u/michaelnovati replied · ★ FEATURED
The title is a overgeneralizing. Open Source projects vs Short Internship is different than Codesmith's projects vs Rithm's internships.
The one liners are that Codesmith's projects are curated learning experiences branded as work-like experience. Rithm's internships are real work, but tends to be understated on resumes, and people get hit or miss experience.
I'll do a quick Pros and Cons:
Codesmith's Open Source Projects:
PROS:
* They have optimized the heck out of talking about these projects. They look like real work on a resume, they have a lot of buzzwords, it's very effective for getting interviews.
* The projects are almost all tools, which is a great thing to work on in general because it's solving a developer problem.
CONS:
* The actual projects, people spend 6 weeks on and most people commit only a few commits over 2-3 weeks.
* Not many people use the projects outside of Codesmith (they don't have any external bugs, pull requests, discussion etc...) so all the work is determined by the people working on it.
* Peer code review instead of people with a lot of industry experience.
* No PMs, Designers, TPMs, customer support, etc.... which you'll encounter on real teams.
Rithm Internships:
PROS:
* You can to put, undisputed real experience on your resume
* Having real users is the best way to build intuition that will help you on the job
CONS:
* Rithm doesn't do as good of a job as Codesmith in how to TALK ABOUT these internships
* The companies tend to be smaller and while you get to work on something people use, and you might get designers and PMs, the focus of these people in on their products and not training you. So I don't know if people get the most out of these internships as a skill building experience.
* You might be working on messy code and incomplete requirements, rather than a perfectly crafted experience.