Codesmith

I had heard about coding camps prior to Codesmith but I never really had the intention of signing up for one. I figured I could learn web development on my own and apply to junior positions with that knowledge. I didn’t realize how difficult the industry was to break into though, even for a junior developer. It was near impossible to even get an interview.

Then I attended a Hard Parts class Will was teaching. I was impressed with his knowledge and how engaging the class was. Then I explored the Codesmith campus and saw the current students working and talked to a couple of them, and it seemed like such a great and inclusive atmosphere. My positive impression along with my disappointment in finding a job pushed me to apply for Codesmith where I ended up being accepted.

The experience of Codesmith itself was amazing. I met so many motivated people that motivated me more, and I met a lot of good friends from my cohort and other cohorts that I still hang out with. It really does feel like a family there. The course content was also great and they taught us a lot of difficult and advanced topics in detail. That’s one of the biggest differences with Codesmith compared to other schools: You will struggle. But you come out at the end of it very knowledgeable in a lot of areas and you have projects that are genuinely impressive, even to experienced developers. Many other schools will have you make generic,  junior-level projects that you see a million times on inexperienced programmers’ resumes. That won’t make you stand out.

Keep in mind, even by the end of my time there, I was still skeptical about finding a job because I remembered how difficult it was before Codesmith. We went through a lot of job preparation like resume reviews and mock interviews, but I was still unsure. The key here is you have to follow what Codesmith tells you to do to a T. It’s very easy to get lazy when job searching after your graduation. But I followed exactly what they taught me and I ended up getting interviews left and right. Some of them didn’t go well, but most did.

I ended up getting two offers and went with a company that currently pays me a six figure salary doing something I love. Before Codesmith, I would have been surprised to get an offer of even half that. I’m still in disbelief that I was able to get to where I am now in such a short time.

Everything about Codesmith was life changing, from the friends I met to the experience of being there to my new career now. If you’re on the fence about this school just because you think it might be too good to be true, know that I felt the exact same way. I just pulled the trigger on it and it was the best decision I ever made.

I’m very happy with joining the Codesmith community. The skills I have developed during my time as a resident are incredibly invaluable, not just in the sense that you learn the latest technology stacks, but also for the fact that the pedagogy this program incorporates instills a refreshing approach to solving challenging problems. Residents traditionally put in between 80 to 100 hours worth of studying to synchronize with the rapid pace of the curriculum. It is advisable to enter the program with a strong foundation in Javascript fundamentals to lessen the overwhelming time spent on learning popular technologies and familiarizing oneself with the newest libraries that complement these technologies. You spend a month and a half concentrating on the core curriculum that prepares you with the essential skills to build a full-stack application. The remaining time is used to build a solo project, two smaller scale projects with teams, and one big project (that is usually a tool that may be used by other developers) with a team you will be collaborating closely with for several weeks. Lastly, you spend one week reinforcing all that you’ve learned with one more team-developed project.

There are very supportive engineering fellows that assist you in times of frustration or in times where you might feel a lack of complete understanding due to the exponential growth in the field of software and information technology, but the environment is conducive to helping each other learn. It is apparent that with the abundance of projects you build throughout your time, the engineers graduating from Codesmith are of an exceptional quality as they learn mostly through doing and not only from the instructors, who have a very solid understanding of the material that is taught in the program.

People from very diverse backgrounds, both technical and non-technical, decide to transition to a career in software engineering and all walks of life have an equal opportunity to excel because of the cooperative atmosphere that Codesmith maintains. If you are considering a engineering residency program, strongly consider Codesmith.

CodeSmith is remarkable. It transforms experienced (and less experienced) developers to senior engineers who are able to architect complex applications that scale. Perhaps its secret is teaching the ability to learn itself – engineers are taught how rapidly to pick-up new technologies and swiftly become experts.

After reading the positive reviews here before taking the course, I was skeptical since it sounded too good to be true, but it simply isn’t.  I’m beyond glad that I took the dive.

In terms of my background, I attended Williams College, and recently graduated in 2016; I’m from New York.  What I particularly appreciated about CodeSmith is the culture instilled from the top-down by its impressive CEO and founder, Will Sentance. Will is an Oxford and Harvard grad and has built a culture of critical thinking, hard work, and innovation, alongside fantastic collaboration and fun.

We were there 11hours a day and then once every two weeks they had "optional" hackathons after. I never stayed because I was tired and at the end they didn't let me graduate because as they told me I wasn't passionate enough. It was more like "we did a poor job teaching you by leaning on the Socratic method as an excuse to force you to figure out 95% yourself, and we aren't prepared to share the responsibility of failing you so well just blame you for not staying at our hackathons". They kicked out half of the cohort to boost their job placement numbers, yea maybe I wasn't ready to be a dev just yet, but you weren't ready to start a bootcamp.

Codesmith is a program for experienced developers in Playa Del Rey, Los Angeles. It is NOT for folks new to the software engineering space. If you have no background with programming, this school will NOT hold your hand and help you through the basics. On their website, they used to advertise that they were a school for 'experienced programmers' now they refrain from mentioning the type of student they accept instead focusing on what you'll get out of the program. This is left ambiguous for a reason. While there are plenty of programmers out there wanting more experience in web techologies like javascript, there are many more folks who are trying to make a career change and become software engineers. They are trying to appeal to both at the risk of the latter group of which I was a part when joining.

I first discovered Codesmith attending their JavaScript the Hard Parts events on Thursday nights. These are free, insightful meetups where you dive deeper into the basics of JavaScript and start getting a sense of how things you'll use everyday function 'under the hood'. These are very good sessions and I recommend folks attend especially since they are free.

I had no intention of joining but I was on the market for a code school and once I mentioned that, I was targeted via email by the CEO of the program who also teaches the Thursday night courses. I was convinced that even though it was billed for experienced engineers, I would do well in the program as I learned quickly and was a great culture fit.

I joined and am very unhappy with the results. Here's why.

1) Teaching Style - The program claims to abide by the "Oxford University" style of teaching. This seems to be code for 'very little teaching with problem sets for you to figure concepts out on your own.' You work through problem sets and follow the instructions which include reading documentation for a product you've never heard of and figure out it's purpose and how to use it. To an experienced programmer, this is somehwat normal. You are introduced to new technologies all the time, and therefore, for experienced programmers, this style of teaching makes sense. But for people brand new to the space, this is not only frustrating but time consuming - a luxury which one simply does not have in this 3 month intense environment.

Every 2 days you focus on a new aspect of programming with javascript and it leaves you very little time to fully grasp what you're learning.

Daily Schedule:

- Come in and code for an hour (practice algorithm problems that are common for job interviews)

- After that, you either go to a 30-45 min lecture OR you jump into the work for the day for about 2 hours

- If you started with lecture, you work on the work for the day. If you started with work on a new subject, you go to a 30-45 min lecture. You spend the first 10 minutes talking about how difficult it was and the rest of the time rushing through what the heck you just did and a high level overview of how it works.

- back to work until lunch

- lunch break

- another 30-45 min lecture OR you continue working on what you did that morning

- Stay until at least 11pm, but usually closer to 1am trying to figure things out on your own or with some friends in your cohort

2) Trust the Process Mentality - When things weren't going well, I made it a point to request feedback on my work and find out where I stood because there was no formal feedback along the way. When I expressed my doubts about my fit for the program, I was brought into a room to speak with the COO and a teacher. They gave me two options, defer to a later cohort or stick it out because I was "doing just fine" I just needed to 'trust the process'. The idea of letting me leave beacuse this was not the place for me was something I had to bring up and the conversation was diverted away from that. I have training in sales and this is a classic sales mentality which, looking back, is really sad. I genuinely believed my best interest was in mind at the time, but I am very skeptical now. In terms of my learning, I was not doing well at all - they just had no accurate way of scoring or measuring my progress. 

I went through this side discusison, 'trust the process' loop 3 times throughout my time there (the latter 2 meetings included the CEO) and I never felt good about the outcome. I should have left early on but there really is a serious level of coersion, intimidation and manipulation that goes on in these meetings.

3) Senior Project - During the latter 6 weeks of the course you work on an open source developer tool. You're assigned to a group of your peers (usually 3-4 people), you all ideate on something that will be impactful and relevant for developers to use, you pitch your ideas to the CEO. If you're interested in VR, your project likely will not be accepted - they don't like VR projects. Very few have gotten through but they believe the technology isn't impressive enough right now. It's all about how your project will look to potential employers -- and potential partners of Codesmith. This process is about you but it's also very much about the school.

My group of 3 had a slew of issues but the biggest was that we were of vastly differing skill levels and some other members did not feel it was their job to teach me things - which I can agree with. They paid just as much as I did and did not deserve to have to spend hours every day teaching me things I should've learned in the weeks prior. The staff was not very helpful, in fact, my partners were more knowledgeable than most of them. This made asking for help seem futile and no project group really worked very closely with their assigned staff mentors.

4) What I have to offer now - I left Codesmith feeling really bad about the investment but willing to work on my own to get my skills to a point where I could get hired. Unfortunately, I've found that not only am I extremely stressed but I also just don't have much to show for the massive amount of time and money I spent on this. 

I'm considering legal action due to the misrepresentation of the product and the manipulation involved during my time there.

TL;DR:

Pros:

- The culture is fun, they like to party and play ping pong

- The staff are generally very nice people

- They tend to find really nice, smart and driven students. If I left with anything, it's a solid group of friends. I only saw one person asked to leave and it was definitely warranted. Strange situation.

- Solid program for current engineers looking to add something interesting to their portfolio and take a deeper dive into Javascript and a few other web technologies

Cons:

- Teaching style is poor. It's barely teaching.

Ex. The machine learning/python section basically did not happen. The teacher literally rambled and sped through slideshows of both basic and complex machine learning concepts, asking every 3rd slide "got it?" to which we all just remained silent because we were so lost, we couldn't formulate relevant questions other than "no. don't got it. what are you talking about?".

- Misleading/Manipulating - The CEO is a great guy but comes off as super salesy. You can't help but feel like you're being conned, and, like any good con artist, you also feel bad about questioning the transaction. This is standard manipulation and it's being practiced at a large scale here. Be careful.

There are quite a few students who had a negative experience and the common denominator among them is that they had 0 or very little programming experience prior to joining. 

I have a unique situation. When I applied to Codesmith, I had taken some online courses and applied to jobs, but wasn't getting results.

The first few weeks of Codesmith, we reviewed a lot of JavaScript fundamentals. During that time, 2 companies reached out to interview me. During my lunch, I went to the interviews.

I did so well that many of the interviewers said they've interviewed developers with 5 or 6 years of experience, but never seen them get so many of the questions right.

A lot of that was due to Codesmith's great way of teaching Comp Sci fundamentals that many bootcamps don't teach.

A lot of my success in these interviews is due to Codesmith. Thanks!

At times, you'll feel like you want to give up. You think you're not good enough. Codesmith is not those "feels good" bootcamps that's all over the place. The first part of the program teaches the fundamentals of JavaScript. Coming from a PHP background, little did I know that JavaScript has such differences! It's a language with so many twists, and Codesmith explained it thoroughly and clearly.

The most intense part about the program, IMO, is the brainstorming week to come up with ideas for our senior project. This segment exposes us to vast amount of web technologies and trends. This gave us perspective on how big the web dev ecosystem is and what's possible.

Overall, I like the method and approach Codesmith is using, it trains people to be autonomous problem solving engineers, a skill employers value greatly.

I made a huge gamble to choose Codesmith over other coding programs in the Bay Area. Roughly 9 months later after "graduating", I'm in massive and crippling debt with very little to show for it. My portfolio can't even make it past any recruiter.  I'm no longer even looking for a developer job and I'm working minimum wage to make ends meet.  

The curriculum may have changed since I finished but at the time Redux was not taught; you absolutely can not call yourself a React developer unless you know either Redux or Flux architecture. 

The little interview practice we had was not helpful because we gave it to eachother. How are we supposed to know what to ask for and what to avoid if we've never interviewed and hired actual candidates?

I'm in the Bay Area; companies, start-ups don't care about Codesmith and there is a non-existant network here. Will told me that 25% of hiring partners were from the Bay Area but they all seemed to have failed to show up for my hiring day. That career network and React was why I decided to study at Codesmith.

However, it took nagging and months until I was finally connected to 3 companies; 1 of which never called despite organizing a meeting and the other required that I have experience in RoR while keeping me on a thread for nearly 2 months.

I don't even qualify for Internships or jr. positions apparently and most of the advice I was given did not help me; in fact, it seemed to have done more harm than good because nearly all recruiters found my resume misleading and so I never made it past that round. Again, we were providing resume feedback to eachother and received little professional resume tailoring.

I think I actually only had 4 technical phone screens and 1 on-site in my entire search.

Take it with a grain of salt when you hear success stories of people who graduated from here. It's a good program only if you're looking to relocate to LA where the bar is significantly lower. 

Codesmith has a relatively wide range of individuals coming through the program. They range in age everywhere from twentysomethings to fifty or older, it's a really diverse program. I came when I was 18, straight out of high school, in lieu of going to college. When I was first considering going to Codesmith, I never thought I would leave with such a strong emotional connection to the people I met there, and such a feeling of community and connection that Codesmith has given me. Codesmith also has a universal reputation for producing really high quality, professional engineers- not just bootcamp grads- and I can honestly attest to the fact that I've grown more and learned more in the last three months than I ever did in any whole year of traditional schooling. Now I'm confident in calling myself an authority on frontend javascript development and state management, and that's something that people I know who went to other bootcamps like GE and Hack Reactor just can't say.

I attended Codesmith at the end of 2017, and it's been the biggest game changer in my quest to switch careers. Codesmith offers a valuable, hands-on learning environment that focuses on teaching students how to become better pair-programmers, communicators and self learners -- something that's almost impossible to find if you're trying to learn software engineering on your own. But be forewarned that the program is difficult and will stretch your limits; there's minimal hand holding, and imposter syndrome can be a very real thing. With that said, if you attend with these expectations, you'll be able to graduate as a stronger researcher and problem solver. And while I needed more time to brush up on some core concepts after I had graduated, I found that I was better equipped to learn more efficiently because of Codesmith. Ultimately, I was able to land a software engineering job within three months of graduating -- so the entire experience was absolutely worth it. If you're looking for a software engineering residency that offers great culture and the opportunity to develop cutting-edge projects that you're passionate about, Codesmith is it.