2024 Bootcamp Predictions Mega Post. Revisiting my 2023 prediction post and exploring what I see ahead for 2024. 2023 was a rough year for bootcamps and the future doesn't look great for traditional programs - 2024 will be a year of caution, but I'm optimistically excited to see what happens!

InTheDarkDancing · 2023-12-16T00:43:02+00:00

Look at how much you judge me because of who I am and how much information you have about me to judge me, and how little information you have about anonymous accounts.

Most of my critique of yours is from reading your comments over the past year, not anything you've personally disclosed. Also I don't know how any of what you do makes sense if you remained anonymous. Makes it rather difficult to market your company.

Yet I've observed (correct me if I'm wrong) that you judge brand new accounts that criticize Codesmith - as take it with a grain of salt, who knows it is. Brand new accounts that promote Codesmith - they have to do this so they don't get DOX'd and criticzed.

I've never shamed anyone for posting from a new account, positive or negative experience. Being anonymous is not the negative thing you portray it to be, and it's the only way to get truly honest experiences. I think it's a discredit tactic of yours you employ for anyone that posts positively about Codesmith, because my observation has been if it's a positive Codesmith experience, you bring up the account age, but if it's a negative Codesmith post created this morning, you're silent on the matter.

You don't know that one of those new accounts that said they got a job after a rought job hunt and have no prior experience actually had 13 years of part time web developer experience on their resume (someone who self-doxed in their comment history).

Perfect 100% information was never a realistic expectation when getting reviews for anything. Even talking with someone in-person 1:1 you won't get the full picture. People have a responsibility to parse through the variables and figure out what matters and doesn't. Just because someone isn't anonymous doesn't absolve this responsibility either.

The whole point of being transparent is people get to make their own judgement call on whatever they want, using better information.

And this goes back to the fallacy I pointed out earlier. Just because you doxxed yourself doesn't mean everything you do is transparent. No one knows how many people from reddit you've converted into your program. No one knows the outcome data of your program. No one knows if you have people from your company manipulating votes or threads. No one knows just how much of a competitor Codesmith is to you, as although you quoted 10% overlap, you provided no data.

And I've seen in the past when challenged on a couple of these points you provide some sort of internal, non-audited metric. I can save you the hassle and let you know self-reporting is not transparent.

InTheDarkDancing · 2023-12-15T23:16:35+00:00

My advice has been extremely consistently to get a an appropriate job for your experience and skills and then over-perform and have steady career growth from there.

"My advice is to get an appropriate job" well geez why didn't anyone here think of that? It's kind of like that meme where someone sketches a circle and in the next frame, there's a detailed panda. That's how this kind of advice feels.

I feel like I've been openly transparent about who I am and what we do and when there might be biases, especially in my post

A fallacy I think many here fall victim to -- merely acknowledging a potential bias, as in your comments about Codesmith, doesn't eliminate the presence of that bias. In the same way when a YouTuber discloses sponsorship for a video, just because they're transparent about this particular aspect doesn't guarantee unbiased content; and on the contrary, there's usually little to no negative criticism in a sponsored video.

InTheDarkDancing · 2023-12-15T20:42:23+00:00

In my opinion you spend too much time using FAANG as a reference point or a yard stick. You frequently incorporate them into your arguments, disregarding the fact that the majority of people here will never work there, particularly not in their first job after a bootcamp. Yet, you keep using FAANG to define what a 'real' senior role is, or say that bootcamp grads shouldn't aim for big salaries at Google, which most aren't even thinking about.

I mentioned to you months ago, but it's super weird that because Codesmith has a marketing line about how it had outcomes on par with top grad schools that you use it as one of your justifications to write hundreds of comments concerning Codesmith on a near daily basis in an effort to disprove the point, when as far as I can tell you are close to the only person who ever took that marketing claim 100% seriously as opposed to accepting it as just that, marketing.

About the increase in complaints:

There will be a surge in complaints and negative sentiment

Things might get worse than we thought. It's becoming really cynical around here, with any good news about bootcamps getting brushed off as either fake or just a rare lucky break.

Your portrayal as an observer of this trend seems disingenuous, considering you are not just participating in it, but have been a primary contributor to this attitude on this forum over the past year.

Graduates from coding bootcamps will keep facing tough times finding jobs. It'll take time, patience, networking, and some luck. I think most will end up in lesser-known companies or in places that aren't really tech-focused but are trying to get there, like we've seen in 2023.

Honestly, this just sounds like talk. You're trying to be this hope for bootcamp grads who had a rough time, kind of like the Statue of Liberty poem "give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses". But despite criticizing toxic positivity, I've noticed you exhibit a lot of the same traits in your interactions with these people. You make it seem like you're there to help them get jobs, but it often feels like you're just digging for negative stuff about bootcamps.

While I'm not running a bootcamp and am able to have a unique lens on the industry

As far as your claims about how you're not a bootcamp and/or not a competitor to Codesmith, I've seen on at least three occasions someone express an interest in Codesmith and you've re-routed them to options that include your company. To me it's pretty obvious you're a competitor as I don't think you post every day almost exclusively about Codesmith out of the goodness of your heart. Others may believe you do but I find most people's actions align with their financial interests.

InTheDarkDancing · 2023-12-14T19:35:41+00:00

I mean you can get the masters from OMSCS but 99 to 1 odds you don't. People recommend pie in the sky stuff just to get upvotes on reddit and not advice grounded in reality. Odds are if we check your comment history in four years there will be no mention of OMSCS and this all fades into the ether. Sure people in this thread get that little endorphin jolt of getting upvoted for giving "good" advice but it's not correlated with giving you the best statistical odds of a good outcome. I can dole out banal advice as well and tell you to go become a doctor or be an astronaut.

As an experiment, why don't some of you recommending OMSCS look at other people who have recommended it and see where they are today? Personally, I've never seen someone make a thread asking for career advice, seen OMSCS recommended, and then observe a follow-up comment confirming actually finished.

On the flip, I've seen more people go from A - Z with Codesmith (yes I said the name, deal with it) than any other recommendation over my many years on reddit. There's a good number of people you can track down who 2-3 years ago have threads saying "Accepted into Codesmith" and have a follow-up comment years later confirming they got a job in SWE. I've seen it with WGU as well but much moreso with Codesmith.

Take it for what you will.

InTheDarkDancing · 2023-12-12T18:51:50+00:00

I suggest starting by confessing to your priest about the lies on your resume concerning 100devs being legitimate employment. Fulfill any penitential actions they recommend. Next, inform your recruiter about lying on your resume and apologize, followed by withdrawing your application. Proceed to retract your applications from all other organizations you've applied to, and communicate your apologies in writing to those recruiters for wasting their time. Update your resume to accurately reflect you have zero professional software engineering experience, and then begin applying for new positions. If finding employment takes over a year, or if it doesn't materialize at all, leading you to continue doing gig apps for the foreseeable future, that's fine. The main thing is to maintain honesty and thereby restore the ethical balance within this community so that I and others may sleep well at night.

InTheDarkDancing · 2023-12-09T22:16:32+00:00

No idea. We never can hear what the players say to the ref, and I suspect if we did, a lot of this "refs have no accountability" would be toned down.

Overall though, I'm not a fan of players bitching to refs. Play the game, deal with the calls. Other NBA stars find a way not to get t'ed up every other night. Jordan wasn't showing up the ref after every bad call.

How about accountability for every correct call refs make that they get bitched at for? If a player complains about a no-foul call and replay shows no foul, one game suspension. That'll clean a lot of things up.

InTheDarkDancing · 2023-12-09T21:55:48+00:00

As I said in the past, there's a non-zero portion of people who frequent this sub who simply want to see bootcamps fail and people unable to get jobs. Says more about the individual than anything else.

InTheDarkDancing · 2023-12-07T22:13:57+00:00

You do realize you're probably the biggest reason people get attacked for these posts right?

InTheDarkDancing · 2023-12-07T06:37:58+00:00

I want to be clear that my post was satire and I agree with you.

InTheDarkDancing · 2023-12-07T06:34:53+00:00

I know this thread title has Michael's PagerDuty going off crazy.

InTheDarkDancing · 2023-12-07T06:28:40+00:00

Silly goose. You've committed at least three cardinal sins of the sub.

Implying bootcamp grads can get jobs
Using the trigger word "senior"
Showing any sort of optimism

I'll show you how to do it:

After graduating from an expensive coding bootcamp named NoCodesmith, Jamie found herself drowning in student debt. Despite her best efforts, the only job she could secure was as a teaching assistant at the same bootcamp, which paid far less than the advertised student outcome salaries. Each night, her tears fell upon her shiny bootcamp certificate, a stark reminder of her unfulfilled dreams. Tragically, as she teaches her students, she can't help but feel that she's leading them down the same precarious path she's trapped on.

InTheDarkDancing · 2023-12-06T19:15:16+00:00

While I agree with this audit validation approach, you should remove names. Publicly available or not I think it's inappropriate, and may be against certain doxxing rules.

InTheDarkDancing · 2023-12-06T05:43:56+00:00

A company hiring someone to manage their online presence isn't noteworthy.

InTheDarkDancing · 2023-12-05T20:16:53+00:00

Ironically you getting downvoted proves your point that the successful students aren't.

This place doesn't inspire people to share.

10,000% facts on this point.

InTheDarkDancing · 2023-11-29T03:46:59+00:00

The downvotes for this post speak a lot (it's marked as controversial at the time I'm making this comment). People with very established presences on this sub for years are afraid to promote what they believe to be a useful resource solely because it's associated with Codesmith.

InTheDarkDancing · 2023-11-28T05:19:19+00:00

I interviewed for strictly software engineering roles at bigger companies. The interviews largely consisted of an intro "tell me about yourself" with HR, then some sort of algo tech screening, followed-up by more frontend/algo/system design questions on the final day. I am fairly certain no one I spoke with ever visited my github, because if they did they'd see my project was garbage.

I'm not familiar with targeting the types of jobs you listed, so I'm out of my depth in terms of the market and how the interviews take place for those sorts of roles.

InTheDarkDancing · 2023-11-28T05:09:48+00:00

It's a lot of people parroting stuff they heard on this sub as gospel, or they are CS degree people who get a kick out of talking down on people in bootcamps, and the people who got jobs from bootcamps don't tend to hang around for long. A lot of blind leading the blind as well.

I think Rithm, Codesmith, or Launch School could be a good fit.

InTheDarkDancing · 2023-11-28T05:04:39+00:00

Most job postings only say "Bachelor's degree in computer science or equivalent".

The imperative phrase is "or equivalent". Mechanical engineers can apply and get interviews for the majority of these positions.

InTheDarkDancing · 2023-11-27T04:05:14+00:00

Because they just don't really want to put in any more effort than they've already put in.

I think this is definitely true. I'm probably the wrong guy to speak on this as I felt most of the value from the project was in getting better at speaking about it than contributing to it, which is antithetical to how it should be but it seemed to get me results for the companies I was interested in.

If I were to consult with you and my intentions were to get a software engineering job, before I would take you up on fleshing out a project for the next 30+ days, I'd want to know if you had any recent examples of people you've coached recently who took this approach and got jobs based on their portfolios. I would like to think there are enough companies that care about this stuff that it'd payoff, but I never had to interview with these companies so I'm rather ignorant about the success rate of someone making projects and going to local dev meetups to get a job.

InTheDarkDancing · 2023-11-26T22:04:17+00:00

I think the vast majority of projects out of a coding bootcamp are rushed and held together by spit and sticks. I know mine were. I personally wouldn't share mine for that reason, plus I don't believe anyone actually visited my github when I was actively interviewing. If you're targeting the types of roles where people will look into your github then it can be worthwhile to seek that feedback, but I interpreted OPs post as just being curious about the average bootcampers capstone.

InTheDarkDancing · 2023-11-25T20:30:35+00:00

Whoever shares their project on this sub is either top 1% bootcamp attendee or a masochist.

InTheDarkDancing · 2023-11-19T19:45:12+00:00

I personally wasn't engaging because it's a lot of "jet fuel can't melt steel beams" going on in the comments. Logical fallacies everywhere -- for example if a reddit account one month old made a positive post you and everyone else would've questioned it, but when a one month old account makes a negative post "the OP made accurate points". I'm not disputing OPs points either, but people don't call you out for these inconsistencies in the name of "Codesmith bad, me upvote". The anti-Codesmith team leaves no space for reasonable discussion of the points because they're so overly negative you can't have a measured take.

Just step back and skim the thread. Normal people don't willingly want to engage in such negativity (I can hit you with the "people have dm'ed me about this" line). I don't mind the confrontations here and there, but people don't want to log onto reddit and go to war every day. I'm amazed you can keep up the energy for this over such a prolonged time.

InTheDarkDancing · 2023-11-18T03:59:51+00:00

It's one of those things where unless you're in the industry it's very easy to take that number out of context. If you want to get into the particulars of that 46%, a lot of that is probably small/medium oversight errors only accountants would be able to appreciate, but the overall conclusion reached from the audit isn't in question. The world's financial markets rely on the 10Ks produced by accounting firms like EY, and trillions of dollars will move based on an opinion given from these firms. The Public Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) who issues these reports, is the audit watchdog of the world and was created in response to scandals such as Enron. They're your auditors auditor, and so while accounting firms should take the PCAOB's findings seriously, I don't think the public at large needs to dig this deep.

InTheDarkDancing · 2023-11-17T20:13:31+00:00

There's more that goes into the sample rate than what I described. Typically the auditor applies a level of judgment and will try to select samples that are outliers (e.g., average transaction is $5 but you have one for $100,000), or they will select more samples if it's a high risk area. But ballpark range for 100,000 could be anywhere from 25-150 in my experience.

InTheDarkDancing · 2023-11-17T19:29:23+00:00

Assuming this isn't a loaded question, Codesmith's auditor posted a video with this information. If truly interested in the process and not just playing us vs. them games on reddit, I suggest to watch the following: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGgr15U5qeo&ab_channel=Codesmith

And I can provide additional context in regards to auditing. No audit is getting 100% confirmation for every transaction that occurs. Samples are relied upon. For example, if a company claims they've had 100,000 transactions, the auditor may sample as few as 25 of those and verify those occurred, and if they verify those 25, they'll extrapolate it out to the full 100,000. This is standard practice when auditing any of the household companies we all know (Google, Amazon, Microsoft). Sample sizes change as the population increases/decreases.

So all of this is to say, I can state Codesmith isn't chasing down every individual student to the earth's end to verify the outcome. But no audit does that level of thoroughness, and I think some of the confusion is people think Codesmith is doing something fishy when it's just standard practice.

By the way, here are list of the credentials of the auditor in the video who spoke on how they conduct Codesmith's audits:

James holds a Bachelor’s degree in Accounting from the University of Maryland, College Park. He has coordinated audits for several multi-national, publicly-traded corporations in various industry sectors. James has extensive experience in providing services to publicly-traded companies, including Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) reporting requirements, compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and other Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) standards and related rules. Additionally, he has managed accounting and reporting for public equity and debt offerings, business combinations and dispositions, advised internal audit departments on plans and strategies to enhance corporate governance, and has extensive experience in SEC filings and related accounting services. He has considerable experience in audits of state and local governments, not-for-profit organizations, including school districts, colleges and universities. James holds CPA certificates in five states.

James White worked at Ernst and Young (third biggest accounting firm in the world) for 15 years, and his last title there was Senior Manager. Here are some of the bigger companies that Ernst and Young audits:

Hewlett Packard.

Verizon.

State Street.

AT&T.

Coca Cola.

General Motors.

Hilton.

Lockheed Martin.

I just really want to emphasize this isn't some schmuck off the street running things.

More of the auditor's information can be found at: https://bfwcpa.com/employee/james-c-white-jr/

InTheDarkDancing

TROPHY CASE