Currently in Codesmith, question for former students?

Hi! RE: Update. Things seemed to get worse in October/November, and have since gotten a bit better. Seeing more people getting FAANG interviews again - with generally longer time frames (e.g. scheduling onsites for over a month from now). We've seen mid-level and senior engineers (based on FAANG standards, not Codesmith standards) get hired and get interview more easily. Zero experience people definitely have a harder time with FAANG. We've seen people go to Palantir, Amazon, Bloomberg, but in general having some kind of genuine connection to the company is key. Something about your background that aligns so much better than most other people, that by trying every angle from referrals, to recruiter pings, to networking events, something works to get that interview. Google specifically has hired a few experienced engineers at the L4 level and has slowly resumed some entry level interviews. However, there might be some turbulence coming and I don't expect many slots to open up. If you pass the interview, you can be eligible for team matching for up to a year, so they are proactively interviewing a small number of people in case spots open up. RE: Formation. We are continuing to grow actually and cautiously take on as many people as we can while maintaining (and improving) the experience. We've actually increased the amount of support people have - from 1 dedicated staff member in your private channel to 3 staff members. The really unique thing about Formation is that we have invested in a senior/staff/principal level FAANG-level engineering team to build the technology that powers it, and this will let us scale while constantly improving where every other program relying on humans to scale will have to stop, or will get worse and worse as they grow. First, every Fellow gets a unique schedule created from scratch every week based on what they have to work on. You would need an army of humans to determine and schedule almost a thousand sessions a week that are entirely scheduled magically for everyone's schedule and that happen to be on topics you need. This process is far from perfect but it's already orders of magnitude better than what humans can do and it requires almost no human input. Second, we are building world class product tools so that we can identify and offer support when it's needed, at the right place at the right time. Our engineering team has built all kinds of complex tools like this and it takes tremendous product building experience to do this well. The key thing about Formation is if it you keep putting in the work and progressing, we keep working with you for as long as it takes to get a job, so we're finding people who are joining are not concerned that much overall economy (a small number are for all kinds of reasons, but vast majority are not). A lot of people do Formation part time, so they can do it for many months and opportunistically take interviews. We have good revenue yeah from all the people placed already, from people who pay upfront, we are able to get loans and financing for people who will pay us in the future. Because of the power of our technology, our team is relatively small. That said, this roughly breaks even and we as we are also venture backed, we plan to continue fundraising so that can continue to proactively hire the best engineers to continue making the technology better and better. RE: Interviews. Nothing is changing no. It might be the end of FAANG as a new set of up and coming top companies solidify themselves as the best places to work. I would say that right now generic referrals are less relevant, and might become more relevant again when things pick up. Formation isn't gamifying interviews or helping you figure out some loopholes to get a job. We're building fundamental problem solving skills all engineers need and we're helping you navigate the job hunt (and adapting to changes in the market, the best we can). All of that said, I generally recommend Codesmith grads get a first job directly from Codesmith and then come to Formation in a few months or later to fill in their fundamental gaps and level up. If you are struggling on the job hunt and want Formation's help, that might work (it's just expensive to do two programs back to back). Or if you are extremely ambitious and want to take as much time as you need post-Codesmith for a really good job, then that could work too. Let me know if you have any more questions!