Why I signed up for Codesmith… quality open source project experience! Spearmint.js

I have some neutral comments on the project-as-work-experience debate. I was a E7-level Engineer at Facebook for 8 years, interviewed hundreds of people, read thousands of resumes. I'm co-founder of Formation.dev now which does mentoring and coaching and I have worked with many Codesmith grads and alumni and am familiar with their program. We also have recruiters at Formation with 10 years recruiting experience at Facebook as well who review Codesmith applicants to Formation. We also hired a Codesmith alumni who we worked with at Formation as well. 1. If you put something on your resume that says Software Engineer for a "company", where the company is an open source project, it's a little grey area/pushing the limits of what people deem acceptable at top-tier companies. Here's an example of a prolific open source contributor and what their resume looks like with things clearly labelled: [https://www.linkedin.com/in/feross/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/feross/). 2. You will absolutely get way more interviews by framing the experience this way. Having "Software Engineer" work experience on your resume will drastically increase your application -> interview conversion. 3. However, you will not pass top tier behavioral/experience interviews. Every Codesmith alumni I've interviewed within minutes it's clear that the experience was not a paid engineering role. Questions like "who is your manager?" "what was the hiring process like?" "why do you want to leave your job" "what's the development process like", "what do the other employees do at the company", "how many engineers are on the team", "how much funding does this company have" don't have sufficient answers typically. 4. You are at risk of failing a background check if you didn't tell the truth about this experience during the interviews. If you have other students or an instructor lie about your involvement and say you were a Software Engineer, it's not a means to an end to get your foot in the door, but a lie that will loom over your shoulder. If the company thought you had work experience and they find out it was unpaid open source contributions, then you might get an offer rescinded. So my TLDR; if you are aiming for a foot-in-the-door role at a smaller company, I think this kind of framing of experience might be a means to an end type thing. If you are trying to get into a top tier company, it likely won't work and will make the company more likely to filter out that project on future resumes. Would love to discuss this more if people have opinions or thoughts!

One point of clarification that is critical is that it depends on what role at Facebook (SWE vs other roles like Solutions Engineer) and if it's a contractor role or a full blown role. I can only speak the the full blown SWE bar, which is the highest and most consistent as well. The contractor bar is very different and I could see the above approach not being a problem for those roles. For the SWE bar, absolutely we prepare you. We have extremely senior and director level former FB mentors preparing people in a variety of ways (1-1, small group) for the behavioral SWE interviews. We coach more experienced people so each person has to prepare differentlty and needs unique feedback and a unique strategy to the behavioral interview. We also have several full time team members who taught engineers at Facebook how to conduct these interviews.

Yeah we have. Most people have some professional experience, but there are a few people with zero experience that have gotten top tier jobs (Facebook included). Again, it varies so much by person so there aren’t definitive patterns, but these are some examples: 1. We have a production level internal codebase where people complete tasks and bugs and get code reviewed by our team. People with less experience often work on this area, whereas people with experience do not. The goal of this is to learn professional level git, and how to communicate with engineers. So while employers know this is a project and not a job, people have examples for team-based stuff to talk about. 2. Some people have extremely impressive personal projects (this is an entire thread topic hahaha) and we help you practice talking about them very impressively. Overall, using our extensive Facebook experience, we know what is impressive and what isn’t, and we help each person triple down on their strengths. And we train you how to steer a conversation towards those strengths, rather than your weaknesses, instead of having a mediocre answer to everything.

>So is the goal to present this final project as work experience? In my experience talking to Codesmith grads about their projects, most could not talk about them at the Facebook, full blown SWE level behavioral bar for entry level roles. (I posted above but I worked at Facebook for 8 years as one of the most senior engineers, trained Facebook engineers on how to run these interviews and many of my current co-workers have as well). The projects are not run like real companies so people don't have real answers for many critical questions and raise a lot of flags. A good example is a project where the team chose to rewrite their project using a brand new open source framework instead of a super reliable framework (not disclosing details to reveal anything personal). The team had no idea about the tradeoffs of using something stable and reliable for a large scale project vs using something brand new and buggy and didn't really know why the decision was made to use the latest and greatest framework. Another example is when asked who how big the team was, the person said 20 people. I was impressed because that's a big engineering team! So I asked how many PMs there were, how many tech leads, how were standups run. The problem is that this project was no where near the level of what a real Facebook-level team operates at and it was a giant red flag to even consider them for Formation.dev. This person now works at Facebook btw after we worked with them at Formation.dev. This is just my experience for this specific point about representing these projects as work experience, I have absolutely nothing against Codesmith and think that it's one of the bootcamps that has scaled significantly better than most others and would recommend looking at it for someone looking at bootcamps.

Sorry not to pile on here, but I was looking into this "mid-level FAANG" statement more because I've been involved in every aspect of hiring at Facebook it's just not possible at Facebook to get a full blown E4 SWE job with zero experience. If that happens, eight people made mistakes: the recruiter, 3+ engineers, the hiring manager, and the two VP/directors who have to approve the offer. It has nothing to do with raw skill and there's no way to game this without them making a mistake or a very large and coordinated lie. It was bothering me that people would think this could happen so I want to set the record straight. I can't speak to other FAANG and Amazon definitely has a less consistent process where I could see this happening. I also know contractors via Global Logic get Senior Engineer titles sometimes. But it's bothering me!

So Facebook doesn't even interview new grad E3s who didn't come from internships or the schools they recruit at. They experimented with an E3.5 program but that required 6 months of work. And the E4 rotational program also required more work, just where the experience is not at the normal E4 bar. Sorry, I geek out over this stuff haha

I found two people that got into Google from Codesmith without experience listed on LinkedIn so it might be possible there too! [https://www.linkedin.com/in/cameron-greer/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/cameron-greer/) [https://www.linkedin.com/in/andieritter/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/andieritter/) One lists their open source projects as work experience and the other doesn't. Not sure what their resumes looked like pre-Google though.

It's very case by case and depending on timing. Right now there is a rumored hiring freeze on E3 and E4 (and possibly more), they haven't said anything publicly. I can't emphasize enough how unique each person's background and path is, no one could read this and get THE answer for how to get a job at Facebook. That's part of the value we offer, Facebook, or otherwise, we use all of our expertise to help craft your path to YOUR goals (a lot of people really don't like Facebook and don't want to work there). Similarly as you start interviewing, pass/fail, your timing changes, your preferences change, remote vs in person stuff, we adapt to what you want, and we're a shoulder to lean on for advice (and sometimes proactively give advice as a lot of people have misconceptions as well). At the end of the day every person at [Formation.dev](https://Formation.dev) wants to see you in a super impactful role that you are happy with. Period. RE: Facebook, our team has extensive experience will the various paths, even helping build some. I personally know a few dozens VPs, Directors, and am friends with Mark Zuckerberg, so we have a lot of experience that help deeply understand the landscape there. There are many different paths at FB that could apply at are not E3/E4. I think the ideal is E3/E4 SWE roles, but there are other solid paths: 1. E4 Rotational Engineer 2. Discover Production Engineering (E4 role for PE) 3. Return to Work internships 4. RAISE Program for AI 5. Considering: Data Engineer, Network Engineer, Production Engineer, Solutions Engineer, Partner Engineers roles depending on your background. 6. Considering: the right kind of contract role, and then supporting you in figuring out how to convert to full time. There are so many paths though I don't have time to enumerate them in depth because I'm focused on helping people at Formation :D This is probably the simplest overview they have: https://access.fb.com/career-pathway/