u/Chanceawrapper wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
If you are a person that needs a lot of hands-on instruction, I agree Codesmith is not the place. I found it totally adequate and I generally think doing it yourself is a better way to learn. Sounds about right, probably put the project as open source 3 months or something like
u/michaelnovati replied · ★ FEATURED
So something a lot of people don't realize is that Open Source !== free/unpaid work. Look at this resume: [https://www.linkedin.com/in/feross](https://www.linkedin.com/in/feross)
People who contribute legit open source work often work at companies who pay them to do it, or they have some kind of grants/support to do it.
People who do one off contributions here or there, or on the side, do not list that as "work experience" and they do not list it for 4X longer time then they spent on it. So you lied on your resume and you might not even realize you did.
Amazon is the most gamable FAANG but you are doing it wrong by trying to game the interviews. My entire life now is teaching people how to be better engineers and helping them pass interviews by investing in becoming better engineers instead of investing in gamifying the interview.
I know all the Codesmith alums at Amazon and Capital One basically cheat their way through the interview by sharing questions with each other and it can work, but your just wasting your time. You could spend that same time becoming a better engineer and passing everyones interview and performing better on the job, but Codesmith doesn't know how to do that, so you get taught to do LC practice all day long without feedback on your thought process.