How do graduates get away with fake experience?

Codesmith is the SWE place where 80%+ of graduates do this by stretching their resumes. How people get away with it all? 1. Companies not verifying employment 2. The person putting friend's contact info and the friend verifies 3. They use fake pay stuffs or offer letters to verify 4. The bootcamp lies for them for background checks 5. They list group projects as work and have peers from the group project do the background checks 6. The list a bunch of stuff on LinkedIn to get recruiters attention but they don't talk about it to the engineers and they don't include it on the background check.

During the boom times of 2021-2022 it had like a 95% graduation rate and 90% placement within 6 months. Now in 2024 they have like a 90% graduation rate and 40% placement within 6 months. HOWEVER, people list like "X to Present" for these fake listings. The bootcamp has like a 60-70% placement within 12 months now and as people hit like 1 year post bootcamp these fake listings look like 1+ years of work experience and help people start getting jobs. So the TLDR - no - Codesmith is falling apart and I would recommend running for the hills - they are down to a skeleton crew of staff, half of who are looking for work. The best bootcamps have closed down or pivoted. Rithm closed, App Academy closed SWE, General Assembly pivoted to B2B according to their annual report, Bloom Tech closed SWE, Turing shut down, Launch Academy shut down, Code Up shut down, Episcodus shut down. Tech Elevator was collapsed into Galvanize.... I can go on. The only place that hasn't had layoffs that I know of is Launch School.

It does get screened and you get a "unverified" for that section - and many companies don't care and ignore it. Just remember that selling your soul has a price and it will catch up to you some day. Maybe it will take 10 years. Look at how great Codesmith felt taking in $20M a year and feeling like the kind of the world.... changing the industry.... creating the leaders of the future. All bullshit built on lies and when people figure it out, reputation is gone, money is gone, and you are worse off than when you started.

I believe that when an engineer is working on something and it "just works" without knowing why - some day you will have to understand why. Maybe not right away but some day in the future. Similarly I believe that about integrity. Integrity doesn't mean being nice or friendly or a good leader or friend. Integrity means acting honestly, transparently, and with good faith towards others. If you lack integrity and lie to one or more people to get a job, it's going to catch up with you and you will have to pay the price some day. In Codesmith's case they never taught anything technical of value. All of the teachers and instructors are former students who follow a script and don't have any / much real engineering experience. They lie about the nature of that work. A lead instructor who claims to be a senior engiee= at Codesmith has hardly any commits on GitHub because they are actually a teacher and not an engineer and never worked as an engineer. Not everyone sells their soul and those people might take longer to find jobs and might take lower paying first jobs, but they will do fine. The people that lie - I've spoken to and even worked directly with many. What you have is paranoia, layoffs, job hopping, stress, in your future. The lie only begins when you get the job, keeping the lie going is even harder. People break down. Some leave the industry. Some of these people didn't see this after a year and thought the lie was worth it, two years, three years, and the more time goes on, the more my DMs fill up with "you are right". People lied to get that $140K first job but they realize they should have taken a $90K job without lying and gotten to the $140K job in just two years - a small blip in the bigger picture. I've been telling this to Codesmith staff for years and they don't believe me. So many layoffs and departures (most of the staff) and those people agree with me now.... the most stubborn of them left will come around when they leave too, but probably because Codesmith shuts down.

Launch School is doing ok because its model protects against the market to some degree and the market impact is less severe. 1. You do Core for months so then only people who are perfect fits for Capstone get in 2. The founder is hands on doing most of the work, so there aren't many people to pay. He could personally take lower income for some time to survive. Codesmiths founder uses your tuition money to go to conferences and write books and make lectures for Frontend Masters and students complain they never see him. Fine but you have to pay more people to run the program and when most of those people leave and you are still MIA - math doesn't work out. 3. Launch School's very small, like 20 capstone at a time, 60 a year. Codesmith had like 1000 people in 2023. The founder knows everyone by name and helps them try to get jobs individually. So yeah Launch School ends up with like a 70% placement rate in 6 months which blows away Codesmith's 29% (of people responding to compare to Launch School which only includes people who respond). But it still dropped from 100% to 70%.

I mean I'm sure some people get by and are edge cases. But my argument was moral and not fact based. Even if you are absurdly successful and surrounded by a beautiful family in a giant mansion on your death bed.... you'll leave the world knowing your legacy was built on lies and those people might never know their own lives are built on lies. No one is perfect and we are all flawed, and I'm saying that as an extreme thought experiment. Point being - you decide who you want to be and how you want to do but understand and reflect on how you are doing it and what the impact is in the bigger picture. If you choose to lie, knowing the consequences on the world around you can help you adjust and maybe even make up for it down the road. "Nice guys finish last" is also a saying, so it's not so simple.

You sound like one of those people who wins the lottery or gets lucky early life and then loses it all later on and has their life destroyed because you didn't have a good system around you to navigate. I grew up where people buy lottery tickets and success was having money, but no one actually had any money. Being at Facebook, I saw a lot of wealthy people and how they lived and what their advice was and I saw the other side of things. I ask myself a lot, what if people growing up were just given $1M cash instantly, what would they actually do? Like pay off debts and then what? A lot of people don't actually know. All these people telling me that my value when I grow up is how much money I make, but none of them actually knew what that meant. You don't have to listen to my advice, but if you find yourself with some money, make sure you have role models around you who manage it well to learn from.

And did you lie to get it all? Or what's the point? You lied to get your life and you are happy? Or you just think my arguments are full of shit.