Has anyone done formation and is it worth it?

I can answer this very transparently, apologies it might be long or over detailed, but trying to explain clearly and openly. Originally we worked with Leif to administer "classic" ISAs, which is something like, don't pay anything until you get a new job, then pay X% a month for Y months, capped at Z dollars, e.g. 10% per month for 15 months, targeting 15% of one year's base salary. These also had caps so if you make over $165K base salary, you won't pay more than the cap. If you didn't make $65K or more then your payments are paused until you do, or until a year passes in which case the contract is cancelled. There's a lot of good things about classic ISAs as they really help people pay who otherwise wouldn't be able to afford, or be approved for an upfront cost or a loan. The flip side is that, as I've said many times, the job market was particularly rough in 2023. Since we work with people until they get a job, people were taking longer to get jobs, and hence we don't get enough cash upfront to pay for our employee's salaries. **Another side effect is of unconditional support and the fact that most people are currently employed as SWEs**, is people would pause or ramp down, and move into holding patterns waiting for the market to improve, further exasperating this issue. So for people that had a job and in theory could afford upfront, or could afford another option, but just preferred the ISA because it felt less commtittal, the relationship just doesn't work financially if a person is also going to not commit to a timeframe for their job hunt. So we stopped offering "classic ISAs" earlier in 2023 and repaced it with FOUR OPTIONS. 1. Pay upfront, with credit card if you want 2. Pay via an ISL, which is similar to an ISA, except it looks more like a loan on paper. You are being credited the upfront cost of Formation, and you will pay back based on your income (and pause if you don't have a job) aiming to pay back that upfront amount + a reasonable effective interest rate. 3. Pay via deferred loan. Like a normal loan but you can defer it for a year from starting Formation. 4. Pay via up to 24 payments, upon approval by our partner, possibly interest-free, but the payments start on day 1 and no deferral. THESE ARE ILLUSTRATIVE AND THERE ARE MORE DETAILS ON OUR WEBSITE COMPARING THESE OPTIONS - BUT EACH OF OUR PAYMENT PROVIDERS WILL GIVE THE FINAL AND LATEST DETAILS OF SPECIFIC OPTIONS FOR YOU. So these options are aiming to be a little more in the middle. Formation gets paid mostly upfront and you can make a tradeoff (upon approval with each partner)) of how much you want defer payments and what kind of interest you want to pay. The more deferral generally the more interest and that's fair and gives you more control over the situation, and if you want to start payments right away, you might not have to pay any interest at all! We're always exploring ways to make payments the most accessible possible, while also paying our bills, and it's also why we take venture capital funding to pay top tier engineers competitive compensation to work for us on the long term platform we're building.

Hi, I'm happy to answer questions and always like to hear what others have to think. I'll list just a couple of shorter comments to help answer, but feel free to me, I'm very open with people about if I think Formation is a good option to consider or not, and ultimately you have to decide. 1. It sounds like you are somewhat familiar with it at least, but just to clarify that we're not a bootcamp and have no fixed curriculum, lectures, classes, lessons, etc... We are a practice, benchmarking, mentorship, job hunting and mock interview platform. You do practice by yourself in in small mentor-led group sessions, you get feedback in those sessions and through benchmarkings, and you trust us to move you through topics and skill areas at whatever pace you go at, and you trust us to tell you when you are at the top company bar. So you are paying to reliably get your skills (from DS&A to System Design, to behavioral, etc...) to a top tier bar, not on any certain timeframe. 2. We have job hunting tracking tools built entirely in house, and we source hundreds of jobs a we and use AI to match them to you - 5 a day. We prepare you for upcoming specific interviews, help your strategize and negotiate with on demand career coaches that are seasoned FAANG recruiters, etc... 3. While we have a number of formal and informal partnerships with companies, recruiters, agencies etc... we don't guarantee any referrals but we do try to refer you when we can. You should NOT come to Formation as a shortcut to get a guaranteed job a FAANG companies - it doesn't work that way and no one can promise you that. We can promise to try our best to help you but we can't create jobs that don't exist. You should join to have accountability on your job hunt and get feedback from FAANG recruiters and hiring managers about your resume and pitch, but not to skip the line... if we are able to refer you that's icing on the cake. 4. **COST**. If it's worth it is up to you. The average placed Fellow increases their compensation by multiples over the program cost, according to our self-reported exit salary data we collect. So we consider Formation an investment in yourself. Like instead of investing in Snap stock or Google stock you invest in yourself and hopefully increase your compensation so much it was well worth it. **The question though is, without Formation what would your outcome be?** And that's impossible to ever know. Many people find great jobs on their own. Would their outcome have been better? Would negotiation help alone made the payment work it? From what I've seen, a lot depends on the person, and luck, so we're focused on just making sure people who join feel like they got value for what they paid, and if we do that for most people, we think the product works.

We don't cover CICD or DevOps and we also don't have mentors I would say who could do mocks overing those topics specifically. We have some mentors which an do iOS and Android mocks, so while we don't cover those skills either day to day, there's at least some practice available. There's no fixed curriculum and you'll do different things at different paces. But the overall areas we cover are: 1. CS fundamentals/DS&A, up to all the topics needed for the hardest interviews (including DP, advanced graphs). How much you do will vary by your goals but you can go all the way up to the hardest of the hard. 2. System design. This is full stack system design preparing for top tier company system design interviews. 3. Technical Behavioral. Preparing your resume, pitch and practice hiring manager interview and things like the Amazon Bar Raiser 4. Minor areas: frontend (practice and mocks), software engineering (more for people with almost no SWE experience, practice fixing issues in a codebase). OOP (this is a stepping stone for SD but also it's own interview topic) This might sound a little like we're interview focused and to some degree we are, but the structure will be focused on practice, group sessions, and benchmarking until your skills are solid and then starts focusing on job hunting and mock interviews in preparation for the job. I would say that we are currently ideal for full stack top tier preparation and that is our goal. People who apply and focus on smaller companies with more practical interview processes still find Formation useful but it's less focused on preparing for those interviews and you'll have to complement it with outside prep. Finally on curriculum: our stance is that there is so much free material out there, we aren't trying to sell you magical content for 10X the cost... we expect you to use a number of free and cheap learning resources and our job is to help you figure out what to do and when and benchmark you against the bar you need to be at for top tier interviews - so that the process is faster, less stressful, and you are getting better advice for navigating top tier interview processes than Blind or online forums.

Definitely good questions. We stand by what we do but we also don't do everything and I fully support making sure you know what we do and know it's a good decision for you. Overall I would say we are good for half of what you mentioned. The SD and technical behavioral practice the explanation part. Technical behavioral is about talking about your past work in the best way possible. SD is about connecting your big scale experience with more general concepts and applying those as tools to discussing general systems problems. Anyone can read a solid systems design book for general materials and we're focused on actually applying the tools and communicating well in group and interview settings (and getting feedback) so you can successfully pass system design interviews. We don't do any hands on projects or capstone projects and we don't do anything that builds your resume. It's something on the radar for helping people with less experience, but for most of the top tier jobs they just want to see really world work experience + good full stack interview performance. Now regarding specific technology questions, two buckets: 1. Trying to see how much experience you have with big scale systems but they don't actually care about specific technologies, just want to see you have experience on systems at the scale where you need to solve those kinds of problems, like building a massive data pipeline. We help for this. 2. Looking for experience with specific technologies because they want you to show up day one able to use those tools and do work. We DON'T help for this. Real work experience with a tool is what they are looking for and you have it or you don't. Some programs help you fake it to try to get by interview and we do not do that. So our engineers and product people are building our platform, which is a product, they aren't mentoring for the most part. There is one team member who has 20 years of experience and actually does lead the mentorship side in terms of content, configuration, and he's a special person that is also one of the best teachers in the world at this. The mentors who run sessions are industry engineers who vary from more like great teachers to just great engineers who are not good teachers... it's a mix and you work with all kinds of mentors and give feedback on who you like and don't. We often find one person will hate a mentor and another person loves them, so over time you'll find the mentors that work for your style and spend more time in their sessions. Pulling off the scheduling and feedback parts of this system are very hard problems and why we have those strong engineers building the underlying technology.

I'm on airplane wifi on my phone and in Japan struggling with the timezones and I'm shocked there aren't more typos haha