u/michaelnovati replied · · edited ★ FEATURED
Hi, yeah I'm the co-founder (Sophie is the CEO and founder) and hang around this sub as Derek said :D. As Derek kind of said as well, Formation isn't a "bootcamp" and roughly 80 to 90% of Fellows (approx) have some kind of professional engineering work experience (typically 1 to 3 years) and are working full time while they do Formation. A lot of people did bootcamps in the past so I took an interest to this sub, and a ton of people have been asking me questions about bootcamps (we have Formation Fellows representing many different bootcamps in the past) and the industry since I became active, so I stuck around to help.
I also highly doubt past Formation Fellows are in this sub, I know a few people in this sub who are doing Formation now and are on the more junior side and they might be able to comment on their experiences to help you get a better picture. Try contacting people on LinkedIn! More junior people often put it on their LinkedIn profiles and you can find them that way, and for more experienced people ping anyone who opted in to being on our Network page: [https://formation.dev/network](https://formation.dev/network) (you can also search LinkedIn for some people posting posts after they started their now job for some more experience people)
I don't want to write a novel, so I'll list some things that make us a different category of things from a bootcamp or school (...we consider ourselves more like a "personal trainer").
1. We work with people who are already at a hirable bar, and we help them get truly top tier jobs at the best companies. We do not work with most people who are at a beginning-of-bootcamp level. The last 50 or so accepted offers are, reverse chronologically are: Plaid, Sense, <startup>, <startup>, Figma, Google, <startup>, <startup>, Amazon, Amazon, <startup>, Bill.com, Microsoft, Amazon, Bloomberg, <startup>, Front, Workday, <startup>, Microsoft, BitGo, Amazon, Jelly Fish, GitHub, Microsoft, Toast, Quantcast, Meta, CloudTrucks, Plaid, 1Password, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Google, Snap, Akasa, Atlassian, Pandora, Atlassian, Amazon, <startup>, Square, Capital One, Facebook, Amazon, Bloomberg, Intel, Microsoft, <startup>, Pinterest, Amazon, Apple. Startups are all top tier teams and well funded, competitive offers and some were chosen over FAANG.
2. We don't have a fixed curriculum in our approach to training. We have created thousands of tasks and session types covering all kinds of activities, from working through a hard algorithm, to doing a practice take home exercise w/review, to 3-5 person group sessions with senior and staff level industry FAANG engineers, to 1-1 mock interviews with people who have conducted hundreds of interviews, to in-house built online assessments, literally thousands. Every week we collect a bunch of feedback on what you need to work on, grab your calendar availability, and create a unique schedule of tasks and sessions that we think is perfect for you. You'll have \~2-5 sessions (1-1 or up to 5/6 other Fellows) with very strong industry mentors (senior/staff/principal/directors at FAANG). So your day to day and week to week will never be the same and will be unique to you.
3. We have no fixed length of time whatsoever. We set a start date, and from that day forward, we continue with our full force of training, mentorship, feedback, strategizing, etc... until you sign an offer that you are happy with. So we work with people anywhere from 1 month to 10-12 months. The average is somewhere around 6ish months I believe? It's longer than a bootcamp. But that's because we have no fixed schedules and adapt week to week completely to your needs. Some people even pause and resume for a week or two for personal reasons. You might get offers you don't like and continue. Lots of things happen and it depends on you. Put another way, by joining Formation, you will get a job you are happy with, but we don't know the timeframe it will happen on. We start with an estimated plan and every week, with feedback, you get a sense of roughly how long it will be until you are top tier interview ready.
4. Our Fellows have backgrounds similar to INSTRUCTORS at top bootcamps, like Codesmith and Hack Reactor, some TEACH at bootcamps, not attend them, some mentor junior engineers in their free time.
5. We actually have a good number of alumni from a specific top bootcamp who have come to Formation to cement themselves at a truly top tier/FAANG company. We ran some data on their incoming assessments compared to hundreds of others because one of our employees noticed a pattern, and there is surprisingly low variance amongst this group. Almost all of them are coming in at a solid 2nd/3rd tier entry level job bar and we work extremely well at filling in the gaps to bring them to the top tier industry bar. This is another example to show the difference between a bootcamp and us. Bootcamps prepare you for your first job, we are filling in your gaps and training to get a top-of-the-top job.
u/Icy-Association7305 let me know if you have more questions or if you are actually considering bootcamps instead I can help give you advice. If you are considering Formation, I HIGHLY recommend reaching out to people directly above (anyone you can find) since I don't know if a ton of Formation people will see this.