u/ThrowawayVainilla wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Sure. But it honestly wasn't that difficult for me to figure out. If someone has an Open Source product as their main software engineering experience or ANY mention of OS-labs... that's a pretty telltale sign of Codesmith. Unless there's something I'm missing that you're trying
u/michaelnovati replied · ★ FEATURED
Yeah, I'm playing devil's advocate and I agree it's not THAT hard.
Practically speaking, people advertise their projects loud and clear, with their GitHubs and LinkedIns and you can grab all the contributors from os-labs repos and you can spend a few hours identifying all Codesmith alumni.
I did this like a year or two ago now - after noticing patterns in people applying for Formation - and audited 200-ish people and the vast majority had no signs of Codesmith on their profiles, had 6+ months of SWE experience at their "projects", and contributed 2-3 commits over 2-3 weeks to their projects. I dumped all the data somewhere but I have a ton of real work to do but someone who really wants to see how people do could reproduce this easily.