I would also point out that my team (but not me) does cold outreach (searching LinkedIn and using various tools and sources to find potential fits). Even when we required less experience, as far as I know, we have always trying to target bootcamp GRADS not people earlier in their journey.
If we haven't been able to reach out to every PLACED bootcamp grad from all bootcamps, including all placed Codesmith grads, at this point then we aren't doing a good job in our outreach and connecting with our target market.
We did have a few problems with having to train new recruiters on our team specifically to identify Codesmith OSP projects NOT as "placed bootcamp grads" because there were a number cases of mistakes. This is actually one of the reasons Codesmith even got on my radar to begin with, it was messing with out funnel because a few dozen people were applying and interviewing saying the…
I'm going to ask Brian how he heard about us, it wasn't me reaching out and it will sure be embarrassing if it was Codesmith alumni or employee that recommended it haha. I would strongly guess it was a peer who realized Brian had already self taught to Codesmith grad level and wanted interview prep.
I don't discuss people's individual cases but I'm general, if someone is joining and Formation is not 100% good fit, we'll have that conversation. These are extremely case by case and some people join for different reasons and some people will not join for different reasons.
Exclusive ex-Meta Engineering poll results: Almost no one is considering AI skills when hiring software engineers at their companies! Bootcamps pivoting to AI might be marketing a fictional gold rush so that they can sell you an expensive shovel that you don't need right now.
DISCLAIMER: I'm a moderator of the sub and co-founder of a mentorship program for experienced SWEs (2+ YOE currently) to help them prepare for interviews. I don't believe I have any conflicts of interest but I am bias by the fact that my corner of the market is top tier big tech (including top tier small tech startups) and not the long tail of companies hiring engineers right now. The below analysis is my personal interpretation of the poll and reflects my personal opinions and insights on the raw numbers presented.
Note: I might update poll numbers as more votes come in.
I ran a poll with a group a few thousand…
1. I don't make a personal income and haven't for 5 years
2. About a third or so people at Formation did a bootcamp in the past, it's far from the majority right now.
3. Are you able to prove that I DM'd you and promoted Formation and told you to go there? I've done it very rarely - like 2 or 3 times, while I've had 100s of conversations telling people to go to bootcamps like Codesmith (which I no longer do), Launch School, Rithm, grad school, Tech Elevator, etc... based on their circumstances. If I DM'd you from my account and out of the blue told you that you need Formation, then that was a one off that rarely happens, was probably a very legitmate reason to do so, and I probably mentioned other options too like Interview Kickstart rather than just saying "go to Formation", it was probably like "you should consider interview prep programs because you have a lot of experience alrea…
Codesmith's new model is bullshit. They added 5 Generative AI lectures and are calling themselves an AI immersive. It's unclear if the content is even done yet or just in progress, with the people currently working on it having no AI experience in real life.
There is no "modern engineer". It's a fabricated story in the CEO's head that he's setting up and using alumni to +1 like zombies.
The "modern engineer" is a privileged Oxford/Harvard grad's idea for making the word a better place.
Good idea, but it's not what the market wants right now. If he wants to change the world, he needs to give the market what it wants along the way to get there.
Right now he's acting like a con artist, dressing up sly foxes like prized sheepdogs. Telling graduates with 3 weeks of OSP to list that on their resume as 2 to 4 years of "functional experience" because companies don't check (Recent alumni wer…
A couple of alumni have sent ME their complaints because they said YOU personally don't do anything about them and were defensive receiving them.
Word are words. Actions are actions.
Don't gaslight your alumni when placements for people starting LAST NOVEMBER have been terrible, not one recent cohort 3 months ago.
Work all week, every week, for a few years straight fighting tooth and nail for those graduates like Launch School's CEO.
Don't make alumni wait weeks for resume review sand mock interviews.
Actually LOOK AT THEIR OSP projects and review them so your students don't ASK ME TO REVIEW THEM because the people reviewing them at Codesmith has never professionally written code.
When I report a huge security issue with one of your projects, don't ignore it for 8 months.
Do better with your actions, not your words. People aren't falling for your words anymore.
My response here: https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/s/IFut3FqKNw
And yeah I'm blocked so I can't answer in that subreddit.
I think whoever wrote that lives in an alternate reality and I'm increasingly concerned about their program.
I am just one person, they should be talking to recent alumni instead of me.
We do not compete with you. Our marketing and recruiting team have not mentioned a single person that they can remember in the past year even mentioning considering Codesmith, but many are asking about Interview Kickstart and Pathrise. Do you guys think you compete with Pathrise and Interview Kickstart as well?
I'm not sure if you are delusional or have incompetent internal communication processes but I explained in detail to Eric Kirsten on your team via email a number of months ago.
I full on recommend Launch School at this time. Do you consider them a competitor? Why would I recommend them if I'm here to take down competitors?
As usual you all are big on words and small on details and execution.
RE: Reducing Prices
That's a fair argument to make it more accessible. Why didn't you make it more accessible in 2022 or 2023 and why make it accessible now then?
Launch School Core Liv…
Can you give me more context? You are throwing out a lot of assumptions about my past commentary, my wealth, what our company does, why I am here.
Like are you a bootcamp student, bootcamp grad, industry person, looking at Formation, a competitor?
I'm happy to list all of the problems with Formation directly as someone aware of all the things we do well and things we can improve. You have good questions to discuss fairly but throw in some assumptions that are crossing the line and aren't remotely true about me, my wife, and our mission.
Happy to keep discussing yeah, we're not perfect and some of our reasons might not be good enough but I can at least explain what those reason are directly from one of the founders 🙂.
PART 1:
1. I hear you on clarifying what "guaranteed means", because there are qualifiers that I explained, and maybe there is a better one liner for it. The support is guaranteed until you get a job is how I would respond/state it given your framing.
RE: " lifetime career support, job hunt help", my gosh some bootcamps promise this and it's not remotely the same as what any of these four programs offer and not nearly the same as what Formation offers. I don't want to write paragraphs here but to put it one way, a number of "DS&A career support engineers" at a top bootcamp like Codesmith have come to Formation themselves to work on their skills and get their next job.
Years ago I had debates on people…
Yeah a lot of this was manufactured by Codesmith and insider alumni itself. I know some of those people and it's very obvious that they all disappeared from this sub when they realized what was going on.
A dozen or so pro Codesmith against were permanently suspended recently as well (including two mods of their sub) so people with less honorable intentions that stick around are gone.
Now all you get is the reality of things and hopefully future people will see that.
I'm the co-founder of Formation so I'm really biased.
I would say that none of these are boot camps, so the perspective you get from here is probably skewed to boot camp grads that then went to some of these programs. Which could be really useful if you're also a boot camp grad but less useful if you're not.
All of these are really different.
Outco, I got the vibe was shutting down or isn't really running because you can't apply on their website and their founders seem to have moved on and there's been a number of people being threatened to be sued by them who didn't get jobs within 12 months. I haven't heard firsthand from the company directly so I can't say anything definitively but I'm not really considering them right now when I talk about competitors.
Pathrise, they publish some annual stats and the number of people who go there as a software engineer is has been decreasing s…
Codesmith kind of pushes you out the door and alumni and older alumni kind of use their ambitiousness to hustle into a job. Leaders aren't super involved in individual people's job hunts.
Launch School's Founder personally gets involved in people's job hunts and tries to use his network to hustle you into a job. This is impossible to scale, so keeping Launch School small makes this possible.
I think they have far too much price to drop tuition. I expect them to raise it again in January like they did this year despite tanking placements and outcomes.
If anything they will start to give out "scholarships" to effectively lower the cost but maintain a high sticker price.
Following the ivy League model. Stanford is $60K a year but most people (who don't come from rich families) pay much less or nothing.
So taking a step back....
Codesmith, like Launch School, is for a certain person. There aren't magically more of those people in the world who just aren't going because of the cost. If it's the right program, the cost is irrelevant because the long term impact will be so much more than anything.
So lowering the cost won't do anything at all.
If they relied on anyone with a pulse paying them whatever spare change they have, then lowering the price would result in more people…
Numerous new warning flags at Codesmith. Concerned they are grasping at straws (Personal Opinion)
Hi all, over the years I've developed a decent sense of the bootcamp industry from both the inside and the outside. For better or worse I have developed quite the insight into Codesmith. As one of the more controversial bootcamps (known in the boom-times for placing people with $137K median salaries who will fight to the bitten end for Codesmith, with others who aren't buying the 'Codesmith way' on the opposite side. "Polarizing" is a good word and the most innovating things in the world are polarizing.
Over the past month I've been pretty quiet as a number of current and former students and staff have contacted me to chat about things and shared their views.
I've organized this post into clear sections.
Just a disclaimer, I'm a moderator of this sub and I supported my founder in startin…
Someone reached out who attended this talk and I now actively encourage no one to go to Codesmith...
Any alumni who attended - this doesn't seem like a system design talk but rather Will trying to learn about a system he doesn't understand well.
Did he talk about pros and cons of different approaches?
Did he talk about the decision process for each piece?
Was the system large scale and in need of complex decision making?
Are the APIs between components discussed in great detail?
Are the schemas and data model decisions discussed in great detail?
Was there any discussion of a technically challenging problem solved and how they overcame it?
Did the system make sense and were good decisions made? Like if someone reviewed it and thought it would just be one service instead that would be a no hire or fire.
I didn't want to share but I found that too and was like what Stealh Startup is public on GitHub and called "Stealth Startup" haha.
Do you have evidence the person was fired from a real startup?
I think it's reasonable for people to not make it for all kinds of reasons, even if they lied about their background and couldn't make it at the level they were expected.
But I think it's offensive and absurd to portray those situations as successed to be celebrated. I've seen potential students who don't know any better asking a "senior engineer" representing Codesmith at an official event questions about hiring and management, that the person was NOT QUALIFIED to answer but answered anyways with bull shit answers... and the potential students were impressed and appreciative. It does such harm to those people to keep the charade going.
It catches up to you and that's what we're seeing now. A…
Hey! Thanks for the update.
Do you have more comments about the group of people? One of my concerns is people who used to make a lot of money, like someone was a Medical Doctor, but who left their jobs, would be considered a low income student. Any insights on the backgrounds of other people?
Also do you feel like people truly have no programming experience and are starting at similar places?
I'm not sure how you feel about this, but I talk to a range of alumni for various reasons and contexts, and people are not appreciating these minimal efforts being portrayed as 'all you need to succeed'-vibes.
It's creating distrust, like people believed that when they went to Codesmith 2 years ago and got a job, but now they see it for what it is and it breaks trust.
I know I'm bias because my company helps people specifically with system design, and it's offensive to me when Codesmith tells people it's SD is all you need, when it's absolutely not all you need. It's not even an overview of all you might need.
Anyways here's a great free resource from a semi-competitor to us that is 10X better than the Codesmith materials I've seen on SD: [https://www.hellointerview.com/learn/system-design/in-a-hurry/introduction](https://www.hellointerview.com/learn/system-design/in-a-hurry/introduct…
Yeah I was excited to see the changes proposed and I made a post about it. Then I got flack from alumni for temporarily pausing my recommendation to go to Codesmith to see how those things play out and make sure that they get implemented.
So now I'm giving them a chance to show that they've implemented all these things in a very long amount of time to do it so that I would even consider restoring my recommendation. but if they haven't actually done anything other than add 5 lectures on AI, then I'm not going to. I might even actively discourage people from going there now sadly if that's the case and the concern about layoffs and cutbacks not giving them enough horsepower to make the positive changes people need to succeed in this market came to be.
Like I went from recommendation to a neutral no recommendation and now I might tell people to not go there actively and I've given a comp…
Codesmith resident is a student
Codesmith fellow is a student hired back - they expend their graduation dates for CIRR which violates the rules but no one seems to care.
Codesmith mentor used to be a Fellow hired full time - they eliminated this position for cost savings, increasing the work load for instructions
Codesmith instructors are mentors promoted to be the primary teacher for a cohort
Codesmith lead instructors are instructors that get promoted to run a cohort.
I can try to make a diagram, it's like a pyramid shape.
Current Codesmith residents/recent alumni: how has Codesmith delivered on promised improvements announced earlier this year?
Hi all, I've been talking to a couple of residents recently and wanted to get a broader view on how Codesmith is doing towards it's suite of announced improvements from February (five months ago).
At the time I said I would revisit how they did in a few months and time flies, it's already been five months!!
Please comment (or DM me uncomfortable to comment and I'm happy to need your messages confidential) if you have insight into if any of the following have happened:
(From [source](https://www.codesmith.io/blog/community-update-doubling-down-on-remote-learning-timeless-pedagogy-frontier-tech))
1. Are in-person co-working spaces available in NYC and SF?
2. TypeScript integration into the curriculum?
3. Next.js integration into the curriculum?
4. AI copilots…
Yeah It's very intense community, I think because they spend so long in the ecosystem and then they see it working so they believe. Codesmith is a similar kind of community. It's extremely powerful when the results are really good, but then the community will fall apart when the results are not good and ultimately it's what the graduates see in their own cohorts and their previous cohorts and how the company explains that to them and presents themselves.
Launch school's outcomes have gone down a little bit, but the way that the team has explained it has maintained trust with the students.
Codesmith is losing their students right now from the people that I talk to who are either current or recent alumni and people aren't buying the message. They have no visibility into outcomes and are judging based on their cohort and the previous cohort they work with.
Ironically the Codesmith CEO…
NEWS: Launch School Official 2023 Outcomes: 75% placement in 6 months but time to placement almost double peak year at 14 weeks (still blows away competition). Impressive transparency. Described changes in response to market in detail and their impact 👏
DISCLAIMER: these are my personal opinions and feelings, when I state numbers or data, it is based on the source provided or other data that I have internally to inform my comments, by I'm human and not perfect, and welcome any corrections.
Source: https://public.launchschool.com/salaries
Video: https://youtu.be/_v1fccQ7OGM?si=s-Utxc4kdJVHkq7S
Launch School has great transparency so I don't really need to interpret things.... just read the data and see what happened to every person. It's like one of those farms where you can track the carrot you ate from seed to table lol.
Commentary:
1. Placement rate within 6 months is crushing at…
Yeah a minor gift is fairly common and I have no problem with it IF DONE PROPERLY.
1. Only one of the people disclosed the "gift". All of them should have.
2. Not everyone appears to have gotten the email. Vast majority of the reviews during April and May mention being placed at some point in the past months to years.
Thought Experiment: If I posted saying any Codesmith grad who didn't get a job, post a review on Course Report and send me a screenshot and I'll Venmo you $50. (THIS IS NOT AN OFFER - IT'S A THOUGHT EXPERIMENT)
Does that sound fair and reasonable? If not, why is it ok the other way around.
🚨BREAKING NEWS: Course Report (bootcamp review website) acquired by Career.io - a job hunting platform and placement service.
Course Report is now owned by a job search conglomerate "Career.io" ending an era of it running as an independent bootcamp review website.
I'm breaking this news and have not reached out yet to Course Report or Career.io for comment on this matter.
DISCLOSURE: This post is my personal opinions and does not reflect the views of my company. I have not heard of Career.io before but their services to overlap with my company (specifically "interview prep services") so I might have a conflict of interest discussing them but as of this post I have no idea who they are an first heard of them in discovering they now own Course Report.
# Background Story - How I discovered this, and the decline of Course Report:
# 1. Codesmith Paying for Reviews
I have been watching…
Not App Academy student and no information right now, but this wouldn't surprise me whatsoever.
The CEO stepped down [four months ago in March](https://www.appacademy.io/blog/mari-nazary-joins-app-academy)
To me this was a signal that the promises the CEO made needed to be reset, and a new new 'business-focused' CEO was needed.
Mari, the new CEO, comes from BloomTech. Her LinkedIn, as of 7/13/2024 says the following for Bloomtech:
>Revolutionized the product and learning experience by introducing a proprietary platform and digitizing all learning materials and touchpoints, resulting in a significant reduction of the cost per learner from $15K to $1K.
So I presume that was a reason she was hired by App Academy - if she can reduce the cost per student from $15K to $1K all over again!
How do you reduce costs? Well people are the number one cost of most bootcamps so you have to remo…
Codesmith had about 60 to 70 graduates in March and about 4 months post grad, I see 5 to 8 offers? Would you agree that's a reasonable estimate or disagree?
My main argument below is that for those handful of people, Codesmith was probably a very good decision. If we could identify those people beforehand and try to get them to to a tiny specialized Codesmith program, that would be amazing.
For a random person reading this subreddit though, they need more insight into what's going on, and if the bootcamps don't provide it and aren't here to engage and talk about it, then I feel the need to help you all.
Codesmith published a report and included it in their official curriculum docs showing 53 offers accepted in "April-May 2024".
So they clearly have more data insights into the struggles people are having they aren't sharing.
A coupke of people who work/worked there and have agreed,…
Yeah happy to give answers, these are to the best of my knowledge on the spot here and I didn't ask around to my team, but can if there are followups.
I don't know how closely we monitor Reddit specifically but it falls under "Socials" and isn't notable enough to stand out as its own source as far as I know. And we do not track down to the subreddit in our attribution models that I'm aware of.
Anecdotally, people who found us on Reddit surprisingly came more from the Leetcode sub where people are preparing for interviews and asking for help and they have referred to that as how they found us, or that they saw my official Reddit-sanctioned AMA that is aging now. Anecdotally a couple people have told me that they saw my posts in this sub and those people have been experienced engineers later in their careers, but they didn't mention discovering or being woo'd by them generally. The excep…
There are absolutely success stories for H1 2024 grads
The problem is that anecdotal success stories should not be used to judge any bootcamp.
I would need to spend some time chatting with someone, reviewing their LinkedIn, resume, and debrief their entire job hunt, to access the role the bootcamp played in the person's success and without that it's meaningless right now.
I'm really sad with the state of things right now. It's not doom and gloom but just reality. Pretending things are good is extremely harmful to those of you looking to put down 20 or 30K. But for the right people bootcamp are still a good choice... the set of people being the "right people" just being very small now.
I did a six month post graduation analysis for November and December 2023 Codesmith grads because I have decent data sources for them.
I'm not going to quote the placement rate I see in my data because…
So the way I see it, again this is my personal opinon and I don't have any formal relationships with any bootcamps, is that the smaller, founder-led programs: Rithm, Launch School, Codesmith, some others, tend to be smaller, higher bar to get in, more expensive, and a lot of positive qualities. App Academy and Hack Reactor fall in the more "big business" bucket of companies that are run like real companies. With that comes some amount of accountability in that they have legit lawyers to review stuff, career professionals doing finance, HR, etc... With that though you lose some of the personal touch of the founders.
I'm currently not recommending Codesmith because they appear to me to be imploding. Bunch of pro-Codesmith accounts, including two moderators of their sub, got suspended from Reddit, a couple more staff left, they are going all in on "the modern engineer" and losing focus. I…
I don't want to throw OSPs under a bus at all, I want to be reasonable about describing what they are and what they aren't
But question: I try to be quite vocal about that, but why did you think they were so good before Codesmith? Was something misleading about their explanation? Did alumni misrepresent them? Did they just seem impressive and you didn't know any better?
Yeah I think Eric is good intentioned, he just doesn't have the top tier, best of best experience he portrays in public sessions. He has good negotiation advice, but it's off the shelf stuff that is the basics in the top tier tech industry. From the people I've worked with navigating more complex offers, he hasn't had strong advice.
One of his alumni had an offer pulled because they negotiated a non-negotiable offer. I don't know everything myself but I have enough industry experience to gently steer people through these conversations and try to help people not just negotiate an offer now, but make a plan for the next few years.
RE: "selling his company to Disney". That is correct, he didn't sell it and shouldn't be portraying it that way. He in fact helped the final engineer transfer out his prized asset Coolspotters to a 3rd party that wasn't Disney and he's well aware Disney had no…
I don't know why the website went down, but I know some people who were part of it and it's kind of a fundamentally flawed idea.
They would hire alumni to work on projects. the only project I've heard spoken about is some kind of negotiation bot possibly in relationship with a team at Harvard and possibly with the data science and machine learning initiative.
The fundamental flaw though is that these alumni have busy jobs and their jobs are their priority. many of them just started their jobs and they want to do well. so spending some of their free time on contract projects. they're just not going to do their best work on those projects as good work as they're doing on their job. and if you're going to hire a team, you want to hire a really good team to work on a project. not like a bunch of people who are doing this on the side.
Second really strong tech companies. don't let you moo…
No, I did a general engineering program and self taught web programming by doing a startup in college.
I worked with a large number of bootcamp grads now later on in their careers, mostly from Codesmith, Launch School, Rithm, Hack Reactor, Full stack Academy, App Academy, Hackbright, and more, so I see a lot of common challenges bootcamp grads face later on. We generally work with engineers later in their careers so these are people that made it. But a couple years ago we worked with people who just graduated from bootcamps too.
On the hiring side, at Meta we had tried to work with bootcamps to hire and the people just didn't make it. Only a handful made it and their careers were slower than others so it just wasn't a viable pipeline for new grad hiring.
Finally, I talk to a number of bootcamp founders and know a lot about their goals and pedagogies and have a good pulse on that side.
I don't really know what to say, you seem down conspiracy theory lane and it's just all not true.
This post wasn't held up for review.
I said very clearly for the record that no accounts have been banned from this sub by me, temporarily or permanently.
What's your deal? Do you have questions thoughts?
As someone pointed out, a major part of the problem is no-one from Codesmith or otherwise never discusses or refutes the things I say with facts, it's all just made up stuff and bullying. A year or two ago people used to, and then I talked to those people and they say what I do and then they disappeared and we keep in touch on LinkedIn every so often.
I meticulous document, screenshot, capture, record, collect anything that I reporting facts on to show my work.
if you want to mudsling and play games you haven't seen the half of what I know.
And this why INTEGRITY is important, becau…
Launch School lays out their outcomes here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLKHZYX8D78](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLKHZYX8D78)
Unsurprisingly if you are transparent there isn't any drama. When your outcomes are tanking, your alumni believe in you like a religion, and you don't acknowledge it publicly then you get drama.
Rithm School sadly is really small right now, running a small cohort every few months, so I still think it's a great place if you want high touch, high access learning. But their outcomes aren't that meaningful right now due to size.
I told one person about it who called it yelling, another called it not yelling but a stern tone.
A current Codesmith student say this session and messaged me to apologize because they thought it was yelling and they were disturbed by it and felt bad for me.
The video was since removed so I don't think I can share anything from it, have to look up the rules and laws.
I don't want to fan any flames. Regardless of what he said in the video there are clearly some frustrations outside the context of the actual speech and sharing it would require full interpretation. I'm a rule follower and they have the right to remove me from their communities if they want for whatever reason and I have to respect that ban.
I attended an event recently and this is what I said in the chat throughout the entire event.
1. Early in Will was talking about one of my long time friends as the "founder" of React and "co-founder of Vercel". Maybe I misheard but I said in the chat that I know that person well and he doesn't call himself the founder of React and co-founder of Vercel.
Will responded to that with 'Tom said gest things about you, that you were one of the best engineers ever at Facebook'
2. Will suggested someone talk to a specific alumni and I said how awesome that alumni is.
3. Will mentioned the B1M YouTube channel and I said how awesome that channel is.
Then suddenly I got an email saying I was permanently banned from Codesmith's subreddit.
4. I commented that I was just banned from their subreddit and won't be able to participate in the AMA after. Their was no response.
5. Shortly after Will w…
Oh wow that's unfortunate and ouch... like kicking the bootcamp industry while it's down :(
I feel so bad being real about the industry right now, I don't want to be this way, but people looking to spend $20K on a bootcamp need to know how it is before making that choice.
I feel even worse when alumni and staff from Codesmith go after me for telling the truth about this stuff. Coordinated downvoting my comments because they think they are bad intentioned :(
Yeah you know I respect your path too and good luck!
I think things have really changed with the alumni graduating now and late 2023 that talk to me.
I think the layoffs in Q3/Q4 really hit a lot of people hard. Some loyal instructors were let go, a bunch of career support people left too, so there apparently are fewer people to talk to, instructors have an eye on backup plans.
I know I annoy them by expressing my views on all this so openly because I get the vibe Codesmith does NOT want to talk about this stuff.
Our debates 2 years ago are tame compared to the stuff I'm getting now 😞