Does codesmith seriously get people "senior" level SWE roles with no prior experience?

What role was this? Was it SDE I, SDE II, SDE III, or was it a tangential role? a contractor role, a frontend role, a solutions role? Amazon's promotion cycle doesn't allow stuff like that so this would have to be some kind of special case signed off by a director or VP to correct for a hiring error. The number of times I've seen this EVER for super legit reasons, I can count on one hand, and those people quickly became industry renowned engineers. So even if this happened where someone went from SDE II to SDE III in 3 months it would be absurdly rare and not representative of any program. I asked a couple of Senior Managers at Amazon and no one thinks this is possible on their teams, so it's definitely a very weird case. Every statement like this that I've looked into has been some kind of caveat or weird case that was not as people believed it to be. For example, the $400K Netflix offer Eric K talks about was not a SWE role and was a role the person had 8 years of senior/staff experience doing already... they probably should have gotten a much better offer and going to Codesmith was probably a non optimal decisions.