u/michaelnovati replied · · edited ★ FEATURED
Hi, thanks for sharing a great summary of your experiences and I really appreciate you sharing thoughts to help people figure out if what Formation currently offers is for them or not. Our team cares deeply about each and every engineer succeeding and works with people for as long as it takes to get a job, but we are your partner in the journey and being on the same page is critical.
I won't say much on this thread, other than a few points below, unless people address me directly, because I don't want to interfere with the discussion or step on your toes.
RE: Session consistency: For context, we create a new schedule for each Fellow, and mentor, every week - truly from scratch, and entirely different every single week.... hundreds (crossing thousands) of sessions scheduled every week dynamically from scratch. The real challenge with doing this, is that it's incredibly hard to handle attendance, rescheduling, and making changes last minute while getting the right people in the right sessions. A computer can optimize a schedule, but it takes tremendous and subtle product work to glue everything together. In a typical week, we have a relatively small number of issues overall, but making the scheduling and session consistency better and better will be a lifelong effort for the product and engineering team at the company. We are constantly collecting feedback and making small adjustments, and we will only grow and scale as so far that we can maintain the outcomes we have thus far and continue to have.
RE: Algos vs Projects: For context, everyone at Formation will work on different things at different times, there are no cohorts and what you work on is adapted uniquely to you... but that said, and as you pointed out, we are not the place to go right now to fill out a resume with projects. Our main priority is building fundamental computer science and problem solving abilities that will make you a better engineer. While some people do put the practical practice at Formation on their resumes, it's not at all a reason to join or what we aim to help you do. This is also why I have discussions with people with no full time experience about if Formation is right for them or not - and for some it is and for some it isn't. Down the road, we can absolutely help people in this area by extending our current training, but it's not something we do now (Feb 2023)
Finally, a note for Codesmith (and u/holygosu :) ), I say this all the time but we are currently not a bootcamp and we don't replace a bootcamp nor are we an alternative to a bootcamp and I truly mean this. Which is why I genuinely recommend bootcamps to people all the time who chat with me 1-1.
EDIT: Someone pointed out, not so nicely, that they searched LinkedIn and feel like a lot of Formation Fellows are really junior Fellows and wanted to know where the senior people are since we constantly say that most people have 1+ years of industry experience. Over 2/3 of people at Formation are working full time and doing Formation part time, and they have several years of experience so they prefer to not advertise on LinkedIn that they are job hunting so the ones that do list it on LinkedIn are the most junior people. If you are looking on LinkedIn, I would suggest searching for "Formation" and look at posts we are tagged in, rather than our "alumni" or "employees" tab. And I would also suggest looking at our network page: [https://formation.dev/network](https://formation.dev/network) and contact people on there.