Taking a low job offer to escape ISA?

I commented above, but whatever program this is, did you talk to them about your situation, feelings, and what options you have and what was their response? I would highly suggest that as a first step for anyone in a similar situation.

This is not correct about Formation. The ISA gets forgiven if you leave and don't get a job for 1 year. Otherwise we work with you for however long it takes until you get a job, even if it's a very long time.

Or if the person leaves, they are discounted (depending on number of active and valued weeks) and have 12 months to find a job or not pay us either. It's different though.

If this is about Formation, please reach out so I can help give you advice since you don't seem happy right now. If it's not about Formation, also feel free to reach out and I can try to help you give you advice as well, sounds like you are in a tough spot.

I would encourage everyone to spend time and fully read the 54 comments (of which 1/4 or so are my comments) and judge for themselves how I responded to their feedback. We have some people with no experience, you found one who had several internships but no full SWE experience, and that proves nothing. The other comment thread you shared has a person who loud and clear says they have 7+ years experience, and another person saying that most of the Fellows they work with have experience. And for the fourth time, you have our official data as the primary source proving this. **Yelling loudly doesn't make false statements true**, that's how fake news spreads, like in the 2016 election, which I saw first hand at Facebook. There are people with tons of experience who are weaker at DS&A and people with no experience who are strong at DS&A, and that's why everyone at Formation gets a unique plan that adapts week to week, because everyone is different. So someone commenting on the skill level of their peers has nothing to do with experience or their qualifications for getting into Formation or getting a job. Just because someone is terrible at DS&A it doesn't mean we are scaling our of control and letting anyone in. If you had 5 years of experience and a decent job and were terrible at DS&A you sure wouldn't want people treating you this way and telling you you don't belong to be somewhere. This doesn't at all dismiss the fact that people who are stronger find it a less valuable experience to work with peers who are below their skill, and this is a complex problem we continue to work on and improve. Our patented algorithm gets stronger the more people there are, not weaker. Read the patent yourself, it's public, or ask me questions to clarify, before spreading more fake news about how Formation works. You stated that "dozens of detailed critical first hand accounts from current formation fellows about how unhappy they are". People can read for themselves, count for themselves, and you are entitled to your opinion. In my opinion, it's extremely misleading and slanderous to say "dozens" of people are complaining on that thread when you can count them to check. Every piece of constructive feedback we receive is invaluable and we review each piece of feedback. I'm challenging you on stating incorrect information about what Formation's program offers and who Formation Fellows are, and I'm sorry if that was interpreted as dismissing everyone's feedback. If you are open to asking questions and learning about what Formation is, as I said, I'm happy to answer all the questions I can! We keep working with people until they get a job and we constantly adapt to the job market to fight for Fellows careers. It is heart breaking to myself and my team to characterize this like trapping and abandonment. Many more expensive programs are fixed length and kick you out the door after some time. We think this is a value proposition and if costs us a ton of money to do. If you are feeling down in your job hunt, we want to work with you 1-1 to stay positive and keep improving our support.

We don't force you to take any job and if you want to work at FAANG, **no one is kicking you out and I challenge you to leave Formation and find another path to FAANG right now.** We never promised how long it would take, and we work with people as long as they want as long as they do their part and keep intending to job hunt. We've had a jump in placements in the past three weeks and people gave very high satisfaction ratings despite more people choosing to take non-FAANG jobs, like Chegg, Citibank, and others. For example, one person chose to change their target away from FAANG companies and was thrilled with how Formation supported them doing that and thrilled with the job they received. I think this is very fair and is a top reason people come to Formation. If you really want to work at FAANG, you can come to Formation, don't expect to get a job on any timeframe (which I believe we make very clear everywhere) and if it takes like 12 months, so be it. I think it's much more misleading for a program like Interview Kickstart to advertise FAANG allover the place and an "Average value of offersreceived by alums of $312,275" but to have a fixed length program and fixed period of support before kicking you out the door. You can get a refund if you don't get any offers at all and meet stringent performance, testing, attendance, participation, and other requirements, but you are lured in by FAANG and $300K+ compensation with a message much more prominent than at Formation. I hear the frustrations with Formation and with the job market, our team has taken this feedback to heart, and we will never stop improving and making changes on a daily basis. We also understand the market has changed really fast, referrals are much harder right now, and if people changed their minds, all they have to do is talk to our team and see what their options are. When people leave early, the conversations are deeply personal and we'll do our best to support you.

Sorry to hear about that. Can you DM me anonymously here? Report it anonymously on the platform? Or have you given the feedback to you FM team, in weekly feedback forms, or on the session itself? I see you are a new account posting about Formation in several places and ignoring me. We would love to help and support you if you are not in a great place, and help you exit on a positive note if Formation is not right for you, but we can't do that if you only comment anonymously on Reddit and refuse to talk to us. There was an incident reported along these lines a few months ago and we did an hour-long call with the mentor to investigate what happened and resolved it and the person has since has strong positive feedback. If this is still happening we want to know!

Assuming we are talking about Formation here, have you reported your feedback to your FM team about wanting to leave and what did they say? If you haven't can you do so! If Formation isn't the right fit we are more than happy to support you leaving. Similar to DS&A, we are practice based training with assessment and feedback rather than teaching frontend, so I want to launch an investigation into what you expected, what you received, what worked and what didn't work for frontend so we can both make improvements and also make sure people come in on the same page of what we can do and can't do.

Thanks or adding more detail, yeah the job hunt is extremely demotivating for many people right now. I would encourage you to lean on your FM team, and let them know what's working and what isn't. You mention a number of things we don't have any kind of coaching on, but we do try to help if you surface specific things. For example, if you have a crypto interview coming up we can try to find a crypto mentor do a mock with etc... We constantly update the website so if you see anything there currently you feel is not clearly articulating what you are experiencing please flag it! It could be poor wording, or it could be that you aren't getting certain things assigned that we do support. Our mentors are mostly senior, staff, principal engineers yeah, a small number are at FAANG or ex-FAANG in India, like currently I think it's 3 or 4 (?) out of over 150. But in general we want mentors from all over to represent diverse approaches and views. Some mentors get polarizing feedback, e.g. "this was the best session I ever had" and "I never want to work with this mentor again" and part of the process is finding mentors you like and prefer. So if you are repeatedly getting mentors you don't want to work with, let your FM team know so they can help prevent that. I read every single piece of text-based mentor feedback in almost real time so I assure you if you give feedback about mentors (which can be private) that we read it! Anyone can do LC for free! Following the engineering method, benefiting from the mentorship, the community, and the accountability are what you are paying for so if you aren't getting that please talk to your FM team or message me on MM!