u/philDoesDev wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
I’ve looked into formation.dev and I can tell it’s a great program! I get super excited whenever I read through the page and testimonials. Once I gain enough experience after my bootcamp is over, I’ll definitely be enrolling in the formation mentorship. I do have questions - is i
u/michaelnovati replied ·
Nice, yeah we are far from perfect and it's not the right program for everyone, but we have a great team of people (6 full time team members have 10+ year FAANG experience each many more in the 5 year range) working very very hard to help people prepare for interviews and have a great experience. I would ready some of the "spotlights" on the blog too because people talk pretty openly about their backgrounds and the specific ways we helped the most.
Right now maybe 95% of people have actual paid SWE (or related job with significant programming) experience and it's strict.
Experience for being accepted can be anything like: contracts, self employed, open source, 2+ years self taught, freelancing, internships, legit volunteer coding (with documented hours in lieu of pay), etc... but you do need to have something.
The main reason is we don't actually teach any marketable practical skills like bootcamps do! We aren't a school and we don't have classes or lectures. We are a practice-based mentorship platform and your mentorship sessions are all about mentor-guided practice and problem solving and not lecture-style teaching. Our system design is focused on helping you bridge gaps from things you might have worked on/with and how think about systems from the perspective of large tech companies. We obviously link to reference materials to help people "learn" concepts they might have never heard of, but the actual human-face-to-face time is all about practice and feedback.
So it's NOT a good fit for:
1. If you want to learn a new part of the stack
2. You can't find a job and you already have practice everything in the world for months and months and just want to get hooked up with a job (we have a very very strong network, and the 100+ mentors are all very well connected too, but you shouldn't join just so you can ask a Google engineer for a referral in a session, that's just not how it works haha).