For Those Graduated CodeSmith or Currently in CodeSmith. Regarding Open source

I have commented on this extensively from an outsider point of view but commenting for distribution. Codesmith leaders follow me with anonymous accounts so hopefully people will comment on this.

I agree with this too, I just think it's important people sign up for it to play the game and understand the game well and not to sign up because they think Codesmith is a magical place that teaches them things they can't learn anywhere else. Don't just choose Codesmith because it has high outcomes and all the reviews say superficially great things about it being life-changing or they made amazing friends or that the program was intense and "hard learning". I would say that all bootcamps students are signing up to play some kind of game but different programs have different ways of branding that and you want to choose the one that does things in a way you are aligned with... for some people that Codesmith and for others it's not

There are other ways yeah :D. Ada Developer's Academy is free, 4 months of training and 5 month internship with their partners. They had to scale back because of the economy but it's been consistently reliable for getting people into the industry. I also know several people who are self taught with a tech-adjacent background (other engineering degree or math degree) - focusing on LeetCode and gunning for entry level FAANG roles and got those jobs too (e.g. Amazon and Palantir). **I would not advise this at all right now because of the market** but it's a path that can work for the right people. Apprenticeships are another pathway - seen several people with no experience get Apprenticeships (e.g. via OnRamp) that led to good jobs. There's no one size fits all here and the hard part is figuring out what to even do! Too many people do a whack-a-mole approach where they start everything and don't finish anything.

I can add details and caveats from various discussions with dozens of Codemsith alumni and from analyzing public OS Labs repos When people on here call Codesmith "culty" three reasons are 1. they convince students these projects are production level projects. They are not and I've looked at many of them. Most don't work properly, many have commented our code and terrible practices, mish mashing libraries, no planning, and fellows/mentors who have no experience. Ive done hundreds of interviews and I have yet to see a OSLabs CODEBASE (the ideas for the projects themselves are great) that would pass as a production codebase and any employer impressed by someone actual code contributions didn't look at the code or did so with the understanding it was a 3 week project and not expecting production code. 2. Do you get formal paperwork you were accepted into OSLabs? Do you sign paperwork with OS Labs about your relationship to the company (it's a legally registered corporation in Delaware)? Do you have an IP agreement with them about who owns your code? If the answer to any of these isnt yes then it's not being run legitimately and you are being misled by Codesmith. 3. They explicitly tell people to not lie that they were "paid" but its not not-lying that Philip Troutman signs letters of reference saying you were a "software engineer" at OS Labs for 3 to 4 months and signs it as a board member of OS Labs when no students have a signed relationship with OSLabs and considers themselves a student at Codesmith. I also have direct evidence of Philip Troutman saying in a lecture, where he got upset when someone asked if their projects were production level experience, that the OSP projects were the equivalent of months of mid level work and every graduate should get full credit for the work. Sure, Codesmith doesn't tell you to say you had paid work, but they influence you to misrepresent their projects.

So for a lot of the people I've worked with - they are awesome, hardworking, driven, and those qualities lead to their success on the job. In some cases that gets misdirected to something Codesmith did - and perhaps confidence-building-as-a-product is the product you are paying for with Codesmith - and it's worth it. That problem you talk about is a fantastic problem to work through and great in an interview, 100%. That doesn't mean it's "production level" though. I had several notable personal projects I talked about in interviews that were super impressive but the code was not "production quality code". One "project" we actually incorporated a company and it was featured on TechCrunch - and even the code was not "production level", it was a group project with tens of thousands of lines of code, had a ton of fascinating product, growth, and technical problems, and it got me a job at Facebook because we had interesting API integration. So maybe we're just no on the same page as what "production level code" means. At the top tier companies, your level is based on your scope of responsibility and experience at scale that you have delivered impact at, and not your coding abilities. That project above got me an "entry level role" because only a few thousand people used it. I didn't see how to scale growth, product, and all of the skills needed to work on things at the Facebook-level of scale. I learned those quickly, was promoted to Mid Level in 3 months and Senior in another 12. Was a "mid level" engineer the whole time because of my "mid level production project" - no. I needed a few months of Facebook and working 24/7 to fill in the skills I was missing to be a mid level engineer. I have this debate a lot on Reddit, because I'm talking from a FAANG-level point of view and things are different at most non-tech companies or the contractor roles that a lot of people get "mid level jobs" at after Codesmith. A "Senior Associate" at Capital One is an entry level equivalent FAANG job for example. I map to the FAANG-levels, but a lot of Codesmith people map to the Capital One-ish levels and call those entry level FAANG jobs "mid level" jobs. At the end of the day it's not really relevant which words we choose - as long as we understand what we're talking about. Job titles are largely irrelevant, and compensation is complicated and can't be summarized in a single number on here.

The reason I care so much is because I work with people aiming for FAANG and top tier jobs and a number of people come from Codesmith and we have materials on levels incorporated so people can learn how to navigate levels at these companies. I totally understand how most bootcamps grads realize the levelling at their first job is different from FAANG but Codemsith is the exception where people come in wanting Senior FAANG roles because one person at Codemsith got a Senior role at Google and it's a whole process to explain that that role was entry level - not Senior and some amount of disbelief because Codesmith said it was senior. Pragmatic Engineer just wrote about levelling today in an amazing post - with the subscription fee: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/what-is-a-senior-software-engineer

It changes constantly. We work with a lot of people who want canonical FAANG and we work with FAANG who want the even "better" tier of companies (FAANG level engineering bar and product but earlier stage with more upside). Notion and Figma (pre acquisition) are that level. Stripe and Square were also that level during COVID. Now it's shifting to AI a bit, like Open AI. The three criteria: 1. super strong engineering culture and engineering driven decisions 2. product or service is leading edge / best in class and at a fairly large scale / making money / growing fast 3. top compensation and significant equity (on par with the canonical FAANG) These companies also tend to have very similar levelling systems to each other