Just spoke with recruiters from four different major companies. They are filtering out bootcampers.

This is true for big companies but it's not new. Most big companies do not hire directly out of bootcamps and I can tell you why from my experience 8 years at FB as a principal engineer! So first off, where do these applications go: 1. Apprenticeships! Big companies often have apprenticeships/emergent talent/etc... programs for bootcamp grads who come from diverse backgrounds. 2. During the boom times, Amazon would interview anyone with an online assessment and passing that would usually get you an interview. So people with very little SWE experience but who had good professional experience to talk about in a behavioral interview, could pass. Google briefly was talking to bootcamp grads via a number of contractor recruiters at Randstad but you had to get connected through them directly. Second, why don't big companies want to hire bootcamp grads. Unfortunately they DID in the past. Big companies trying to increase their diversity internally found bootcamps very appealing. Hackbright, a women-focused bootcamp, for example had ins with most major silicon valley companies. The problem was only a handful of graduates would pass the interviews and then people generally needed a lot more support in their first months/years on the job. The handful I know hired at Facebook eventually had great careers but it was a huge investment on Facebook's part. They wasted hours and hours of time interviewing people who weren't qualified and it frustrated the interviewers. Then teams with a bootcamp grad on them were frustrated at how long it took the person to ramp up compared to a Stanford/Waterloo grad. So who is getting hired now? Well Codesmith is a good example of a program where the majority of graduates's resumes trick many recruiters into thinking the person is experienced when they aren't. This alone gets through that "bootcamp filter" and if you are strong enough to pass interviews, you might be able to get the job! However that's by no means the end of the journey because you aren't qualified for the job to begin with and many people who skipped a level this way spend hours a day secretly trying to catch up and many people switch companies to a lower tier company 1 to 3 years later. NOTE: a number of people DO FINE AND MAKE IT! I'm sure people will comment here saying so. But if you run the numbers at scale, many don't make it. So we are left with a dilemma here. If you identify as a diverse candidate and are very strong at DS&A -> go for major company apprenticeships. If you aren't you can fake it a little more upfront and feel the pressure every day, or you can be honest and continuously network to try to find the best opportunities. At the end of the day, bootcamp grads have no experience and are saturating the market, so what do you expect companies to do? They see 1000 applications in 2 days to entry level roles and 600 of them have the same bootcamps on them and otherwise look not different from each other.

Sorry "trick" might be the wrong word, it's conscious but it's not bad intentioned, and people are repeatedly told not to lie. They are told so many times in so many places not to lie it makes you ask - why do they need to tell people this so much lol. Anyways, look at Codesmith project for example this one (I chose one randomly, I'm not calling our or identifying any individual people here): [https://www.linkedin.com/company/grpseek-app/](https://www.linkedin.com/company/grpseek-app/) And look at how people who work on it present themselves on their LinkedIns. All of those people are recent Codesmith grads and gRPSeek was a 3 week long project. Most people present: 1. the project as 3-4 months of experience at a company 2. have their 3 other projects under "open source projects" to misdirect that the highlighted one is NOT an open source project - or else why wouldn't it also be under "open source projects" All of this is just part of 12 weeks of Codesmith and they are 1x 3 week project and 3x 1 week projects.

Full disclosure I work with a number of Codesmith alumni later on in their careers with thier 2nd, 3rd, 4th jobs and support people 1-1 to tell their best narrative. And it's highly personal how people portray themselves. The reasons I've been given are, in no particular order - pretty much all the reasons: \- Unawareness: a specific leader told me that my 3 weeks was equivalent to months of mid level industry experience because the 11 hours days and the difficulty of the projects. \- Fake it til you make it: hustler mentality, no regrets \- Ends justify the means: if people get jobs and do well on those jobs, does it matter how they go them? \- I tried being very correct and didn't get any interviews and saw friends get interviews were using this style of resume so I tried it \- Slippery slope: as I didn't get interviews, I adjusted my resume every week or two and each time was a little more exaggerated

People are struggling right now on the job market and it's tough - especially if you did a remote bootcamp and poured your heart and soul into doing what they told you to do and then can't get a job :( I don't know if posting on Reddit is the best way to go about it. Like if you are talking to four recruiters at major companies that's good! You can look at that positively as networking! Even if nothing is going anywhere.

Yeah those were reasons I've been told. My personal opinion is that since every single instructor has only worked at Codesmith (a fact they are open about) from fellows (TAs), to instructors, to lead instructors to senior engineers, people don't have industry experience to fallback on and they perpetuate a unified consistent message. But one hole in this reasoning is why alumni later on, don't come back and try to change the narratives. "Career Support Engineers" who review resumes tend to do it part time while working in industry. I hear anecdotally that are told more 'how it is in reality' during 1-1 chats, but these people still uphold the Codesmith guidance. I'm curios why they don't question the presentation of the OSPs and presumably encourage it - because Codesmith's official guidance is very clear to not lie.

Yeah this is the basis for my recent observation that a number of the alumni at top companies either 1. are working so hard to keep up, they move on from Codesmith and don't look back, 2. they aren't actually reviewing resumes and interviewing people themselves. I reviewed thousands of resumes and did 400+ interviews at Facebook and it makes a HUGE difference on how you see things for sure!