Let’s say you decide to start a coding bootcamp. Your background is in pedagogy and you love teaching. Your parents were teachers.
You find a co-founder, raise a bit of money, and pour your soul into your company.
The first couple of years, students love your program. Positive feedback, extraordinary student outcomes, employees love the mission. You are quite literally changing lives.
Your business grows. One day, you realize you’ve grown to 70 employees.
And then…
A competitor gets control of the main subreddit for your industry by becoming a Reddit Moderator.
That watering hole becomes their megaphone. They are not shy about using it. An all-out attack on your brand begins. The barrage of accusations and harassment are relentless. The attacks happen daily. You become a neurotic fixation of the moderator. Every little thing you do represents your failings as a company.
You get compared to a sex cult. One of your employees is accused of nepotism. The mod starts joining your company information sessions for prospective students, slinging conspiracy theories at every turn under a pseudonym. You avoid outright bans to avoid appearing biased yourself. Your own employees start wondering if these accusations have merit, some leave.
Even worse, confidential information from your company starts leaking out. There’s a mole. Or at least your team suspects it. No one knows who to trust. Your carefully built company culture? Eviscerated from the inside out.
Any time you attempt to defend yourself in the main subreddit, posts get deleted. Or you’re accused of running a Reddit bot army.
This goes on for years.
Every day, another attack. Every fucking day.
Student applications drop. First a little… then a lot.
Combined with a market downtown, your revenue collapses by 80%.
You go through 2 layoffs just to keep the lights on. A bunch of other folks move on. You’re down to 15 employees now.
The attacks don’t stop. If anything, they escalate.
And you begin to wonder, as the CEO and founder of your company… “Maybe I’m the problem? Maybe I am doing something wrong? Or somehow encouraging these attacks on my company?”
You make a decision to leave.
You step down, walk away from everything you built, and start anew.
But even then, the attacks don’t stop. Nothing can stop this nightmare.
This is the story of Will Sentance and his company, Codesmith.
It can happen to your business too.
The Codesmith Reputation Attack via Google
For many businesses, the first page of Google for their brand name is the single most important asset for managing their reputation.
Let’s say I’m considering a bootcamp, I hear about “Codesmith,” and pop it into Google.
Fuck me that’s bad. This is the number 2 result right after the company website.
- “Codesmith is an enormous waste of money”
- “Do Not Go To Codesmith”
I don’t even have to click, Google is serving that stuff up right under the company’s website. God damn.
That top Reddit thread has been ranking highly for Codesmith brand terms since Sept 2024. That’s a year’s worth of brand carnage.
Pay close attention to the subreddit all those threads are from: r/codingbootcamp. That’s the key to all this.
Are LLMs Also a Reputation Attack Vector on Codesmith?
Yup.
My prompt in ChatGPT was “is codesmith a good bootcamp?”.
The intro has a bunch of standard stuff, and then there was this:
Same Reddit threads are featured, same brand-destroying quotes.
By the way, CIRR is a nonprofit in the bootcamp industry that collects graduation data across the industry. It’s a neutral third-party with the goal of providing transparency on student outcomes across coding bootcamps. If your graduation rates are solid, wouldn’t it make sense for a competitor to call that data into question? ChatGPT is regurgitating those same doubts here.
At this point, I’ve done a quick brand search and asked ChatGPT if Codesmith is any good. I already have a TON of doubts as a prospect.
I don’t believe this is an accident. Or a result of Codesmith’s actual quality as a bootcamp.
I believe this brand attack is the result of one person’s actions.
When I’ve researched Codesmith’s brand, every Reddit thread I’ve seen in Google and various LLMs have all been from a single subreddit: r/codingbootcamp. That subreddit is controlled by the Reddit Moderator Michael Novati.
Who is Michael Novati?
For the best recap of Michael, listen to this interview from Pragmatic Engineer Gergely Orosz.
The highlights:
- Michael joined Facebook early in 2009.
- As he tells it, went through a bunch of promotions quickly and made it to Principal Software Engineer (E7).
- Left Facebook in 2017.
- In 2019, co-founded his dev bootcamp, Formation, with his wife, Sophie Novati. His wife is the CEO, Michael took the CTO title.
In that interview, Michael tells a story about playing Risk (the board game) with Mark Zuckerberg.
“The way we became friends, he [Zuckerberg] used to play Risk, the board game. I think it was once a week that people would get together. Like 4 or 5 people. He would show up often and I really liked Risk. I would always play Risk as a kid for whatever reason, I don’t even know why.
And one day, we’re down to the final three people. And it was me, him, and I was losing. Mark was in second place, the leader was taking over.
I did a really.. uhhh.. let’s say delicate, strategic maneuver. Where I made an alliance with him to share resources and go after the first place person. So he went all in on the first place person.
My turn’s next. I did not go all in against the first place person, I took over Mark’s remaining resources. He just dwindled going after the first place person. He accepted my friendship request [on Facebook] very shortly that evening.
It’s weird, I basically backstabbed him in the game, really bad. Blatantly to his face. But it’s the game, that’s what Risk is. It’s a strategy game. I think he appreciated the strategy I had. It made him feel more like he could trust me. Even though I backstabbed him, he knows where my strategic thinking is coming from.“
Now, is this just a funny anecdote about an early Facebook backstabbing Mark Zuckerberg and then becoming friends? Maybe.
For me, it tells me a lot about how Michael Novati plays competitive games. In my experience, people tend to run businesses the same way they compete at anything. Maybe Michael is the exception.
I do have to admit, it takes some real cojones to fuck over your boss that hard in a board game. Especially when that boss is Zuckerberg.
One last note: Formation raised a $4M seed round in 2021, led by Andreessen Horowitz.
Michael Novati’s Control Over the Coding Bootcamp Industry
Michael Novati’s power over the coding bootcamp industry comes from one place: being a moderator on the subreddit r/codingbootcamp.
He is, by far, the most active moderator for the subreddit. You’ll bump into him immediately just by visiting the subreddit:
What about the other mods?
- u/samabuna hasn’t posted in about 8 years.
- u/dowcet/ is still active on Reddit but rarely posts in r/codingbootcamp. When I checked, I only found one comment in the preceeding 1-2 months.
So the subreddit is Michael Novati’s show. Full stop.
We have to remember that Reddit isn’t just Reddit anymore. The powers that be have decided that Reddit is infallible, a reliable set of training data for LLMs, and should be featured fucking everywhere.
Before we get to what Michael has actually done, let’s lay out the potential power for anyone that gets control of a key subreddit in their industry:
- If the subreddit is greenlit by Google, threads in your subreddit can easily pop to the top of Google searches that are extremely valuable to your business. Brand terms, review terms, product categories, major how-to topics, all of it.
- LLMs prioritize Reddit heavily. If you want to spin conspiracy theories, those conspiracies will start to become part of the zeitgeist as every LLM regurgitates them.
- Skew the narrative for long enough and it’ll be impossible for ANY prospect to not stumble across your skewed narrative when they’re researching products or services.
- You can delete posts and comments at will. Want to tip the narrative in your favor? Just delete some of the positive posts of your competitors. To cover your tracks, make up claims about a bot army that’s run by your competitor. You’re fighting the good fight and keeping the barbarians at bay! You don’t even need to actively post negative stuff (but you can if you want to dial up the torture). Just removing positive stuff skews the narrative nicely.
- You can ban users at will. Got some troublesome competitors fighting back? Just delete the little shits.
- You can pin posts in the subreddit and comments within posts. Great tactic for pushing a narrative when you really need to.
What about recourse from your competitors? Can they do anything to stop you?
You can only lose your moderator slot in a few instances:
- The Reddit Admis get involved, actual Reddit employees. Stuff has to get pretty egregious for that.
- Moderators further up the mod list can kick you out. But if you get on good terms with them, or they don’t care, you have free reign.
- If there are other mods below you AND you go inactive, you can get kicked by them too. So don’t let any new mods in. And always stay active. Simple.
No one else across the industry can do a damn thing. You get to act with impunity.
To be clear, any moderator of an industry subreddit has this power. That’s not a subjective opinion, it’s a fact. That’s how our online platforms currently work.
Michael Novati has this power over the bootcamp industry. Did he wield it benevolently? If he did, I wouldn’t be writing this fucking post.
How Michael Distorts Narratives on Reddit
At first, I was going to go through a bunch of Michael Novati’s claims and debunk them.
Then I realized I was missing the entire point.
This isn’t a normal debate where there are two sides of the truth and we need to sort through it to get to the real answer.
It’s about one side torching the truth with a firehose of chaos and distortion.
Prospects in the bootcamp space are evaluating whether or not to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a bootcamp. It’s the price of a goddamn car. It doesn’t take much to get someone to pause and redirect their purchase journey.
So let’s go through a few of the worst examples.
Compare Your Competitor to a Sex Cult (Loosely for Deniability)
Here’s a fucked up one.
A Reddit user, with a first-time post, posts a major takedown of Codesmith, claiming to be a former employee. Tons of allegations about mismanagement, poor curriculum, and backroom dealing with CIRR. I personally think these allegations are bullshit but that’s not the most fucked up part in this thread.
u/rosiebeir joins the conversation and gives a measured take on their experience as a student in Codesmith:
Most of the comment is about different aspects of the Codesmith program that could be improved. It all feels genuine to me. Further down, they say this:
Wow, that’s a helluva endorsement.
This is where Michael jumps in:
If you’re not familiar with NXIVM (Michael got the spelling wrong), go watch The Vow on HBO. Short story: NXIVM was a sex cult disguised as a self-improvement group and the founder went to prison.
Did Michael just compare Codemith to a goddamn sex cult? Yes he did folks.
Let’s put aside the subject matter for a second. Michael’s use of rhetoric is a master class on how to destroy someone’s reputation without technically saying the horrible thing you’re actually saying.
Michael takes an incredible testimonial from a student (“Codesmith changed my life”), and associates that comment with the sort of things he hears from sex cults. He doesn’t technically call Codesmith a sex cult, he merely makes the association. He also wraps it with other positive comments to look more measured: “something I hear very often” and “I love that Codesmith changed your life.” But these aren’t good things, they’re red flags! Sex cults do the same thing! Someone could get taken advantage of!
Oh so innocent aren’t we Michael?
Now any time a bootcamp prospect wanders into this thread:
- They see the genuine, positive review from a former student.
- A supposed figure of authority (a Reddit moderator), plants a seed questioning that testimonial.
- The same mod connects Codesmith to a sex cult in a way that also offers complete deniability.
- To top it all off, most folks won’t realize that the Reddit mod is a cofounder of a competing company.
Bravo Michael, brav-fucking-o.
From Reddit Troll to LinkedIn Stalker: The Unhinged Escalation
This one might piss me off the most.
Michael doesn’t just go after employees, he goes after their kids.
This is a Reddit post about a defunct Codesmith program:
Somehow, as these threads often do, the conversation turns into an all-out attack on Codesmith. This time, Michael goes after Eric Kirsten, a Senior Advisor at Codesmith. Eric spends a good chunk of his time mentoring Codesmith students and helping prepare them for the job hunt.
Here’s Michael’s post:
I do not know what the original comment in this thread was (very convenient). But I do have the original comment from Michael before he edited it:
I talked with Eric myself, here’s the real story:
- Eric’s wife did a one-time contract project with Codesmith for 9 months.
- His son joined as a Codesmith student and had a great outcome. They paid the full program cost and his son went through the normal application process just like everyone else.
But it doesn’t stop there.
Michael also decided to email multiple executives at Codesmith about Eric’s son:
I’ve redacted the son’s name and details because WHY THE FUCK WOULD WE BRING SOMEONE’S KID INTO THIS?
I don’t think I could possibly swear enough in order to convey how utterly insane all this is.
Just imagine this happening at your own company:
- A cofounder of your competitor, starts attacking one of your employees on Reddit.
- Then that cofounder starts LOOKING UP THEIR KIDS ON LINKEDIN
- They post weird mentions on Reddit about that kid, accusing your company of nepotism.
- THEN EMAILS you and other executives, accusing the kid of falsifying their LinkedIn, threatening to keep calling it out in public.
WHAT.
WHAT. THE. FUCK.
What would you do in this situation?
I’m not sure what I would do. But there is no world where this is normal or okay.
The Great OSP Conspiracy for Manufactured Outrage
Another favorite tactic of Michael is to take something obscure, and allude to some grand conspiracy behind it.
Like OSPs.
OSP stands for open-source product. It’s a built-in part of the Codesmith program, the capstone project. Here’s how Codesmith explains it:
This seems incredibly boring, how the hell could someone possibly turn this into a controversy?
If you’re asking that question, you’ve severely underestimated Michael.
A since-deleted Reddit account posted this thread (convenient that it’s a deleted user huh?):
They claim Codesmith students are using OSPs to inflate their resumes to get jobs faster. And that this is endemic at Codesmith.
The comments are a dumpster fire. Michael has posted 11 of the comments, almost a third of the entire conversation.
A former Codesmith student jumps in:
There’s some back an forth between u/peppimenti and other Reddit users, then Michael responds:
Fuck me, that’s a lot to take in.
Quick tangent: this is another one of Michael’s tactics. Make accusations faster than anyone can possibly fact check them or even process them. I still haven’t figured out what that Phil Troutman reference is.
To summarize, Michael claims he has evidence that Codesmith is aware of the lying on resumes, alludes to a conspiracy with OSLabs, and he believes Codesmith helped verify some of this lying.
Then he associates all of this with “conspiring to commit fraud” and that it’s a “jail-able crime.”
We’ve gone from “Codesmith students complete an OSP during their program” to a shadowy conspiracy and fraud via student resumes. God damn did that escalate.
So I got a hold of the exact SOP that is given by Codesmith to students on how to write their resume. Here’s the section on OSPs:
Codesmith is telling students explicitly not to misrepresent their experience with OSPs as a role at a company. They advocate for transparency, as they should. What students do with that is up to them. And even if some students stretch the truth, no hiring manager is getting fooled by that. End of story.
What about the OSLabs stuff?
When I chatted with Alina (the current CEO of Codesmith), here’s what she had to say on how Codesmith students interact with OSLabs:
“They [students] get a chance to work on it [projects]. Once those are ready, they submit to OSLabs who keeps the repository and manages the repository. There’s no kind of financial exchange or anything like that. They just hold the repository of the open source dev tools.“
OSLabs is just a nonprofit that manages student repos. That’s it.
Maybe you think there are problems with Codesmith’s guidance. Real quick, why don’t we check some of Michael’s own students from his bootcamp company, Formation?
There’s tons of students on his site. Some of them get featured heavily, like here:
Here’s Carlitos’ LinkedIn:
Carlitos is listing his time at Michael’s bootcamp/training company in his experience section. The exact same thing that Michael RAILS on Codesmith for.
To be clear: I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this. Carlitos, all the Codesmith students, or ANY student from ANY bootcamp have done nothing wrong by putting stuff like this on their resumes. If Formation students list their time like this, I don’t see anything wrong with that either.
In the thousands of resumes I’ve reviewed, I’ve never had any trouble differentiating between full-time roles, part-time, freelance, training, or any other random item on a resume. Any hiring manager will sniff this stuff from a mile away. No one is fooling anyone.
But Michael has now turned this into a story of fraud facilitated by Codesmith. And here I am writing hundreds of words about this nonsense. There’s nothing here beyond what Michael has conjured into the ether of Reddit.
You might disagree with some of the guidance that Codesmith gives its graduates but no one is doing anything wrong. It sure as fuck aint fraud.
And that’s what Michael is so damn good at, turning innocuous little things into grand conspiracies that take hours of research to untangle.
Michael Novati’s Nonstop Attack Campaign Against Codesmith
Think I’m cherry picking examples of Michael’s posts?
Let’s zoom out.
My team and I looked at every Reddit post and comment made by Michael Novati over the past 3 months.
We then catalogued the posts that mentioned Codesmith or were referencing Codesmith based on context. Next we categorized those posts based on if the sentiment was positive, neutral, or negative towards Codesmith.
Here’s all the days that had negative comments along with their frequency over the past few months:
Fucking relentless.
It’s easier to highlight days where Michael DOESN’T talk about Codesmith. Dude, get a fucking hobby.
What if the past few months don’t adequately reflect Michael’s posting history? What if recent events have just been a negative phase of the bootcamp space? Can we really make any claims using just the last few months?
Fine, let’s go further.
I went to my team and said “fuck it, let’s go back as far as possible.” So we went through all of Michael’s posts since June 2024. That’s when Reddit stops making it easy to pull up comments. Yes, we looked at every post and comment from over a year. No fast and dirty AI analysis here, we did it by hand.
Here’s the timeline of negative posts and comments since June 2024:
What. The. Fuck.
Who has the time for this?
In order to adequately show how often Michael posts negative comments about Codesmith, we had to use HABIT TRACKER VISUALIZATIONS.
It’s relentless, it’s nonstop, and in my opinion, completely unhinged. At least Michael slows down a tad during the holidays. Otherwise, he’s all gas, no breaks.
Well, alright, MAYBE Michael was posting in such absurd volume that the positive mentions outweigh the negative? Maybe I’m selectively pulling data?
NOPE.
The comments about Codesmith are severely overweighted on the negative side. In aggregate, here’s how the sentiment breaks down:
Is it just me or is there a weeeee bit of bias in this posting?
Yes, yes, there fucking is.
Alright, fine, MAYBE all this negative attention is deserved. Maybe Codesmith is the villain that Michael claims. Let’s find out.
Other Bootcamp Competitors Hold Codesmith in High Regard
I interviewed 10 different folks. Including students, multiple Codesmith employees from the leadership team, and founders of competing coding bootcamps. I dug through countless docs, many of them internal, and probably annoyed some of these folks with my endless requests for screenshots to verify stories.
Overall, I found everyone at Codesmith to be:
- Extremely responsive and on top of their shit. They made promises and kept them.
- Transparent to an absurd degree.
- Humble, honest, and self-aware.
- A desire to do the right thing even at their detriment. These folks don’t know how to play offense, they assume good intent from everyone.
In short, these are good folks. Faultless? Of course not, everyone makes mistakes.
But I do believe that the world is better with Codesmith in it.
Which makes this whole situation all the more tragic.
Michael isn’t waging some war against another competitor hellbent on profit-seeking. These are folks that are helping people transition their careers. They are quite literally helping people change their lives. And they’re doing it for the right reasons in my opinion.
Don’t take my word for it.
I spoke with Anthony Hughes, a co-founder of Tech Elevator, another bootcamp. Here’s what he had to say about Codesmith: “The folks at Codesmith were competitors of Tech Elevator. Especially as everyone went online, we competed directly. I never minded losing to Codesmith. Either choice by students was a good one, both our programs vetted students heavily and would get students great outcomes. If we ever lost to Codesmith, we could accept that because we knew the student would get the outcome they wanted. Not like the lower-quality major programs.”
I also heard the same from Kush Patel, a co-founder and former CEO of AppAcademy “Codesmith is one of the best players in the space. They run their programs in a way that we benchmarked against. There are plenty of other schools that are questionable and are not getting any scrutiny from Michael.”
We have two co-founders of competing bootcamps saying that Codesmith is one of the good ones. Are there shady bootcamps out there? Absolutely. But Codesmith isn’t one of them.
The Tactics Michael Uses to Wage His PR Nightmare Campaign
After reading hundreds of Michael’s posts, a few patterns emerge on how he attacks Codesmith.
To be honest, it’s a masterclass on how to gut your opponent via PR. If every move is intentional by Michael, I gotta hand it to him becasue he’s exceptionally good at this.
Here are the most prominent tactics I saw:
- Relentless volume. It’s not enough to post a few days. If you want to destroy someone’s reputation, you gotta hammer the shit outta that drum. Over a 487 day period, we counted 425 negative posts on Codesmith. That’s an average of 0.87 negative posts per day. A negative post almost every fucking day.
- Reference multiple conspiracies at the same time. If you only mention one conspiracy, folks have a straightforward path to getting to the truth. But if you mention 3-4 at the same time? Only the true masochistics like myself will even attempt to pull it apart.
- Rarely, if ever, state your full accusation. For any single conspiracy, always allude to it. Don’t make a full, comprehensive case that allows someone to see the full picture. Let your audience sit with the uncertainty. You don’t need to win the argument, you only need to sow doubt and fear.
- Cherry-pick data. As the saying goes: “there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.” For any industry data you can get your hands on, find the slice that skews the narrative in your favor. Don’t worry about anyone fact-checking, they never do.
- Attack every misstep, no matter how obscure. Sooner or later, your victim will make mistakes. When they do, attack. No matter how small or obscure, blow it up into a major drama. Hype, distort, and magnify.
- Take down third-party arbitrators. If your industry has some sort of credential, certification, or regulator, attack that body just as much as your competitor. If your competitor has optimized for this transparency, you’ll turn their strength into a weakness. Even better, accuse both parties of conspiring together.
- Blame the victim. Whenever someone mentions that you’re going too hard, say that your competitor is forcing your hand. “You’d love to move on! You don’t want to spend your time on all this! If ONLY your competitor would do the right thing, then all this would stop!” But we all know it’ll never stop.
- Delete comments and posts. Delete comments and posts to skew the narrative in your favor. You don’t need to delete everything, just enough to make the conversation messy and difficult to follow. And a few key deletions tilts the scales in your favor.
- Make your claims squishy. Don’t ever say your competitor is a cult or committing fraud. Say that things look like it, or remind you of it. You’ll have deniability while the association still gets planted in the minds of your audience.
A sign of the times.
The Impact on Codesmith
Has all this had a material impact on Codesmith?
I spoke to both Will Sentence (former CEO and co-founder) and Alina Vasile (the current CEO). When I asked them how much revenue has declined at Codesmith since their peak, they both told me about 80%.
Then I asked how much of that was due to everything on Reddit. They said about half of the decline, so a 40% drop came from the negative PR on Reddit. And the other 40% is from a slowdown in the bootcamp market.
Will told me that Codesmith reached a high of $23.5M in revenue. A 40% hit from Reddit means a revenue drop of $9.4M.
What about the emotional toll?
I asked Will Sentance how it all impacted him “It made me doubt how I can start anything after. Michael Novati is still going at it by commenting on my fellowship at Oxford. And Reddit is so visible in Google – at a meeting last week in the UK, the person used ChatGPT to look up Codesmith and it referenced all those Reddit posts. I have genuine caution about launching new stuff.”
Even after leaving Codesmith, the Reddit harassment still impacts Will.
Students also feel deeply uncomfortable with Michael’s actions.
I spoke with a former employee from Codesmith who told me “I was a teacher at Codesmith and the primary reason for moving away from teaching was MIchael Novati. I signed up to help a team of great people help people achieve their goals like I did, I didn’t sign up to be targeted and attacked by a Reddit troll. It took a toll on my mental health and I decided to step back to focus on my day job at Microsoft.”
Here’s another instance of a student calling Michael out on LinkedIn:
And another student that reached out to Will Sentence:
My sources also told me:
- An executive was threatened after moving to another company, accusations were going to be raised over IP conflicts. These accusations appear meritless and ridiculous to me.
- The morale at Codesmith has sharply declined.
- Some employees have had mental health difficulties, some left Codesmith.
- One contractor ended their working relationship with Codesmith because of a fear of being dragged into all this.
- An employee was doxxed after posting in the /r/codingbootcamp subreddit.
- Prospective students have pulled applications.
- Students that had amazing outcomes are afraid to post about their experiences.
- After graduating, some students began questioning their own experience and considered going back to their old careers.
As much as I wanted to detail these stories, I had a lot of requests from sources to remain anonymous. Even when folks went through some heinous shit from all this, they specifically requested not to be included.
It is difficult to understate the impact that Michael’s actions have had on Codesmith.
Is Michael Novati Breaking the Moderator Code of Conduct on Reddit?
I think so. But it’s not my call.
The Reddit Moderator Code of Conduct says this:
So what counts as compensation?
Basically, Reddit Moderators can’t receive compensation for doing basic moderator tasks. Good rule, the point is to prevent companies and third-parties from paying Reddit mods off.
Now here’s the tricky part.
What if that Reddit Moderator is a co-founder of a competitor? What if they spend YEARS shit talking you and destroying your reputation? What if they’re not technically receiving new stock but the value in their startup equity goes up after they destroy you on Reddit? Doesn’t that count as financial compensation and a violation of Reddit’s own rule to “Moderate with Integrity”?
I believe it does.
And I believe that’s why Michael is doing what he’s doing. He wins when Codesmith loses.
Shit like this is why Reddit has become extremely untrustworthy.
What Drives the Crazy Student Outcomes at Codesmith
If you dig around, you will find stories from Codesmith students and placement data that seem too good to be true. Is Codesmith actually that good?
As far as I can tell, it’s all real.
So how has Codesmith managed it? I found two forces that have driven these outcomes.
1. Codesmith Has an Intense Application Process
Not just anyone can join Codesmith. They screen folks OUT of their program. If you’re a line cook, kinda think a software engineer job sounds fun, have never spent even 5 minutes figuring out what that looks like, and apply, you won’t get in.
Codesmith only accepts folks that they think have a good chance of succeeding.
They filter the front of their student pipeline which keeps the outcome rates really high on the backend. That’s how they get their placement numbers as high as they are. That’s the “trick” to juicing the student outcomes.
Now, if you have some software engineering experience, you’ll likely find the application to be absurdly easy. That’s the point.
To me, Codesmith isn’t a true zero to one program. The students that thrive have already put a lot of self-study hours into their career transition. They’re motivated, have learned the basics, and are ready to dial up the intensity. These are folks that are also likely to succeed during the job application process after they graduate.
This is also one of the easiest ways to spot the shitty bootcamps. If they take anyone and everyone, that’s an enormous red flag. Stay away.
2. The Hiring Market Was Extremely Strong from 2019-2022
I spoke to one student that went through Codesmith in 2020, they reported that every single one of the folks in their cohort landed a software engineering job within about 6 months. That’s nuts.
Another graduate from the 2019 era told me that 80-90% of the students from their cohort, the cohort before, and the cohort after, landed software engineering jobs within a few months of graduating.
How were the placements that high? I believe the Codesmith program had something to do with it. But that was also a period where the tech market was exceptionally hot. Across all levels and functions, it was much easier to switch jobs, get promotions, and change careers in tech. I saw that myself.
I’ve also personally seen things tighten a lot in the past few years.
How do Codesmiths placement rates look now?
Even if we look at more recent cohorts, the placements are still pretty damn strong for the full-time program:
That’s one of the reports issued by CIRR on Codesmith. It’s the full report so I’m not cherry picking.
Even during 2023-2024, a pretty shitty period to try to start a career as a software engineer, 70% of folks are still landing in-field jobs within a year of graduating Codesmith. With a median salary of $110,000. Even if you only count full-time employment, it’s still 62%. I personally think that’s remarkable.
The part-time program is only slightly worse at 60%.
Again, this is during a hiring market when entry-level software engineering jobs are brutally hard to get. And the placement rates are still in the 60-70% range.
I’m also hearing that students have to work a lot harder now to land that job. And it can take a solid year. That’s that state of tech hiring at the moment.
So if you see old placement data of 80-100%, that was when the market was hot. Now it’s come back down to earth which is to be expected.
The Future of Codesmith
To me the future of Codesmith looks quite bright. Alina (the CEO) is very much in control, the team is excited about the future, and the student outcomes still look impressive to me. I’ve been told that there are no plans at Codesmith to shut down.
Especially with all the changes to software development from AI, there’s a lot of training that everyone is going to have to go through in tech. Good time to be in the education space.
If Michael could take his boot off Codesmith’s throat for just half a minute, they’d do a lot of good for a lot people.
My Recommendations for Anyone Considering Joining a Developer Bootcamp
I cannot tell you which bootcamp to attend. Or whether a bootcamp is worth it at all.
I’ve hired well over a hundred folks in my career, interviewed countless others. Including engineers and data scientists.
At no point did I ever place any value in a bootcamp. I also never considered it a detractor. It’s neutral to me, never really signaling anything. Neither good nor bad.
If you think it’ll get you your first job (which is all that really matters), and the price/time makes sense for you, go for it. But there are plenty of other paths. It’s not required by any means. I know plenty of self-taught devs that have worked at prestigious startups and big tech.
As for which bootcamp, that’s also up to you.
What I can say is this.
As I’ve gone through Michael Novati’s Reddit account, I’ve been appalled. I’ve never seen anything like this in my entire career. And I’ve played in some fucked up corners of the internet. That last thing I’d EVER want is to have my name or career associated with anything that Michael Novati has touched. That includes his startup, Formation.
You’ll have to make your own choice. But I know what mine would be.
At the very least, when doing research on bootcamps, I would consider anything on r/codingbootcamp/ to be completely contaminated. Whatever the real truth is, that subreddit is Michael’s personal fiefdom. He can do and say whatever he wants. And he has one helluva conflict of interest: he’s a co-founder and CTO of a leading bootcamp (even if he tries to claim that he doesn’t run a bootcamp).
If I was looking for unbiased reviews, I’d only factor in content from a community that Michael (or any other bootcamp founder) did not control. Make sure you know who your subreddit Mods are.
Every Company is Now Vulnerable to These Types of Reputation Attacks
For me, the craziest part of this story is that it’s not an edge case.
Anyone can use this exact same method to tear down their competitors.
You only need to complete one step: become a Reddit mod in one of the main subreddits for your industry. If you do that and the original mods of the subreddit don’t care what you do, you can completely fuck up your whole industry. Sow lies, fear, and misery at will.
Which means anyone can do this to you.
Reddit has become THE reputation attack vector.
And since Reddit is considered the default source of all human knowledge now, Reddit threads pop to the top of Google. Anyone searching for your brand will stumble into this madness. LLMs also prioritize Reddit so that narrative gets corrupted too. Getting control of one channel allows you to corrupt three major channels all at once. Most people don’t check receipts, they don’t dig for truth, they accept what’s put in front of them.
Reddit mods now control our search information ecosystem. Unpaid, corruptible Reddit mods.
I know there are good Reddit mods out there. But all it takes is one to fuck up your own business.