u/joeyfosho wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Do they address the fact that they intentionally deceive employers and use an affiliated company to sign off on fake work experience lengths that are longer than their graduates have even been programming for? Because THAT is the tea they should address. Their graduates make mo
u/michaelnovati replied · ★ FEATURED
The raw evidence I've seen shows Codesmith on paper discourages people from lying about their experience - almost awkwardly directly - like it's said early on in the resume process and said firmly, so I think it's important to call that out to lay the pieces out there.
It's also a fact that they sign off on background checks for the time that you claim you were involved with your OSP. By default they sign off on your time in Codesmith but they sign off on it under OSLabs and under your main project, and not under Codesmith's name. And if you update a README 6 months latter and tell them you've been active over 9 months, the would sign off on that.
I've talked to two students who refused to exaggerate at all and were struggling on the job hunt and I honestly don't have much advice for them. But when you see how demoralized these people were, you start to piece together how another demoralized grad seeing their friend get a job by turning that previous "Customer Support" role into a "Support Engineer" role worked, they feel less bad doing it. They might describe the work the same, but just fudging the title opened up a whole new set of jobs.
I see both sides. I personally don't want to stretch the truth, but I also advise people to describe the work accurately. If someone was a "Data Engineer" but wrote code all day and worked in the same codebase as the SWEs, I might advise to say "Software Engineer - Data" for example.
I think the judgement of how to communicate a resume is very nuanced because it's a COMMUNICATION TOOL. If you can brain-transfer your experience into the recruiters head directly, we wouldn't need them. So having very experienced recruiters who actually hire for companies help you word things the best way possible but still acceptably.
I know one recruiter at Formation that reviewed a Codesmith grad's resume almost terminated their contract with us because the person refused to remove that they had 2 YOE and the recruiter didn't want to work with people like that.