Do Not Go To Codesmith

Me, I'm a non-anonymous member who has been here for 2 years and comment a lot. My background is I worked at Meta from 2009 to 2017, grew from new grad to E7 principal engineer, did 400+ interviews of all shapes and sizes, participated in calibrations and interview offer panels, and was the number one code committer at the company when I left. After I took a break, I joined my partners company which helps engineers with experience level up their careers. We work with a lot of bootcamp grads later on in their careers so I know about and hear about just about everything with bootcamps. Codesmith caught my interest about 2 years ago when I was interviewing people to join Formation for leveling up and they had these really weird jobs at "OSLabs" that made no sense, and were being nervously vague about them in the interviews. I then went down the rabbit hole and found out that OSLabs was (at the time) just an unregistered name under Codesmith and that over 2/3 of grads were doing this strategy of making their 3 week long project look like months of work experience. I'm non-anonymous because this industry is full of miscommunication and I see so many people easily swayed one way or the other without solid reasoning or evidence. So I'm hear completely authentically, with one Reddit account, to give my 2 cents on things in here and try to help people get going on the right foot. People ask why I care so much and how I can be so all over the place in here without "living on Reddit 24/7" and I'm equally transparent about all of that: 1. I work with a lot of bootcamp grads in their 2nd, 3rd, 4th job hunts, so it's good for my company if I gave people truly valuable and thoughtful advice years ago and they remember me down the road when they might need more help. 2. I'm extremely responsive and fast. I hardly spend any time on Reddit, I spend at most 5 mins and usually 1-3 mins on comments, often full of typos from my phone responding to push notifications. 3. I started working at my company to help people, I haven't got a salary for the first 4 years and still don't, and I see a lot of "low hanging fruit" to help people here with seconds or minutes of my time asynchronously and I feel it's a net positive in doing so.