Intermediate/Advanced Bootcamps?

Hi, full disclosure, I'm the co-founder of Formation which is a competitor for Interview Kickstart, but I'm also a daily active member and contributor to the community and try to give good, fair, advice. So first off, if you want to consider the "career accelerator" bucket of programs these are the competitors. Note that each one is very, very different but they all focus on the job hunt process rather than building new practical skills: 1. Formation: focuses on fundamental problem solving/DSA/SD/behaviorals, adaptive platform to move you through skills efficiently, small group sessions (2 - 8 people), dedicated support team, unlimited targeted mock interviews with senior top tier engineers as you start job hunting, senior/staff/principal FAANG-level mentors. Most 360 coverage program of the group. 2. Interview Kickstart: fixed curriculum/structured program with larger lectures and more school-style learning, focuses on fundamental problem solving, SD. Based in India and most employees work in India, but they have mentors from around the world and they are senior engineers. 3. Outco: a shorter, smaller program, with fixed topics and then unlimited peer mock interviews and job hunt support. It's a little lighter than other options but also cheaper if you pay upfront. 4. Pathrise: almost solely focused on the job hunt funnel and optimization, dedicated career coach to make sure you are tracking your funnel, optimizing parts of the funnel that are week, i.e. not passing certain interviews, and then 1-1 coaching sessions to work on those weak areas. A fairly expensive option for what you get, as it focuses more on the job hunt funnel itself and not making you a better engineer, but it's a good option if this is what you need. 5. Coachable: a super small program that focuses on DS&A. It's run by one person and has a number of mentors around to grade work and discuss in Slack. 6. Scaler: this was more on the radar in the past, but I think they are focusing almost solely on India - all of their placements on their website are in India, and someone who went there said most of the other people and mentors were in India. So it might not be the best option if you are looking for a job transition in the USA. It sounds like you need two things: 1. Practice DS&A and SD DS&A being completely foreign might make these programs harder to get into and I would suggest self teaching a bit to get to a "LeetCode Easy" level first. SD you probably have good instincts from your work and Formation or IK would be good at filling in gaps. 2. Behavioral/Narrative/Career Journey. Not having a traditional background you need more support on your resume and practice telling your story to get credit for your dev ops experience. This is just as critical as the DS&A. Formation, IK, Pathrise are good for this. You likely aren't at the senior level yet. You might be at the mid-level, or possibly even "FAANG entry level", but a program that helps you figure this out is critical too - and it's incredibly hard even with these programs, in this market.

Good question: 1. Formation has a frontend track. I need to emphasize that it's not educational and people with no frontend experience find it not good for them. It's the equivalent of how if you can do LC Easy problems then these DS&A programs are good, but not if you haven't done any at all. Our frontend is good for people who know frontend and want practice, not for people with no frontend experience. It's JS/HTML/CS/React 2. Interview Kickstart has a similar view as Formation, where you can do a short amount of practice on frontend but the focus is still classic DS&A. Interview Kickstart also has a lot more modules you can do like Data Science and ML 3. Outco: I don't think they have frontend 4. Pathrise: no frontend 5. Coachable: no frontend 6. Scaler: has frontend and projects in their longer program I can't speak to IK, but Formation basically covers 14ish interview types, so we have mock interviews with senior/staff frontend engineers to prepare for tough frontend interviews. The problem with frontend is that there are thousands of combinations of frameworks and tools and you can't learn them all, so it's a little harder to benchmark and prepare for. DS&A interviews are intentionally designed to be language and platform agnostic (that's why they are the way they are!) and are much easier to prepare for. Frontend system design is a variant we do too if you have one upcoming! Most frontend interviews though aren't so much "frontend interviews" but are more like "live coding" (mini features, debugging, mini projects) and those you can prepare for by practicing in the right dev environment that you'll have for the interview and doing mock interviews.