I’m Michael. I was a principal engineer at Facebook from 2009 to 2017, where I was the top code contributor of all time and also conducted hundreds of interviews. I recently co-founded Formation.dev, an engineering fellowship that trains and refers engineers directly into big tech. Ask me Anything!

I haven't heard of them before but I can walk through how I would look into a program you are unfamiliar with. This is information gathering, not about making judgements each step of the way. 1. Who runs the program/owns it/and why did they make this program? It doesn't matter if it's for-profit/non-profit more so than the reasons it exists. A good start here is to try to find the corporation/company's legal name. If you can't find it, that's not a good sign. You can usually find out quickly if the legal owner is a startup, a giant company, an individual person, etc... and helps paint a picture of where it's coming from. Giant company !== bad, just painting the picture. Often times you can find this on the Terms and Conditions page or Privacy Policy on their website. 2. Google '<program name> scam'. Now any kind of big program probably has some disgruntled former people who claim it's a "scam", but look for like overwhelming numbers of comments, anecdotes from multiple sources as a warning flag. 3. Find former people who did the program on LinkedIn and cold-message them to ask very simple how their experience was, if they would do it again, and ideally find out more about the day to day of what you would be doing for real (and not what the marketing says). 4. Finally, look at the cost, look at what your goals are and if they seem reasonable (i.e. compare yourself to past students and estimate the range of outcomes you might expect from the program.) And decide if it makes financial sense for you at this time. If the program defers payment and makes it feel like you only pay if you get a tech job, watch out for that and read the fine print carefully. If you are learning and the program isn't a scam, and it doesn't work out for you, you should pay something for the time and effort they spent training you, you just want that to be reasonable. But you don't want to emotionally feel like you have "nothing to lose" by signing up, that's not a good state of mind to be in.