u/orangecoloredorange wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Awesome points!! Can you elaborate on your thought #6? What’s the fake it til you make it work experience?
u/michaelnovati replied · · edited ★ FEATURED
Oh sorry I've been talking about this elsewhere over time.
SUMMARY: I audited over 200 Codesmith alumni, documenting LinkedIn and GitHub commits, and noting the number of years of "work experience" as a "software engineer" that was claimed at the open source groups projects Codesmith runs, like Reactime and Spearmint. I have a large spreadsheet, but the majority of people claimed 6 to 18 months of "work experience" but commited 2-6 commits over 1-3 weeks on the projects (my understanding is this project is a 6 week unit in the course). The most extreme being someone that claimed 6 months of work experience and their only commits to the project were changing an image file and updating a README. In addition, these projects have no activity outside of Codesmith, no issues or feature requests from outside Codesmith, and it's not clear any of the tools or projects are used outside of Codesmith.
Don't get me wrong. The projects are great ideas, building tools is a great idea. It's just the way they are portrayed is a little grey area.