u/michaelnovati replied · ★ FEATURED
I'm fairly familiar with this and can offer my 2 cents, in no particular order:
1. I heard that instructors, mentors, and fellows (TAs) were listing Codesmith as their recent job, but it was becoming less effective, because people recognized it as a bootcamp and it makes sense that people would perceive "Senior Software Engineer at Codesmith" as really just a bootcamp STUDENT embellishing their resume. It wasn't made clear to me who's idea this was, but someone came up with the idea of creating a "CS Engineering" brand that these people could list to differentiate their REAL jobs from coming across like a student.
2. In all fairness, I think that's reasonable because people actually had jobs with Codesmith that they should get credit for. My opinion is the need for "CS Engineering" as a brand is a very clear sign of the problems of appearing to work at a bootcamp and how you get written off by many, rather than a problem with Codesmith promoting fake resumes.
3. Now that said, I've interviewed instructors or reviewed their profiles (various reasons: people applying to jobs at my company, people applying for services from company, me just exploring what the people do proactively and sourcing) and people do exaggerate quite a bit in their descriptions. Instructors report being overworked teaching, helping, giving feedback, doing 1-1 support, and it's very rare for them to have time to contribute to the website. Most do at various points, but it ends up being a fraction of the work rather than the primary work - which is teaching. So should a teacher be called a "Senior Software Engineer"? Up to you, but I feel way less strongly about this than other things I've seen in Codesmith resumes.
4. The larger problem with these jobs is that the system they are working on is TERRIBLE in my opinion. The CEO did a "system design talk" recently that covered the system, and the explanation that was reported to me sounded like all of this stuff is really just a very simple website and the engineering needs were very small and the decisions made appear very poor to me. For example, it was reported they have 32 services running for something that could easily run on 1 box. They duplicate their website across Hubspot and their own code. Their authentication is a mess. And from what I've observed, their data model contains many problematic decisions.
Assuming I'm understanding the system correctly, if I interviewed someone from Codesmith who was unable to articulate all of these problems and defended these decisions, they would be rejected for sure and would never pass a system design interview.