I used to be more open minded on this based on all the materials I saw that every clearly tell you not to lie.
But there have been some layoffs recently, employees are concerned and some ask/have asked me for advice on what to do because they cannot express their concerns internally.
I don't think it's a mega conspiracy but they are well aware that alumni resumes don't portray what their guidance is internally but they have no control to change that.
The reason I changed my mind is that these placements are celebrated by Codesmith as mid level and senior placements. Not everyone lies and they handpick the ideal alumni to talk about how they didn't lie and got high level jobs, but they are well aware of the ones that are and getting high level jobs and bucketing them all together showing that the handpicked cases are just common examples of the larger pool.
I'm sorry I can't break peo…
This is a not so secret-secret to how a number of bootcamp grads get past resume screens. There are two critical pieces if you do this:
1. You have to practice your narrative and story to not get caught (you can't fake real experience so you won't pass every interview, but you have to get good enough to pass some.
2. Since you'll be in more senior roles than you should be, you have to be ready to fake it on the job to not get fired while also not telling the company the truth about your background and getting the support you need. I've seen some amazing people get fired or let go (and they might not even tell the program they were placed because it happens so fast sometimes). But I've also seen people make it with a little extra sweat, but they make it. Can't give numbers on each bucket, but it's not an easy journey for anybody.
I work with hundreds of people from zero to 20+ YOE and h…
I might want to move this offline but can we connect on Codesmith's OSLabs. Feel free to DM me or LinkedIn Message me.
It's a 501.3c charity but:
1. President went to Codesmith a long time ago as a student
2. VP is a paid consultant for Codesmith who co-founded a subsidiary of Codesmith
3. Treasury is Director of Community for Codesmith
4. 3 Codesmith employees posted about how they are helping hire / involved in hiring the executive director position at OSLabs
5. The contact phone number is the same for OSLabs and a Codesmith for profit subsidiary.
6. Letters of Reference from OSLabs are signed by Codesmith's Chief Academic Officer but titled as a OSLabs Board Member who is not listed as such.
I'm curious because we've explored sponsoring non-profits in various ways and consulted expensive Silicon Valley lawyers and non of this would fly according to them.
CIRRs standard doesn't have clear processes for everything. For example there's no clear process for collecting salaries, while there is a clear process for collecting job start dates. The document itself isn't written by lawyers, like GRAD (Hack Reactor's version) is, which has clear language and a clear structure. In addition, the worksheets they provide have formulas in them and some are not explained in words in the docs. Like if I remember correctly, there are some about excluding students or deferring graduation dates where the sheets were.doi f something that wasn't explained in the spec.
Finally, Codesmith extends the graduation date for people that get hired back as fellows/TAs. While they don't count them as placements (which is good) they do extend their clocks for the life of the contract, which gives these people an extra 3 or more months to find jobs and be included in the…
It's really hard to answer this question. It's just impossible to work on this scope of project in 3 weeks. I would say that having a smaller scope project would LIMIT the potential, and the potential is NOT limited by the scope of the OSP, it's limited by the time.
Even if people worked 24 hours a day for two months it wouldn't be enough.
[Ada](https://adadevelopersacademy.org/) is a 11 month bootcamp, where everyone spends 6 months learning and then 5 months at a top tier internship with a partner company. It's a non profit with very strong partners like Zillow, Redfin, etc... And IF these people convert full time at the end of a 5 month full time internship, they are hired as entry level engineers.
Ada has paused enrollment because of the market and they can't guarantee those internships.
What makes Codesmith's 3 week OSP a secret sauce that makes it's alumni not just equal to a f…
I appreciate you sharing your views professionally. The fact that I'm extremely open about who I am enabled this kind of reasonable discussion, and anonymous new accounts that might have their own biases cannot possible be evaluated fairly.
Codesmith isn't a competitor in my opinion. There are a small number (about 15%) of people who go to Codesmith who might be a candidate for Formation, but likely not. We don't work with new college grads right now and people with zero experience is an edge case. Like the 15% is an edge case for both Codesmith and us that neither of us market to, in my opinion.
I in fact talk to make people 1-1 and suggest they go to Codesmith and to consider coming to Formation in a few years.
The way Formation works though could expand in the future to people who don't have any coding experience but it's not on the radar right now. I think it's fair that the fact…
It's very reasonable to question a new account posting about a $140K outcome and we can have a very REASONABLE conversation about it.
If people are that passionate for and against Codesmith and don't want to have REASONABLE discussions then moderation won't help... people have to self reflect a bit more and try to be more open minded.
I've had 20+ alumni, sutdents, staff, former staff and family of students tell me that Codesmith is extremely positive place with processes to "correct negativity" and that's part of the problem. The result is that people with feedback message me telling me they have no where to give feedback and they dump it on me instead. It's really hard to navigate!
I'm really plugged into to Codesmith and this post is not fake in the sense that the content is incorrect or that the responses are not genuine, but leadership members at this program do indeed monitor this subreddit and react to posts.
I wrote [this code review a couple days ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/16v4fig/codesmith_osp_code_review_numerous_unbreak_now/) that was then shared internally to numerous people and actioned very quickly in a number of ways. They do ways to get successful, dedicated alumni to post on Reddit and respond to things but I haven't seen evidence they put words in people's mouths directly. I asked the OP directly and they acknowledge that "Codesmith always encourages us to share our stories to help others" but that this post was not encouraged or prompted, and I have to believe the person. I do know less successful graduates who were ne…
I asked for clarification in my questions above, if I don't get a reply I would assume so because I'm aware that at least one Codesmith team member monitors this sub and has a group of alumni that are prompted to post and comment. I can't go into more details because of confidentiality but it sadly is a thing and has been demonstrated to me.
I've interviewed a number of Codesmith grads for Formation acceptance (which is not a job, so I have a more constructive/feedback hat on and more tolerance) and they practice all of these questions at Codesmith yeah.
But yeah I noticed within 5 minutes, and the misleading answers kept going or we would have awkward silence, but people would not say it was a job, but they say it's something else. I was "working with an company under OS Labs" for example.
There are a number of buckets here but generally, this is why all of these jobs are with small or less well known companies - who are not tech companies, and don't have solid vetting processes, and sometimes people make it through.
1. People who get entry level jobs at solid tech companies that they call "mid level and senior" but aren't. e.g. someone at Google got entry level L3 job and said it was "level 3 senior" but L3 at Google…
Well 3 people in the group say they worked on theos for 2 or 3 months on LinkedIn and it's listed as a Software Engineer job at a company so clearly people think this.
And I have a couple of emails from alumni to the effect of 'how dare you contact anyone in the Codesmith community about Formation, we don't need you and leave us alone, we are already mid level and senior engineers'
Of course people make mistakes and then they have to figure out how to fix that by rewriting the git history and changing all the credentials. In this case the credentials are all over the place and not just one bad commit.
The project is not close to any production code I've seen and is blatantly being portrayed as so.
Codesmith OSP code review: numerous "unbreak now" security vulnerabilities discovered after spending 5 minutes reviewing an "advanced security tool". Not the mid-level or senior engineering work it is claimed to be.
I'm not going to share direct links because I don't want to pick on just this project or the people that made it. I circulated this post amongst a couple of Codesmith alumni to make sure they were ok with it as well.
What is the "OSP"? The OSP is the capstone project at Codesmith. You work in groups of 4-5 people, supervised by engineers. Codesmith claims it to be the key in making you a mid-level or senior engineer. It's the highlight of most alumni's resume and the main talking point in interviews.
I feel jerkish in posting about this widely instead of privately contacting the team that worked on it. But I've observed Codesmith's CEO, outcomes advisor, admissions staff,…
Yeah for the right people the mid-level senior thing is interpreted rationally and you can get by.
I don't know if you have seen any info sessions or heard their outcomes person Eric do a talk, but if you did I think you get a sense of the vibe. It's not like 'we aim for mid level and senior' it's 'this is codesmith, it's obviously only for mid level and senior, so it's offensive to call it a bootcamp', you'll even see the leaders arrogantly chuckle if you call it a bootcamp, like 'ha ha, we don't like that work around here because we only make mid level and senior engineers'. If you've heard Eric K talk about his background, and then you've actually dug into and asked around, it tells a much different story... but he's fantastic at turning anything into something that sounds amazing! An alumni described him as having a "silver tongue who can make anything sound good".
.... again, if…
Yeah I've done deep dives on MLMs in the past and deep dives on Codesmith's info sessions.
Codesmith is absolutely not an MLM by any definition, people pay for lectures and education, and they get those. Alumni and students don't get bonuses or paid based on how many other people they convince to join.
The Codesmith vibe has the isolation aspect - everyone starts at zero and is trained using MLM - like techniques of consistency and status to "brainwash" (for lack of better word) people into absorbing desired materials quickly.
I think the behavior we see is actually defensiveness - a lot of people I talk to feel uneasy - but only in private - about how they present themselves in the Codesmith-way and I think some people feeling a bit uncomfortable double down on defending it so they feel less guilty for what they did themselves - I'm not a psychologist, but I bet a lot of these peopl…
Neither are amazing right now and the market continues to evolve day by day so no one will be able to give you a definitive answer, but I can share some opinions.
1. Hiring is picking up for people with 2+ YOE SWE. This is genuine SWE work experience and not "programming experience" or "open source projects". Specifically 2+ years. I work with engineers in this bucket and a number were hired by Meta in the past few weeks or an doing onsites and it's definitely a change in pace!
2. Hiring is NOT picking up for bootcamp and new grads and it's getting more stressful and more intense. University recruiting teams were decimated in the layoffs and are using the resources they have for new grad hiring right now in the fall at the most reliable top tier schools, instead of broad entry level hiring that was happening in the past. This is making it much harder for bootcamp grads and grads of no…
We're waiting on CIRR results but Codesmith has provided some info in a report last week and in info sessions.
The placement rate was down from about 80% to "in the 60%s", and the salaries were down about 10% or so to the "$120Ks"
I've also heard anecdotally that they are trying harder to to track down alumni and get every last person into those CIRR reports.
But 60% ish still isn't that bad. It's significant if you are planning your life around a bootcamp right now - might not be the best idea to make any assumptions on outcomes - but it's not like it's ZERO placement either.
Those people can CALL themselves senior engineers, their resume can certainly say that if they want, I would encourage people to do so when reviewing their resumes, but it doesn't make them senior engineers.
Do you not believe I've worked with a couple dozens Codesmith alumni later that have trouble with this?
The typical case is someone with a "Senior" title and 1 to 2 YOE on their resume. Depending on the company, but they will likely get a lot of interviews because of the Senior title, and then they hit the hiring manager interview and they get rejected.
I've seen some truly heart-wrenching cases - people passing the coding bar but the HM doesn't have any junior or midlevel headcount to downlevel and it's much more pronounced in this current market than it was before.
I then have to help the person apply to top tier mid level and junior engineering roles and sometimes the people p…
1. To sue someone you have to have damages in most states. First, someone would have to show that they joined Codesmith to become a mid level engineer and that they didn't AND that a reasonable person would have also believed they would become a mid level engineer seeing the same marketing. Second, they have to show that their outcome was worse and then somehow try to figure out how much they were overcharged given their outcome. If you raised your compensation by $25K, but didn't get a senior job, how "harmed" were you? It's really hard and not many people would want to deal with this kind of thing unless they felt really truly screwed over as a last resort.
2. There aren't any legal definitions of "mid level and senior engineer" and they could argue it's their opinion and that it's backed by the high salaries earned by graduates compared to competitors. Even if it's more of a gray are…
If the company had layoffs there is likely to be a lot of disgruntled people (not just people laid off) and a lot of internal churn as things get reshuffled or changed. I heard last week that recently the number of instructors/support staff was cut down by 1 per cohort, and things like that have a cost to student experience as well. If they are ending or pausing the CTRI quietly without telling anyone that will also make prospective people confused, and if there are less staff to explain and communicate things to them = more bad sentiment.
Hi, I think this overview is pretty fair from my understanding, and I can summarize what I can corroborate from multiple sources. I have a lot to say good and bad about Codesmith - overall a balanced view, but these specifically are things corroborated by others and the **ALL CAPS BOLD** are my **PERSONAL OPINIONS.**
1. The free lectures and courses ARE the marketing funnel so they are intentionally trying to move people through to the immersive. So they represent a more high touch experience than the actual imersive.
2. I know someone from Oxford who talks about "hard learning" and it's reputation for just meaning "teach yourself" and I think Will is bringing this approach to Codesmith intentionally. That said, it might work for some people - Oxford is a great school and I think their admission process is essentially weeding out people who won't do well in that environment. As a result…
A lot of commenters don't believe this is real, I do, but I have a lot of words of caution and OP's post is potentially irresponsible in this community because the result is not reproducible at scale and broadcasting it to 33K people without any context doesn't help anyone figure anything out.
1. 1 year ago was Sept 2022, meaning you got he job before then and started then. Amazon was still hiring their last remaining hires in Sept 2022. The hardest time to get hired was the very end of 2022 and H1 of 2023.
2. "Total Compensation" needs clarification. What's the base, what's the signing bonus, what's the performance bonus, how are you valuing the stock, are you including relocation or other benefits in that?
3. Tell us more about the job. I know people who graduated Codesmith with $150K **contractor** role and that's much different than a full time role.... many of those people are not…
Hi, you can trust that CIRR numbers are what they are because the auditing process makes sure the numbers are recording and calculated correctly. But the standard itself was written by Bootcamp marking people to promote bootcamps and it's not legally sound paperwork. For example, there's not description of how salaries are collected, other than they are base salaries, but no description of evidence needed or mechanics of it.
They also have a worksheet with formulas in it that are not explained in the specification clearly, which leads to errors. Codesmith's auditors files the wrong numbers and had to issue a correction!
Some data came out from a Codesmith grad that showed 70 recent placements and the people's starting salary. The median starting salary BEFORE CODESMITH was 70K+ and 20% of people were making 90K+. So the target audience is not the same as programs that have people maki…
Last year's came out mid September for the first wave and first week of October for the 2nd wave.
For Codesmith, Will Sentance said in a public talk this week that the numbers are somewhere 'around $120Ks but need to be audited still and will come out soon'. (No source, but credible)
I personally don't care what the salary numbers are and am more curious about the placement rates themselves, but I know a lot of people care about the salary numbers.
On the other hand, Codesmith describes itself as "Codesmith is a team dedicated to democratizing elite education for a new era - the outcomes of an elite grad school but online and for 1/10th of the cost" [Source](https://www.glassdoor.com/Overview/Working-at-Codesmith-EI_IE1093972.11,20.htm). And I know that elite school new grads I work with are getting about $155K base salaries right now at FAANG-level companies (and $200K+ with equity)…
Yeah a few things. It is a very very solid 3 week group capstone project. And they put a lot of effort in the presentation, like if you click that link it looks super buttoned up and legit in the writing and imagery and overview, etc...
But the problem I have (again, my opinion only) is that that 3 weeks gets represented as months of 'experience' - framed as an ambiguous job on LinkedIns and resumes. Many grads talk about it exclusively in interviews, for dozens of minutes talking about people-problems and technical-problems and all kinds of things from these projects that's really just squeezing them for more they they have in them. I've interviewed Codesmith grads myself and 'talk about a conflict with a non engineer' and people just make stuff up because they didn't work with non-engineers... like that didn't "come from the OSP" it came from practicing TALKING ABOUT the OSP over and…
Interviewing.io is currently the best in place to go if you just want 1 to 3 or so mock interviews and nothing else.
If you plan on paying for 5 or more, I would consider an interview prep program like Formation.dev (disclosure co-founder), Interview Kickstart or Pathrise (I've removed Outco because they haven't accepted applications in a month.
Exponent bought PRAAMP (which is free peer to peer mocks) and they offer paid mocks in a number of areas as an upsell but they don't have as many or as a strong mock interviewers as Interviewing.io or the interview prep programs. If you can get a good deal on them then doing a few there is probably fine.
A number of people might recommend various free options, Codesmith also offers alumni free mock interviews for life, but not all mock interviews are the same. If you aren't doing a mock with a person who has either done hundreds of interviews…
While this is a little opinionated in tone, I think this is all true except that there's no point in sharing it. It shows a super key thing, which is that the median Codesmith grad was about the same in their LAST JOB that the median bootcamp grad in the whole industry makes AFTER THEIR BOOTCAMP. I think that's a pretty important thing to note for people looking at their options and Codesmith had this data all along and didn't share it!
ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY. I think people know me around here well so I won't introduce but I have a lot of comments. Most important point is in bold, the reset is just commentary.
1. **IF CODESMITH HAS THIS DATA SO EASILY ACCESSIBLE - BE TRANSPARENT ABOUT IT AND TELL PEOPLE THAT SALARIES ARE DOWN $20K (median/mean) FROM LAST YEAR.** I've seen a few info sessions where employees say that outcomes are "similar" to last year but at "different types of companies". Second, I've seen numerous documents shared with me where Codesmith ties it's "excellence" with the high salaries compared to bootcamp and CS degrees, so they have to take a hit with this kind of drop, when the best CS grads from Stanford and Harvard are still all making $150K base salaries at Figma, Asana, Palantir, etc...
2. The columns of this data align with their post-graduation CIRR collecting intake form so I think this is r…
Said by a true Codesmith grad with a $130K job that says they couldn't have gotten it without Codesmith.
The Ivy Leagues have dampened diversity efforts for 100+ years with that attitude and the industry will be a hell of a lot more productive if everyone with ambition and drive had a way to fulfill their potential.
Yeah this is the basis for my recent observation that a number of the alumni at top companies either 1. are working so hard to keep up, they move on from Codesmith and don't look back, 2. they aren't actually reviewing resumes and interviewing people themselves.
I reviewed thousands of resumes and did 400+ interviews at Facebook and it makes a HUGE difference on how you see things for sure!
Yeah those were reasons I've been told.
My personal opinion is that since every single instructor has only worked at Codesmith (a fact they are open about) from fellows (TAs), to instructors, to lead instructors to senior engineers, people don't have industry experience to fallback on and they perpetuate a unified consistent message.
But one hole in this reasoning is why alumni later on, don't come back and try to change the narratives. "Career Support Engineers" who review resumes tend to do it part time while working in industry. I hear anecdotally that are told more 'how it is in reality' during 1-1 chats, but these people still uphold the Codesmith guidance. I'm curios why they don't question the presentation of the OSPs and presumably encourage it - because Codesmith's official guidance is very clear to not lie.
Full disclosure I work with a number of Codesmith alumni later on in their careers with thier 2nd, 3rd, 4th jobs and support people 1-1 to tell their best narrative. And it's highly personal how people portray themselves.
The reasons I've been given are, in no particular order - pretty much all the reasons:
\- Unawareness: a specific leader told me that my 3 weeks was equivalent to months of mid level industry experience because the 11 hours days and the difficulty of the projects.
\- Fake it til you make it: hustler mentality, no regrets
\- Ends justify the means: if people get jobs and do well on those jobs, does it matter how they go them?
\- I tried being very correct and didn't get any interviews and saw friends get interviews were using this style of resume so I tried it
\- Slippery slope: as I didn't get interviews, I adjusted my resume every week or two and each time was a…
This is true for big companies but it's not new. Most big companies do not hire directly out of bootcamps and I can tell you why from my experience 8 years at FB as a principal engineer!
So first off, where do these applications go:
1. Apprenticeships! Big companies often have apprenticeships/emergent talent/etc... programs for bootcamp grads who come from diverse backgrounds.
2. During the boom times, Amazon would interview anyone with an online assessment and passing that would usually get you an interview. So people with very little SWE experience but who had good professional experience to talk about in a behavioral interview, could pass. Google briefly was talking to bootcamp grads via a number of contractor recruiters at Randstad but you had to get connected through them directly.
Second, why don't big companies want to hire bootcamp grads. Unfortunately they DID in the past. B…
this is correct. it's very hard to find alumni but because of the tremendous structure that Codesmith has in its resume guidance it is absolutely possible to find people.
The most consistent way is to look for their open source project announcements which are blasted pretty much everywhere and then you can collect a list of people's LinkedIns.
Your question is probably better for CSX Slack because there are a lot of alumni there. The downside is that it's mostly successful alumni who continue to participate in the community and people who failed out of Codesmith tend to disappear quietly and they don't complain because they put the blame on themselves and I found anecdotally that those people are more often people who don't have any kind of professional experience, even outside of engineering.
Sorry yeah I was aggregating. The 6 weeks is 4 weeks of super fixed concentrated lectures and another 2-ish weeks sprinkled across the other stuff.
You might be the first person to say I've oversold Codesmith!! I always get yelled at for downplaying them and that Eric Kirsten told them Formation is a scam that offers everything Codesmith does for free for a lifetime... although that has subsided a bit since the market has tanked and I've worked with dozens of Codesmith alumni - and the vast majority at best love us (we have several "spotlights" written for people who wanted to talk about their story post-Codesmith) and at worst think it was maybe break even-ish, and not a single person I know of has said we offer what Codesmith offers haha.
I'm going through a dilemma right now myself and I can't give a well sourced, confident answer. I'm focusing on Codesmith because week after week I just get so much stuff sent to me, I know the ins and outs better than any program.
At the end of the day, there's no 12 week program that can turn anyone into a really good industry engineer. I see so so so many people, covering all backgrounds and there are patterns between successful ones and unsuccessful ones but each individual is a unique human that is unpredictable!
I can say it's extremely hard to get entry level jobs right now and there are no shortcuts, loopholes, "get rich quick" ways of doing it.
I can also say that THE JOB IS THE BEGINNING, not the end. This is one of Codesmith's "dirty secrets" - people get highly paying first jobs - that they exaggerate their experience to get - but if you follow the alumni down the road,…
BloomTech has changed A LOT on recent months. The result is that the graduation rate has plummeted, but if you do graduate, the odds of getting a job are higher.
I think the main problem is all of the changes basically turned it into a Udemy course with live sessions where the "self motivated autodidactic" people are the ones that make it through - and the ones that probably would have gotten jobs in any bootcamp.
For those unaware, the changes are:
1. You move the curriculum completely at your own pace.
2. You sign up for "lectures" whenever you want and the same lectures are offered frequently so you can always join the one you need right now, or repeat ones you aren't understanding.
3. There is no longer a sense of community or that you are doing this with other people - people start every week and you don't have cohortmates anymore.
4. You have a support person that you can file…
I don't plan on sharing the actual spreadsheet or any personal information because I respect all/most of the individual Codesmith alumni I know very deeply and don't want to be a part of any individual person being called out out focused on negatively. In fact I help a number of Codesmith alumni on a 1-1 basis figure out options and paths forward in this market and I know how unique and person these convos can get and "exposing people" would be against my goals.
Yeah I'm EXTREMELY good at cmd+click cmd+tab, etc... lol. Apple Automations and formulas in Sheets can help. For example if you have a GitHub handle, you can make a formula to great a url concatenated with that handle, then copy those into a text file and open in the Terminal, and then cmd+ double click on each one to open in a new tab. 5 mins to get 200 GitHub pages open. And then say we want to go to a tab in the same location…
Sorry, I don't know them :( I fortunately/unfortunately know a lot about Codesmith because it's a snowball effect of it being discussed so much in this subreddit and then people send me stuff - usually anonymously because I get a lot of pushback from Codesmith insiders in comments and they want to help me and thank me for explaining things more the way they are.
I know a decent amount about Rithm (I know the founder) and HR (I know a number of alumni), BloomTech, but not every single program
It is because it's the length of Codesmith and the argument is the skills you build before and after are all part of the skills that go into the OSP. This is bs because
1. People choose a very specific tech to work on in the OSP and the rest of Codesmith is breadth across many topics
2. People are told to ALSO PUT THEIR OTHER PROJECTS in another section of their resume - essentially double, triple, quandruple or in one case I've seen 5X counting their time at Codesmith.
That said. It's not done in some super sketchy way to teach you how to lie cheat and steal. It's indeed a good program, the people are great, the alumni do well on the job, it's more of a "optimization strategy" that people see as a means to an ends.
I see both sides and I don't discourage people from joining just because of this. But I do think it's critical for you to know HOW it works and not just see six figures an…
Codesmith can be a good choice. It's the #1 choice for super ambitious people who are already decent programmers. The alumni I know are amazing, hard working, and great people who want to have a big impact on the world. If you want to put your head down, do what you are told and exceed all of the requirements/expectations, it's the place to go and you'll be happy.
The only problem I have with Codesmith overall is misrepresenting mid-level and senior outcomes (and by relation, exaggerating the value of the OSP projects that they claim make you a mid-level engineer).
The reason I would consider not recommending them is if they pull some shenanigans with H2 2022 outcomes because the raw data I've been shown is not good and if they don't acknowledge this openly and transparently and continue to try to frame them as Codesmith's best in industry results and keep up the attitude, then I will…
OSLabs is a charity that owns and manages all of the OSPs that Codesmith students work on for 3 weeks and they end up being the highlight of your experience at Codesmith on your resume - assuming you have no prior SWE experience. OSLabs collects donations and pays mentors to review open source projects. Which happen to be the same open source projects that Codesmith people pay $20K to do during the OSP phase of Codesmith... hence why it's so important that there be a clear line between the two entities or it could look like OSLabs is funneling tax deductible donations from people to mentor Codesmith students who are paying Codesmith $20K each.
OSLabs has full control over all the OSP projects and is responsible for choosing students to work on them and not a single person at Codesmith has the ability to influence these decisions or that would be a conflict of interest (people tell me th…
They don't actually get away with it all the time, but because they are so small in the grand scheme of things, it works enough to make a difference for individual students. Other than Capital One, which is a very large company that the alumni have a machine to get you into (referring each other to jobs and practicing known questions with them), alumni spread across hundreds of companies. There are some small companies that explicitly love Codemsith grads and no need to use the Codesmith-style resume there. But most people are just slipping under the radar with a recruiter that misses this.
More importantly - Codesmith students are generally wonderful people and perform well enough on the job (even putting in hours of extra work a day to keep up) so that most companies don't look back and question the on paper experience later on.
We have this discussion a lot and people keep sending me more detailed info that makes me believe otherwise. It's very clear from official instructions to not lie but it's in office hours and 1-1s that the pressures come out in subtle ways. I am far too busy to dive into this but have all the raw ingredients to definitely demonstrate the stats on how every single student ever presents their experience and I have primary evidence of an employee telling people that Codesmith tells people to put 3-4 months of experience for their 3-4 week OSPs.
I showed some people on my eng team in person, without any context whatsoever, a guideline to consider separating OSP from "open source projects" on your resume to make the OSP stand out and how to make a LinkedIn company for that project (while also clearly saying don't lie) and someone very senior said "that's fraud".
The market right now is not great for bootcamp grads. FAANG hiring is opening up again for people with 2+ years of SWE work experience, but not for people with none. And you can't fake this work experience or stretch your resume - it's either 2 real YOE or not - faking your resume will just piss off hiring managers that will tell the recruiter that sent you over to never consider candidates from your bootcamp again and waste their time.
The only data I have here is from Codesmith. They had H1 2022 CIRR placements of 80% within 180 days of graduation for people who graduated and were job hunting. I've seen Codesmith's placement numbers for H2 2022 and for recent cohorts and they are hovering around 50% +/- 15%ish (these are not official numbers but from primary data from students and alumni) and are about a 20% drop from H1 2022 in H2 2022 and H1 2023 (which still has a lot of time left…
Right, 14.6% of people in pacific time group didn't report salaries so might have been confirmed from LinkedIn or another source.
RE source. Yeah so CIRR has no requirements on how the salary is verified and the auditors for Codesmith said they just ask people to confirm - no offer letter required or anything.
This is the GRAD standard and sounds similar in that it's self reported:
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Compensation Rate
The Compensation Rate includes only annualized base compensation and excludes bonuses, equity, relocation, and any other non-base compensation. If a Graduate has held multiple positions of the same outcomes classification code within the Job Search Period, Galvanize reports on the position acquired at its discretion. If compensation information is known, it must be included. A GRAD Report must indicate the total number of Job-Seeking Graduates as well as the percentage of succes…
Hi, Formation isn't a good replacement for a bootcamp for most people. There have been a very small number of people that have done this but the reasons have to be right and we usually reject people without some kind of relevant experience. For example, self taught but contributions to large open source projects might be a good fit.
I don't recommend doing it in this market because almost all of these cases were people who got top tier entry level roles and sometimes from new grad headcount, and the market has tanked for entry level and new grad roles. The same struggles apply with going to a bootcamp, but I'm not also not advising doing Formstion right now in this bucket, UNLESS you have a job already and are doing it part time over a long period of time.
Second giant note: ISAs are great for the reasons you mentioned. But if you end up being one of the minority percentage that give…
What I've been seeing is a strong demand for senior engineers, and decent demand for mid-level engineers (1 to 3 YOE) that have worked at pretty solid companies for a few years.
I've seen people with experience but not necessarily full time strong experience (i.e. they might have contract work, large resume gaps, lots of job changes, or are bootcamp/CS grads with no experience) get pretty good jobs that in the boom-times, graduates of Codesmith, Hack Reactor, Rithm etc... (i.e. the top bootcamps) were getting - i.e. 100 to 140K great junior positions.
So my advice to top tier bootcamp grads at these top bootcamps is to not try to sneak into those 120K entry level roles that 2021 and 2022 alumni were getting and to aim for apprenticeships and internships. e.g. start with [apprenticeships.me](https://apprenticeships.me). NOTE: I'm sure I'm going to get some people commenting on here that…
I can add details and caveats from various discussions with dozens of Codemsith alumni and from analyzing public OS Labs repos
When people on here call Codesmith "culty" three reasons are
1. they convince students these projects are production level projects. They are not and I've looked at many of them. Most don't work properly, many have commented our code and terrible practices, mish mashing libraries, no planning, and fellows/mentors who have no experience. Ive done hundreds of interviews and I have yet to see a OSLabs CODEBASE (the ideas for the projects themselves are great) that would pass as a production codebase and any employer impressed by someone actual code contributions didn't look at the code or did so with the understanding it was a 3 week project and not expecting production code.
2. Do you get formal paperwork you were accepted into OSLabs? Do you sign paperwork wit…
Yeah, I'm playing devil's advocate and I agree it's not THAT hard.
Practically speaking, people advertise their projects loud and clear, with their GitHubs and LinkedIns and you can grab all the contributors from os-labs repos and you can spend a few hours identifying all Codesmith alumni.
I did this like a year or two ago now - after noticing patterns in people applying for Formation - and audited 200-ish people and the vast majority had no signs of Codesmith on their profiles, had 6+ months of SWE experience at their "projects", and contributed 2-3 commits over 2-3 weeks to their projects. I dumped all the data somewhere but I have a ton of real work to do but someone who really wants to see how people do could reproduce this easily.
I comment on many of those threads and get notified for every post in this sub, and it sounds like you are super bias already at the start. I don't see many people selling other bootcamps on Codesmith posts or steering people away from it. I see a few one off comments, but it's not the core content on most posts.
In fact a very large number of alumni from Codesmith who do videos for them, are active here, and write reviews online with their names on them, actually WORK/WORKED AT CODESMITH AND ARE/WERE ON THE WEBSITE AS EMPLOYEES. Reddit is anonymous by default but it's not that anonymous when people give out a lot of information that identify who they are.
I have a following of hundreds of people now - many of whom respect my extremely thorough and balanced view of Codesmith - and many of whom end up going there because of my recommendation after talking to them - and I criticize certa…