I dropped out of Formation.dev after 6 weeks and this is why

Hi, thanks for sharing a great summary of your experiences and I really appreciate you sharing thoughts to help people figure out if what Formation currently offers is for them or not. Our team cares deeply about each and every engineer succeeding and works with people for as long as it takes to get a job, but we are your partner in the journey and being on the same page is critical. I won't say much on this thread, other than a few points below, unless people address me directly, because I don't want to interfere with the discussion or step on your toes. RE: Session consistency: For context, we create a new schedule for each Fellow, and mentor, every week - truly from scratch, and entirely different every single week.... hundreds (crossing thousands) of sessions scheduled every week dynamically from scratch. The real challenge with doing this, is that it's incredibly hard to handle attendance, rescheduling, and making changes last minute while getting the right people in the right sessions. A computer can optimize a schedule, but it takes tremendous and subtle product work to glue everything together. In a typical week, we have a relatively small number of issues overall, but making the scheduling and session consistency better and better will be a lifelong effort for the product and engineering team at the company. We are constantly collecting feedback and making small adjustments, and we will only grow and scale as so far that we can maintain the outcomes we have thus far and continue to have. RE: Algos vs Projects: For context, everyone at Formation will work on different things at different times, there are no cohorts and what you work on is adapted uniquely to you... but that said, and as you pointed out, we are not the place to go right now to fill out a resume with projects. Our main priority is building fundamental computer science and problem solving abilities that will make you a better engineer. While some people do put the practical practice at Formation on their resumes, it's not at all a reason to join or what we aim to help you do. This is also why I have discussions with people with no full time experience about if Formation is right for them or not - and for some it is and for some it isn't. Down the road, we can absolutely help people in this area by extending our current training, but it's not something we do now (Feb 2023) Finally, a note for Codesmith (and u/holygosu :) ), I say this all the time but we are currently not a bootcamp and we don't replace a bootcamp nor are we an alternative to a bootcamp and I truly mean this. Which is why I genuinely recommend bootcamps to people all the time who chat with me 1-1. EDIT: Someone pointed out, not so nicely, that they searched LinkedIn and feel like a lot of Formation Fellows are really junior Fellows and wanted to know where the senior people are since we constantly say that most people have 1+ years of industry experience. Over 2/3 of people at Formation are working full time and doing Formation part time, and they have several years of experience so they prefer to not advertise on LinkedIn that they are job hunting so the ones that do list it on LinkedIn are the most junior people. If you are looking on LinkedIn, I would suggest searching for "Formation" and look at posts we are tagged in, rather than our "alumni" or "employees" tab. And I would also suggest looking at our network page: [https://formation.dev/network](https://formation.dev/network) and contact people on there.

To clarify for anyone else reading, Formation isn't a coding bootcamp and is not an alternative to a bootcamp if you are looking for a program like App Academy, Codesmith, Springboard, Hack Reactor, etc.... It's a program for experienced engineers to level up their skills! I try hard to state this like a broken record and if that isn't clear, let me know so we can clarify our language! It's really important to understand that what we do is nothing remotely like a 'coding bootcamp' and I want to make sure people know what they are getting into!

I'm the co-founder and lead engineer and have been in the industry for 15 years, 8 years at Facebook and then a break, and then 4 years at Formation. Formation's predecessor, Buildschool, was a free coding bootcamp, and Formation was explicitly founded to not be a bootcamp. There are a few differences, for which there are no bootcamps that offer this kind of thing: 1. Formation has no length, no curriculum, and no expected time frame that you will be training for. You start training on day one and you keep training until you get a job. We work on things week to week that you need to work on, and constantly benchmark across many skills until we think you are at the top-tier company bar (not just FAANG, but the broad top tier bar). As the OP posted, you might have good weeks or bad weeks, but you are paying for unconditional support until you get a job. 2. The majority of people at Formation are currently working full time as SWEs with good jobs, and they are doing Formation part time to train to get a better job and to get our support while job hunting. The people who have zero experience almost all have graduated from a bootcamp already or have a college degree. A bunch of people at Formation TEACH AT BOOTCAMPS. You'll have sessions with current FAANG engineers who are Fellows just like you trying to get a new job. I don't know any bootcamp that is like this. 3. There are no guarantees on what you do day to day, and you don't get any kind of certificate or "completion", everyone will do something different and pay the same, which is very expensive and not cheap. We pay mentors and we pay our engineers FAANG-competitive rates. To put it in one sentence: we are like a personal trainer at the gym for your fundamental skills and job hunt, and not a school/bootcamp/course.

I can share my thoughts on these questions. 1. Everyone has a different experience at Formation by nature, and has different goals and starting points coming in. So if you already put in the work to apply and get signed up, you get 7 days with a full schedule before deciding if you want to stay so I would recommend doing that and judging for yourself. It might genuinely not be a good fit for you but you can make the most of that first week even if you are not a good fit. 2. One part of the "special sauce" is how we efficiently get you through topics and objectively evaluate how you are doing. So if you've already done 1000 LC problems and feel like you really understand the concepts, you might move through the topics very quickly and spend less time on them. Some people consider that poor value for your money, and some people consider saving your time valuable, depends on what you value. 3. I reiterate that we collect a ton of feedback and people are really satisfied overall with their experience at Formation. But even on a given session, 5 people might have had a great experience and 1 person had a bad experience (which is one of the common patterns we see). We care deeply about figuring out how to improve the experience for that 1 person, but if that one person complains on Reddit saying that the session was terrible, that's not really fair. It was terrible for THEM and we care more than anything to fix that for that person, but the session overall might not be objectively terrible. Some mentors are very polarizing and some aren't and the fact you get to work with dozens of people to find ones you like is a value add to me. You will do a ton of sessions over the course of Formation and I'm positive you will find some poor for you, and others extremely valuable. 4. The other part of the "secret sauce" is the tech behind the scenes that makes it possible to adapt things like career coaching to the current environment at a speed that no other program can. We are constantly fine tuning things but the job hunt support is undergoing a larger shift due to the larger market changes. 5. Regarding the coach quality, we feel that you get more value for you money talking to current and former FAANG recruiters to see how they will perceive your resume. You might disagree with how they perceive it but these are the people reviewing your resumes **for real.** You can get a more generic grammar and spelling review from a seasoned resume professional without tech-specific knowledge, so that's less value-add for us to offer. This is the reason why we did this, but there's always lots of improvements to make in the details to get the most value out of it. If we get overwhelming feedback that this is a bad approach, we'll change it and change it fast! These FAANG recruiters are frequently nominated by Fellows as their most impactful mentors in a given week, so, again while some people might not find them useful, others do find them useful. 6. We don't have a structured system for referrals or guaranteed interviews with companies and please do not join for only this reason! We have an extensive network of recruiters, engineers, hiring managers, and we are working with companies like Netflix to get people into top tier positions, but we can't create headcount when there isn't headcount.

Hi, I respect all opinions and I'm sorry your experience wasn't what you expected. Hopefully you feel like leaving was the right thing and left on a fair note. While the majority of people successfully get placed (on no guaranteed timeframe) and we try to accept people who are a good fit for what we do, we very much understand Formation is not for everyone and support people leaving who aren't a good fit. I want to correct some inaccuracies though for others reading this and I hope my response is very fair and transparent. 1. I agree Formation is very intense and I discourage a lot of people from joining who don't seem on the same page. I'm sorry you might have joined with the wrong expectations. You can change your workload and schedule week to week up or down as things change and no other program I've seen allow this but it might be that even with that, we couldn't support your needs. 2. We allow people to pause for mental health breaks and are extremely flexible to changes in life circumstances that require changes in commitment to Formation. We have an official policy in writing that allows you to take breaks of a certain length and if you weren't aware and no one told you, I will give that feedback to the team. We also consider special circumstances on a case by case basis. I personally see cases of every life circumstance you can think of and how we have approved leaves of all kinds. 3. If someone forced you to work through burnout can you please message me anonymously who they are so we can investigate fully and take action against the person if needed. I've seen cases where people don't have any reason to pause but just aren't a good fit for the style of training we do and we mutually agree Formation isn't working, but this should happen as soon as you feel burnout, not long after. 4. We don't have any mandatory lunch and learns. They are strictly optional and clearly labelled as such. If you got in trouble for not attending, that warrants an investigation and if you misunderstood that they weren't mandatory I also take responsibility for the platform not communicating that clearly enough. 5. I've commented on referrals before and while we do actively refer people who match requested background experience and skill levels, the market conditions are such that these opportunities are very slim. For example, if someone hasn't passed any mock interviews yet and a company wants to interview candidates who have received a strong yes with a FAANG engineer, we can't refer you to that opportunity, and we instead keep working on getting your skills up to that bar so we can hope to refer you in the future. 6. I completely agree that the best engineers are not the best teachers. Formation also doesn't "teach" anything. Instead we have industry engineers working through problems with a small group in an interactive way, so that the Fellows can see how experienced top tier engineers think about problems and get feedback. This style of training is not for everyone, and it's why I adamantly DISCOURAGE anyone looking to learning from joining Formation. Formation is like a personal trainer at the gym and not a university professor. If you would like to share more personal details or feedback about your experience feedback anonymously, please message me!