Question for Codesmith students and Alumni: What percentage of your cohort already had professional experience?

this is correct. it's very hard to find alumni but because of the tremendous structure that Codesmith has in its resume guidance it is absolutely possible to find people. The most consistent way is to look for their open source project announcements which are blasted pretty much everywhere and then you can collect a list of people's LinkedIns. Your question is probably better for CSX Slack because there are a lot of alumni there. The downside is that it's mostly successful alumni who continue to participate in the community and people who failed out of Codesmith tend to disappear quietly and they don't complain because they put the blame on themselves and I found anecdotally that those people are more often people who don't have any kind of professional experience, even outside of engineering.