Are coding bootcamps still relevant or should I just opt to work for free for experience?

Hey, I'm the co-founder of Formation and before I got to the part about you applying I was going to say it's not a good fit if you don't have any experience yet, but it would be an excellent fit once you get your first job to level up to your next job. Now in terms of advice/questions: 1. Yeah entry level FAANG is basically internship conversions + new grads via top tier CS schools right now and we'll see in the fall if that changes. Apprenticeships are extremely competitive. Contract to hire might be the only possible option and still not likely. 2. I think that's a good idea, getting a real product in the app store with real users can count as experience but I would give it say 6 months of real work-equivalent full time contributions to really make it count. 3. Real 40 hour a week experience on a single company/project can trump credentials yeah, but you need an equivalent amount of that and it's a lot more than 12 weeks, I would put it at 6 to 12 months. But that said, if you do a bootcamp, I would expect it to also take just as long and just as much follow up work to get a job. So I would do a bootcamp if you need structure, motivation, community to get the ball rolling on this journey. If you feel like you can already code and you can spend 6 months to a a year on this app, then I would go that rout and save the cost.

Good question, it doesn't matter at all skills-wise how much experience you have to benefit technically from Formation, and you can do Formation for a fixed length of time if you are at the minimum skill bar (which it sounds like you might not have been yet on the benchmark) but don't have enough experience. We just don't want you to think we have a magic formula to get you a job, and nor can we afford to pay more to mentor you than you pay us (which can happen if you are here for like 1-2 years) :P Internship + Formation isn't quite enough experience right now for the unlimited Fellowship. We are actively exploring different shapes and sizes for different people though, because there is a lot of demand from people we currently don't support and that's where are month to month and short term packages come into play right now.

I mean maybe you should DM me a bit more. You sound like you are in the right direction but I might need to dig a little deeper. Everything we do is deeper personalized so it's hard to generalize and what I gave is my general advice :)