“Experience”

I have zero affiliation with Codesmith but I know a lot about them and have done a deep dive into 200 alumni profiles. I posted a similar comment in the coding bootcamp sub reddit recently and am reposting here. My story: I worked at Facebook in California from 2009 to 2017, straight out of school from Canada all the way to E7 principal engineer in 5 years. Company grew from about 200 engineers to 10,000 engineers and I did a ton of interviews, helped grow people's careers and really saw pretty much people of every background imaginable at/interview at Facebook... so after leaving, took a break and started coaching and training (potential bias disclosure: this is paid training) to help people from non-traditional backgrounds... so I work with a lot of bootcamp grads and learned a lot about how the top bootcamps work. **Codesmith:** I do know a little more than most programs.... fun story time! I've interviewed many Codesmith alumni, but at first I didn't realize they went to Codesmith at the time because of the way Codesmith recommends people to hide it on their resumes and exaggerate their project work as work experience. Focusing on people from non-traditional backgrounds, I'm used to seeing imperfect answers to questions when talking about work experience and I give people more "wiggle room" than in a real FB-type interview, so while I noticed many holes in the stories, I didn't dig too much deeper at the time. Then one day I interviewed someone whose work experience really made no sense at all. I asked what non-engineers they worked with, how they found this company, what their manager was like, what kind of feedback they got from their manager, what the code review process was like, what the deployment process was like, an example production bug that you caused, how they could improve, what the company goals were etc... and the answers kept changing entirely from 'this was more like an unpaid internship' to 'I wasn't actually hired, my friend Philip Troutman was my manager and brought me on' (after struggling to remember their friend's name) to 'I don't know what the company goals were we made no money' to 'but we had 5 people on the team working without any goals'. It became evident very quickly that this wasn't a real company and that's when the pattern clicked.... because I had seen similar vague answers with a few people in the past. The other people were at least consistent, so while the experience was flagged as very weak with lots of holes, it wasn't to the point of "this is definitely a fake company" like it was this time. I realized that two other people had "incubated under open source labs" at the bottom of their work description or on the "company" LinkedIn page. And within minutes it all led to this entity "Open Source Labs" (that has no evidence of being a real entity) that is run by Codesmith. I went down a crazy rabbit hole gathering all kinds of data and analyzing the open source projects that Codesmith has. I'm very fast and it took about 2 hours one Sunday afternoon. I logged alumni LinkedIns and GitHubs for \~200 people listed on these open source project individual websites. I found about 2/3 of people listed 6+ months of work experience on their LinkedIns as "Software Engineers" but when looking at their GitHub contributions to the projects, committed on average over 2-3 week long periods only. All of these projects had the exact same spiky patterns, it was crazy, over and over and over and over again, like this: [https://github.com/open-source-labs/spearmint/graphs/contributors](https://github.com/open-source-labs/spearmint/graphs/contributors) and [https://github.com/open-source-labs/reactime/graphs/contributors](https://github.com/open-source-labs/reactime/graphs/contributors) and over and over people listing months and sometimes years of experience on their LinkedIns. I then started talking to people to learn more about these group projects branded as real companies. It was like such a common pattern. And Open Source Labs seems like a giant front (that is not a real business entity I could find) intentionally created to seem more legitimate than if Codesmith ran these projects. I'm a very middle of the road person so I'm just fascinated by this and want to learn more about why it is the way it is from all sides over a longer period of time, hence why I keep them on my radar. At the end of the day their outcomes are strong on paper and a lot of people love them, so clearly there is a lot of controversy on this issue.