People on this thread are talking about total compensation, including bonuses and stock, and that’s why the range can be so high.
For base salary, at FAANG. you will be a mid level or possibly senior engineer. Based on your question I might lean mid level but you can send me your LinkedIn and I can give a better estimate if you want. So mid level is Google L4 and right now you would be looking at 150K base to $190K base. This is FAANG so at a smaller less known company, you might see an inflated title and $130 to $170K base.
Now the stock is where is gets interesting. At public companies, it’s almost like cash and a super critical part of your compensation.
I work with people that will often turn down higher base salaries for tremendous amounts of stock to more than make up for it.
Levels.fyi is great but it hides the variableness of the stock portion and the performance bonus po…
Leon has a lot of bootcamp experience at GA and is also very smart. I think his materials is great for free. I don’t think you can get a real great (top tier) engineering job by going through 100devs but it’s a great complement for self taught devs. If his approach motivates you then you might get more out of his lessons.
My only caution so if you watch a couple of live streams and love it, you have to commit to that approach for months and months to payoff. I’ve seen people make more impulsive decisions on what to work and and jump from to thing to thing and you should take a deep breath and make sure it works for you. No magic solution to getting a job.
RE: paying for content - this is a tangent and not CS prep specific. You can get great Udemy courses for very cheap (e.g. Colt Steele). You can get a lot for free even on Youtube. Springboard licenses content from other people for example and it's the same content you can get elsewhere. Nucamp is another example of a program that is very affordable, relies heavily on somewhat generic content, and the reason you are paying four figures is for access to instructors to help you and give you feedback. People pay to have accountability and to have instructors give you feedback and answer questions and my understanding is think that's the goal of CS Prep (and there is a lot of problem solving and feedback), but generally I advise people to never spend more than \~$100 for one-way fixed curriculum content.
Yeah look at the website. We have a fairly high bar and 90%+ of people we work with have worked for at least 1 year in the industry already as an engineer. But we can help some people who are self taught (or also who did a bootcamp already). Our training does not work well otherwise and we can't work with you.
If you are comfortable answering programming problems with Binary Tree, Linked Lists, and Arrays then look at the website more and let me know and it might be worth going farther. Otherwise, I would do a bootcamp first.
1. Yes for that specific person, without knowing their skill level, they should look into Formation. If their skills are at our bar, it would be a better choice than a bootcamp. For reference, the comment thread: [https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/viw3bd/switching\_from\_civil\_engineering\_to\_swe/idhm08u/?context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/viw3bd/switching_from_civil_engineering_to_swe/idhm08u/?context=3)
2. 80K is the increase in total compensation over people's previous job engineering, not the compensation itself (and we exclude people who don't have a previous job from the calculation as it would be very unfair). I've been trying to crunch more recent numbers and my rough calculations for median base salary is $138K for salaries submitted (not job start dates but when people submitted a form with the info) Sept 30th 2021 to May 29th, 2022 (…
80K is the average INCREASE in compensation for people that had jobs prior. Not the average compensation.
I think that's kind of proving the point, we are not competing with them and there's nothing to be put to rest. A bunch of people have messaged me here about bootcamps and I've recommended they go to Codesmith given their situation, it's not either or. Others have messaged me about Formation. No one has said "I'm choosing between Codesmith and Formation"
Again, people typically talk to us about Outco, Interview Kickstart, Scalar, Exponent, and Pathrise - some of whom don't have pricing on their websites, let alone outcomes, but have had thousands and thousands of engineers go through their programs nonetheless. We're playing different games here and I'm sorry if my involvement in this subreddit is causing this confusion.
This is the best I got for raw outcomes: last 50 offers acce…
RE: career change. How much experience do you have already coding? We have a civil engineer at Formation.dev right now with a similar background but who has been self studying for some time now and crushing it. It could be a good path to consider if you are already at our bar and I can ask them if they would talk to you to give you advice. If you already have your plans set then ignore me and keep going.
RE: job market. I can comment on what we've seen at Formation. We have seen zero offers rescinded or layoffs. We have seen a very small number (under 10) of cancelled interviews (specifically at the headline companies that have rescinded offers/hiring freezes). On the other hand we've seen a lot of companies aggressively hiring and compensation has been increasing. If anything we've seen a pickup in hiring. We've had more people got to Google, Amazon, Microsoft than ever.... 15 out of t…
Sorry, 100% agree the traffic meant that if you have real users, it will help you build a better project even if it’s a small number so sounds great.
I do mentoring at Formation so this isn’t for me but I will keep an eye out if a Fellow is looking for a side project along these lines!
You should make a tool to tell people which bootcamp to go to. I think it will get a lot of traffic! Ideally it would narrow it down to like 5 so the person can focus on talking to people who went to those bootcamps.
I'm very familiar with this process in the United States at least. It's called "team matching".
So if you do well on the onsite, the recruiter will send your packet to the hiring committee review. If that committee "recommends hiring", you passed the interviews! You will go into a big pool of people who passed to get matched with teams and the recruiter can also help you match.
During team match, the goal is for a team to see if you are a good fit for their needs and then if they want you, you will get an offer officially with numbers shortly after.
This process will vary depending on you and the teams. An earlier career candidate might have an easy time because the teams they are marching with are looking for someone junior who seems good to work with.
If you are very senior, the team might be more selective about who will join because you will be a leader with more influence and…
I've recommended two things to people:
1. A perpetual project that is publicly launched that you work on and iterate on with a lot of discipline. Ideally solving a problem you actually have based on your passions or background.
2. Volunteering at something like Hack4LA, where you get do take part in real projects for real people with design, PMs, etc...
Adding this for future reference as well to show how drastically different we are. Codesmith posted a blog announcing their CIRR results that explains the job hunt differences quite well
The TLDR: this reinforces how Codesmith is a bootcamp program to teach people using structured lectures and curriculum and Formation is a program to give you unique "personal trainer"-like development and mentoring.
THIS IS AN ENTIRE QUOTE FROM SOURCE BELOW WITH INLINE COMMENTS IN BOLD MARKED "FORMATION" TO HIGHLIGHT DIFFERENCES
During Codesmith’s **Hiring Program**, you can expect:
* Tailored Resume Guidance and Feedback
* Residents attend lectures covering resume best practices and are pushed to craft their experiences in a way that is both technically sound and authentic to them. Residents receive three revisions with specific feedback from an engineering fellow to ensure the content and quali…
Yeah no need to finish the bootcamp. I work with a lot of people now that have a very similar background and there are definitely paths to top tier jobs down the road. So once you hit about a year on the job, you'll easily get interviews in the future without 500 applications. Recruiters will reach out to you proactively!
You'll need to brush up on data structures and algorithms and other gaps to make a top tier jump. But you can cross that bridge when you get there.
Hi. You have to be really careful because if you have any bugs or problems, people will find them and exploit them (i.e. steal your money or your products).
So you have two reasonable approaches if you want to do this for real and launch it publicly.
1. Make a shopify or similar page and customize the look and feel so it appears more custom.
2. Use commerce APIs like Stripe or BigCommerce, or even just PayPal, and build your own website from scratch using their APIs to actually store and handle financial transactions. Stripe’s API is pretty easy to use and you can use their demo mode to build something quickly without any real data. It’s a bit confusing at first because they support so many different use cases, so you want to make sure you keep it simple.
2 sounds like what you want. Just be careful with storing your api keys and your customers tokens properly so that they don’t l…
I’m actually not from the USA either originally and visa scenarios are very personal and very complex. So we are not equipped to help people navigate them right now. We focus on the training and mentoring being extremely effective as the priority. In the future we hope to have more resources to dedicate to visa support.
Hi /u/racheletc, I read through the thread and sorry to hear. I have a few thoughts on this. (For context, I was at FB for 8 years, now I help train and mentor people get top tier jobs, we have a person who ran the FB internship program for 10 years on staff too, lots of experience with university recruiting in general).
1. Sorry to hear this :(. A lot of people kind of cruised through senior year looking forward to that new job and it’s really turned things upside down overnight.
2. So you are correct about new grad pipelines at big tech. But there are still some angles you can work. Google and Amazon should have paths. And a tier of top companies, like Figma, might have paths as well depending on your specific case.
3. Leaving a job from a startup in under a year doesn’t look bad per se, but it raises flags you have to explain. What happened is a good reason. But that said, rule of…
Our ISA is very much trust based too in practice. We take a person’s offer letter as proof of base salary and don’t dig into tax records and stuff. It’s possible some programs are doing extreme income verification with the company and alerting them to the fact that their is an ISA?
Wow that seems so weird, do you know which bootcamp? An ISA is just a contract between you and the program and they can have whatever terms they want in them. Like ISA’s have no standard rules or anything at all and this is one of the reasons people are cautious with them. Very curious to know more about this!
Apologies if this sounds like product placement but you should consider Formation.dev to see if it’s a good fit or not. You may or may not need it but we have worked with a couple of people in this bucket (one is on our formation.dev/network page in the top row) and had very strong results. Again, not meant to be salespitch, check it out on your own and do your research but you should know all your options. Some other programs that exist to help get interview ready are Outco and Interview Kickstart. They all cost about the same and Outco and Interview Kickstart have fairly similar fixed training models. At Formation, we work with you full force for however long it takes to get a top tier job and your training will adapt personally to you week to week to efficiently get you there, but it’s fairly intense (10 to 20 hours a week minimum up to full time 40 hours).
Companies have nothing to do with ISAs so I would be curious to know what’a really the problem. At Formation, we have ISAs for a different purpose - we aren’t a bootcamp, but we train and mentor people (many who went to bootcamps and are now working at their first job) until they get a new job and then they start paying back their ISA. Because we keep working with people until they get that job, no matter how long it takes, everyone has been happy with this model and not once have people been turned away from jobs because of this. People are going to Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Dropbox, Figma, and dozens more and not once has an ISA come up.
So I have some follow up questions:
1. Why is this even coming up in conversation, no one should know or care about how the person paid for their program?
2. Perhaps the person’s resume hides that they went to a bootcamp? and it’s the r…
I'm also not familiar enough with them. I have worked with a few alumni who struggled to get jobs and they were not quite prepared for legit jobs right out of Coding Dojo and I spent a lot of time working with them to get them ready.
So they are quite a large program at this point so I expect a wide range of outcomes. Based on their anecdotal reputation, it seems like they are fairly expensive, not doing anything particularly better or worse than others, but generally aren't fantastic.
The biggest criticism I feel barely qualified to make is that I think their bar for entry is too low and that contributes to the above (very large program, large variance of outcomes). So like all my advice, I would consider them along with all your options and do extensive background checking. I would not choose them if you get rejected from other bootcamp and accepted here and it's your only option.
Yeah it could be that! Maybe you are doing well and the CTO wants to spend some time with you so that you also feel really bought into the company and will be a long term valuable member.
Hi. I have done hundred of interviews at FB, a lot of interns, and someone on my team ran FB's internship program for TEN YEARS before leaving.
1. Practicing Leetcode will help for FAANG internship interviews, because they lean DS&A heavy (not much behavioral or anything else). That said, I've interview far too many people who show up super nervous, don't talk much, or like over-obsess over the wrong details. Practicing interviews is highly advised in addition to Leetcode.
2. So the peak hiring season is October (September to November). It can't hurt to apply now if applications are open but you should expect this time window for the top companies. Most likely Akuna is opening up their applications early, so they can try to get people interviewed and signed BEFORE competitors do and steal all the good people. If you love Akuna, go for it. If not, expect to interview in the fall for all…
Do you have any experience already? I agree with someone else below, reading about things will barely help you here as this interview is testing for your real world experience.
I highly recommend reading this to get a better sense of what these interviews are all about: https://formation.dev/blog/how-to-prepare-for-a-system-design-interview-and-pass-it/
I am not self-taught, but through my company, I train a lot of people who are self-taught and help them get truly top tier jobs, so I can comment on what I've seen.
1. It's common to get intimidated and dejected it. There are infinite things to learn and do in programming and it's never clear what to do when.
2. You might have never even said some of the terms out loud before and the though of interviewing is often intimidating to people. I'm bias because I have a PAID program to help people, but if you can practice interviewing it will go a long way.
3. Best thing about being a developer. Scale. You can write a tiny amount of code that can truly make people's lives better and seeing that is VERY rewarding.
4. Worst part. This is also bias, but it's people focusing on Leetcode problems wayyyyyy too much and missing the point. More generally, people programming for personal success and t…
Not only is this not weird, but it's HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. Even if it's small, this is a really effective way to get in the pipeline. Don't be too hovering or invasive, but something like this is very lightweight and non-invasive:
'Hi! I just applied for a position at X and am extremely excited about the company. I just wanted to reach out and connect because I saw you worked there. If you have any advice for the process, let me know! This is really my dream company!'
if you want to more aggressive you can do something like:
'Hi! I just applied for a position at X and am extremely excited about the company. This is really my number 1 dream company. Do you have any time to meet to give me some advice on the process?'
What's the context? How big is your company? It's possible you are doing really well and the CTO just wants to get to know you so you understand more what the company is about and how it works. But without any context here it's impossible for me to give more advice.
It shouldn't be hard to pass this course if you follow along and do the work week to week. Any course where you fail for doing the required work day to day is a very poorly designed course. That said, if you aren't doing an internship this summer, consider practicing DS&A for practice. It can be lonely. If you are starting from zero, doing some online free/cheap courses and being very disciplined can help. I would also recommend doing a personal project the whole summer that you launch publicly.
Everyone has their own goals. I think the world would be a better place if everyone found their ideal work environment. I'm bias, helping people find this is what I do now for a living. But there are definitely a lot of people for whom a FAANG job is great, even if just for a short period of time. A lot of people come from non traditional backgrounds and historically underrepresented backgrounds, and it's not so easy to navigate the market. It's somewhat of a privilege to choose your perfect job that comes with experience and/or mentoring.
I have a lot of thought on them and have been following for a while. They have audited outcomes that are really not great (something around 50% of people who start get a job within 6 months of graduating and the median salary is quite low compared to the national averages for engineers).
So this is a bit of secret but they use to have this webpage where they listed all of their new grads who were available to hire. I was monitoring that page month to month and something in the low dozens out of many hundreds were hired every month. Their CEOs tweets make it seem like a lot more people are graduating and getting top tier jobs.
I have a minor beef with them personally. One of their alumni came to Formation 2 years and 2 jobs after leaving Bloomtech. We helped them very briefly to interview and negotiate their top tier offer and then Bloomtech shouted out this offer as a success case for…
Hi Ilias, we currently support people in United States and a small number in Canada.
To be transparent, there are two challenges:
1. We work with people as long as it takes to get a really really good job so the job market in your country has to be similar to the USA so we can expect you to get that job in a reasonable amount of time. Similarly, we can’t typically support deferring based on your income (you can pay upfront) because the salaries have to be similar to here for the economics to work. If you are somewhere with a similar market to the USA it might be possible, otherwise we need to made some changes and offer a specially design program for specific countries. We currently don’t offer immigration or visa support if your plans are to move to the United States for a job. If you are authorized to work in the USA already, than this wouldn’t be a problem even if you are currently…
I don't know much about their curriculum but they seem to have a lot of turnover. Someone on here said they get 1 or 2 weeks to drop out tuition free, and this person dropped out a week after and had to sue them to get a refund. They said 75% of people had dropped out in the first week. Now this is someone clearly disgruntled so take that with a grain of salt.
Now what I do have an opinion on is that I really don't like how they convinced so many top universities in CS to run programs in their continuing studies departments under the university's name. I've heard a lot of stories about people who didn't realize this and joined thinking it was a UTAustin or UW or Columbia program. I have no problem at all if they offer courses in partnerships with the universities, just wish this was clearer. This might be the universities fault 🤷♂️
I probably wouldn't have them on MY shortlist but ea…
Ah my favorite topic haha. So one resource is CIRR. It's a business group started by bootcamps to develop standards for reporting audited outcomes that they all agree with.
Unfortunately it's down to only 5 bootcamps reporting in the recent results and has been on the decline each half. Quite frankly, the results other than Codesmith are not great so people have little incentive to keep publishing results as they will probably be used against the bootcamp.
HackReactor and BloomTech publish their own audited reports as well, but just following their own metrics rather than CIRRs.
I have a strong stance on metrics and don't love any of the above reports as they focus on medians and averages.
You want to know what someone with a similar background felt about the program. These numbers get juiced up by people with CS degrees and experience attending and getting high outcomes.
I would…
Sorry to hear about that, but glad you have another company lined up. If it's very clear you aren't even trying, you will be terminated on PIPs. It's a risk for the company, and they are willing to take it if you are blatantly not doing anything.
On the background check always put the truth. A background check is first and foremost checking if the information you entered for the background check is accurate. Second, when there is an inconsistencies it's not like you fail and are dismissed. They will flag the inconsistencies and company will review them. So the report might look like:
STATED ON RESUME: Rainforest (June 2019 to Present)
CONFIRMED BY COMPANY: Rainforest Music Services Inc. (June 2019 to June 2022)
Sometimes the old company won't even confirm and it will say
CONFIRMED BY COMPANY: Company did not respond (with a log of attempts)
It's really hard to answer this question. The code would be compiled down into machine code to fit onto a cartridge. Tangent: something I learned about NES and SNES cartridges is that they actually add ADDITIONAL HARDWARE that can vary by cartridge and this is also why some games are more expensive than others. N64 I don't think/know if this was as common. But anyways, the short answer is it doesn't really matter.
The source code could be long or short to be more readable or easier to iterate quickly on the game. As long as it compiled down to something that worked on a cartridge and had high performance on the N64 hardware.
Additionally, games have lots of sprites and images, which take up room and aren't really a "line of code". So you probably need a few metrics to try to understand the size of the codebase.
Formation doesn't have public any "reports". We don't aggregate a lot of numbers either internally. We are focused on meeting or exceeding each person's individual goal. I'm more than happy to try to answer questions you might have.
Some notes about why. The summary is that since we aren't bootcamp, course, or anything like that, it's very nuanced to summarize numbers and we would need to invest a lot of time and energy in figuring things out:
1. Bootcamps have a consistent A starting point and a report is a way to measure how well they develop people from starting point A. Formation is focused on someones goals, so our outcomes are relative to that. For example have Senior Microsoft engineers who want to go to top tier smaller companies. We have new grads who want to go to FAANG. We have self taught people looking for apprenticeship. Our most common Fellow will have 1-3 years of exper…
Hi, what are your job goals for your first job?
You can self teach backend. You can't really self teach scaling backends but you can make solid backend progress on your own.
I've worked with people who are self-taught/cheap courses (at Formation.dev, which is paid "personal training" and quite expensive, but not a bootcamp or course) and they have gotten top tier FAANG-level jobs with zero experience. If you have the raw skills and a strong alignment to the right company, then the right referral to the right person can get you in the door. It's extremely personal and nuanced but it's worked and I've seen it happen. Here's one of the best cases who is public on our website: [https://www.linkedin.com/in/mpay/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/mpay/) (this is a full blown SWE role and not a contractor or adjacent non-SWE role). Some of these people have had stronger outcomes than people who we…
It depends on what you need to work on. We have hundreds of small group session types, thousands of tasks, hundreds of assessments and assignments, and you do what you need to do :). We bundle them up into these different "challenges" so you work on one (or sometimes two or three) larger area(s) of stuff at a time.
In terms of practical work, we forked a production codebase (in the tens of thousands of lines of code) and people work on bugs and tasks in there, get mocks, code reviews from mentors and our team, follow an engineering process that simulate real work. You might do 20 to 40 of these tasks and bugs if you really need more experience.
People will put this on their resume as project work if they are lacking, but any kind of real work experience (or volunteer experience) will be better on a resume. The goal of it is not a big shiny project to show off, but to develop your engin…
My understanding is that there was a small cohort that was their "test" cohort for remote but that was back in 2020. I saw a video they did possibly on Course Report (I have YouTube running in the background almost all the time and consume a ton of stuff) where they discussed this test period.
But this is for people that started it H12021 which presumably would be a much larger number of people. Someone on good authority said cohorts have about 35 peopleso 25 is an odd number.
Would love someone that knows the answer to come in. Maybe more people dropped out and were fully refunded to be nice during COVID and we're excluded? Maybe the program indeed had only one or tiny cohorts and what not at capacity? I have no idea, but remote programs in general have much lower engagement and higher dropout rates in industry in general.
Does anyone know anything?
Ok great, I would aim for a tech adjacent role at a company that has or does a lot of cybersecurity. Like a support engineering role at Crowdstrike or 1Password would be a good entry level. If you are REALLY passionate about cybersecurity, then getting an even lower role, like an IT person at a cybersecurity company would be pretty cool and then doing part time of a more intense program on the side while doing that role.
So I don't think I would go to NuCamp with the expectation of getting that job though.
I can help throw out options like the above, but I don't have enough experience with your exact stage to say what the best path is.
What do you mean by signing up for "hacker rank?" Are you talking about the platform for online tests. At Formation we send out thousands and thousands of CodeSignals and HackerRanks assessments we have developed, and there's nothing wrong with signing up and doing their practice materials, it's a very common legitimate service.
You can use their examples to practice and learn for free! They cover all kinds of topics.
Dancing can give a more confident answer.
I'm not familiar with their career services other than that they have a job hunting unit now that I think is new and possibly not live yet. I believe when they started, they had no job hunt support other than a job listing board (that was nothing special). Based on feedback I think they added an additional paid unit: [https://www.nucamp.co/bootcamp-overview/job-hunting](https://www.nucamp.co/bootcamp-overview/job-hunting)
NuCamp does not provide much job outcome data because they are focused on student happiness more. They ask people if they feel their new skills are useful, etc... I actually think this isn't trying to cover up poor results, but they just don't believe you should expect a job after and they want to make sure people feel like the course was at least somewhat useful or very useful.
NO IDEA IF NUCAMP FOLLOWS THIS: but the trend…
I chatted with someone about System Design and can use that as an example, please CORRECT ME IF THIS HAS CHANGED AND WILL EDIT IT
​
**Codesmith's System Design**
* 1 week long, fixed classes
* 2 hour lecture from Codesmith staff (not necessarily with industry experience) (entire cohort, 35 people)
* 3 hour working sessions working through problems and materials (unknown size)
* reading materials
**Formation System Design**
* Variable length until you passing system design mock interviews w/ senior/staff/principal level engineers (typically 4 to 6 weeks)
* Specific topics for the following depending on what you need to work on from the previous week, collecting feedback for all for next week:
* 1-2 weekly 1 hour workouts with a senior industry engineer working through a specific problem with 3-5 other Fellows
* 1 weekly 1 hour session reviewing a topic in more depth with…
I do think down the road we will compete head on but still disagree we do now. Our technology right now works for taking a range of A to a range of B outcomes in C time (which is the variable). We have a few hundred different micro sessions, and a few thousands different tasks, a few hundred assessments, a few dozens types of mock interviews. And every week we pull out a set of things that fit your schedule that you need to work on to improve that week. This is all the stuff to get from "1-3 years industry experience at decent company" to high performance top tier company. But if we expand this library of tasks and sessions we can really support a much wider range of transitions.
I'm happy to go over more details about what we do specifically or maybe chat with Chris G or another person you can find that went through the full gamut.
Maybe on paper these words sound similar but our bar…
Codesmith just released their 2021 H1 data last night, and the percentage of people who got jobs within 3 months and 6 months improved (over already good previous numbers) and is quite good:
LA (130 people): 48% in 90 days, 85% in 180 days
NY (123 people): 51% in 90 days, 89% in 180 days
Remote PT (25 people): 71% in 90 days, 88% in 180 days.
There's some wiggle room that these are of the people who GRADUATED, which is 96+% so doesn't impact much right. And some people stopped reporting their data after 90 days, again very small number (0 to 7% stopped reporting after 90 days depending on the program).
Anyways, yeah you should try to find how long it took people with a similar background to yourself to get a job so giving a bit more info about your background could help others chime in anecdotally.
Thanks for sharing. Yeah we lose a lot of context on Reddit and my writing might come across more mean than it's meant. I love that Codemsith has helped so many people and had a major impact on people's lives. We need way more people working to make tech a better place. Thanks for writing this out and I'll be more cognizant of this in the future.
100% compared to other bootcamps, there are so many bad apples out there that are genuinely not great intentioned. Sophie, the founder of Formation was a mentor at different programs and wanted to do better, which is why she started Buildschool all by herself - a free iOS bootcamp. That evolved into Formation when I joined on and we realized we needed to raise funding to hire top tier engineers in the industry (mostly from Facebook, so we can debate that haha) to help scale out truly one-of-a-kind approach to training. I think we need more peop…