u/Available_Bother_342 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Of course I did. But again we're dealing with unreasonable people so I expect no less. Their goal is money.
u/michaelnovatireplied·· edited★ FEATURED
Hi, I haven't read the entire post yet! We collect feedback on every interaction you have at Formation, as you know, annoyingly so, and I'm really heartbroken that you have been feeling negatively for a while and this hasn't been surfaced, or if it has been and you don't feel it was actioned, I apologize and want to make it right.
Who did you talk to about a refund or adjustment if you want to leave early and can you message me about that? I don't think I saw this ever reach my inbox and want to launch an investigation of what happened.
We can't control the job market and referral opportunities obviously, but we have been investing in adding FAANG/ex-FAANG recruiters as career coaches to try to level up our career support in these hardder times (and this was intended to be a benefit), but I'm happy to jump into your private channel and help advise if you are open to that!
u/michaelnovatireplied·· edited★ FEATURED
Thanks for sharing your feedback and opinions about your experience. Regardless of the tougher job market making it harder to get interviews, making sure you feel supported is one of most important internal goals that we constantly monitor with a magnifying glass and I'm sorry that the support you aren't receiving isn't meeting your expectation.
I respect your opinions and won't comment on everything you mentioned that I might personally disagree with. For others reading, I'm going to add some responses to specific statements that I feel will be helpful to clarify.
1. We don't let in everyone who wants to join and we only accept a fraction of people who apply. Acceptance is based on three things: 1. a benchmarking assessment that gauges your starting skill level and has a complex evaluation model that is not akin to "passing a test". 2. your past experience. 3. your goals, timeline, and motivations for joining.
2. Not everyone who joins has the same goals and not everyone is at Formation for the same reasons.
3. Even though you have 7 days to withdraw for free, you can leave at any time and pay an amount per week that you actively trained. So while it's not free after 7 days, you can leave for a heavily discounted rate, without a placement, that is simply based on the number of weeks.
4. It's correct that we control your schedule and we set it up every week and you can't choose your own sessions. Fellows have the opportunity to request changes to get more, or less, sessions, tasks, etc... and can self-service add additional sessions if they match your needs and match your availability.
5. The tasks you are assigned and questions you get in a session, are computed based on a bunch of signals about your skill level, feedback, and progression and aren't just assigned to you in batches from a list, it's a officially patented and complex system we've created. We do indeed link to many resources for problems and solutions, in addition to in-house problems and solutions, and we feel the value add is in determining which problems to work on next and letting you know when you've gotten good enough on a topic.
6. The market is what it is and it's definitely harder to get interviews right now, but we have been investing in enhancing career support as a result to help people more and more by adding in current and ex-FAANG recruiters as coaches for reviews, advice, and strategizing and made it easier to book calls with them on demand. As the market remains tough, we will keep investing in career support, rather than weakening it, to be as valuable as possible in these times.
7. I understand your experience with the FAANG recruiters hasn't been what you want and want to deep dive more into this. I monitor all of our mentor feedback and these ex-FAANG recruiters are frequently nominated (dozens of times a week) by Fellows as their most impactful mentors of the week. So I think this model can work well and would love to figure out if there are ways to make it work for you, e.g. trying more sessions with different recruiters, what kind of questions or advice you are lacking that you expected, etc...
8. It sounds like you have had many mock interviews and you suggested comparing to [Interviewing.io](https://Interviewing.io). [Interviewing.io](https://Interviewing.io) charges $6999 for 10 1 hour long 1-1 sessions with a staff level ex-Facebook engineer and our interviews tend to be senior, staff, or principal level engineers at similar companies. So while [Interviewing.io](https://Interviewing.io) might be a good option for some cases, I feel you are getting better value if you are paying $7500 (Interview Prep upfront price you are referring to) for dozens of group sessions, ongoing mock interviewers as you need them, dedicated support channel with 3 team members, unlimited access to FAANG-recruiters for job hunting advice and negotiation, and it all keeps going until you get a job, rather than with a fixed time limit. Even if some of those items didn't hit the mark for you personally or you don't need to use them as much, we feel the overall package is compelling and competitive.
Again, thank you for sharing your feedback and my door remains wide open if you want to reach out for more support so we can help you find a great job! No hard feelings and please reach out !
u/Glittering_Shoe396 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Reposting my comment from the other post:
Current Formation Fellow, been here for several months. I agree with everything that u/Available_Bother_342 said. I have consistently passed mock interviews given by "FAANG" level mentors at Formation, and I can confirm that their statem
u/michaelnovatireplied·· edited★ FEATURED
Hi! Thanks for sharing your feedback as well. I have some comments:
1. For you specifically, you demonstrated your DS&A are at the bar in only 3 weeks and got to move on and for someone else it might take 3 months. In other programs you get a fixed list of questions or a fixed schedule of classes. I totally accept the argument that another alternative is to not do Formation at all, but for people who are committed to doing a program, I think our model works really well at efficiently getting people to that bar and adding confidence that you are legitimately there.
2. Our mission is to support people from non traditional and underrepresented backgrounds and not all people (in fact, very few) come into Formation having interview-ready level Graphs and DP like you did. We actually get the feedback that Formation is harder than expected much more often than easier. That said, we want to adapt flawlessly to everyone's starting skill level and we can do a better job for someone like you to accelerate you even more!
3. While most people have SWE professional experience already, we accept a range of people. Some people have never done DS&A before but have 3 YOE and might start off weaker, whereas other people might ave 0 YOE and have done 1000 LC problems and start up stronger at DS&A. The whole point of Formation is that your trajectory adjusts to your skills and your pace and each of these types of engineers get a unique experience for them. The bar is not only DS&A based, but it is high and only a fraction of people who have applied have been accepted into the program.
Similar to the OP, please feel free to ping me on MM and I'm happy to join your private channel to advise and brainstorm some ideas on getting more traction! You have our full team of support behind you in trying to help with the job hunt. It's rough out there and there's no magic answer, but we want to be in your corner!
u/Top-Measurement-7216 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
to Michael -- you've posted on this sub for months marketing formation as a service for "experienced" engineers. Yet students are reporting vast discrepancies in their sessions. that people with no SWE experience at all have been accepted into the program. this will inevitably le
u/michaelnovatireplied·· edited★ FEATURED
Hi, we severely limit the number of people with zero experience (hence waitlists or rejections) and you can see in our recent placement data that about 1/3 of people had no full time experience and that was equally split amongst: bootcamp grads, CS grads, self taught/other degree: [https://formation.dev/blog/2022-formation-fellow-placements/](https://formation.dev/blog/2022-formation-fellow-placements/)
I would argue that CS grads have fundamentals, some bootcamp grads do if they self studied post bootcamp, and self taught is the real wildcard where we would only admit people who meet the bar and just happened to do it themselves - typically over many years.
RE: Sessions. People get dynamically scheduled for sessions based on the skills and difficulties they are working on right now, so generally speaking, you should be in sessions with people around your level. We have a lot of improvement in this matching to do but it's not that terrible right now according to our data. We have millions of data points about people's feedback about sessions and we monitor this closely to identify problems that come up and investigate. We are FAR from perfect and there's a lot of work to do, but according to our data, the vast majority of people are satisfied with sessions overall.
P.S. Codesmith alumni are often right at the average/below-average part of bar and I talk to many of them to figure out if Formation is right for them or not - and for many it's not. It's a very small case for us overall.
Let me know if that explains it or not!
The vast majority of people in Formation are currently employed at decent jobs, doing Formation part time on the side, and there are 4 people who posted in this thread (my current count) that went to/claim to have went to (I believe they did, but there are a lot of brand new accounts here) Formation
u/Tbh_idk______ wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Experienced engineer !== effective teacher.
Conflating these two things happens often and it’s overlooked.
What’s important in any learning experience is whether the trainer has both subject area competence and pedagogical expertise. Having only one is insufficient.
I don’t
u/michaelnovatireplied·· edited★ FEATURED
100% agree that great engineers are not always great mentors, couldn't agree more! This is one of the reasons I personally don't do sessions, and focus on writing code, but that Daniel, Sophie, and others do sessions.
So most of our mentors are industry engineers who first go through light training (reading materials and videos) and then go through a shadowing and reverse shadowing process to be approved to run sessions.
For 1-1 mock interviews they are instructed to run them as industry mock interviews, and they complete a structured feedback form at the end with dozens of data points.
For group sessions, it's a little more complicated. We have a few dozen session types and people need to get shadowed and reverse shadowed for each type. Each session has very clear instructions on how to run that session - both technically and regarding the overall flow. Every single session technical session, Fellows are required to complete a multi data point feedback about the session and often times a reflection as well.
Weekly we collect a few dozen data points per Fellow to measure satisfaction, happiness and places for improvements that we summarize, prioritize, and action weekly.
Every Fellow can book a checkin with a Fellow Manager whenever they want, for whatever reason to discussion anything. And every Fellow has a private channel with at least 3 team members to discuss any feedback.
Fellows can block sessions with specific mentors by notifying their Fellow Managers, as some mentors have polarizing (love/hate) feedback.
Finally, Fellows can provide 100% anonymous feedback if they don't feel comfortable sharing something.
Now we collect all this feedback, tens of thousands of data points a week, and we identify areas of potential concern, like a mentor that scored very poorly in a session or a type of session, or broader feedback and then make adjustments.
Some mentors are fantastic and have a bad day at work or an emergency. Some mentors are removed. Some mentors are coached. And some mentors realize they don't want to do this kind of thing and leave.
Even though we do all of the above, I think we have underinvested in session consistency because having say 95% of sessions rated amazing isn't good enough when people are paying a lot of money for your service. We hold ourselves to a high bar, and it truly saddens our instruction engineering team if a Fellow gets too many poor sessions and we try to correct it behind the scenes.
Overall, yes, it's a challenge and we do have a handful of Formation Alumni doing certain sessions that truly benefit from that. We have a handful of more classic teachers who are not engineers for some sessions. It's a really complex thing to work on for sure and we have a lot of work to do!
u/HauntingSelf5962 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
People are going to make new accounts to stay anonymous. Your logic doesn't make sense, so don't try to discredit them. There are many of us in Formation that are dissatisfied, but obviously it's not worth the energy for all of them to complain about it on a place like Reddit. So
u/michaelnovatireplied·· edited★ FEATURED
That session sounds unacceptable and I believe that surfaced in feedback and was addressed and is being monitored if it's what I'm thinking of regarding mic-off.
Have you been reporting this internally on the session feedback forms, your weekly feedback forms, your daily standups, FM check-ins, your private channel, or with the anonymous feedback flow? We constantly ask for feedback and love it so please send more feedback our way so
If you have more suggestions on how to contribute feedback itself, let me know as well, please!
We want nothing more than every session to be perfect for every person. But things happen, for example a session this week had very good, thorough feedback from all the Fellows but one, one have very clear feedback about why they didn't like the session. If that person comes and complains that their sessions are terrible and the mentor was terrible, that's true for that person. We do a investigation into what happened and why, and we might block the mentor from working with that Fellow, we might discover that the person felt talked over or not acknowledged, but others didn't feel this way, etc... It gets complicated fast, but I stand by that the majority of sessions for the majority of people are valuable. If you are finding that, for you, all your sessions are terrible and useless, and we don't know about, then that's devastating. I assure you this post really saddened several people on the team who desperately want to talk to the OP to figure out why this level of feedback was not surfaced or handled, and the OP is non responsive.
RE: partnerships, your argument saddens me. The job market is very tough right now and we are fighting to get you all jobs. The Netflix partnership might not be for current Fellows, but we are fighting to get ins and that unique partnership is a step in the right direction. I'm sorry it doesn't help current Fellows with the current job market, but we're hoping it will unlock possibilities in the future.
u/Traditional_Leg_6938 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
One thing I think they should add is involving FAANG SWE's, not just recruiters, in the career coaching. I've received better interview prep and resume advice from actual SWE's on Blind and Reddit who have been through this gauntlet on the same side as me, rather than just recrui
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
Thanks for the feedback, this is on the radar and we might be experimenting with one person soon doing this!
Additionally, we have several sessions around the "technical behavioral" (a 3 person group one and a 1-1) that are with fairly senior engineers and managers, directors. If you've had these and find them more useful than phone screen prep, let me know!
u/HauntingSelf5962 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Although fellows are giving feedback on all sessions, I honestly believe it is not a good reflection of what fellows really feel. Why? Because the feedback form is not anonymous and it will be seen by the mentor in question. Many times I’m giving the mentor a good grade because I
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
Thanks, this is invaluable feedback and I'm going to share it with the team! This is the kind of productive thing that we cherish, so thank you!
We do have an completely anonymous flow (that is legitimately no technical way to know who submitted feedback) that we could maybe link to on that form and I'm going to set that up ASAP right now!
u/michaelnovati wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Thanks, this is invaluable feedback and I'm going to share it with the team! This is the kind of productive thing that we cherish, so thank you!
We do have an completely anonymous flow (that is legitimately no technical way to know who submitted feedback) that we could maybe lin
u/michaelnovatireplied·
u/HauntingSelf5962 done and shipped, thanks! A link will appear on all Fellows' mentor feedback forms
u/HauntingSelf5962 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Fixing the feedback forms won’t help the people who are currently work through the program. We’re still going to have to deal with subpar group and 1on1 mentor sessions for who knows how long. Issues like this can’t be fixed overnight. Like OP mentioned, we’re working with people
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
This doesn't sound like a good situation for anybody so we should talk more about it and if you are open, ping me on MM. Daniel would love to meet with you to talk about the sessions and you can ping him directly if you are more comfortable.
We obviously don't want you sitting through useless sessions and then rating them a 7!! That makes no sense.
And we absolutely do not want you showing up to sessions that waste your time out of a fear of being cut or removed and having to pay.
This is absolutely off track and there might be some communication issues to sort out about this that I really want to get to the bottom of.
We move fast, so it would be really awesome to share as much feedback as you can and give us a chance to action it.
u/Available_Bother_342 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Ha! The low key brag with that placements blog post. I've checked out the linkedin profiles of the people getting into the faang companies, and they all had multiple years of experience. Quite misleading for anyone looking at that post. But you've got to milk the "FAANG" right?
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
You have several comments and deleted comments that are fairly offensive or negative about Formation's intentions that have been hurtful to the team and it makes me feel like you just don't want to be here.
If you do want to be here, we need to get back on track and be on the same side for this to work.
If you don't want to be here, please message me privately on MM and we'll remove you and figure out a cost that is appropriate to the value you think you got from Formation and we'll be more than fair to make sure you feel good about that cost. No hard feelings and no judgement... it's a stressful time for early career job hunters and we'll be happy to have you back in the future if there is better alignment and we are on the same side.
u/Available_Bother_342 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Maybe start with addressing some of the fellows who feel like they were ripped off. The ISA preys on the weak. I personally asked whether I could switch to some lower upfront cost after a month or two, but of course that was denied. There's no way to assess whether an unknown pro
u/michaelnovatireplied·· edited★ FEATURED
You sound extremely frustrated in your job hunt and with Formation, but taking it out on the team and portraying us a money hungry individuals repeatedly is offensive. Sophie and I have not made a penny from Formation and pay ourselves $0 from day 1. Sophie has pledged any profit from Formation's stock to reinvest into others in the future and to not benefit personally from.
What makes you think we are money hungry and preying on the weak? When people pay upfront we have cash flow, and when people pay with ISAs we generally get paid far in the future, and it's a lot better for people to pay upfront for a small company like us even if we get paid more on an ISA down the road. So I think you have a big misunderstanding about ISAs. If Formation was 100% upfront only, it would be tremendously better as a business model. We offter ISAs to support people that don't have thousands of dollars lying around.
I respond to almost every bug report, feedback, and feature request personally as fast as I can, any time of day, anywhere, and we take them all very seriously, so what examples do you have of that public feedback going ignored?
If you message me directly on MM, I will take care of your removal and refund personally, and not tell anyone else at Formation who you are, other than you are someone who is leaving. I genuinely want you to be in the best place for you and if Formation is not the best place then you are doing a disservice to yourself staying and being frustrated.
u/Traditional_Leg_6938 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
I've heard this refrain a lot about formation, "I've learned a lot!". They EXCEL at teaching the basics but they are poor at job placement, which you admit you have zero exposure to. They can't be blamed for the current market but all of the career services they've offered have b
u/michaelnovatireplied·· edited★ FEATURED
The market is really tough right now and taking a tole on a lot of people who don't have jobs. There are a number of people who have been in the program for longer than they wanted and they can get frustrated at the job hunt and ongoing practice when they are ready to run. In the personal trainer analogy, it's different when you are training to shed the weight/build muscle vs when you're just maintaining your weight. Some people leave and give up job hunting even though their skills are at the bar.
We feel our never-ending training until you get a job is a huge value add in this market, and it costs us more and more money to train people as a result of the market.
But we can't create headcount that doesn't exist and if someone joined expecting a job handed to them, they joined for the wrong reasons, and we're happy to have you leave on very generous terms to take responsibility for the misunderstanding.
u/Available_Bother_342 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
I personally don't think Formation is fit to help those with little to no swe experience AT ALL. People with little to no experience - stay away. They can't help you get your first job. That will be up to you and the amount of effort you put into job hunting. All they can provide
u/michaelnovatireplied·· edited★ FEATURED
It sounds like you aren't on the same page about the value and reasons to do Formation, for example, we try to be very clear that we feel that there are hundreds of thousands of hours of content out there already that you can get for free and having original content is not a large value add - you shouldn't have joined for that reason. My offer remains open to personally and confidentially handle the refund on your ISA and remove you from the program to take responsibility for the misunderstandings that are ultimately our fault.
Otherwise if you don't want to leave and want to make the best of it, you have Daniel, Danielle, Selena, Sophie, ALL of the FMs, all with open arms wanting to talk to you and support you and help you keep chugging along in this challenging job market until you get a job - we all genuinely care.
Like I said, no hard feelings and no judgement if you want to turn things around.
u/Top-Measurement-7216 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
this isn't a fair take ----- is michael offering a refund to all the other students in this thread who feel equally deceived? the OP probably feels its morally unethical to take some solo deal here that other formation fellows here arguably deserve as well
u/michaelnovatireplied·· edited★ FEATURED
Your post from two months ago that was auto-deleted: "all of those reviews online are from formation employees, this novati dude is a huge sleazeball"
Please stop following me and defaming the company with provably false statements.
We have really strong reviews because the majority of people have a great experience overall, get great placements, find a new job making significantly more in salary, and recommend us to their friends. A smaller number of people understandably do not. We are a fast moving startup but that doesn't mean the experience should be compromised and it's not an excuse, it's expensive, most people feel like they get good to great value for their experience and we want nothing less. If someone joins for the wrong reasons, doesn't have the experience they wanted and wants to leave, we want them to leave positively and feeling like they got value for their time. Everyone at Formation has a unique experience and deserves a personal conversation about leaving.
u/irobot_11 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
I am also a current fellow. I wish someone had wrote this post before I joined. It's not worth the cost and I feel like i've been ripped off. I have made better progress going through other courses like Neetcode, Structy, etc.
I do feel like Management genuinely cares about the
u/michaelnovatireplied·· edited★ FEATURED
Hi, I'm sorry to hear you both aren't finding value in the program. Can you surface specific feedback internally or message me on Reddit completely anonymously with specific feedback and examples so we can action it?
The majority of commenters on this thread are new and anonmyous accounts which makes it hard to get concrete feedback.
For example, IRobot, how do you know you are making better progress through other courses and what signals are telling you so? Like I said in another comment, we link to and suggest all kinds of free content, so I want some clarity on what this means. If you signed up to Formation as an alternative to Neetcode, you didn't sign up for the right reasons and I want to chat!
u/Competitive-Feed-359 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
As someone who’s in the final stages of Bootcamp, I’m thinking about formation and similar programs as a next step in the process. I appreciate Michael’s transparency and openness in his approach and response.
Almost every response he gives is opened by disclaimer on who he is a
u/michaelnovatireplied·· edited★ FEATURED
Hi, I wanted to comment directly since in reviewing the thread I realized your questions weren't answered.
1. I don't think OPs experience are growing pains, or at least not the way they were portrayed. Behind the scenes, our scheduling and matching algorithms actually get better and better the more people we have and create more opportunities for better session matches. We have chosen to grow much slower than we can, and investors want us to, to prioritize experience over growth and making sure everything is great in practice and not just in theory. I said this in another comment but it's not uncommon for 5 out of 6 people in a session to have great feedback and 1 to feel like it was a terrible session. We are fully aware that Fellows are paying a lot of money and expecting a lot, so one bad experience needs to be investigated and improved, but that one experience is also not representative of the majority.
2. New Grad training isn't a pivot or expansion per se. We are doing very few changes to support this partnership with Netflix. The underlying technology that powers Formation is unique, patented, and extremely powerful. We haven't used it broadly yet because Fellows pay a lot of money to do Formation and we prioritize their experience over our own growth. We don't want to "experiment" with high paying Fellows like a lot of other programs do. We are hyper-focused on specific narrow demographics because we believe that the vast majority of the Fellows receive value in what we offer and we only want to expand when we expect to deliver great value to any new Fellow demographic.
u/Evening_Message5556 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Oh yikes. I planned on starting in March but this thread is making me leary. Mainly joined this to get into FAANG and level up my LC and system design skills. It seems this fellowship doesn't have the network effect that was advertised to me during my call with the sourcer. Id l
u/michaelnovatireplied·· edited★ FEATURED
Hi there, I'm happy to give more info and my thoughts. Ultimately we want you in the right place and if that's not Formation, we're happy. I've responded a lot in other comments that might be useful as well and feel free to message me directly with more info about yourself if you want me to give more personal advice.
First off, we take every piece of feedback seriously, investigate and discuss it, so I don't want to come across as dismissive, but the majority of people have a great experience and recommend us to friends. Not a single person on this thread has responded to our team or reported anonymous/untraceable feedback despite open arms from everyone on the team. In terms of feedback, so far this evening there have been 7 pieces of explicit feedback (i.e. text feedback, supplemental to numerical ratings) given, 6 were glowing positive reviews about the impact the mentor(s) had, 1 was a constructive feedback about having Fellows work in parallel versus sequentially. Again, we flag and discuss almost every piece of constructive feedback, but it's also not representative of the majority experience. Some people join for the wrong reasons at the wrong time or just aren't on the same page and have a particularly bad experience and our entire team tries our best to find a unique path forward that works for that person, whether it's staying or leaving.
Second, this is one opinion and everyone has different reasons, starting skill level, experience level, and goals. If you went through all the trouble of signing up, then you should do your 7 day trial and judge if it's a good fit for yourself.
Third, if you were accepted, then we are confident in helping you level up your DS&A and problem solving (not just LC), system design skills, and behavioral skills.
Fourth, regarding referrals. We sourced several referrals today and we did a call with a hiring partner recruiter to send over a few people, there just aren't many positions right now and companies are very picky about who they will accept as a referral. Things change month to month and we cannot promise anything, but in the better hiring market, referrals have been extremely impactful for Fellows, particularly junior ones. 9 to 12 months is a long time, and if you are especially not in a rush, I'm more confident in a FAANG-level placement. I can give more specific advice on where you stand for referrals if you message me your background info.
Fifth, last placements in order, unedited except for privacy reasons: Bloomberg, <Bank>, <Large Healthcare>, <SASS Startup>, Cisco Meraki, Realtor.com, Realtor.com, <SASS Startup>, <Ed-Tech Startup NonProfit>, American Airlines, Welcome Homes. Clearly not FAANG-FAANG and clearly not all "mediocre startups" and I think the February slump might be impacting some people's perspective, especially for people who are frustrated with the current job hunt. Most common companies with interviews this week are looking good: Bloomberg, Nextdoor, Google, PayPal, Repl.it, Palantir, ServiceNow, Expedia, Cisco.
But overall, do not join if you are joining purely for referrals, even in a good market. We are primarily focused on getting your skills up to a FAANG-level bar and join if that's what you want to do. We've asked the team to review all communications to make sure people don't interpret anything we say or do to imply that someone can pay a lot of money to do Formation to get referrals as the main benefit. If anyone who has already joined has joined thinking that we are happy to talk about a reasonable exit.
u/Tajman wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Have you found the level of career support very helpful? How much more to it is there than just resume prep?
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
A couple more things we do. Top level OP had several complaints about these, but according to our collective feedback the vast majority of these go very well and these mentors are often nominated as the 'most impactful mentor of the week' awards we do.
1. Everyone does at least one extensive resume review with a FAANG/ex-FAANG recruiter (and more on-demand as needed). Most have many many years of experience. The OP didn't have a good experience with their reviewer, but you can always work with different people if you are not on the same page with a recruiter. Even if you aren't on the same page with several, you can keep trying.
2. Everyone does at least one recruiter-call mock phone screen with a FAANG/ex-FAANG recruiter (as many as you need until you pass). Simulating a real mock phone screen. And unlimited more as needed.
3. Most people will do technical behavioral group sessions and 1-1 mocks with staff/principal/director/senior manager level engineers. This is simulating a hiring manager call and focused on talking about your experience.
4. Once you have interviews, you can book on demand calls with a FAANG/ex-FAANG recruiter to about job hunt strategy, offer process, negotiation, wording of emails etc...
u/TouchTheSkyyyy wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
You failed to comment on his main point:
>"and I can confirm that their statement on the website that "once you are consistently passing our mock interviews, we’re able to refer you directly into our connections with a high hit rate." has thus far been completely false"
You
u/michaelnovatireplied·· edited★ FEATURED
Hi! Sorry, I had answered in other threads but not here and happy to provide more context.We do referrals but they are more limited than before because companies are hiring less and have more rigid criteria (which tends to disadvantage people with less experience). In the very limited scenarios where we do refer people, they remain high hit and effective. We constantly change the website as the market changes.
We are far from perfect, but I think some of the negativity in this thread stems from the market changing suddenly in Fall 2022. A small number of people joined during the hot market when many people they spoke with who did Formation at the time were referred to the canonical FAANG and they expected to follow the same path. They trained hard, got their skill level up and then things changed suddenly and all those pipelines shut off. They are understandably frustrated, which I sympathize with and we want to do whatever we can to support these people - whether that means leaving Formation because of the change in market on reasonable terms, or sticking with it and figuring out a new strategy... the handful I've been a part of have been highly personal discussions that I highly doubt will end up on Reddit.
More generally, no one should join Formation **only** to get referrals, we are not a pay for play referral service and if you think your skills are already great and want to buy your way into FAANG, it's not the program for you. Whatever the website or any ad says, every single person talks to a recruiter, signs complex paperwork, and gets a week to withdraw after seeing all of our internal reference materials, and if anyone still falls through the cracks we are happy to take responsibility for the misunderstanding and support you leaving on a positive note.
Accepting people on ISA who pay us far in the future (even if they were to leave on a partial refund) but us having to pay thousands of dollars of training costs right now is a terrible business model for a small startup that has limited funding... so much so we are considering getting rid of them. So the idea of luring people in, accepting anyone who will join, and growing out of control is completely and utterly false. I'm happy to go more into this but the post is already getting long.
Finally, just some more notes on referrals I posted elsewhere:
1. Referrals come in many sources but we can't refer you to jobs that don't exist and we never promised that we would
2. The mentors you work with mostly work as senior+ engineers at top tier and FAANG companies and in a better market an a great source of strong referrals
3. We have been working on training to help people leverage their networks better for peer referrals
4. We have hundreds of years of FAANG experience on staff and though mentors, so we have a pulse on FAANG hiring from people who work there and are hiring (or not) that don't talk on Blind, etc...
5. We are talking to companies about longer time formal partnerships in all kinds of ways that might not be direct referrals, but open doors.
6. We don't make you take any offers, and if you really want to work at FAANG and you don't give up and put in the effort, then we keep working with you. The challenge here is if your skills are ready but the jobs don't exist, it can be really frustrating to keep putting in the hours of training.
u/PythonDataEngineer wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
u/michaelnovati, thanks for all the effort you've put into your responses here.
As a Data Engineer, I'm wondering if your program is right for me, since DSA interviews are generally easier for DEs (max Leetcode-medium questions) and because DEs also have SQL, Data Modelling, OOP
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
Hi, we aren't able to help with DE specific areas or with DE specific domain knowledge. We have a number of mentors who are strong in frontend, iOS and Android, so we do one off mock interviews with them if you are in those areas, but we don't have anyone to do that for DE right now (March 2023).
We have very minimal bare bones SQL practice (\~5, 2-3 hour long practice assessments of varying difficulty, not hooked up to our training algorithms) but we constantly update and change things (which as OP posted can be a bit hectic as things do change frequently - all in an attempt to get you the best resources, practice, etc...) and more basic SQL skills have been creeping into more SWE interviews lately, but nothing formally launched.
We have strong systems design for a junior, mid-level, and low senior engineer, which is useful for full stack, generalist, backend, infra, dev-ops, sre, and DE and that covers system architecture and system modeling, which overlaps data modeling, but not so much at the schema and object modeling level.
The career support, job hunt support, and negotiation support all applies, other than that we don't source jobs for DE and we don't source referrals for DE. But you can always try to leverage the network to apply to DE jobs referred by a SWE there.
So overall, I'm on the fence. Some DEs have had great success, but as I've said repeatedly, you have to be on the same page about what we will and won't do. I don't think we will lead you off course into skills that aren't useful but we also won't cover the full list of things you'll need, like maybe 50% of them.
Interview Kickstart is a competitor you should compare us to and they have a DE track: [https://www.interviewkickstart.com/courses/data-engineering-interview-masterclass](https://www.interviewkickstart.com/courses/data-engineering-interview-masterclass). Their DE track covers what we cover except for the DE module they have - which is granted - a very important piece of the puzzle.
u/witheredartery wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
were these people already working?
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
The 20 placements? It's out of date now since there have been about 10 more since then so including all the recent placements, the distribution follows a similar pattern to the recent data on our blog, about 1/3 had no experience, 1/3 had 1-3 years and 1/3 has 3+ years.
I don't have aggregated info of who was employed or not already but anecdotally I also feel like it followed the similar trend of 2/3 working 1/3 not working. The typical Formation demographic would not be in this subreddit and probably doesn't know it exists, so you lose that point of view here.
A huge factor in these people's success is showing up and chugging though every day, staying as positive as they can, and appreciating advice and feedback - even if they don't always agree. People that have turned more negative to the job hunt and rejecting feedback are definitely struggling more in the job hunt right now.
We have made a bunch of changes and continue to make changes to help people feel more community support in the job hunt to keep their spirits up because those are the people getting jobs.
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
Making you grind Leetcode like that is an inefficient use of time. The fact that you feel barely able to breathe means you aren't absorbing the materials and it's even more of a waste of time.
There's nothing special about Leetcode problems, anyone can just do them for free online, it's about HOW you do them that you should expect a program or bootcamp to help you with.
At Formation we train you to learn problem solving methods rather than raw grinding LC. We have hundreds of years of FAANG engineering experience in our ranks and this is an almost universal recommendation.
This is a simplified version of the approach we work through and every mentor problem solving session you work through these steps and get feedback: [https://formation.dev/blog/the-engineering-method/](https://formation.dev/blog/the-engineering-method/)
Even though a method like this sounds simple, it's really hard to do it by yourself and it's why feedback is crucial to help you absorb it.
u/PythonDataEngineer wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Thanks Michael! I appreciate your thoughts!
In my earlier message, I asked about the Canadian market. I said it's less "DE-heavy" but meant less "DSA-heavy".
Would you know if that's the case based on data you have collected?
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
It doesn't seem much different than the USA market, but we have seen fewer Canadian interviews. The big tech companies have classic DSA and the smaller companies have very varying processes (some practical, some DSA, some live programming, etc...).
Side note more broadly for other readers as well, even though we do a lot of DSA, the goal is to train you how to problem solve an interview settings and people who fully buy into this tend to find the training really valuable for every single kind of interview. I think the OP and some of the comments that focus too much on DSA are also people who haven't been through the entire program and job support people get during real interviews. Like If you have a practical interview at Square coming up you can do a mock practical interview with a senior Reddit engineer or Google engineer, or Block engineer.