u/CodedCoder wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Someone made a post earlier on a Reddit sub just to thank Codesmith for getting a job, it reeked of fakeness tbh. This school is horrible, the more stuff like this comes out the more I dislike them.
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
I don't want to speak for that person, but that person was thanking THE COMMUNITY ON REDDIT (not Codesmith), they were a member of this community for A LONG TIME and asked a lot of questions and really deliberated the right place to go and for them it was Codesmith, and that's great because they were happy with the outcome. For other people it's not Codesmith!
u/michaelnovatireplied·· edited★ FEATURED
I'll confirm you're not me lol! But I looked up all the people in that screenshot and they all have fairly normal Codesmith-y LinkedIns with exaggerated OSP experience.
Some of those people have a lot of experience before too, that's not super common. I've seen info sessions before and Codesmith is pretty clear that people come from 'a range of backgrounds' and most people haven't worked as SWE's before.
Did they talk about that in the session? I'm sure they chose people that were all saying amazing things about Codesmith was and how they persisted with the Codesmith-way of doing things and it worked, without really saying what that means.
I'm sure Eric K was probably mentioned by everyone too as the reason why they got a crazy high offer. Several people have sent me Eric Ks advice (in various forms from audio/video) and it's very good, standard, bread-and-butter advice you would get from one of hundreds of career coaches in the industry, and it's included in your Codesmith $21K tuition. That's totally find, but people talk about his advice as if it's some magically unicorn milk that gives you super powers! (not exaggeration in the tone I've heard repeateadly).
u/MundaneValuable7 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Makes sense. I worked with a Codesmith grad who was hired on as an intermediate dev who said he had zero work experience coding. When I checked his linked in he put open source contributions that lasted over a year as his experience and when I looked into them they were dinky t
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
A couple of notes. They are "legally" associated with OSLabs, a completely separate charity that seems to have a lot of ties to Codesmith but is not Codesmith. OSLabs signs the letters of reference for these people (it's a Codesmith employee too, but he's also a Board Member of OSLabs).
And second, yeah anyone can audit the GitHub projects for OSLabs and see how the vast vast majority have 2-3 weeks of contributions from each member, in these spike patterns following the cohort cycle that you don't see on any real open source projects. One of the projects had console.log(password) in the authentication code - and password wasn't hashed at this point.
But employers - especially the smaller companies that hire Codesmith grads - don't look at this stuff and are just happy to interview people with experience on their resume!
u/jcasimir wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
I just want to clarify — are you saying that (a) these people lied and created a fake work history, or (b) are you saying it’s lying/disingenuous to report the outcomes of people with 10 years tech experience alongside people new to the industry?
u/michaelnovatireplied·· edited★ FEATURED
Not OP, can't speak for them, but I think both are a problem haha,
a) is a problem with Codesmith - even though I've seen materials that clearly say not to do it, I've seen other materials that clearly guide people to do it without telling them to do it... It's like DO NOT LIE!!!!! Use this example though of how we recommend doing it: <link to example that exaggerates 6 months of experience>
So many people message me about this, I get the vibe that all of the staff at Codesmith GENUINELY feels the OSPs are a magical project that is GENUINELY worth month and months of senior engineer experience that they do this on purpose, but this is just proposed to me in theories. One person said a staff member went on a rant and had to pause the session to cool down after someone asked if OSPs we're being exaggerated and you'll see in the tone of many Codesmith employees in public talks an arrogance about how good the OSPs are.
b) is a CIRR standard problem
u/Mindless_Level9327 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Forgive me for not knowing, but what does OSP mean? On-Site Placement?
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
Sorry, my bad, I'm a person of pros and cons and don't present my opinions often, except my strong opinions on this one: it stands for "Open Source Product". It's a 3-4 week phase of Codesmith spent on building an open source project, like this one [https://github.com/oslabs-beta/anago](https://github.com/oslabs-beta/anago)
u/Mindless_Level9327 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
You're all good. I thought the general points you made were good, I just didn't know what OSP stood for. That makes sense though. I appreciate you giving an example though. 3-4 weeks seems like a pretty short amount of time to get an actually worthwhile OSP done. Maybe that's the
u/michaelnovatireplied·· edited★ FEATURED
Yeah a few things. It is a very very solid 3 week group capstone project. And they put a lot of effort in the presentation, like if you click that link it looks super buttoned up and legit in the writing and imagery and overview, etc...
But the problem I have (again, my opinion only) is that that 3 weeks gets represented as months of 'experience' - framed as an ambiguous job on LinkedIns and resumes. Many grads talk about it exclusively in interviews, for dozens of minutes talking about people-problems and technical-problems and all kinds of things from these projects that's really just squeezing them for more they they have in them. I've interviewed Codesmith grads myself and 'talk about a conflict with a non engineer' and people just make stuff up because they didn't work with non-engineers... like that didn't "come from the OSP" it came from practicing TALKING ABOUT the OSP over and over with the alumni and career support.