I mean facts are facts, and upvoting and downvoting doesn't change them. People can follow me and downvote all my comments, doesn't make then false.
People in the bootcamp industry need honesty and transparency. They do not need the next level of manipulation: using transparency as a marketing tool, they need straight up open communication from the source.
This Codesmith AMA blog is no where near open communication from the source and no one is engaging in tough questions. The moderator told me not to reply to anything.
Nothing is perfect but if Codesmith doesn't confront it's imperfections it's going to fall apart, they seem to be intentionally spewing out user and student information, source code, and content all over the place and are upset AT ME for reading it and make me out to be some creepy person spying on them. They need to get their stuff together instead of putting lipstick…
I don't have explicit list of who is paying how much, but this is what I have:
1. They are on the "featured schools" list: "Schools may compensate Course Report for featured placement."
2. The mention sponsorship tiers here: [https://www.coursereport.com/connect](https://www.coursereport.com/connect)
3. I follow their Youtube and they release videos there (and on their blog) from the same list of bootcamps, that they also publish "weekly events" for on their socials. And all of them are "featured schools" on their website.
I wish they were more transparent about all this, it's not easy to tell.
I did report a review on there from an alumni who listed their name, so I found their LinkedIn and that they worked at the school they reviewed and didn't disclose that in the review. Course Report said it was totally fine and didn't remove it.
The marketing team was all laid off, correct. They hired a former student to write blogs and post in CSX Slack.
But this has always been their marketing strategy - they don't pay anything on display ads anywhere. The closest thing is sponsoring Course Report.
I think this kind of marketing is fantastic use of money and it's also more organic than seeing blatant ads like we do.
But it IS marketing, correct, and the person who ran it is a career long director of marketing. So if people think it's all fun and great community - it both is great community AND it's marketing, but anyone who thinks it's purely one or the other is choosing sides.
There's a campaign against me right now since I criticized CIRR yeah. It happens every time I criticize CIRR.
That's why I'm here day in day out for 2+ years now and have a strong long term reputation.
There are some alumni that REALLY love Codesmith and some that REALLY DON'T love Codesmith, and it is what it is.... on both sides, anonymous people who have very little history making rude, angry, or personal comments.
I have nothing against Codesmith overall and up until their recent changes recommended a lot of people go there (and might again once things stabilize).
I told you repeatedly that I don't spend much time on Reddit and you and other Codesmith alumni keep saying otherwise. I can PROVE how much time I spend on Reddit relatively to work so I'm giving you warning to back off and stop lying about it.
You can talk about how you "perceive" me to spend all my time, but you can't make a factual statement like that that is not true, this is your warning, and I will consider further cases harassment.
Several\_Top is no longer a mod of r/Codesmith as of today.
Another moderator said this announcing the sub: "Hey everyone! My name is \[A\] and I am a CSX student. I work full-time as a remote analyst. I discovered Codesmith through Reddit and also through a friend who has gone through the program. We saw that there wasn’t a subreddit for Codesmith so myself and a few others have started r/codesmith. We want to invite everyone to join, especially those who are new to Codesmith like me!"
And stated that it's not affiliated with Codesmith at all.
Several\_Top stated that they were an alumni of Codesmith and has shared inside information about Codesmith in the past (leaked screenshot from an [Alumni presentation](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/1apcrg5/83_of_job_offers_from_codesmith_in_2023_were/) - , so being a founding moderator of the sub would look bad and go again…
In April-May is what Will said last week I think or a few weeks ago. My understanding it was going to be paid and not free, and for current residents and alumni, framed as a "minor", like in college.
In the mean time, you can do this completely FREE online course from Stanford and Andrew Ng, an industry expert in AI and teaching AI: [https://www.coursera.org/specializations/machine-learning-introduction](https://www.coursera.org/specializations/machine-learning-introduction)
**Historical Context:**
- They had an entire Data Science and Machine Learning (DSML) track they experimented with, but it initially failed as they needed people with more experience to go through it.
- Then they forked it off as a separate concept aimed at PhD students/grads, https://www.dsmlresearch.org/. They reportedly spent over $1M on this to get a cohort running and when they brought on their new external…
No drama when people are boringly transparent and don't have a single thing to read between the lines: [https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/1blhhh0/launch\_schools\_2023\_capstone\_outcomes\_commentary/](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/1blhhh0/launch_schools_2023_capstone_outcomes_commentary/)
If Codesmith's CEO just says straight up like Launch School's founder did, people had low morale and started ghosting from Codesmith and it was devastating blow to Codesmith's culture and one of the reasons they shrunk down 70% (est. 1000 alumni in 2023 vs on pace for 300 in 2024) so they can re-focus on a tighter and more supportive group of residents, then that's FANTASTIC.
All of the alumni from BEFORE this "ghost era" who had that great culture should cheer on that kind of change instead of misleading prospective students that everything is still fine because Cod…
+1 it can go both ways for sure and I didn't comment on salaries at all.
That said, there are always people who ghost salaries every half, and it's generally a smaller number, but it REALLY tanked this half and I think something else is going on. Like combining all of this, 25% of people are ghosting in some way in H2 versus hardly anyone in H1 and the market only got worse in the rest of 2023 for H1 2023 grads.
It should be zero surprise that sentiment on this sub is bad and that enrollment tanked 70% in end of 2023 and it's certainly not me pointing this stuff out that's causing it. Smart engineers making $130K salaries can figure this out by talking to these alumni and hearing about this stuff from them.
Now I have inside info here that end of last year, Instructors were asked to text and reach out to alumni to try to get placement info out of them via whatever means they could to…
I think Codesmith is responsible for 1. letting these people in in the first place. 2. making sure they are progressing and doing what they are supposed to.
You as a random alumni probably should be unofficially responsible for helping people do their work... they are paying almost $22K for 13 weeks - $1700 a week.
+1 to number 2. Stanford and Berkeley did a lot of work to vet and evaluate people at a high bar for 4 years, and if a company hires those grads and those grads tend to do really well at the company, it creates a cycle of reinforcement.
FOLLOWUP: **Why don't bootcamp grads have that reputation**? Like if people hire HR or Codesmith grads and they out perform Stanford grads, wouldn't that want to make the company go back and hire more HR grad? From my observations at Meta the Stanford grads just flat out outperformed on the job and it took bootcamp grads a lot longer to settle in and find their place. It's why apprenticeships became a thing.
A couple of Codesmith alumni are constantly on my case and claiming that I'm trying to put down Codesmith and get people to go to Formation instead. Now I don't really want to talk about Formation but I'm going to try to use this as an example of my constant points about this and I hope this doesn't seem like an advertisement.
(Apologies to the commenter that I used this comment as an example)
But this trajectory is not that uncommon and in fact it can be improved beyond this for those that want to prioritize work and want to work at big tech, and that's what FORMATION does. We help at that 2021/2022 mark in this trajectory to get to the E4 mid-level $300K job at top tier tech companies. We are NOT designed to help with the 2020 first job like Codesmith does.
Now not everyone wants to do that, but for people that do, you pay around $10K to Formation to hopefully make that 2023 jump to…
Awesome, thanks for sharing your trajectory! This is a super reasonable trajectory for a ambitious bootcamp grad working their way up from entry level SWE To senior SWE (generally speaking, not title-wise) in 3 years.
Some questions:
1. Curious if you changed companies anywhere in there or if you stayed at the same company and got promoted.
2. I've also heard from a lot of people that Codesmith wasn't happy with them considering a < $100K job. But your trajectory really worked out so well and maybe even better, so I HAVE NO IDEA WHY. Any more thoughts on this?
3. The market is super different right now, so do you think someone with a similar background to you should start Codesmith today?
What you said here to me is that the people attending Codesmith are awesome. The people graduating are self-organizing to run standups and encouraging each other in the job hunt.
That's all fantastic stuff but is it what you are paying $21K for? Imagine a random person added all those same people to a Discord and they all had self studied and were supporting each other just the same.
Similar arguments are made about going to Harvard Business School - you go to meet the people, not to learn anything special, so it quite frankly might be worth the cost.
I talk to a lot of alumni, and the lowest ballpark I've heard is 30% placed in a year, and the highest is what you just said at 75%.
Given that they had about 1000 students START in 2022, and 550ish offers in 2023, that sounds like a 50ish% placement rate within a year - maybe higher on CIRR because they reduce the number of people in…
The problem I have with Codesmith alumni is that I'm not in fact attacking Codesmith or defaming them. I'm reporting on the facts, some are good and some are bad. But the WORST of all is the market for entry level jobs, which Codesmith has absolutely no control over, and that's the primarily reason people aren't going to bootcamps right now, not anything that Codesmith is doing poorly.
Formation isn't a competitor to Codesmith but I'm happy to tell you how we are doing. You can read it on our blog. Our 2023 offers tanked and people's average first year total comp increase dropped from $100K to $80K. Our top tier placements tanked from 75% of all placements to 50%. This is on our blog since December 2023. In 2024, which is not published anywhere, top tier placements are back up to 75% and average comp increase is $117K. We don't have any placements rates because it doesn't make sense the…
Which competitors am I discrediting? Our competitors are Interview Kickstart, Pathrise, and Outco (before they kind of went MIA) and I never say anything to discredit them on Reddit or anywhere and I've even ENCOURAGED people to go TO SPECIFIC ONES in specific situations, e.g. for Product Management - which we don't help weith.
Our recruiters talk day in and day out with people considering between these options (or only considering Formation) and these are our competitors.
It comes up like ONCE a month that someone is considering a bootcamp OR Formation and the recruiters escalate to see if the person is experienced enough for Formation. The bootcamps vary from Codesmith to Springboard and the majority of the time if the people don't have experience we tell them to go to a bootcamp.
If someone has legit SWE experience for 1+ years they should not go to a bootcamp in almost all circums…
I wish I had a strong answer, but I don't. I think better information would include:
- backgrounds and experience of people before entering
- more clarity on the types of jobs people get
- more satisfaction related qualitative info, i.e. "how much do you credit your bootcamp in getting the job you got"
- histograms on placement times and salaries instead of medians and averages
- including all forms of comp in data, like bonuses, benefits, etc...
- salary increases - i.e. someone leaked data that mid last year the average placed student at Codesmith had a current/previous salary of about 70K - which is higher than the median placed salary at some bootcamps
- more transparency on hiring companies. too many bootcamps show a wall of logos of amazing tech companies, and talk about anecdotal placements there, but what are all of them. e.g. are people making $120K at a design agency v…
CIRR appears to be done and irrelevant now - Codesmith needs to get off the Titanic before it sinks (Personal Opinion)
As many are aware, [CIRR](https://cirr.org/) started out a business-league from Skills Fund to try to standardize bootcamp outcomes in the early days of bootcamps.
While CIRR's stated goals were to create transparency in the Bootcamps industry, it was ultimately not a charity - and was a business league, like the Chamber of Commerce, whose practical value was promoting and marketing for it's member bootcamps (who pay fees to be members) that did particularly well. So as bootcamps started doing terribly - particularly in 2022 -> 2023, a lot of those backers left.
**You can see this in how important "transparency" was when bootcamps were doing well, and how quickly and efficiently they posted outcomes, and how when outcomes are terrible everything comes to a halt - this…
I went through some of CSX and did some of the materials, and it's fairly light, so you definitely need to supplement. From my experience working with prospective students, current students, and alumni, the universal advice is to leverage the pair programming and live sessions they offer.
Codesmith is looking for students that will ride-and-die with Codesmith and showing up to the live sessions and getting the vibe and fitting in will go a long way to progressing VS banging your head against the wall alone in your room... it's why you see a number of students and alumni so excited when they get in, and so supportive of the program publicly, and if they get a great outcome they will fit to tooth and nail about how Codesmith "changed their lives".
So TLDR: it works if you are the right fit, don't try too hard to BECOME the right fit - because then it doesn't work, and doing live session…
Codesmith offers free lifelong job support i.e. resume reviews, mock interviews, negotiation, etc.... via being able to book calls with alumni dedicated to those things. This isn't so much free but included in your tuition, and it's a great feature to take advantage of. I've heard pay is about $45 session so the weakness and/or way to control costs, is by having a fixed number of slots and it being first come first serve. So if they were pressed on finances they could have fewer slots so you have to wait longer. They have pretty decent availability now, but in the past people have waited two weeks for a resume review for example.
I don't think they ever offered lifelong LEARNING though included in your fees. In fact the CEO said alumni would have to pay to join in new "minors" in ML-for-engineers and others floated around.
As far as I know, the cuts they made were primarily just scal…
I'm personally very far on the don't tell people they are senior engineers side on this one but I've had many debates with people that "know someone that got a senior job out of Codesmith" who adamantly believe in Codesmith's stance on this.
I would argue with them why a program branding itself as a top tier program preparing people for jobs in the TECHNOLOGY industry should be using the canonical definitions of the top tier TECHNOLOGY industry companies.
Codesmith does this "how to get hired in 2024" talk that I saw most of yesterday and they aren't just saying this anymore, but the CEO spent almost 2 hours straight in the talk convincing people that using - what in my opinion - are incorrect arguments:
1. Argument: the 2024 market has changed and companies that didn't previous prioritize technology - like banks - are hiring laid off FAANG engineers to build the same level of produ…
I happened to pop into that live stream when he was going over recent Reddit posts in a few subs.
I answered some questions he had very neutrally since this was his stream and not mine.
Don calls out pretty strongly some of the patterns and behaviors I've seen too, specifically how he didn't know OSPs were 4 weeks because every grad he's seen lists months or years on LinkedIn and hardly writes any code when looking at the GitHub repos. He even challenged the Codesmith CEO to come in his podcast and explain that to everyone, since it sounds like he has done his homework and would fairly aggressively push him on this.
I mean I have a couple of spreadsheets over the years and I would also like to see the CEO's response going through the most recent one of these privately, why 48 out of 52 people stated they had on average 11 months of experience on their OSPs, many not disclosing it wasn…
So Codesmith doesn't just hire fellows/TAs, but there is a pipeline - which is extremely disrupted by the recent changes and could very well change
Resident (student) -> fellow 3 month @$50K salary -> lead fellow 3 more months -> mentor (full time paid $80K - $120K depending) -> instructor ($120K to $150K) -> lead instructor ($150K to $180K)
At Codesmith the ENTIRE instruction hierarchy is this except for:
1. One person who was hired as instructor who went to another bootcamp and taught there for two years
2. Two instructors I know of were SWEs in industry and came back to teach. Both of those people are no longer instructors and didn't last long after coming back from industry.
There are a lot of pros and cons to this approach, but just laying out there in this comment for starters, can discuss more.
Yesh same for Rithm and Launch School. The main difference in grads is how they present themselves and not in their skill sets or experience levels. I tend to see a little more adjacent tech experience at Codesmith but not enough to target higher level jobs. That experience though could maybe explain why Codesmith grads who really frame that adjacent experience as technical coding experience, can get $130K jobs at less tech focused companies. But no reason a Rithm grad could do the same strategy.
Yeah I mean smaller cohorts with same number of instructors would be better and that makes sense and probably what this means.
As others pointed out, I think there are a lot of ways fewer staff can be worse for alumni and grads. Like the wait time for reviews and mocks was really bad for the past few months, people asked me to review their resume. But I think they improved that a bit recently, and that they churned out not involved alumni and pushed the existing ones to open up time.
Yeah I think all that is fair. I just don't see how the person in that post would know I became a moderator unless they were on here very recently and noticed that I happened to be a moderator.
And yeah I mean I don't expect Eric K to ever like me, and I think if I had switched up the language a bit when I talk to Formation Fellows about a startup that closed down 10 years ago, and someone was just harping on that, it would be a bit irritating. I would probably message them and be like hey, this is what went down, and I was trying to summarize the experience maybe too casually and I'll be careful with how I talk about it in the future.
Anyways, I don't have anything personal against Eric K, maybe it's like politicians debating, who co-exist professionally but don't really see eye-to-eye.
I also don't think my personal treatment matters whatsoever and I'm not going to discourage anyone…
The raw evidence I've seen shows Codesmith on paper discourages people from lying about their experience - almost awkwardly directly - like it's said early on in the resume process and said firmly, so I think it's important to call that out to lay the pieces out there.
It's also a fact that they sign off on background checks for the time that you claim you were involved with your OSP. By default they sign off on your time in Codesmith but they sign off on it under OSLabs and under your main project, and not under Codesmith's name. And if you update a README 6 months latter and tell them you've been active over 9 months, the would sign off on that.
I've talked to two students who refused to exaggerate at all and were struggling on the job hunt and I honestly don't have much advice for them. But when you see how demoralized these people were, you start to piece together how another demor…
I'm happy to respond to this point by point, but **if this is real, the timestamp is accurate, and it's one of the leaders (i.e. Eric K or Will)** then I'm going to reconsider recommending anyone go to Codesmith instead of just pausing that recommendation like I did when the new changes came out. Why? 1) they are directly admitting to being involved with this subreddit, and 2) they are continuing to be defensive and vaguely dismissive instead of providing specific examples, and it doesn't sound like anything has changed.
MY PERSONAL RESPONSES:
1. **Most importantly this post is clearly admitting to being extremely involved on this subreddit after being fairly dismissive of that in the past.**
- I became a moderator like three days ago-ish, it wasn't announced anywhere, and the Codesmith person is already aware, so they are clearly paying attention to Reddit closely
- "We've had grads…
FWIW you can't have "contractors" be training in a strict style of teaching and force them to teach that way, otherwise they are employees. You can't give contractors mandatory training on how to do something and you can't give them performance reviews and direction on how to do their job.
Obviously there is a massive gray area and a lot of factors play into this, but that's the general overview, but if they are systematically making people contractors and exerting strong control over their work, that might be illegal.
Finally, you mention you "could", that's the key thing here. Very strong industry engineers have complex jobs and can't commit to consistent teaching or projects as "faculty". You need to build a system around managing these people so they can "teach a workshop" every few weeks that makes sure everything is covered. Which my company has patented and built.
Giving back a…
Ok the tone is a little bit antagonistic, but I do agree with the opinion stated that not all alumni and staff are super happy with everything going on and there's a significant lack of organization of things internally. A lot of people have access to a lot of things and a lot of those things are completely publicly shared. So I wouldn't be surprised if people do start posting more about their experience even with an NDA because a bunch of things are publicly available that I certainly wouldn't make publicly available. People who have non disparagement clauses might not be able to post anything.
That said. I learned from someone last night that Codesmith actually doesn't have much "code" that employees actually work on. The main codebases are the public website and the CSX website, both of which are like junior web developer level work and not "senior software engineering work". I looke…
Yeah +1, my understanding is they want MORE EXPERIENCED alumni and not alumni who just got jobs, etc...
That said, that person was identified as a "Faculty", which has four very important consequences:
1. Since Codesmith is a "school", has important meaning (for regulation) and this person might be more tied now to Codesmith than they think, maybe they are fully aware but I'm curious if all these new "Faculty" will be aware of this.
2. Conflicts of Interest. Companies generally barely allow people to be lightweight mentors and a lot of the top companies block people from being the "Faculty" of a school without disclosure and review for conflicts of interest. I know at Meta this was a major thing and there was a very non-fun conflict review process that blocked a lot of things. So I'm hoping if someone is an alumni and wants to be a "Faculty" or is going to be identified as one, that t…
I agree yeah generally speaking, but they removed the times from the website so it's not entirely clear if the times will change. They have been soliciting feedback on the times for a while.
FEEDBACK FOR CODESMITH (OPINIONS):
1. The blog post should have had more logistics for the students impacted instead of half defending how great Codesmith is before discussing any of the changes.
2. The website should have been updated in tandem because it's very confusing right now
3. Staff should have been around when the blog went out to assist and support people
4. Will should have written a letter in his name about all that Codesmith has accomplished over the years as a preface to alumni and to the public, and then a SEPARATE LETTER from a Shanda about the program changes written to students and future residents about logistic changes that was more tactical and less marketing.
Codesmith (due to declining enrollment) shutting down NYC in-person, merging remaining full time remote cohorts into one. But also alludes to new Future Code program, co-working spaces and announces new changes! See my line by line commentary and personal opinions.
SOURCE: [https://www.codesmith.io/blog/community-update-doubling-down-on-remote-learning-timeless-pedagogy-frontier-tech](https://www.codesmith.io/blog/community-update-doubling-down-on-remote-learning-timeless-pedagogy-frontier-tech)
DISCLAIMER: The following is my top to bottom analysis and personal opinions. I always disclose this and hopefully it's not boring. These are my personal opinions. I've not new to the sub and I have been giving my opinions on bootcamps for almost two years now, daily, from the FAANG angle, and also having worked with hundreds of bootcamps grads. I'm the co-founder of an interview prep mentorshi…
Yeah great point! These outcomes are still very strong and consistent with the industry changes in bootcamps.
My analysis is on the tougher side because Codesmith doesn't call itself a bootcamp, and it compares itself to the top grad school programs in the world so I'm anlyzing against the top in the world bar.
A student pasted some data shared with the alumni in a session and it showed that the median person with an offer sometime last summer was making $70Kish BEFORE STARTING CODESMITH. But this post isn't about "who should go to Codesmith", it's just an analysis of the data.
Codesmith posted an "Early Look" into 2023 outcomes w/ 2022 comparisons. My personal opinions and anlysis. Notable to me is both that median salary was $130K in 2022 and that it was $115K in 2023. Placement rates are missing, but I would guess much lower, for a double whammy 🥺
SOURCE: [https://www.codesmith.io/blog/early-look-2023-outcomes-and-analysis](https://www.codesmith.io/blog/early-look-2023-outcomes-and-analysis)
DISCLAIMER: These are my personal opinions about the data. I'm human and I make mistakes, but I'm giving my quick personal thoughts and opinions the most open and transparently I can, comments and corrections with sources are appreciated. I have a long history of being around this sub and giving my opinions from the FAANG angle, and the bootcamp angle (having worked with hundreds of bootcamp grads from all kinds of bootcamps over the years). I'm the co-founder of an…
I'm acting as a moderator because there is an ongoing conversation that OP is involved with making very large claims about Codesmith with I've seen first hand evidence of some of those claims. Some public messages called out certain individual Codesmith employees resulting in the account being suspended and the person appears to be trying to steer the conversation in a constructive direction with this new post.
It sounds like you made the right choice going to Codesmith and it's a fit for you. Some people don't like the "cringe moments" and some alumni, as they get real industry experience, feel like people there don't "know their shit", but instead know how to portray that they "know their shit". You won't be able to judget that until you are in the industry for a few years, but regardless, it doesn't mean the experience can't be effective at helping the right people find jobs.
Where…
Hey, thanks for sharing your experience with everyone, two follow up questions in bold below. There's a lot of common stuff I hear about career support at Codesmith (in terms of response times and the idea that they don't really care if you give up after a year because it won't impact CIRR numbers anymore). Additionally, people often report that alumni mentors tend to regurgitate the lectures, repeating the same solutions and people who get it, do well and people who don't just get told they are "hard learning" and to figure it out.
**I have a follow up question, which is how many people in your cohort do you think were in a similar boat, i.e. what was your approximate placement rate within 6 months?**
Codesmith aggressively markets that their alumni are mid-level and senior engineers and bluntly, I saw [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/18cpq98/analysis_of_52_most…
I don't know but Codesmith is one of them, also don't know who the new president is.
If the new president is from Codesmith then it basically makes CIRR a marketing tool to validate their outcomes, just like GRAD for Hack Reactor and Rithm 's own standard. Which is totally fine just have to realize that.
There are no bodies and I don't expect one to happen because CIRR had more force than anyone and failed to get schools on board.
Anyone have any updates from CIRR and their new standards for 2022 full year outcomes? All the "official standards documents" on their website are "owned" by Codesmith's former product manager (!?!), not someone at CIRR, and haven't been updated in a long time.
Hi all, I'm hitting the slopes skiing in Japan and what else would I be doing but checking up on CIRR's website because we're all awaiting new updates any day now! However, I'm more concerned than ever that it's kind of falling apart :(
1. All previous data seemed to have disappeared, so there are no past reports to look at, zero data on the site. After the site changed ownership and hosting behind the scenes, I'm concerned they lost access to the previous data and it's gone :(. I would love any evidence anyone has if this is correct or not, just a theory because I can't imagine why they would delete all the old data.
2. I notic…
The SDE 2 role at Amazon is for people.with generally 2+ YOE as an SDE 1 or equivalent so you are much better off posting somewhere else.to get advice because most people here haven't been to a bootcamp yet, nevertheless worked already in industry.
Now if you want SDE 2 onsite advice, I'm quite qualified to provide that.
1. Your coding interviews are standard LC style,.usually medium to hard questions and occasional touching on very hard topics like DP. At Formation, we benchmark and practice exactly what you need to know for this but outside I would say you should be able to solve any LC Medium you haven't seen before in 25 minutes or less with a very clean solution.
2. Ping me if you get an offer for negotiation,.so I can compare that to other SDE 2 offers I've seen at Formation this month and let you know.exactly what to ask for. They are unique offer structures. Don't trust Blind o…
\+1, yeah definitely agree it's good advice to push grads to follow the advice
I don't have the full context on this presentation, but I do think Codesmith can do more though than use data to convince people to do the same old same old because what worked in <= 2021, doesn't work the same now, and alumni that talk to me don't think Codesmith is doing anything to address that. They've added 2-3 career support engineers, but a number of people feel like Codesmith is telling them everything is fine it's just taking longer to find jobs.
But with all of this new data they share to convince people of this, they haven't given any placement rates to compare and people aren't happy so I'm giving that feedback :D
Haha, so Formation isn't a bootcamp or an option to consider instead of a bootcamp and doing so would be a huge mistake. Formation is an interview prep and mentorship platform that doesn't teach any specific skills and instead is about practice - benchmarking - feedback - and mock interviews/job hunt support.
From my best estimates, there are somewhere between 5 and 10% (i.e. 2 to 3 people per Codesmith cohort out of 30+) that might BARELY be candidates for Formation - and only if they understand what Formation is and it's genuinely the right move for them.
In this market that has become rarer and rarer and it might even be almost 0 overlap because the number of people with under 1 year of experience we accept now I can count on one hand, and the people spend a ton of time talking to our team and determining that Formation is indeed the objectively right fit.
\---------
# RE: "CODEMI…
I mean I work with alumni who went to all of them so I have some good insight across the board.
I disproportionately hear about Codesmith because it's the biggest anomaly of them all that just has a very unique ecosystem around it. But maybe given the results of this poll so far that helps explain why I get such polarizing information haha.
I find a lot of polarization from graduates I chat with. Some good advice for anyone you talk to about any bootcamp is to dig into the HOW and not just the superficial.
There was a Codesmith grad last week that wrote a comment 'I graduated and it changed my life'... that was it, and it got 40 upvoted in a day on a 2 month old dead post that 3 upvotes.
That's fantastic, and it has changed hundreds of people's live, over a thousand! But HOW did it change them is key because what worked for them might not work for you too and you have to get into the details.
1. What kind of background did they have before?
2. Can you see their resume that finally worked?
3. How long have they kept their job for and how did Codesmith prepare them for the job and what do they wish Codesmith had prepared them for? (Codesmith says every single info session I've seen that 100% of grads get promotions within…
Yeah I totally get where you are coming from and we can and want to share more.
The hesitation is that people truly do have unique journeys at Formation. They do entirely different things at different paces and it's something noted by many people who go through, and it also makes it hard to review as no one else will have the experience you did again. You can go on leave and there is no expected timing. Some people have really demanding jobs already and need to ramp up and down completely unexpectedly... this is surprisingly common and I don't think I've ever seen a Fellow who hasn't adjusted their involvement because of unexpected things.
So we have to be super careful that people don't get misled by making assumptions about their experience or their self assessment of their skills or how fast they think they can do stuff, and we really want to give more personalized data and estimate…
Yeah totally agree that it's a huge amount of time! Like people might go back to their old jobs as a mechanical engineer or what have you and count as "offers". They can't call those jobs "non engineering roles" for CIRR but call them "engineering roles" on their resumes - have to go one way or the other.
I also found that a significant number of alumni who got offers frame experience as jobs on LinkedIn and I always wondered how the auditors reconciled those. Did they flag things as jobs that were just projects? etc....
Yeah I mean at Formation people pay us explicitly for interview prep mentorship so you can get resume reviews and mock interviews on demand (when you need them or ask for them), usually within a day, often same day, definitely same week, almost a 24/7 clock of availability across dozens of mentors across a dozen+ interview types. Occasionally people cancel mocks, or resume reviews take longer on rounds of feedback, but that's the bar for "career support" that people should expect if they are being promised career support.
The Codesmith career support is:
1. A handbook with a ton of very good resources, including the 'Codesmith Style Resume' and 'Codesmith Style Application' walkthroughs
2. 8 alumni you can book 1-1 sessions with who have varied schedules, some available in days, some in weeks, some never.
3. 2 alumni you can book for technical algo mock interviews who also have only…
One part of the polarization with Codesmith is that a handful of people do land FAANG jobs, even in 2023. Context matters. Someone got a job at Netflix, but it was a non-SWE job and it was in the field that the person had 8 YOE... which 100% CODESMITH HELPED THE PERSON, but this was not an outcome that anyone should EXPECT, it was a unique situation.
Someone got a job at LinkedIn recently, but the FAANG placements are really rare, because FAANG isn't interviewing bootcamp grads with no experience right now. If someone has experience then you might get a FAANG job.
\+1 to getting a good job at another company, they have a couple placements at Mavis Tire making in the mid six figures.
We (Formation) have formal and informal pipelines with FAANG companies and recruiters, and they are extremely picky about who they interview and I wish they would interview everyone, but they won't in this…
Yeah there's two sides to every coin. I try to present a balanced view but it's notable to me how polarizing Codesmith is compared to other programs. Like people who feel this negatively towards BloomTech even don't talk about the 'behavioral techniques' that they observe at Codesmith.
I'm making this vague to not out the person but someone related to a Codesmith student who overheard their Zoom calls while working from home, was so concerned about this they contacted me. The person was trained in psychology and said they observed concerning techniques being used.
I'm not a psychologist, I don't know who this person is in real life, could all be made up, but they did convince me at that they overheard the sessions and lectures at least.
And I really have never had anything like this from other programs.
It's an unsolved problem I asked a lot of people on the inside about, because I g…
They claim to have between 3,500 (their recent info session info) to 5,000 (recent job posting as of 1/19/2024) alumni of the immersive program total.
Most people who work there as TAs put that under "CS Engineering" and not Codesmith.
But yeah the vast majority do not list.
However every resident does an OSP and you can get a list of students from their GitHub repos and most have LinkedIns checkin to the repos too.