What is the job searching portion of Codesmith like?

I've interviewed Codesmith grads and my background is having done over 400 interviews at Facebook. This is entirely my personal opinion, but these were some of the most awkward interviews I've ever had yeah. This is the summary of one, not a direct quote but a summary of the conversation. NOTE: the job I reference was the 3 week long Codesmith project presented as 8 months of experience on resume. Me: "So what is this recent job you've had for 8 months and why did you leave before a year" "I worked on X, it's a scalable developer tool to visualize and debug Y" Me: "So why did you leave" "The team kind of wound down" Me: "How big was the team" "Its like a startup sized of 5 people" Me: "So what non engineers did you work with, like designers, PMs, marketing, etc... "The team was only engineers, it's a developer tool for improving developer efficiency" Me: "Interesting, so how did they get funding and pay you, like what is the business model" "Oh this was incubated by OSLabs" Me: "What was the business model though, like how did it work" "Oh it's a developer tool, it wasn't making any money" Me: "I don't follow, like what was the eventual business model, or business idea to eventually make money" "I can talk about a challenge we had, we migrated the entire codebase to Y" Me; "Wow, Y came out like only a year ago and isn't super well adopted yet, why did you decide to migrate the whole codebase" "The team lead decided" Me: "But why? That's very risky, you often want to use more stable tech with a strong ecosystem because you can move quickly and have more support for things. "Y is a very useful tool because it reduces overhead of doing Z and we expect everyone to be using it soon, it's going to replace A" Me: "Wow that's really confident but just some feedback that this startup experience isn't going to be that useful for your job hunt right now because it sounds like a group project for school or something, like we are looking for real engineering work experience" "Oh I'm so sorry, this was a bootcamp project at Codesmith and they told us not to say anything and I'm sorry for wasting your time" Me: "Sorry too because you clearly have strong drive but this role requires experience working on very large codebases for thousands to millions of users, and experience working on teams with designers, PMs, user experience researchers, marketers, support, and proven ability to work across those functions and it doesn't sound like your project had that breadth of collaboration. I'm sure you can ramp up fast but this is a mid-level role that needs someone to have that experience already." ---- But it seems to work at non top tier companies, and people get very good outcomes and salaries following this. But I completely agree this would never get through a calibrated top tier tech company if framed like this.