Analysis of 52 most recent Codesmith offers LinkedIns and trends on who is getting a job right now and why. Summary: an average of 11.7 months of experience claimed for 3 week long projects (lacking evidence of additional time spent). Majority claimed to have prior SWE-adjacent experience.

Hi, you are touching on the more real aspect of this that I didn't go into at all and have a strong appreciation of. I work with a ton of people.sho struggle with similar problems. First off, I wouldn't worry individual about doing this because no one really cares on am individual basis. Fraud requires harm to be done so if you got a job and didn't perform, that would be s problem. The tiny amount of harm you cause on society by getting a leg up is heard to measure too. More practically what you see is companies raise the requirements bar for everyone and completely dismiss all open source work and bootcamps. One motivation for this post is I'm working with someone who has about 10 significant commits to a very large open source project, several parts of a sizable feature, and they are struggling to get noticed because they otherwise have no experience and their resume looks less legit than the typical Codesmith one that has carefully constructed bullet points making things like adding a test case sound like groundbreaking work. They don't want to stretch the truth of what they did because it was part of a legit project with a developer community and norms. It's very discouraging for this person and feels unfair and this kind of thing drives people to embellish to even get noticed. What should you do? Well this is fundamentals the market and lack of entry level roles and you can't make up those jobs. Most bootcamps are struggling as a result and Codesmith is too (based on both enrollment trends and outcomes over 2022 to 2023). My biggest advice is consistency and patience. Give yourself a ton of time and give every job application a solid chance (ping engineers there and recruiters) and eventually something will work, it just might take a long time.