u/Faero_ wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
I see where you're coming from, but I definitely don't agree that the OSLabs contributions don't qualify as production level code. It's true that for many of the students this is their first experience writing for production and so of course they aren't going to always follow bes
u/michaelnovati replied · ★ FEATURED
So for a lot of the people I've worked with - they are awesome, hardworking, driven, and those qualities lead to their success on the job. In some cases that gets misdirected to something Codesmith did - and perhaps confidence-building-as-a-product is the product you are paying for with Codesmith - and it's worth it.
That problem you talk about is a fantastic problem to work through and great in an interview, 100%. That doesn't mean it's "production level" though. I had several notable personal projects I talked about in interviews that were super impressive but the code was not "production quality code". One "project" we actually incorporated a company and it was featured on TechCrunch - and even the code was not "production level", it was a group project with tens of thousands of lines of code, had a ton of fascinating product, growth, and technical problems, and it got me a job at Facebook because we had interesting API integration.
So maybe we're just no on the same page as what "production level code" means.
At the top tier companies, your level is based on your scope of responsibility and experience at scale that you have delivered impact at, and not your coding abilities. That project above got me an "entry level role" because only a few thousand people used it. I didn't see how to scale growth, product, and all of the skills needed to work on things at the Facebook-level of scale. I learned those quickly, was promoted to Mid Level in 3 months and Senior in another 12.
Was a "mid level" engineer the whole time because of my "mid level production project" - no. I needed a few months of Facebook and working 24/7 to fill in the skills I was missing to be a mid level engineer.
I have this debate a lot on Reddit, because I'm talking from a FAANG-level point of view and things are different at most non-tech companies or the contractor roles that a lot of people get "mid level jobs" at after Codesmith. A "Senior Associate" at Capital One is an entry level equivalent FAANG job for example. I map to the FAANG-levels, but a lot of Codesmith people map to the Capital One-ish levels and call those entry level FAANG jobs "mid level" jobs.
At the end of the day it's not really relevant which words we choose - as long as we understand what we're talking about. Job titles are largely irrelevant, and compensation is complicated and can't be summarized in a single number on here.