Feels about right

Good question! For people who have no or little experience we give them tasks and bugs to fix in a forked production codebase. You get assigned tickets, fix issues, send PRs, get code review from industry engineers, complete your tasks, etc... This is important for helping people ramp up in an unfamiliar codebase, follow a real engineering process. The goal of this work is to help you hit the ground running on your job and NOT to build a portfolio. Sometimes Fellows will list their contributions here as project work on their resume and use it for examples in interviews, but it's not something you can put on a website and show off. You obviously also do all the fundamentals (e.g. DS&A), resume, behavioral, job hunting practice that is the bread and butter of all engineers. We've gotten feedback that people think the above task and bug fix practice should actually be supported more for resumes. Specifically many direct bootcamp grads who say it's much more valuable than their bootcamp projects and they spent more time on it than they did their projects. For example, Codesmith OSP's are \~3 weeks of coding and Codesmith helps people get every single last drop out of those projects. We could adjust our practice (typically is 1 to 2 months of this, completely adaptive to each person though) to be something much more "flashy" on a resume. But really we're focused on the skills. What drives us it hyper focus on getting your fundamental skills to the top tier bar, and not on any trendy framework or language that you want to leverage short term to get a leg up. We give you ten legs up by helping you become a stronger problem solver and generalist that has impact in the world long term. I should add that most top tier companies don't evaluate any practical skills and they don't expect entry level engineers to have any substantial experience. So the best of the best problem solvers openly walk into these interviews telling everyone they have no experience, and passing regardless because of their abilities. This is one of the reasons I'm so tough on the bootcamps who have a strategy of telling their graduates that they are more senior then they are and to advertise that, and drill it home, leading those people to exaggerate. This approach can work for pretty good (but not best) companies and the less good companies, but for the top tier companies it's the opposite of what you should do. Don't equal high salaries with how good a company is either :D