u/michaelnovati replied · · edited ★ FEATURED
Here is my 2cents having worked with a number of Codesmith grads anywhere from during Codesmith, immediately after, or down the road, for a variety of goals, from just wanting to get a job, to wanting to get a top tier job.
Overall Codesmith is a great program, an incredible community of amazing people. Every one I've worked with is professional, hard working, and great.
It's great for people who are super ambitious and work hard but it's not magic. So I try to help people choose to go for the right reasons and look beyond the on paper results.
I have the same 3 issues you do and comment about them often.
I also have a different perspective with these issues because as an industry engineer who knows literally several thousand other FAANG/ex-FAANG engineers, the dozen or so peers I've asked have had reactions to Codesmith resumes ranges from "omg that's sketchy" to "this is blatant fraud, wtf". I think this is also why almost every single TA, and full time instructor went to Codesmith itself. Their approach is to get alumni into great jobs over a number of years so that they can then legitimize the training and maybe change perception.
1. Very few people list it. I did a dated audit a year ago and jt was ballparking 10% of people. If they squeeze by with the ambiguous OSP experience as their core resume focus, they don't want to be found out later on during the job and they just leave it off. Some people actually add it back after a few years for future job hunts. It's something to be proud of completing!! You can always include it if you want, no one stops you, you'll just find peers who exclude it and exaggerate getting $130K jobs while you can't get interviews feel even more depressing.
NOTE a small number of people are super honest on their resume and get fairly good jobs. This is an edge case but it happens and I suspect some people will jump on this comment pointing these cases out as a counter point to my argument.
2. Yes. I audited 200 a year ago and the vast majority included ambitious "jobs" and the average work experience was 6 months (when the project is about 4 weeks). Codesmith tells you to make it look like work, BUT TO ADD "developed under Open Source Labs" at the bottom. No one industry has any idea what that is, which is why it's kind of a trick. A number of people I know put it in the company name. After I've complained for months and months on here about this, I noticed they are adding "Open Source" to the company names.
The problem here is that most real open source work is PAID and people work at companies supporting the open source work. So simply saying something is open source, in the eyes of industry people, doesn't mean it's not a job.
They also were running OSLabs for years as unregistered entity and recently formed a charity under the name. I'm going to be very curious to see where that goes because there are very clear laws about using a charity resource to benefit a private corporation.The charity has written letters of reference that I've read saying people were a "software engineer on X" there (uncapitalized) so this is definitely on my radar... they seem to be going all in on this approach.
3. Very complex answer.
a. A number of people have experience already and may qualify for slightly higher jobs
b. A number of people exaggerate so much and borderline lie to qualify for more experienced roles at non top tier companies
c. Codesmith bases "mid level" and "senior" based on job titles and compensation at not top tier companies but the compensation ends up being entry level FAANG equivalent. A senior engineer at Capital One is paid like an entry level Google engineer.
d. You can't get a non entry level FAANG role with zero experience unless you mislead them in some way. They have hiring manager interviews solely focused on gauging the responsibilities of your previous work experiences to pattern match against the levels at those companies. So without any real engineering experience, you can't pattern match into a non-entry level role.
e. Their outcomes advisor continuously states in lecture that taking a junior job is the worst thing you can do for your career, even at a FAANG company. So people get drilled into this idea of only taking mid level and senior roles.
f. There is some confusion: Google starts their engineers at level 3 but that is entry level, Amazon starts them at 4, which is entry level. These systems are based on their internal HR leveling compared to non-engineering jobs and have nothing to do with seniority. But a number of people think that being a level 3 engineer at Google means that they are a senior engineer because level 1 and 2 must be junior and mid-level but that is not true.
Happy to answer more questions about any of these. I expect a bunch of people to comment and counter these points and look forward to healthy discussion.