Interested in joining Formation.dev? Here's why you shouldn't.

Hi! Sorry, I had answered in other threads but not here and happy to provide more context.We do referrals but they are more limited than before because companies are hiring less and have more rigid criteria (which tends to disadvantage people with less experience). In the very limited scenarios where we do refer people, they remain high hit and effective. We constantly change the website as the market changes. We are far from perfect, but I think some of the negativity in this thread stems from the market changing suddenly in Fall 2022. A small number of people joined during the hot market when many people they spoke with who did Formation at the time were referred to the canonical FAANG and they expected to follow the same path. They trained hard, got their skill level up and then things changed suddenly and all those pipelines shut off. They are understandably frustrated, which I sympathize with and we want to do whatever we can to support these people - whether that means leaving Formation because of the change in market on reasonable terms, or sticking with it and figuring out a new strategy... the handful I've been a part of have been highly personal discussions that I highly doubt will end up on Reddit. More generally, no one should join Formation **only** to get referrals, we are not a pay for play referral service and if you think your skills are already great and want to buy your way into FAANG, it's not the program for you. Whatever the website or any ad says, every single person talks to a recruiter, signs complex paperwork, and gets a week to withdraw after seeing all of our internal reference materials, and if anyone still falls through the cracks we are happy to take responsibility for the misunderstanding and support you leaving on a positive note. Accepting people on ISA who pay us far in the future (even if they were to leave on a partial refund) but us having to pay thousands of dollars of training costs right now is a terrible business model for a small startup that has limited funding... so much so we are considering getting rid of them. So the idea of luring people in, accepting anyone who will join, and growing out of control is completely and utterly false. I'm happy to go more into this but the post is already getting long. Finally, just some more notes on referrals I posted elsewhere: 1. Referrals come in many sources but we can't refer you to jobs that don't exist and we never promised that we would 2. The mentors you work with mostly work as senior+ engineers at top tier and FAANG companies and in a better market an a great source of strong referrals 3. We have been working on training to help people leverage their networks better for peer referrals 4. We have hundreds of years of FAANG experience on staff and though mentors, so we have a pulse on FAANG hiring from people who work there and are hiring (or not) that don't talk on Blind, etc... 5. We are talking to companies about longer time formal partnerships in all kinds of ways that might not be direct referrals, but open doors. 6. We don't make you take any offers, and if you really want to work at FAANG and you don't give up and put in the effort, then we keep working with you. The challenge here is if your skills are ready but the jobs don't exist, it can be really frustrating to keep putting in the hours of training.