u/Droidger wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Except those things aren’t what interviews at big tech test for. I’ve seen people with 10 YoE at good companies struggle on a LC medium like “number of islands”. Formation seems to be like a Princeton Review-style test prep program for this kind of interviews.
u/michaelnovati replied · ★ FEATURED
I've heard people outside of Formation who think we 'gamify the interview process' but I don't know where that comes from and I think it's a weakness in our public content and website if people feel that way.
The core approach to DS&A follows this method: [https://formation.dev/blog/the-engineering-method/](https://formation.dev/blog/the-engineering-method/)
And all of the practice is in applying that and getting feedback and practicing it in 1-1 mocks.
That link is free \^\^\^\^ so clearly it's not as easy as it sounds to apply it if people pay us a lot of money, and some people - even some new Fellows who signed up - have an instinct to fallback to memorization or trying to game the system - and for them the hard part is re-learning how to solve easy problems!
If you try to game the system and go into interviews, it's highly risky - you'll either crush it or fail miserably. That's why we focus on a problem solving method that makes you a better engineering thinker - from scratch, because you can pass way more interviews and all kinds of new questions and curveballs by being a good engineering thinker and being able to demonstrate that under pressure.