One of the “projects” of my bootcamp is to post positive reviews for them online?

I work with many ex-FAANG recruiters directly on my team and many more in the industry. I also did 400+ interviews at Facebook, and work with colleagues that have thousands. So I can give my view, which is obviously biased by that background, but is hopefully useful for that perspective. 1. Many recruiters do immediately ignore bootcamp grads. But the reason is the same as why they ignore a lot of COMP SCI GRADS resumes. They all look the same and they can't figure out how to differentiate them. We would go to a recruiting fair at a college and we would get 300 internship resumes, having to choose 20 people for interviews then next week. All the resumes have the SAME projects, SAME courses, so what do you do? How would you differentiate. There's no time to go through everyone's portfolios. So you look for referrals, look for past internship experience, look for grades sometimes when all else fails. It's not easy at all. When Formation posts new job postings, we similarly get hundreds of bootcamps grads all applying. Codesmith resumes might not say "Codesmith" but they all look the same. 2. 100%, Facebook interviews I did and observed and trained people on, you would be "exposed" within 5 minutes and be vetted based on your skills. Unfortunately though Facebook almost exclusively hires entry level via the internship program, and you absolutely cannot get mid level full blown SWE roles there with zero experience. Amazon is the most approachable right now, and they don't care that much about background. In fact, most FAANG companies don't actually care about your background and they care about your fundamental skills bar. 3. Where the alleged "deception" comes into play is in the "2nd/3rd tier" companies, which are all the non-FAANG level tech companies, and the non-tech large companies. This is where Codesmith students are getting "mid level" jobs, sometimes with no experience. Some of the companies are not tech-centered, and might not do the vetting you think they should. Some companies have lower bars for titles.... "Vice President" at Goldman Sachs translates to "E5 Senior" at Facebook so you can imagine what kinds of titles below that are not actually the canonical FAANG mid-level. Most of these companies have a hard time finding strong engineers, so they lower the bar for entry level and spend more time training them... so their "mid-level" might be considered entry level at strong companies. 4. Finally, I've seen some Codesmith students use the number in their title as a sign of seniority. Software Engineer Level 3 at Google is the lowest level and what they call "entry level" or "early career". Because it has a 3 in the title, doesn't mean it's the 3rd level of engineers and is a senior or mid-level role. Codesmith (the company) used to market that 70% of people get mid level roles and 25% get senior roles (this has since been removed from marketing) so they don't correct people. If I were Codesmith, I would be in a tough place because I would be so much better than most bootcamps, I would want me marketing to stand out and show that. So I think I understand this doesn't come from bad intentions.