Bootcampers that graduated without SWE-related work experience

If you go to Codesmith they just did something pretty interesting here. They created a charity in June 2022, that was authorized in Dec 2022, for their open source projects so people can say they did work for this charity and the charity writes letters of reference for people. I'm assuming they made all the legalities of this work and vetted it with silicon valley lawyers because I can only imagine the IP headaches this would cause and the conflict of interest of having a charity take in tax-free dollars to pay to mentor people in a for profit program that people pay for. Considering Codesmith and OSLabs have been around for years and this charity was formed 8 months ago, I'm not sure what this says about all the people who graduated before then and got letters of reference from "OSLabs" signed by a Codesmith executive. But assuming it's all on the up and up, it's an interesting solution to the lack of experience problem. Hack4LA is a branch of Code for America that has an interesting model that's a lot better than OSLabs, where you can volunteer to help build projects for non profits on real teams of PMs, designers, researchers, etc... But it's essentially a similar model, open to everyone, except people in the program don't pay anything to do it.

OSLabs, Inc. is a standalone charity registered in Delaware and in California, whose registration doesn't mention anything about Codesmith. The communications manager at Codesmith is on the OSLabs board, and I have a few letters of reference signed by "Philip Troutman, Board Member" but don't see any documentation that he is actually on the board of the new charity. I have also seen on LinkedIn, Codesmith's "senior board advisor" advertising for the executive director role at OSLabs and asking candidates to reach out to him. Yeah three things interesting on the website are: 1. The "accelerator program" which sounds like, if free/volunteer, takes the best part of Codesmith and makes it free. 2. The "mentors" being paid $100 an hour for up to 8 hours a week. If those mentors are mentoring Codesmith students working on OSPs that could be illegal/violation of charity laws 3. If they allow anyone to work on the OSPs with mentor support, then they are going to have to deal with thousands of people who are far below the Codesmith bar with all kinds of commitments, who sign up to work on the OSPs to get the "Codesmith experience" for free/for people who don't meet the bar. If they don't allow anyone to work on them then that would fall under #2.