Comparing Outco, Formation, Interview Kickstart, and Pathrise

PART 2: 2. Yeah I comment on those. I'm aware of two Reddit posts. One is a person who left and ended up going out of SWE for their career and it was the right thing. The other person I don't know who they are but I do know someone who commented on that thread in support of the primary person recently tried to come back to Formation a second time, so maybe their opinion changed haha, but I want to go through the points. **MOST IMPORTANTLY - we make hundreds of changes (literally) a week and Formation today is not Formation a few months ago, is not Formation a year ago.** I'm going to answer these as they would be TODAY, and I stand by my previous comments on those posts at the time they were posted. ------------------------- 1. "**Don't be blinded by their marketing**...". We absolutely have people that are still with us and very low morale. There are a number of people who joined us during the market peak and were really hit by the crash afterwards. Some of those people eventually got jobs, some gave up, some are still looking. I think this is normal and expected. We're not magicians who solve all your problems. We're like a personal trainer who is standing by your side and supporting you and guiding you. One of the comments on one of those posts took two years to get our record high compensation job, and it's just the way the market has been going. 2. "I felt the **quality of sessions diminished** as I progressed with algorithms".... There are multiple response I have to this but to focus on the constructive side, while I wouldn't say sessions diminished over time, we do have variance in sessions by having many mentors with different perspectives running them. Often times one person LOVED a mentor and another HATED them in the same session. We have a ton of mandatory feedback we collect, process, watch, aggregate, and we have all kinds of systems in place with managing mentors. But it's definitely a fair criticism that your mentor experience won't be consistent with the same person. I personally frame that as a positive thing, but if you want consistent mentorship or a single dedicated technical mentor, Formation isn't the place for that. 3. "I didn’t necessarily want the prestige...". We don't have ISA's anymore. I don't actually think the price was that high imo, but the cost is more easy to digest in dollar price now and there are way more options for different people. People pay between $2500 and $20000, with the typical cost for unlimited aiming to be around $10,000. 4. "the **price tag is incredibly hefty** for what you're getting.". I mean if it's worth it is ultimately up to you, but I disagree strongly with the characterization that all you get is leetcode problems thrown at you. Like I said above - constantly making improvements to a complex system and we have a well compensated product team working on this. If we wanted to throw leetcode problems at you I could write up that product in hours and we wouldn't be spending millions of dollars a year in salaries for our product team. Again though, we aren't perfect and we collect feedback numerous times a week from everyone and constantly improve and if people feel that way, we're not doing something right and it's our responsibility to deep dive into that. 5. "I don't find the group mentor sessions all that useful....". Similar answer to 4. Additionally, we've made a number of improvements behind the scenes in our matching algorithms to try to put people with people of similar seniority level that has helped with what the person said about being matched with people super far behind. The nature of these sessions is that they are 3-6 person small group, interactive sessions and they are **different everytime**. You have a team of FOUR dedicated Formation team members in your private team channel to work with you on making adjustments with your sessions to help where our product fails too. 6. "I think I disagree with your claim that your admissions process...". This point is about time to placement. I don't really know what to say more on this one, like I see and hear the feedback, I just don't think giving placement times would help anyone estimate what their own time would be. Like I'm deep on the ground and see many placements happen and I don't think you should look at any aggregated metrics without us doing a deep dive into your specific background. I think for marketing purposes it would help us to have some kind of high level numbers so people can get a sense of it this is something they want to spend time looking into at all, but you should also not sign a contract expecting to get a job in a certain timeframe (that might be published publicly) that you didn't discuss on a one on one level with our team.