Debating Kenzie Academy

So I don't know 100% but the spouse of a co-worker has worked on running the Amazon Tech Academy at Amazon and we (Formation.dev - disclosure I am co-founder) worked with someone in ATA to help them convert faster. My understand of ATA is that you have to work at Amazon for some time first (1+ year), and then are eligible to apply to it. It's a fairly small and competitive program and still very early stages - even though Amazon is enormous. At the end, you can interview immediately for SDE 1 and if you pass you're done, if you don't you do an internship at Amazon and get another shot (this was \~1 year ago, might not be true anymore). My understanding is not EVERYONE got jobs immediately after the ATA but the person we worked with was in the first cohort I believe(?) and did. Now Kenzie and BloomTech offer a program that teaches the same curriculum as ATA, but you have to pay them directly like a bootcamp. At the end you are not guaranteed an interview with Amazon but they are supposed to consider your application equivalently to someone with a CS degree. Austen from BloomTech announced that the first group of people in this program had graduates recently but said that interviews with Amazon "haven't happened yet". Anecdotally I haven't heard of many people moving forward. Kenzie says clearly "You may qualify for a role at Amazon. Although we cannot guarantee you a job at Amazon." **Plug for my company,** we have placed a lot of people at Amazon (~20+ offers in the past year, a lot of people surprisingly don't want to work there though) and it genuinely sounds like an option you should look into (I don't want to promote here, so you should research on your own). If you can do well on LC medium already, you are likely going to need \~2 months to be at the Amazon L4 (SDEI) bar. If you apply, ping me with your details so I can keep an eye out. Note that we are quite backlogged for people with no experience as the majority of people have already worked in industry and I wish we could grow faster but we maintain results by growing sustainably. Anyways, even if Formation is not a good fit, you can try this assessment: [https://formation.dev/join/assessment](https://formation.dev/join/assessment) and ping me for some advice on bootcamp selection based on how you do.