Is Formation.dev legitimate?

Hi I can comment, I'm one of the co-funders and heavily involved day by day, so my answer is super biased, but I can tell you about what we do and why we do it. First off, we're not a bootcamp and we don't have a curriculum or teach anything. We're a mentorship platform to practice, benchmark, and prepare for interviews and become a stronger engineer while doing it. Everyone does different things with us and the personal trainer analogy below is pretty good imo... we help you get from A to B with your job hunting goals and your path to get there will look unique to you. Second off, the vast majority of people we work with have 1+ YOE as SWE (often more) and are currently employed and doing Formation part time on the side. Our platform supports you ramping up or down your commitment every week, so people practice at their own pace and it tends to take people about 6 months or so before they get a new job and the range of time is huge. Cost: the $2500 is the monthly rate that we just started offering, and the $7500-$13500 rates aren't monthly, they are unconditional mentorship until you accept an offer you like, wether it takes 1 month or 2 years. What justifies the pricing model? The average placed person so far in 2023 increased their compensation by $82,000 (first year total TC, see the [website](https://formation.dev/terms#outcomes) for the exact details of how this is calculated) so a lot of people find value in the service and even though we're 4 years old, there are people who have come back a second time for their next job search, paid us a second time, to go through Formation again (further demonstrating how it's a practicing platform and not an education/learning experience) The main criticism of this model is that the timeframe on which this happens is not guaranteed. So the outcomes are mostly fantastic on average when you get a job, but you don't know WHEN. It sounds awesome to have unconditional support until you get a job, but if it takes you 1 or 2+ years you might not be as happy, even if you got your money's worth and we lost money on mentorship cost and you might get frustrated because you've done all the practice in the world. Because everyone has such a unique experience and contributes widely varying amount of time to Formation, it's really hard to make any conclusions about how long it takes. We want to share more, but we want to make sure the data is useful and helps people make the right decisions and it's very hard to capture this. Whether it's right for you is the key question and for some people it is and some people it isn't. We don't have a magic formula to get you a job, just like you can't hire a personal trainer to lose 50lbs overnight. We're like a personal trainer for a casual jogger who wants to run a 3 hour marathon. And just by getting you to a 3 hour marathon, that doesn't guarantee you'll win any races. We have a ton of examples on our website of typical weeks so I won't go into all of that, but you get a new dynamic schedule of things to do every week based on how you are doing, including sessions scheduled based on your availability and what topics you need mentorship in at that time. There isn't a fixed list of stuff to work through and we move you along based on your benchmarks - not necessarily when you are 100% perfect at something, but when we feel the time is right. The downside to this is you have a schedule that changes every week and I bet we have more cancellations and last minute reschedules than a fixed program would (about 5% to 10% of session maybe - not huge but enough. So our team builds products around rescheduling and finding replacement mentors/peers for sessions so that we can continue to work on your schedule. We aren't a school or program and we don't have many reviews as a result, it's hard to review, a lot of how people evaluate Formation is through their own expectations and I don't think any specific person's experience can characterize what your experience will be like. Someone once complained that they felt like they did LeetCode all the time and it was useless, but this person didn't even work on System Design - which is one of the most useful pieces for mid-level engineers from non-traditional backgrounds and a major thing that other people found super valuable and has nothing to do with LeetCode. Overall though, this is a pretty unique approach, and a lot of people like it, and some people don't, so I'm happy to chat more very candidly about if it might work for you. People who go there or went there can talk more about their personal experiences, but I would try to talk to people who have a similar background and goals to you or it's not really representative of what your experience might be like.