u/Top-Measurement-7216 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
to Michael -- you've posted on this sub for months marketing formation as a service for "experienced" engineers. Yet students are reporting vast discrepancies in their sessions. that people with no SWE experience at all have been accepted into the program. this will inevitably le
u/michaelnovati replied · · edited ★ FEATURED
Hi, we severely limit the number of people with zero experience (hence waitlists or rejections) and you can see in our recent placement data that about 1/3 of people had no full time experience and that was equally split amongst: bootcamp grads, CS grads, self taught/other degree: [https://formation.dev/blog/2022-formation-fellow-placements/](https://formation.dev/blog/2022-formation-fellow-placements/)
I would argue that CS grads have fundamentals, some bootcamp grads do if they self studied post bootcamp, and self taught is the real wildcard where we would only admit people who meet the bar and just happened to do it themselves - typically over many years.
RE: Sessions. People get dynamically scheduled for sessions based on the skills and difficulties they are working on right now, so generally speaking, you should be in sessions with people around your level. We have a lot of improvement in this matching to do but it's not that terrible right now according to our data. We have millions of data points about people's feedback about sessions and we monitor this closely to identify problems that come up and investigate. We are FAR from perfect and there's a lot of work to do, but according to our data, the vast majority of people are satisfied with sessions overall.
P.S. Codesmith alumni are often right at the average/below-average part of bar and I talk to many of them to figure out if Formation is right for them or not - and for many it's not. It's a very small case for us overall.
Let me know if that explains it or not!
The vast majority of people in Formation are currently employed at decent jobs, doing Formation part time on the side, and there are 4 people who posted in this thread (my current count) that went to/claim to have went to (I believe they did, but there are a lot of brand new accounts here) Formation