u/michaelnovati replied · ★ FEATURED
Hi all, I don't want to step on the discussion (I'm the co-founder of Formation) but will share my thoughts too. I think it's very important and healthy to talk openly about the pros and cons of programs so people can figure out what works for them, so feel free to ask me questions and I'll give the most transparent answers I can!
I also post the feedback with the Formation team because there are a couple of points of feedback that we can make improvements on and thanks for sharing that!
My personal thoughts:
1. I wouldn't say you HAVE to be extroverted but you do have to interact with people and one of the selling points is face time in 3-6 person small group sessions, and 1-1 mock interviews with legit industry engineers to get their perspective. The amount of sessions and types of sessions can adapt to you, so introverted people can get by, IMO, but you should expect to interact with people.
2. We aren't 'training to the test' so to speak, so the continuous benchmarking indeed asks questions you haven't seen before. Now you shouldn't get entire TOPICS you haven't seen before and the team will look into that (feel free to ping me anonymously if you are comfortable as that could help debug based on everything you did personally).
3. Our mentorship model is to give you the opportunity to interact with dozens of current/ex-top tier engineers and recruiters. But they are not teachers by training. Which means it's normal and expected to get along with some better than others, and a mentor you love, someone else might dislike. That said, there is a bar for basic communication and mentorship that we look for in accepting a mentor, and experiences below that bar are flagged and individually debugged, but people should not expect every session to be a magical experience, but when zooming out should feel like they met a ton of interesting people and a couple they really got a long with.
4. Job hunt support: we spend a bunch of time curating hundreds of job postings a week and using AI to match them to your career prefs - 5 per day. And when you report interviews in our job tools, we'll jump in to help you prepare with resources and mocks. To be honest, a lot of Fellows don't promptly report all of their jobs and use these tools and it's something we are working on as a "product problem". It's one of the most important pieces to a successful job hunt - and we tell people that - but they don't use them as much as they should.
5. We do not hand people jobs. We have a bunch of partnerships (formal and informal) to try to surface jobs and make matches, but every single engineer we work with is unique and some find the job hunt easier than others, so we promise to do our best to help connect you with jobs, but we can't create jobs or push you through to jobs that you don't meet the requirements the recruiters are looking for.
6. Finally, every person has a team of three Formation staff members and a private chanel dedicated to supporting them in their Formation experience and I encourage anyone to communicate with them openly and often. They will guide and customize your experience to your needs, like a hotel concierge. If you want to plan a trip by yourself, Formation might not be fore you and if you'll get the most out of it by leveraging your team.