u/Knikkey wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
> There is a cap to make sure your ISA has an upper bound that is meant to be a positive feature for you and that is not the amount you owe necessarily Not the person you were originally replying to, but I'm wondering if you could clear up some confusion I have about the ISA,
u/michaelnovati replied · ★ FEATURED
Hi! Yeah send me a DM so I can explain a little more how the new ISLs work. They are very different from these old ones as the payment term is longer and the individual payments are typically smaller and what the typical person will pay back is expected to be closer to the cap.
You have to start making payments after a year, but only if you are making the minimum salary at the time, so if you are unemployed your payments won't start. This is less friendly than the old ISA but it helps solve the problem that numerous programs have discussed where anecdotally, people don't feel motivated to look for a job as aggressively as those who paid upfront.
I say this all the time but it's very important because of the down market that no program, including Formation, hands you a job and you are not paying for a job. You are paying so that you present your best self and become a better engineer and be supported the entire job hunt by a range of industry veterans. Ironically people with this attitude get placed faster because on every rejection they grow and improve. So it's a pretty rare case you would hit the 12 months rule anyways, especially when you know you have it. Almost all of the people at Formation who have been here a year have taken numerous pauses or breaks or vacations, or ramped up or down their intensity numerous times... and that's totally fine with us but if you really want to hustle to get a job within a year you have a higher chance of doing so.