u/climate-is-changing wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
>The reason I've enrolled at Formation is because I want to get more experience. I think Formation is perfect for Codesmith grads, especially those that lack industry experience. Could you elaborate on this? Do fellows do more projects in Formation that they can add to bolster t
u/michaelnovati replied · ★ FEATURED
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 engineering skills with real bugs, tasks, and a real process.
Your personal story and resume review development process is completely separate and takes a couple of weeks usually. External mentors and career coaches will review your resumes with fresh eyes. So they aren't really biased by the project work at Formation, or at Codesmith, or anything, and they give impartial feedback that we can iterate on.
That said, a lot of Codesmith people start with their Codesmith resume and sometimes add Formation. It depends if they want to make their Codesmith project super highlighted and the star of the show or not. Some people add Formation to projects or "experience" (not Work Experience) in addition.
At the end of the day when we hit your job hunt we are hyper focused on your unique strategy and finding the right paths based on your goals. For some people that is referrals, and the resume doesn't matter much. For others, it's an apprenticeship, and it also doesn't matter much since no one has experience. For others, they are gunning for entry level FAANG roles where they need to pull out a certain amount of experience on paper to get in the door, even via referral. For people at mid level and senior FAANG roles (Codesmith's definition of mid level and senior is not consistent with FAANG), we will focus on pulling out all of the stuff we as experienced hiring managers and interviewers would want to see to justify a higher level at FAANG. We give advice based on our experience, try stuff, iterate, keep going until you get a job you are happy with.
Let me know if you have more questions.