Why I signed up for Codesmith… quality open source project experience! Spearmint.js

I have some neutral comments on the project-as-work-experience debate. I was a E7-level Engineer at Facebook for 8 years, interviewed hundreds of people, read thousands of resumes. I'm co-founder of Formation.dev now which does mentoring and coaching and I have worked with many Codesmith grads and alumni and am familiar with their program. We also have recruiters at Formation with 10 years recruiting experience at Facebook as well who review Codesmith applicants to Formation. We also hired a Codesmith alumni who we worked with at Formation as well. 1. If you put something on your resume that says Software Engineer for a "company", where the company is an open source project, it's a little grey area/pushing the limits of what people deem acceptable at top-tier companies. Here's an example of a prolific open source contributor and what their resume looks like with things clearly labelled: [https://www.linkedin.com/in/feross/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/feross/). 2. You will absolutely get way more interviews by framing the experience this way. Having "Software Engineer" work experience on your resume will drastically increase your application -> interview conversion. 3. However, you will not pass top tier behavioral/experience interviews. Every Codesmith alumni I've interviewed within minutes it's clear that the experience was not a paid engineering role. Questions like "who is your manager?" "what was the hiring process like?" "why do you want to leave your job" "what's the development process like", "what do the other employees do at the company", "how many engineers are on the team", "how much funding does this company have" don't have sufficient answers typically. 4. You are at risk of failing a background check if you didn't tell the truth about this experience during the interviews. If you have other students or an instructor lie about your involvement and say you were a Software Engineer, it's not a means to an end to get your foot in the door, but a lie that will loom over your shoulder. If the company thought you had work experience and they find out it was unpaid open source contributions, then you might get an offer rescinded. So my TLDR; if you are aiming for a foot-in-the-door role at a smaller company, I think this kind of framing of experience might be a means to an end type thing. If you are trying to get into a top tier company, it likely won't work and will make the company more likely to filter out that project on future resumes. Would love to discuss this more if people have opinions or thoughts!