Starting salaries and offers

Hi, I'm sorry you feel that way and hopefully we can continue talking productively and positively. Sophie's life mission is to increase diversity in big tech because for products to work for everyone that have to be represented by everyone and Formation prides itself in having roughly 2/3 of Fellows from backgrounds underrepresented in tech. I'm more than happy to talk about the reasons for the concerns you brought up, not to counter them, but to add more detail for those reading. Sophie, myself, and our team work constantly on making Formation the best it can be, endless conversations dissecting every detail from the ground up. So when you say we are "hawking a glorified interview prep company" you are personally insulting the thousands of hours we put into our work without a very thoughtful discussion of the pros and cons of Formation. I'm sorry if my tone was miscommunicated but no nerves struck for me about Formation. When Formation is discussed, I have to take off my personal hat and put on my Formation hat and represent the company and write complete, super long answers for other people to read who stumble upon this. I've been here for a very long time and met a lot of interesting people here and I'm not showing up out of nowhere and advertising Formation, I'm using my experience from Formation to try to help give valuable answers to people seeking answers. I see my voice as representing hundreds of bootcamp grads from \~a dozen bootcamps. We have an open house this Saturday you can apply for if you want to see what we do! So to summarize what we do, is we work with you continuously until you get a new job you like. During that time, every week we create a completely new schedule of tasks and small-group sessions on topics we think you need to work on that week and with other people who also need to work on those. This means we schedule many hundreds of 3-5 person and 1-1 sessions every week combining thousands of people's calendars and computing all the micro-lessons people need to work on and making it all work. That's what you are paying for with Formation, not a guide, but the hyper personalization and the direct feedback from senior/staff/principal engineers at top tier companies. A $249 one-size-fits all guide of videos things you can Google on the internet sounds like a scam to me, not the other way around. Outcomes is a tough one to talk about because we are like a personal trainer and everyone has different goals. So we want you to set clear goals, achieve those goals, and feel good about your progress. That cant' be summarized in salary numbers and it can't be summarized entirely in qualitative ratings/words. We don't publish outcomes REPORTS but we publish a small set of outcomes data on our website, not audited, calculations were from July 2022, EXCLUDING private stock and options from the "stock/bonuses": ZERO EXPERIENCE: $134,000 avg first year TC ($116,000 base / $18,000 stock/bonuses) 1-2 YOE: $181,000 avg first year TC ($137,000 base / $44,000 stock/bonuses) 3+ YOE: $204,000 avg first year TC ($155,000 base / $49,000 stock/bonuses) But this doesn't tell the right story.... Someone with 4 YOE with a CS degree and 3 years at Capital One making $500K TC at their new job is much different than someone working as a contractor at Accenture for 4 YOE, bootcamp background, making $170K TC at their new job. We aren't a one size fits all program that can be measured by outcomes alone as the starting points all vary wildly too. People need to believe we can help them achieve their personal goals to join Formation. I hope this adds some more depth and I'm happy to explain more!