Yeah thanks for commenting, I do agree the tone can be discouraging for people who are in bootcamps that pride themselves in the more "bottoms up" projects and it was shared with some Codesmith people who rallied against it, but it's all a learning experience. Happy to give my opinions to any and all!
What true Open Source Software means from my perspective in the industry and how I recommend contributing to it to get your foot in the door (spoiler: it's not what most bootcamps do)
Hi all, I've been having numerous intense debates publicly and privately about open source projects. They have become the cornerstone of the resumes of many bootcamp grads, from Codesmith to Launch School Capstone, to Hack Reactor. But some people are trivializing the meaning of "open source" and I wanted to summarize my thoughts in a post I've been working on on the side for a while. When I did my first SWE job back in 2006 as an intern at IBM, I had a similar gross misunderstanding of open source... so much so I bombed an internal fun competition to create a business plan around a new open source product. I thought I would just share it here or on Quora, but I have a decent following here so here it goe…
For super serious engineers who are in it for the long haul and have a day job to pay the bills, it's a fantastic time to continue working on your skills at places with longer term training philosophies, like PE.
We're seeing a surge at Formation from people that don't have any kind of fixed timeframe - since Formation training is perpetual (haha intentional pun, Derek will get it) until you get a job you don't have to game the timing and all you have to do is show up and do your part. People don't want to wait until the market warms to **start** practicing, they want to be ready to pounce on great opportunities that arise.
It's possible but I highly doubt CIRR would shutdown and go offline without any notice. They would probably keep the website running with the standards documents so that others in the future could continue their work.
I also think the bootcamps remaining in CIRR are the ones most serious about the process and would probably want to continue publishing data even if it's bad. If everyone's data is bad and yours is better, it looks less bad for the best ones... even if overall fewer people go to bootcamps because of the results, the ones that do will be more likely to go to the best ones.
Based on anecdotal evidence from \~10 people at HR and Codesmith, results will indeed tank for H2 2022, but H1 2022 might not be that terrible.
So it might help Codesmith to have H1 2022 published and people might mistakenly think the market is still good. And when H2 2022 comes out and the results are…
How much coding experience do you have and what kind of experience is it?
If your practical experience on your current job is sufficient to get an entry level job, you might be better off with a career accelerator that helps fill in more fundamental gaps and helps you practice for SWE interviews.
I'm the co-founder of [Formation.dev](https://Formation.dev), and other options are Interview Kickstart, [Outco.io](https://Outco.io), Pathrise, and Scalar.
It's worth looking into them and if you aren't quite far enough along, consider a bootcamp for sure.
Hi, nice to meet you, lots of questions I'll try to address.
RE: Formation fit. Yes, 1+ years of real SWE experience, even if it was in the past, and teaching experience is a good fit. We've worked with a number of people that have taken multi year career breaks, and it's a very good fit not just for the technical aspects, but for building confidence in your behavioral narratives. For FAANG companies, you don't need to so much worry about updating your practical skills to the newest frameworks as much as building confidence in the fundamental skills and story, and building confidence happens day by day as you practice and get feedback that you are improving.
RE: Timing. It's not the best time for classic FAANG, but it's still a decent time for FAANG-level companies. Depending on how much experience you have, you could be aiming for mid-level roles. One of the nice things about Formatio…
Yeah Launch School's Captone projects are definitely better than Codesmith's. I would say they are similar but the attention to detail and legitimacy is higher on the Capstone.
RE: Formation, we aren't a self paced program, it's actually the opposite, you do no work in deciding what to do, and every week we tell you what to work on! And what you get adapts based on how you do.
We are working on predicting time frames better based on other people who did Formation but right now, it's too hard for a human to estimate precisely given how unique each person's experience is and we need to do more complex predictions. It works best when you have a job and do Formation part time so there is less financial pressure.
I think the bigger point here is the auditing doesn't matter. I don't know where "audited" became synonymous with integrity. The CIRR process auditors just make sure humans input data correctly, and they don't do much investigating to dig into if that data is correct. For example, if a human put Susan's salary as $50,000. They will ask Susan, "was your salary $50,000?" and if she says yes, they are done. The CIRR spec doesn't say much about what auditing means, which is one of the flaws... they just throw the label on their to make it sound more legit... and it doesn't hurt, but it's a flaw. They don't even say clearly how salaries are verified! All they say is that start dates need to be pulled from an offer letter, but they say nothing about salary, so it can be entirely reported by a student incorrectly.
All of this to me is much more important that slapping "audited" on there and ca…
I want to clarify that I don't have an axe to grind here with CIRR or with Codesmith and please don't try to add drama to a non-dramatic situation.
I worked at Facebook for 8 years and saw how misinformation spreads and this subreddit is a misinformation breeding ground. Every day, I see leading questions, one person answer confirming the question, and then the OP being like "I knew it!". This is straight out of the misinformation 101 textbook. No one here has bad intentions, it happens because people make generalized conclusions from one off data and when many people you see in your online community support your ideas. Just because 1 person says something and 5 people back it up it means absolutely nothing, but people take that point, spread it to others, and before you know it, everyone thinks something that is not based on anything valid.
If you hear "trust the process" too many tim…
I don't think I questioned the integrity of the results in my post. When you have been calling CIRR the "gold standard" if you meant the specification itself or the auditing process was industry leading you are extremely mistaken and every bootcamp leader I've talked to agrees. And I take all of their words over a Codesmith alumni who has no context there.
I have read the CIRR standards doc (which I can't link anymore because the site is still down) many times and there are many problems due to lack of attention to detail. And they have similar problems attention to detail in managing their domain name.
The reason I mentioned Codesmith, is that if you are telling your students "studies show that Codesmith is better than Harvard and MIT" (this is a quote a few people shared with me), and in your own description calling yourself competitive to "elite grad schools", then the bar is high a…
CIRR's domain expired 2 days ago, no one renewed it, and the website is now offline
CIRR's website (cirr.org) is completely down for 2 days and counting because they didn't renew their domain name. Their registrar, Google Domains, has put an auto-renew on it, to give them up to 45 days to pay up and renew before it goes to auction.
The reason I'm posting this is that I repeatedly caution those against using CIRR as the "gold standard" (as several people have quoted here). Codesmith touts CIRR in all of their public sessions and has doubled down on it in their marketing.
I understand their positive motivations of trying to help consumers weed out "bad bootcamps", and that something is better than nothing. But the amount of personal insults and attacks I've taken for suggesting that CIRR is just one source of information amongst a sea of information and opinions, is just unwarranted.
I…
RE: Formation's growth. I might have explained too many details about the growth. From the Fellow point of view you would only perceive more support and improved tasks and sessions. The goal here isn't to automate away but to enhance what humans are capable of doing. The number of live mentor sessions we don't expect to change much as they are some of the most important practice opportunities.
RE: Code reviews. Yes, from experienced engineers on bugs, tasks, and take home assignments we assign you. No, on code review for personal projects (officially, but possibly case by case).
RE: beyond DS&A. We have FAANG recruiters and managers around as well to answer questions and mock interviews and sessions in the job hunt phase (once your skills are deemed at the bar), Formation is far from just technical training alone.
We have hired back two Fellows as full time SWEs. We have 5 senior (l…
Hi!
RE: Update. Things seemed to get worse in October/November, and have since gotten a bit better. Seeing more people getting FAANG interviews again - with generally longer time frames (e.g. scheduling onsites for over a month from now). We've seen mid-level and senior engineers (based on FAANG standards, not Codesmith standards) get hired and get interview more easily. Zero experience people definitely have a harder time with FAANG. We've seen people go to Palantir, Amazon, Bloomberg, but in general having some kind of genuine connection to the company is key. Something about your background that aligns so much better than most other people, that by trying every angle from referrals, to recruiter pings, to networking events, something works to get that interview. Google specifically has hired a few experienced engineers at the L4 level and has slowly resumed some entry level interview…
I don't know anyone's ages and the resumes tend to exclude all past experience and education unless it's relevant to programming. So the entire resume is often just Codesmith projects, tech talks, and skills and it's very hard to tell. I would estimate amongst the people that I work with that most have 3 to 10 years of experience post college in another field.
Hi, sure, happy to respond with thoughts.
RE: Formation. It is absolutely harder to get FAANG interviews right now than in the past. The goal of Formation is to increase the chances of passing these interviews and to help you get these interview. When the companies are hiring, it's easier for us to send over some profiles to a recruiter and get you in the pipeline. When recruiter jobs themselves are at risk it's harder to do that. But we help you find the right path to companies given the market, and occasional one offs happen and occasionally a recruiter will respond to you.
RE: OSP. Honestly the projects are not good and everyone knows it. They are open source and anyone can look at the code! Non functional, commented out code, reviewed and mentored by someone who just graduated Codesmith and has no experience. I know the vision of the projects is much greater, but in reality they ar…
I'm extremely biased, but I would recommend looking at Career Accelerators, which focus more on practicing than teaching. Some to look into are: [Formation.dev](https://Formation.dev) (I'm the co-founder), Interview Kickstart, Outco, Pathrise, Scalar, Coachable, and then also [Interviewing.io](https://Interviewing.io) for one off interview-practice.
I'm the co-founder of Formation.dev which obviously I would recommended looking at. About 1/3 of people we work with have no full time SWE experience, and of those 1/3 are self taught. We work on filling in a lot of fundamental CS knowledge that's missing and get it up to a top tier bar.
Anyways, I don't want to promote Formation too much here, but look at those options above to at least consider this kind of approach because it might be a better fit.
Hi! Yeah happy to explain more or answer questions over DM that pertain to your specific circumstances.
What you wrote summarizes exactly my overall stance on Codesmith and also what Formation is trying to do so I'm happy you pieced that together from your experience and from my posts.
I really admire Codesmith leadership for scaling the program that they have, they just don't have the experience needed in the tech industry to really solve the right problems that the industry needs, and if they did, maybe they would be more on the right track instead of the rabbit hole they've gone down focusing on going through the motions to put things like a "tech talk" (which are big jokes among students) on your resume.
At Formation, we think we need to get the most experienced people in the industry who are passionate about mentoring to answer the question of what it means to be a truly great…
Good question!
For people who have no or little experience we give them tasks and bugs to fix in a forked production codebase. You get assigned tickets, fix issues, send PRs, get code review from industry engineers, complete your tasks, etc... This is important for helping people ramp up in an unfamiliar codebase, follow a real engineering process. The goal of this work is to help you hit the ground running on your job and NOT to build a portfolio. Sometimes Fellows will list their contributions here as project work on their resume and use it for examples in interviews, but it's not something you can put on a website and show off.
You obviously also do all the fundamentals (e.g. DS&A), resume, behavioral, job hunting practice that is the bread and butter of all engineers.
We've gotten feedback that people think the above task and bug fix practice should actually be supported more for…
I noticed a bunch of people just launched their OSP projects this week. There are example after example of this behavior continuing... every single person that lists their OSP on their LinkedIn as work for a company "Oct 2022 to Present" ... **every.... single... person.** One person said 'I spent several works working on this project' , shared their LinkedIn below and their LinkedIn says they "worked" at this project for FOUR MONTHS. They all started CODESMITH in October 2022, not the project, and then they double list all of their GitHub projects overlapping with this, and some list Codesmith as well.
I genuinely believe Codesmith tells you not lie loud and clear, but can you explain why this behavior happens over and over again?
Yeah Codesmith is a solid choice and should always be a contender when considering the top bootcamps.
I help run a coaching and training service aimed at experienced engineers from non traditional and underrepresented backgrounds to level up to top tier companies (many have bootcamps on their resumes) and prior to that was at FB from 200 engineers to 10,000 and did hundreds of interviews, resume reviews etc...So yeah I really have a pretty unique view on the market from both of these experiences.
This is very subtle but not many bootcamp projects have numbers.
No one uses them, these writeups happen right after launch, they are 3 to 5 week projects!
I think when people stretch here is where the exaggeration comes out.
e.g increased the number of users by 300%... from 1 to 3, and they were my friends.
I'm not saying this is wrong, I just want people to acknowledge it's happening. Especially before complaining about the ever increasing YOE requirements in entry level jobs.
I hear you and appreciate your ongoing pushback, it's why I keep such a close eye on this.
I understand your position is both similar and different from others. I've heard from people that agree with you and people who haven't, who have sent over anecdotes of talking to Eric. Or anecdotes of talking to a career support engineer to make their resume qualify for certain jobs
I don't have all the answers but Triathlete I assure you two things: 1. I have shown OSP resume snippets to industry friends who think the way OSP are portrayed, even when disclosed on fine print, is lying. 2. we have done recruiter training at Formation to identify Codesmith resumes because they were repeatedly flagged as industry experienced engineers at application time because of the OSP portrayal as a work experience, repeatedly.
I understand pushback on second hand accounts when you have first hand experience…
I have not. I grew up middle class in Canada and my summer internships paid for my public education. I consider not having student debt a great priveledge for sure.
I work with many people who are severely not privileged, support them, cry with them, and celebrate with them, and it is absolutely brutal sometimes which is why I try to portray both sides of this.
Being middle of the road doesn't mean being neutral. There are two loud camps on both sides and after working at Facebook especially I saw how silencing people who disagree with you only makes things worse.
I do what I do to change lives and to change the world by enabling people from non traditional backgrounds to change the world. Period. And will always fight for people who are fighting for themselves.
1. The reports are audited annually after the fact
2. The CPA who signed the last audited report said "Direct request of confirmation from Graduates regarding Employment outcomes andobservation of LinkedIn profiles" [Link](https://static.spacecrafted.com/b13328575ece40d8853472b9e0cf2047/r/eb6e615ccddf47e9a891a9c69f223025/1/Codesmith%20Los%20Angeles%20Full-Stack%20Software%20Development%20Audited-AUP%20H2%202020.pdf)
So sure it's audited but it's also self reported by people and uses LinkedIn as a source to see if people have jobs or not. The auditing is to make sure humans put the right numbers in the right boxes, not to audit that people's salaries are what they say they are.
Read through the entire [CIRR Standard](https://static.spacecrafted.com/b13328575ece40d8853472b9e0cf2047/r/aa1e118858a548ec9484b7b714e694c6/1/CIRR%20Standards%202021%20%28rev%202020-07-07%29.pdf) and it's extreme…
Yeah I feel like Codesmith is the same from what people tell me and from the documentation I've seen. People don't even realize what they are doing is perceived as wrong by a number of people because it's so right on the line (e.g. 'construct your sentences about your OSP by using these templates' without realizing that they are leading you to exaggerate your OSP experience). I'm sure I'll be grilled on here by people saying "Codesmith says not to lie!", but the definition of "lying" is subjective and a slippery slope where people land on different places on the spectrum.
On the one hand, if you fake it til you make it and perform well on the job, does it matter? On the other hand, if you fake it and get caught, companies get pissed off, raise the YOE requirements so you can't get through without definitively lying, and it does a disservice to the industry.
Before people attack my comm…
Can you elaborate on lying on a resume? That majority of Codesmith resumes I've looked at overstate the OSP project at a minimum of overstating the amount of time worked on it, and at a maximum, making it appear as a real SWE job. I consistently get comments that "Codesmith doesn't tell you do this" but a pattern is a pattern and they should go over the top to tell people to stop, because in a 200 person sample, over 70% did this.
But there is a difference between careful wording and blatant lying so it would be helpful to explain more your specific experience with that at HR!
Hi, we do run credit checks but look beyond just the score alone for ISAs, so having just a low score only won't necessarily disqualify you from an ISA. Since our coaching and training is ongoing until you get a really good job - people are generally able to pay the ISA even if their prior credit had some minor issues and this model works really well in this case.
There are other payment options you can discuss after applying yeah depending on your circumstances. And we will continue to try to provide more options so people can choose what works for them!
Hack Reactor is a relatively good program that has scaled pretty well post-acquisition where a lot of other programs that scale have lost some of their steam. I think their size and parent company growth pressures have resulted in them have a lower entry bar than Codesmith in order to take on more people, but they keep a reasonably high bar and the result of a lower graduation percentage (\~75%) and they have kept the outcomes for graduates strong.
The people I've worked with from Hack Reactor and Codesmith are all fairly ambitious, hard working, driven people where ultimately any of the top programs might have good enough for them.
If you look 3 to 5+ years down the road, there are many many Hack Reactor alumni at top tier and FAANG companies in their 2nd, 3rd, 4th jobs. I think this is a result of them being San Francisco focused pre-COVID where once you get your first job in person…
A lot of the online best bootcamps resources sadly are sponsored to various degrees.
CourseReport is one that has several tiers of sponsorship package and they do videos and blog posts for sponsorship that is not disclosed. But Codesmith sponsors them so they show up there. Similarly Switch up gets paid if you join sponsored bootcamps through their website.
A lot of blog posts you read are sponsored as well.
Codesmith doesn't do much traditional marketing other than CourseReport, and Career Karma sponsorship. They invest their marketing dollars in the above and in developing public content that will get people to show up to a live session as the goal. There's a good podcast with Will Sentance where he talks about Codesmith's growth and marketing strategy (which is pretty interesting because the extremely strong word of mouth is the goal of their marketing and it clearly works) that y…
Codesmith is one of the top programs with arguably the top outcomes of any bootcamp and is entirely taught by former students. The lead instructors are all former students who were instructors for a few years. The instructors are students hired back full time. The TAs are people who just graduated and do a 3 month contract. The part time advisors are almost all students who now work in industry. Other than the founders and the investors who help out, every instructional staff except one went to Codesmith.
So that doesn't mean it can't work.
I'm not a recent grad so won't answer the question, but zooming out, why to do you get more confused the more research you do?
If you feel like you can see yourself as a good fit in either, then either route will probably be great. One is not objectively better than the other.
A lot of high level outcomes and marketing is great for narrowing down your choices, but at this stage in the decision I would go with the only you wake up in the middle of the night feeling like is the right call... i.e. your gut.
Some warnings I've seen others do:
1. Don't compare exact outcome salaries or placements rates obsessively.... too much wiggle room here, just use them to narrow down in the first place.
2. Curriculum on paper. Don't obsess over every line of the curriculum and compare program to program and/or think that a curriculum with more things is better
3. Don't worry about the stack or lang…
Similar to BloomTech's backend program where all the graduates were placed at Amazon but it was a selective small number around 20, I imagine the first cohorts of this program will have a super high bar so they can ensure success and iron out the kinks. They might even take SWEs who want to convert for example.
At Formation I just pulled upcoming interviews in Jan/Feb of all experience levels which have more than one person interviewing at: Airbnb, Bloomberg, Palantir, Uber, Microsoft, Google, Realtor, Flatiron Health, Travelers, Upwork, Autodesk, Reddit, Patreon, Expedia, Flexport, Hashi.
For people with zero experience: Palantir, Bloomberg, Realtor, Google, Reddit, and numerous people interviewing at smaller companies.
Sorry don't have great data for just this but I tried, timeboxed to a few minutes.
I've been yelled at for not disclosing my affiliations before. I talk about Formation as a reference because I don't know anyone else here that his worked with hundreds of bootcamp grads from all kinds of bootcamps at all stages in-after-much-after. Nor are there any other E7-principal FAANG engineers here that helped grow a FAANG company from 200 engineers to 10,000. I've been here for almost a year now, giving all kinds of advice and telling dozens of people to go to specific bootcamps... Codesmith lines seem longer than ever to me!
I'm obviously super biased and I try to disclose that, but I also have a unique point of view that many find valuable!
I don't pretend I don't have biases, and don't mind some criticism, but I appreciate a kinder calling out if you find me annoying :D
It does not. We aren't a school or bootcamp. We are very upfront (both on our website and in the fine print) that we don't have a curriculum, certificates, courses, lectures, and that everyone will have a unique training experience. The "program buckets" are based on your starting point and how much work you need to do but everyone will have a unique path. So we are not a school or post secondary education for any kind of government program, scholarships, etc...
Hi, yeah can answer!
* We published a little breakdown here: [https://formation.dev/blog/2022-formation-fellow-placements/](https://formation.dev/blog/2022-formation-fellow-placements/). Most people have some experience coming in (2/3 of people) and the 1/3 that didn't, were equally split across bootcamp grads, CS grads, and self taught developers.
* No upfront payment or deposit currently
* Yes open to Canadians but we administer the ISA ourselves, and payments are based on and made in CAD if you get a job in Canada.
I edited to clarify that, I meant both employed SWEs and not yet employed SWEs, I know more than a handful of mock interviewers and coaches with no experienced at all except at Codesmith itself as a paid employee.
I also consider graduates who are employed as "peer support" imo. At Formation we have senior engineers at FAANG companies as normal Fellows looking to change jobs believe it or not who will be peer with each other, but also peers to bootcamp grad Fellows with no job yet. Those are just standard peer sessions and interactions. The actual mentors/mentorship is from very senior engineers (or from 5 to 10+ year FAANG recruiters) who are experts at 1-1 and small group mentoring and they are paid very well at their day jobs and we pay them well as well.
Again sorry for the tangent, I just talk about this a lot to people 1-1 and this is meant more for others who might read this.
This still feels like you graduate and go in "support mode" where some other students/graduates (edit: graduates can be employed SWEs or not yet employed) hired as coaches (i.e. peers) check up on you. It's a wonderful and amazing community but it's still peer based. At Formation.dev we have a bunch of people who are/have been Codesmith coaches or mock interviewers and they are just graduates themselves without jobs or with minimal work experience. So the support is more like "enhanced peer support" and not the full weight of Codemsith behind you. Maybe over time it will be stronger as graduates many years into their jobs give back.
Codesmith experimented with a DSA course for alumni and they charged them for it at a heavily discounted rate so I would expect them to charge for any true future support.
At Formation we give people lifetime access to our version of slack and to some commu…
I was looking at one of the OSP's that got a lot of buzz relative to the others (I think, I can't tell if it's real or just the people working on it promoting) called "Svelvet" https://www.linkedin.com/company/svelvet/
Only 2 out of 18 people listed have jobs now :(
So I think H2 2022 might be a really really bad placement year. The only redeeming factor though is if the market improves and it's now June 2023, no one will care about poor H22022 and it will be explained away as the market is now better! If the market remains this tough though and placement rates are 50% or less, I think people will stop going to bootcamps that require them to put their lives on hold and drop everything to attend.
I do. I think it's going to be much harder this year for bootcamp grads to get jobs without any additional advantages. For example, Ada Academy has built in 5 month internships, and I consider that an "additional advantage". Some programs have connections for apprenticeships with good companies. I also work with a small number of bootcamp grads who haven't gotten jobs yet at Formation and that gives people an "additional advantage" as well.
There are a lot of very strong entry level engineers from top CS schools who were laid off or had offers rescinded and they will be very competitive for those entry level jobs.
Hard !== Impossible! Grit, discipline, accountability, and time, and you will get a job... but these things are not easy when a lot of bootcamps take the foot off the gas the day you graduate and put you into "support mode".
You don't need a degree or even a bootcamp certificate to get a good job. Having relevant experience of any kind does help, but even something like accounting can be a good bridge.
The thing with Codesmith CIRR results are they have an interesting distribution curve with bunch of people on the low side, and a bunch of people on the high side. Their low side is still good, but there are many people who do Codesmith and make under $100K as well. That could still be a solid first job even if it's not the flashy too-good-to-be-true numbers people share.
The other problem with CIRR is it excludes stock and bonuses. A lot of those higher paid engineers are even HIGHER than they appear on CIRR because of that. On the other hand, Codesmith has a lot of alumni placed at Capital One and Amazon over the past year, which are very heavy on base salary and the bulk DOES show up in CIRR.
Anyways if…
If you have really good data-engineering experience to talk about, you should highly look into some career accelerator options like [Formation.dev](https://Formation.dev) (I'm the co-founder), Outco, Pathrise, Interview Kickstart, etc... These options are more part-time. Formation is completely scheduled around your availability. Most people we work with have day jobs and take about 6ish months to find a new job. If you have decent fundamentals already, transitioning to a SWE, or at least a SWE-like-data role is feasible at Formation at least. I can't speak to the other options for this, e.g. Pathrise is focused more on staying in the same vertical, but maybe Scalar would be useful too. Anyways look at these options as well to compare and constrast.
I post criticizing using CIRR as the "gold standard" often :D. But you should trust their reported numbers as reliable.
The issues lie more in 1. the way the data is presented and trying to understand the outcomes for someone like you versus someone with work experience already. 2. they borderline sketchy ways people can be excluded... however these are edge cases and not the bulk of the data. 3. data is too slow -> need more real time data on outcomes
All of that said., the reports trail graduation by 6 months, so the next report will be for H1 2022, which was a GOOD HIRING HALF. H2 2022 -> present has been terrible. Amazon has stopped hiring and Capital One has slowed down hiring for and those accounted for a large chunk of the > $150K salaries you see on there.
We won't know the implications of that until June 2023 at the earliest and you'll be done Codesmith by then! From people i…
1. You want to build (or apply) a framework for problem solving. There are different ones around, we created the "Formation Engineering Method" as one such framework.
2. You want to be extremely comfortable with basic concepts before moving on to harder ones. People jump too fast into LC Mediums to feel like they are making progress. Someone I worked with got a job at Google and did about 150 LC problems focusing on LC Easy the week before, for example.
I agree more with this view than the OP as well. Codesmith has a very heavy emphasis on open source projects but for Codesmith students, I've looked through the code for 10 or so OSPs and these don't qualify as the open source commitments this commenter is mentioning. Codesmith OSPs are of the quality level of any other group bootcamp projects, sometimes better, sometimes worse. Significantly below the standard of true open source software. Look for projects with a lot of usage, lots of documentation (sometimes more than the code itself as it's critical for open source), well thought out processes for reporting bugs and making contributions (not a sentence but a whole process), and look for projects with paid contributors on them (via their companies or because the project is run by a funded company). MUI is a good one with lots of opportunity if you like React.