u/Tajman wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Thanks for the writeup. I'm about to start at Formation and I am now having second thoughts. ​ I had hoped that the interview prep would get me to a substantially higher bar than I could have reached on my own. I can already do a lot of leetcode mediums, and I figured fo
u/michaelnovati replied · ★ FEATURED
I can share my thoughts on these questions.
1. Everyone has a different experience at Formation by nature, and has different goals and starting points coming in. So if you already put in the work to apply and get signed up, you get 7 days with a full schedule before deciding if you want to stay so I would recommend doing that and judging for yourself. It might genuinely not be a good fit for you but you can make the most of that first week even if you are not a good fit.
2. One part of the "special sauce" is how we efficiently get you through topics and objectively evaluate how you are doing. So if you've already done 1000 LC problems and feel like you really understand the concepts, you might move through the topics very quickly and spend less time on them. Some people consider that poor value for your money, and some people consider saving your time valuable, depends on what you value.
3. I reiterate that we collect a ton of feedback and people are really satisfied overall with their experience at Formation. But even on a given session, 5 people might have had a great experience and 1 person had a bad experience (which is one of the common patterns we see). We care deeply about figuring out how to improve the experience for that 1 person, but if that one person complains on Reddit saying that the session was terrible, that's not really fair. It was terrible for THEM and we care more than anything to fix that for that person, but the session overall might not be objectively terrible. Some mentors are very polarizing and some aren't and the fact you get to work with dozens of people to find ones you like is a value add to me. You will do a ton of sessions over the course of Formation and I'm positive you will find some poor for you, and others extremely valuable.
4. The other part of the "secret sauce" is the tech behind the scenes that makes it possible to adapt things like career coaching to the current environment at a speed that no other program can. We are constantly fine tuning things but the job hunt support is undergoing a larger shift due to the larger market changes.
5. Regarding the coach quality, we feel that you get more value for you money talking to current and former FAANG recruiters to see how they will perceive your resume. You might disagree with how they perceive it but these are the people reviewing your resumes **for real.** You can get a more generic grammar and spelling review from a seasoned resume professional without tech-specific knowledge, so that's less value-add for us to offer. This is the reason why we did this, but there's always lots of improvements to make in the details to get the most value out of it. If we get overwhelming feedback that this is a bad approach, we'll change it and change it fast! These FAANG recruiters are frequently nominated by Fellows as their most impactful mentors in a given week, so, again while some people might not find them useful, others do find them useful.
6. We don't have a structured system for referrals or guaranteed interviews with companies and please do not join for only this reason! We have an extensive network of recruiters, engineers, hiring managers, and we are working with companies like Netflix to get people into top tier positions, but we can't create headcount when there isn't headcount.