I have a strange feeling about Codesmith

Here is my 2cents having worked with a number of Codesmith grads anywhere from during Codesmith, immediately after, or down the road, for a variety of goals, from just wanting to get a job, to wanting to get a top tier job. Overall Codesmith is a great program, an incredible community of amazing people. Every one I've worked with is professional, hard working, and great. It's great for people who are super ambitious and work hard but it's not magic. So I try to help people choose to go for the right reasons and look beyond the on paper results. I have the same 3 issues you do and comment about them often. I also have a different perspective with these issues because as an industry engineer who knows literally several thousand other FAANG/ex-FAANG engineers, the dozen or so peers I've asked have had reactions to Codesmith resumes ranges from "omg that's sketchy" to "this is blatant fraud, wtf". I think this is also why almost every single TA, and full time instructor went to Codesmith itself. Their approach is to get alumni into great jobs over a number of years so that they can then legitimize the training and maybe change perception. 1. Very few people list it. I did a dated audit a year ago and jt was ballparking 10% of people. If they squeeze by with the ambiguous OSP experience as their core resume focus, they don't want to be found out later on during the job and they just leave it off. Some people actually add it back after a few years for future job hunts. It's something to be proud of completing!! You can always include it if you want, no one stops you, you'll just find peers who exclude it and exaggerate getting $130K jobs while you can't get interviews feel even more depressing. NOTE a small number of people are super honest on their resume and get fairly good jobs. This is an edge case but it happens and I suspect some people will jump on this comment pointing these cases out as a counter point to my argument. 2. Yes. I audited 200 a year ago and the vast majority included ambitious "jobs" and the average work experience was 6 months (when the project is about 4 weeks). Codesmith tells you to make it look like work, BUT TO ADD "developed under Open Source Labs" at the bottom. No one industry has any idea what that is, which is why it's kind of a trick. A number of people I know put it in the company name. After I've complained for months and months on here about this, I noticed they are adding "Open Source" to the company names. The problem here is that most real open source work is PAID and people work at companies supporting the open source work. So simply saying something is open source, in the eyes of industry people, doesn't mean it's not a job. They also were running OSLabs for years as unregistered entity and recently formed a charity under the name. I'm going to be very curious to see where that goes because there are very clear laws about using a charity resource to benefit a private corporation.The charity has written letters of reference that I've read saying people were a "software engineer on X" there (uncapitalized) so this is definitely on my radar... they seem to be going all in on this approach. 3. Very complex answer. a. A number of people have experience already and may qualify for slightly higher jobs b. A number of people exaggerate so much and borderline lie to qualify for more experienced roles at non top tier companies c. Codesmith bases "mid level" and "senior" based on job titles and compensation at not top tier companies but the compensation ends up being entry level FAANG equivalent. A senior engineer at Capital One is paid like an entry level Google engineer. d. You can't get a non entry level FAANG role with zero experience unless you mislead them in some way. They have hiring manager interviews solely focused on gauging the responsibilities of your previous work experiences to pattern match against the levels at those companies. So without any real engineering experience, you can't pattern match into a non-entry level role. e. Their outcomes advisor continuously states in lecture that taking a junior job is the worst thing you can do for your career, even at a FAANG company. So people get drilled into this idea of only taking mid level and senior roles. f. There is some confusion: Google starts their engineers at level 3 but that is entry level, Amazon starts them at 4, which is entry level. These systems are based on their internal HR leveling compared to non-engineering jobs and have nothing to do with seniority. But a number of people think that being a level 3 engineer at Google means that they are a senior engineer because level 1 and 2 must be junior and mid-level but that is not true. Happy to answer more questions about any of these. I expect a bunch of people to comment and counter these points and look forward to healthy discussion.

It sounds like Codesmith is the one you are naturally leaning towards. No one will shame you or force you to exaggerate at all, they help you represent your work however you want to represent it. You might be one of the few that get a really good job regardless or you might have a harder time. A lot of people I know end up in the middle. They don't want to exaggerate, but you have Eric Kirsten constantly telling you that you are hurting your career by taking a junior job and that Codesmith prepared you for mid level jobs, and you see the resumes of the people getting those jobs, and it starts to feel not so bad just leaving off the months on that OSP project on the resume to make it appear longer, but always 100% telling the truth to anyone who asks.

I can add more to what "encouraged" means. They have lecture and references materials that do no encourage anything strongly as the "official" stance. Where these "encouragements" come out are: 1. Former students who are resume reviewers, TAs, etc... might give that advice 1-1 because of "other people who did it and succeeded" 2. In verbal Q&A's it might come up as an option to help you 3. You talk to alumni directly on Slack who get placed, ask them for their resume, see what they do, and copy them.

The companies for 3 are critical to understanding position level, which makes the levels and titles somewhat meaningless. I know a number of people that even after normalizing for the actual responsibilities and company still get more senior roles than they should at "medium" level companies. As Fluffy said, it's stressful, constantly worried about getting fired, in a an environment of layoffs, constantly worried about being the lowest performing midlevel/senior on the team. I feel extremely strongly this is something to avoid and will happily debate their outcomes advisor publicly about this. (EDIT: From a Facebook, Google, Amazon, perspective) I'm very biased because all junior people I know who were under leveled and out performed had amazing careers and received disproportinately large stock grant bonuses, and the people who were over leveled were managed out or fired within 1 to 4 years, had no career progression, and were unhappy.

I stand by it for FAANG companies. It's why they almost always round down levels if someone is in between. At a bank, or non-tech-focused decent company, it might matter less and you might not plan to stay for a long time, and you don't have the possibility of making millions of dollars following this. Eric at Codesmith tells people that mid level worse companies are better than entry level FAANG jobs because FAANG companies make you do all the grunt work. And that's the thing I thing I'm pushing back on as I believe the exact opposite and can back that up for FAANG companies.

I edited it, this isn't the best comment thread and it's more of a rant on the "mid-level" topic and I agree you should never trust strong blanket statements and ask for more qualification on them

I'm getting coordinated downvoting on my comment :( sigh can't we all just get along.

Hi, it's a bit off topic but I'll answer since based on your history you seem to be asking legitimately and not trying to troll me with new accounts haha. First, overall we're focusing on top tier companies broadly. We always meant FAANG as "FAANG-level" companies, and we're adjusting communication to make sure people don't come expecting a LITERAL FAANG job - since most aren't hiring right now. Second, we work with people for no fixed time period, so how people are responding to the market is very personal - some want to wait it out (and we support you for as long as it takes if you keep showing up and doing the training) - some are focusing on other top tier companies - some are casting wider nets. Some people are frustrated with the job market and giving up. Some people are taking the change to level up so they are ahead of the pack. We liken ourselves to a personal trainer, so we're helping you achieve your goals, and not turning everyone into Arnold Schwarzenegger. Third, because we are a tech based platform with thousands of tasks, sessions, etc... that one can do, we are constantly adjusting everything and adding and removing things and can change things day to day or week to week trivially... this is our patented secret sauce that lets us adapt better than any program can. This comes with downsides too though - content can be less polished, or a mentor can be less ready for a newly created session topic, so that's why we have top tier engineers working on this thing :D Some concrete changes we've made in the **past \~1 to 2 months**: 1. Adding several job hunting sessions to help with networking, motivation 2. Sourcing up to 5 job listings a day for each person based on their stated preferences 3. Tools to help people leverage the Formation network better for referrals (on platform and chat channels) 4. Added more town hall-type sessions with both our team and with external experts (e.g. top-tier industry recruiters) 5. Added a dozen career coaches who are current top-tier level recruiters to help with resumes, pitches, and negotiation. 6. Talking to multiple FAANG companies about partnership possibilities (This is the one we've launched: https://formation.dev/partners/netflix) All of this said, we have many things to improve and many things in the pipeline for the coming months. People pay a lot of money to train with us and want to make sure people get an experience they feel is worth the cost and is a return on investment.

I can only give second hand information from first hand students, employees, former employees, so take it with a grain of salt. The reasoning provided, summarized across a few people with similar versions - all being told this from the same employee, was that 'entry level jobs at FAANG are full of grunt work and easy problems that you are overqualified to solve' and that 'mid level and senior jobs involve hard problems that Codesmith is training you to solve' Even if you believe the argument (which I strongly do not), I don't know why that means that your career though is hindered by it. I've heard from numerous people over a year or so now that: the outcomes advisor's negotiation strategy is 'just ask for $150K, only a mid level engineer would ask for that so it help legitimize your position' and from the head of instruction: 'the OSP projects are mid level work equivalent to several months on the job and you need to get credit for them'. PARAPHRASED AND SUMMARIZING NOT QUOTES. So my hunch is that the approach is most effective for non-tech smaller companies that don't really do their homework or have calibrated interview processes and doesn't work at all at FAANG companies. But just a personal opinion that I have evidence if this is intentional or not.

If I was starting today, I probably wouldn't know that many people. I was engineer number \~220 at FB and when I left, there were about 8 to 10K engineers. I was the number 1 most internally followed non-manager and in the top 20 most followed employees over all in the internal workplace version of Facebook and I knew literally thousands of people.

Fun story, but I was the sole engineer on the first version pre-Workplace workplace (i.e. Facebook Groups for Work) so I never made a Workplace account! When I left you could choose between Workplace or personal accounts and it wasn't until later they forced you to have a WP account. I used to have a weekly newsletter that was on old Notes so it's probably extremely hard to find now that they are gone :(

Thanks for replying with a balanced thoughtful response!

I think you are reading what you want to read from my more controversial comments. Your entire comment history on Reddit is about Codesmith on Codesmith posts. I've been here for a year, giving daily helpful advice on all kinds of topics that aren't Codesmith. I've talked to dozens, possibly over 100 people, advising them to go to bootcamps (often Codesmith) based on their situation and goals. I've even advised people to go to competitors to Formation. Instead, I get Codesmith leadership following my posts, circulating internally, anonymous accounts commenting on my posts, and complaining about me, when they should probably be paying me for helping a bunch of people choose Codesmith who weren't sure about PRIVATELY IN DMs. I've said many times that we don't have that many direct-from-bootcamp alumni and we actively waitlist many or out right reject, this is not our target demographic and it's not the ideal person to join Formation in general. You're going to get a lot farther as an engineer if you don't just assume completely unfounded bad intentions from people and then start drawing a bunch of false conclusions built on false assumptions. Why don't you rip apart Fluffy while you're at it for constantly talking about Rithm School! I'm happy to talk completely transparently about how Formation's business works, and what our goals are that our dozens of partners, hundreds of mentors, dozens of investors, all spent time to figure out before working with and endorsing us.

You are just digging a hole for yourself and proving my point. I have nothing against you, but just be nice and make Reddit a better place. 1. Here's my GitHub and clearly code is what I do all day: [https://github.com/mnovati](https://github.com/mnovati) 5,435 contributions in the last year Today for example, while I'm allegedly spending all my time on Reddit: "37 contributions on Friday April 7th". 2. Ask anyone at Formation how responsive I am in channels. Fellows are the #1 priority in supporting. I know a leader at Codesmith thinks I'm a "disturbed" person spending all of my day Reddit obsessing over them but don't listen to that garbage. I work almost all the time, absurdly hard, and training and mentoring is my entire life and I'm lucky that my partner is doing it with me so we can spend all of our time doing it.

"was a software engineer working on X as part of Open Source Labs"