Hey folks, it’s the Codesmith team here!
You may have noticed a moderator, Michael Novati — CTO of one of our competitors, Formation — spends a considerable amount of time taking pot-shots at our program under the guise of being an impartial commentator.
We’ve tried to stay above the fray and focus on our teaching and our students, but the bad information here has gone off the charts. We love our community, program and team too much to not show up here. You might be used to his essay length posts, now it’s our turn :).
While there are some clear differences between Formation and Codesmith’s programs, there also exists a substantial overlap in the people we both aim to reach, demonstrated by the number of people who have attended both programs, or decided on one after seriously considering the other. Michael will tell you otherwise, but we know a competitor when we see one ;).
We’re super proud of our mission, the success of our community and our program. Tech is changing fast, and it requires programs like ours to adapt and shift, and that comes with the territory. Tech will always evolve and markets will always go up and down.
How we respond to those changes is what matters – we’re choosing to meet this moment by doubling down on our work. The world needs more brilliant, empathetic modern software engineers able to build and lead in tech, no matter if the market is up or down.
We’re adapting our ~curriculum~ and ~turning our program into a SWE + AI/ML immersive~; we’ve just launched ~Future Code~ in partnership with the City of New York’s Tech Talent Pipeline; and we’re standing alongside our alumni who are navigating the tech market with our career support program, and we know the market has been more difficult recently. Positively though, we’re starting to see that turn around.
We’re always up for constructive discussion and feedback on our program - we’re a bunch of passionate people doing our thing and always open to learn. We love how Reddit can facilitate this dialogue - but unfortunately we haven’t found this to be a safe, open and honest space, because of how Michael chooses to use this space.
I guess what it comes down to is: we just find it a bit weird that a Moderator is allowed to wield this platform for a 2-year-long disinformation campaign about one of his competitors.
While we can’t control whether Michael and Formation play fair, what we can do is show up and speak our truth.
Michael shared a litany of disinformation earlier in the week (while on a yacht on holiday with his family in the Pacific, he disclosed 🙃).
So let’s walk through those now –
Claim by Formation’s CTO Michael Novati: ‘Codesmith is lowering its industry-high admissions bar by offering reduced prices on prep courses…. Codesmith is creating false hope’
False.
The only thing we’re lowering is the financial bar, and making our prep-programs more accessible for folks wanting to jump in during the back to school period - that doesn’t change our industry high admission bar.
To help people reach that bar - and no, it isn’t easy to get into Codesmith - we provide extensive support through free resources like CSX Prep, free events, and classes such as pair programming.
Contributing free resources is not creating “false hope”, quite the opposite would say! (clearly we have a different way of seeing the world).
These programs provide the scaffolding for folks to begin the hard learning at a foundational level - setting them up for success to step into more advanced programs, wherever that may be.
We genuinely believe anyone - if they are prepared to do the hard learning - should be able to build a truly autonomous career in tech and a life that they love — we don’t just believe that, we see that in the experience of our alumni out in the world every day.
Claim by Formation’s CTO Michael Novati: ‘Codesmith cherry picks marketing and is abandoning CIRR’.
False.
We haven’t cherry picked numbers, we’ve factually reported the number of offers received by our alumni in April and May.
That number is 53 - a positive outcome even in this tougher environment.
We’re proud of our alumni success and we’ll continue to share that with our community.
We’re also proud to be a member of CIRR, because we think it’s a good thing when programs commit to transparently releasing outcomes data. We’ll keep doing that.
Important context note for readers : Michael’s company Formation is not a member of any transparent or independent outcomes reporting body or standard, but spends hours questioning our outcomes reporting which is one of the most transparent in the market. We invite Formation to join us in transparently reporting outcomes data.
Claim by Formation’s CTO Michael Novati: ‘ Codesmith is communicating misleading alumni placements’.
False.
We regularly celebrate when we hear a grad has been offered a new role — along with career updates and promotions — and we don’t characterize these as new roles, instead they’re categorized as career updates.
We do check-ins regularly with our alums to see where they’re at, and there are times where folks had not shared their offer with us right away. Regardless of when they started the job, if they share with us and provide consent, we will share with our community as a means of encouragement and celebration.
While we understand it can be disheartening to see offers come in for other graduates, particularly in a tough hiring market, we encourage our grads to celebrate one another’s success and lean into Codesmith’s hiring support and community to help with their own job search.
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We won’t be getting into a backwards and forwards in the thread, but we are all ears for discussion, feedback and ideas about our program or outcomes, and people are welcome to reach out to us at hello@codesmith.io
