I'm the co-founder of Formation so I'm really biased.
I would say that none of these are boot camps, so the perspective you get from here is probably skewed to boot camp grads that then went to some of these programs. Which could be really useful if you're also a boot camp grad but less useful if you're not.
All of these are really different.
Outco, I got the vibe was shutting down or isn't really running because you can't apply on their website and their founders seem to have moved on and there's been a number of people being threatened to be sued by them who didn't get jobs within 12 months. I haven't heard firsthand from the company directly so I can't say anything definitively but I'm not really considering them right now when I talk about competitors.
Pathrise, they publish some annual stats and the number of people who go there as a software engineer is has been decreasing so it's now more of a place to go for a career help less for technical help. You get a dedicated career coach and it's heavily focused on optimizing your job application funnel. I personally think for the cost, it's a bit too high but it's probably the best at systematically helping you optimize job applications as the other ones focus more on the technical aspects.
Interview Kickstart and Formation are most similar but still entirely different haha. Both focus heavily on technical and preparing for technical interviews. Interview Kickstart is more fixed curriculum. Has weekly lectures for 4 hours on Saturdays and tutorials in between. Formation only has 3-6 person small group sessions and 1-1 mocks and every week has a new schedule depending on your progress and availability.
Interview Kickstart is India based and focused and Formation is more Silicon Valley based and focused.
I'm happy to answer honestly any questions you have about Formation specifically. It has been incredibly effective in 2024 so far if you are a good fit (2+ years of SWE experience and able to get some intervies on your own and need to focus on preparing for and passing them).
Formation is not a good fit if you have less than 2 years of experience right now. We still have some people in that bucket from that started before the market downturn and we will stand by our promise to support them until they get a job, but we're basically seeing that those people are getting super prepared for their interviews. they just aren't able to really get interviews easily on their own. We have an absolutely fantastic network and we're really able to help with referrals if you are a good fit for what the companies are looking for, but if the companies aren't hiring people with less experience then we can't just find magical opportunities for you that don't exist.
u/BayleeBaylee4578 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Thanks for the rapid response Michael! Appreciate it! I do have some questions as it happens.
1. I see you've taken some bootcamps to task for promising jobs to grads, even in this market, so do you stand by Formation's "Land Your Next SWE Role, Guaranteed" tagline, even in
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
1. Yes, if you join the Unlimited option we will work with you for however long it takes and you aren't forced to take your first offer. So as long as you keep job hunting, applying, interviewing, and accepting our feedback and guidance (and don't have to withdraw for personal reasons, unexpected emergencies, or change your goal and don't what to job hunt anymore) then we keep supporting you. We have some people with us for two years and counting haha. We don't have strict requirements to meet to maintain this either. We have a two way trusting relationship and as long as you are continuously intending to job hunt we do our part. We don't hand you a job though and it's not a place to sign up expected to be handed interviews and a job on a plate.
2. Yeah sounds like you've read my views on this. It makes a lot more sense when you do Formation and see how individually unique each person's experience is and how personal your experience feels. I don't expect that to convince you of anything, but it's why there aren't really people complaining saying that we have made up outcomes or results or challenging the legitimacy of our numbers. We don't publish much but we try to be very clear and explicit about what we do publish on our blog and what it means.
The main answer is when you apply and have a conversation with us, we'll try to pattern match and give you an idea of how long it might take and what kinds of companies are hiring people with your background right now. And I think that's better than any metrics. But that takes a lot of effoet on your part to even get to that point and I would love if we can find a way to publish a bit more timeframe related data that could be useful to people We're small so can't cut data to that granularity and our team is small and it hasn't been a priority to try to figure it out yet.
Because of #1 we don't want to take on people that won't get placed, it hurts the business of you don't get a job relatively quickly and we wouldn't survive. So making sure you are a good fit is super important in a 1 on 1 basis before accepting you.
u/Fawqueue wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
>can people who have attended Outco, Formation, Interview Kickstart and Pathrise give their two cents on whether it's worth the fees?
I'll save you a lot of trouble: no. Not one bootcamp in 2024 is worth the fee. Even if it's free but requires your time, then it's not worth it.
u/michaelnovatireplied·
All four of these programs are not bootcamps and they're not for people who have no software engineering experience. so they aren't meant to replace any kind of education and they aren't considered forms of education like bootcamps are.
u/s4074433 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
I like the disclosure of a potential conflict of interest (I am helping out with a startup trying to change the bootcamp scene as well), but I wonder how long it will remain "The world’s only AI-powered dynamic interview prep platform", or if there are already many similar platfo
u/michaelnovatireplied·
We adjust our marketing all the time and make hundreds of changes a week - inside and out - so as other platforms come up then we might change it. I personally don't live that tagline because it doesn't really show what's truly unique about us too.
u/cglee wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
I have a negative association with Pathrise only because I came across a half-assed "review" of Launch School they wrote for content marketing\[1\]. I don't know anything about them as a company, but that content marketing strategy feels like more enshittification of this entire
u/michaelnovatireplied·
This is SEO for them haha, they have assessed reviews of all bootcamps
u/BayleeBaylee4578 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Thanks again for the answers. I'm still very skeptical of your response here though, felt like a non-answer.
1. That's great you stick with your students, but offering continued support isn't the same as a "SWE Role, Guaranteed", it's only a guarantee you'll continue supporting
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
Happy to keep discussing yeah, we're not perfect and some of our reasons might not be good enough but I can at least explain what those reason are directly from one of the founders 🙂.
PART 1:
1. I hear you on clarifying what "guaranteed means", because there are qualifiers that I explained, and maybe there is a better one liner for it. The support is guaranteed until you get a job is how I would respond/state it given your framing.
RE: " lifetime career support, job hunt help", my gosh some bootcamps promise this and it's not remotely the same as what any of these four programs offer and not nearly the same as what Formation offers. I don't want to write paragraphs here but to put it one way, a number of "DS&A career support engineers" at a top bootcamp like Codesmith have come to Formation themselves to work on their skills and get their next job.
Years ago I had debates on people here that insisted Codesmith's lifetime support was on paper the same as what Formation offers and I DID write paragraphs back then haha.
Take System Design. Codesmith spends 2 days on it and has had a couple of alumni lectures that were EXTREMELY basic through the Formation lens. At Formation you spend about 4 to 8 weeks on System Design, do up to 2 dozen small group sessions, and you keep working on it until you pass FAANG-level System Design mock interviews.
Another interesting stat is that maybe 5 to 10% of people who have done Formation have **paid to come back and do it AGAIN** for their next job hunt. Further demontrating that what we do effective, but also not cheap for us to offer and you have to pay for this level of service, you can't get it free for life from a bootcamp.
u/BayleeBaylee4578 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Thanks again for the answers. I'm still very skeptical of your response here though, felt like a non-answer.
1. That's great you stick with your students, but offering continued support isn't the same as a "SWE Role, Guaranteed", it's only a guarantee you'll continue supporting
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
PART 2:
2. Yeah I comment on those. I'm aware of two Reddit posts. One is a person who left and ended up going out of SWE for their career and it was the right thing. The other person I don't know who they are but I do know someone who commented on that thread in support of the primary person recently tried to come back to Formation a second time, so maybe their opinion changed haha, but I want to go through the points.
**MOST IMPORTANTLY - we make hundreds of changes (literally) a week and Formation today is not Formation a few months ago, is not Formation a year ago.** I'm going to answer these as they would be TODAY, and I stand by my previous comments on those posts at the time they were posted.
-------------------------
1. "**Don't be blinded by their marketing**...". We absolutely have people that are still with us and very low morale. There are a number of people who joined us during the market peak and were really hit by the crash afterwards. Some of those people eventually got jobs, some gave up, some are still looking.
I think this is normal and expected. We're not magicians who solve all your problems. We're like a personal trainer who is standing by your side and supporting you and guiding you.
One of the comments on one of those posts took two years to get our record high compensation job, and it's just the way the market has been going.
2. "I felt the **quality of sessions diminished** as I progressed with algorithms"....
There are multiple response I have to this but to focus on the constructive side, while I wouldn't say sessions diminished over time, we do have variance in sessions by having many mentors with different perspectives running them. Often times one person LOVED a mentor and another HATED them in the same session. We have a ton of mandatory feedback we collect, process, watch, aggregate, and we have all kinds of systems in place with managing mentors.
But it's definitely a fair criticism that your mentor experience won't be consistent with the same person. I personally frame that as a positive thing, but if you want consistent mentorship or a single dedicated technical mentor, Formation isn't the place for that.
3. "I didn’t necessarily want the prestige...". We don't have ISA's anymore. I don't actually think the price was that high imo, but the cost is more easy to digest in dollar price now and there are way more options for different people. People pay between $2500 and $20000, with the typical cost for unlimited aiming to be around $10,000.
4. "the **price tag is incredibly hefty** for what you're getting.". I mean if it's worth it is ultimately up to you, but I disagree strongly with the characterization that all you get is leetcode problems thrown at you. Like I said above - constantly making improvements to a complex system and we have a well compensated product team working on this. If we wanted to throw leetcode problems at you I could write up that product in hours and we wouldn't be spending millions of dollars a year in salaries for our product team.
Again though, we aren't perfect and we collect feedback numerous times a week from everyone and constantly improve and if people feel that way, we're not doing something right and it's our responsibility to deep dive into that.
5. "I don't find the group mentor sessions all that useful....". Similar answer to 4. Additionally, we've made a number of improvements behind the scenes in our matching algorithms to try to put people with people of similar seniority level that has helped with what the person said about being matched with people super far behind.
The nature of these sessions is that they are 3-6 person small group, interactive sessions and they are **different everytime**. You have a team of FOUR dedicated Formation team members in your private team channel to work with you on making adjustments with your sessions to help where our product fails too.
6. "I think I disagree with your claim that your admissions process...". This point is about time to placement. I don't really know what to say more on this one, like I see and hear the feedback, I just don't think giving placement times would help anyone estimate what their own time would be. Like I'm deep on the ground and see many placements happen and I don't think you should look at any aggregated metrics without us doing a deep dive into your specific background.
I think for marketing purposes it would help us to have some kind of high level numbers so people can get a sense of it this is something they want to spend time looking into at all, but you should also not sign a contract expecting to get a job in a certain timeframe (that might be published publicly) that you didn't discuss on a one on one level with our team.
u/cglee wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
The sad thing is I can't judge the quality of the other "reviews", but I know the Launch School one contains A LOT of outdated/wrong information. What I find irritating is that the tone seems to be authoritative, as in "this is how it works". I'd understand if it's reflecting on
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
They also have "company interview guides" that sound equally authoritative. It's for raw SEO. I mean I know a lot of people there, I know the founders second hand, I think they have good intentions and don't overpromise anything and are fairly reasonable. We just have a different opinion on what the gaps are preventing people from getting jobs.
Their opinion is optimizing your resume and recruiter pitch in the job hunt funnel, our opinion is you need to have a strong technical toolbelt full of tools you know how to use well to step into your interviews. As a result, Formation is weaker on the raw job hunt funnel optimization side, and Pathrise is weaker on interview prep.
u/BayleeBaylee4578 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Thanks for your responses, yeah let’s keep discussing!
So I don’t think I communicated myself clearly if you thought I wanted clarity on what “guaranteed” means. I completely understand the meaning of the word - it’s rather categorical in that way.
That's exactly why I don’t t
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
I'll give feedback to our marketing lead about the wording. We change our wording often and I stand by the wording. No one who has joined has mentioned finding this confusing. But if we're losing people from applying because they think it sounds like a scam then we should change it! But our marketing lead has to deep dive and make a call first.
We officially do not consider Codesmith a competitor at this time and in the past and do not market to the same people. Definitive answer on the record. I've emailed the same thing to one of their leaders and explained why.
Launch School is not at all a competitor to Pathrise.
It's extremely important that the record is extremely clear we aren't a bootcamp and don't work with people with less than 2 years of experience. Struggling bootcamp and CS grads are banging at our door and we have a small team and it's wasting time explaining to each of them that we do not support their background right now. So I need to make it abundantly clear that if you are considering Codesmith or Launch School and don't have 2 years of work experience, Formation is not the right thing for you.
I'm not on Reddit for marketing and I rarely talk about Formation compared to other things. You brought it up!!
Our competitors are the three others that you mentioned, not bootcamps.
If you can get all of their founders here talking to you openly that they compete with bootcamps, let me know, it's fake news.
u/BayleeBaylee4578 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Thanks for responding to each of these complaints made! Appreciate it!
1. “**Don't be blinded by their marketing**..." you mention Formation students who have low morale after joining during tech peak and can’t find work still after the market crash…..I mean —again I’m not tryin
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
Can you give me more context? You are throwing out a lot of assumptions about my past commentary, my wealth, what our company does, why I am here.
Like are you a bootcamp student, bootcamp grad, industry person, looking at Formation, a competitor?
I'm happy to list all of the problems with Formation directly as someone aware of all the things we do well and things we can improve. You have good questions to discuss fairly but throw in some assumptions that are crossing the line and aren't remotely true about me, my wife, and our mission.
u/NoAccess4085 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
I am considering joining formation and looking at their pricing page here [https://formation.dev/pricing](https://formation.dev/pricing) I dont think characterizing their support as lifelong guarantee is accurate.
Sure if you do their monthly membership paying 2.5k in perpetuit
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
We do not have a lifelong guarantee and we don't say that anywhere? Where does it say that?
Yeah unlimited support in some packages (like the main one we're offering) is cutoff at 15 months and we have the option to keep supporting you at our discretion. We are experimenting with that term but you are right just I should have mentioned that and you are also right that it's a bit confusing.
If you are considering Formation well go over your personal contract after determining which packages are appropriate for you and make sure you are good with all of the terms.
u/BayleeBaylee4578 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
That's interesting, why would they want to write bad things about another company online?
From what I'm hearing, despite what the majority of people without vested interests think, interview prep program leaders want to distance themselves from what are seen as more 'trad'
u/michaelnovatireplied·
Pathrise has dozens of reviews for almost every bootcamp for SEO purposes, it's not personal. I don't like this approach personally, but it's also not an attack on any program. it's like a ChatGPT summary of a program hahaha
u/GoodnightLondon wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
One of those people is a mod who founded one of the programs so he knows about them, and the other is a person who hasn't done a boot camp or interview prep program who hangs around and just responds to pretty much everything on this subreddit. So my statement that you're not go
u/michaelnovatireplied·
This. I don't know why some people occasionally find it sketchy that I try to say this loud and clear and it makes them suspicious and thing they are the same thing. Cross my heart hope to die they are not and I really don't want anyone to mistake them either what for their own good!
u/BayleeBaylee4578 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Thanks for responding to each of these complaints made! Appreciate it!
1. “**Don't be blinded by their marketing**..." you mention Formation students who have low morale after joining during tech peak and can’t find work still after the market crash…..I mean —again I’m not tryin
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
DIRECT ANSWERS TO POINTS/QUESTIONS:
Generally speaking about the word "job guarantee", I flagged this earlier for our team to think about, so we'll see but it's a uncommon phrase we use in one place with limited spacing that I can see, and there are way more common phrases, slogans, and thousands of other words in our contract to read that are much more important to understand. I standby the accuracy of that in the context, but I think the hundreds or thousands of words, and phone calls, and emails, make it clear to people what that means contractually before signing up.
I take the feedback that you think we should only use that phrase accompanied with stronger data showing that guarantee turns into a job and I've shared that feedback.
1.“**Don't be blinded by their marketing**..." Formations' 2024 numbers are insanes so far. 75% top tier placements, average first year comp gain of 127K. We've ADAPTED to that hard market, made thousands of tiny changes, and come out very strong right now. We are able to make all of these changes because of our investments in technology from day 1. Unsurprisingly, Fellows with the least experience are having the hardest time and we adapted to that partiallly by requiring more past experience to join Formation. So haven't been impacted by the market negatively at all in 2024. In fact, we're seeing increased interest as a result of the competitive but reasonable market for mid level and senior engineers.
Codesmith being a bootcamp with a fixed curriculum, made almost no changes despite trying to, only works with people with no SWE experience, and has had terrible 2024 numbers from what has been shared with me.
So no, we are not as impacted overall by the terrible market, but individual people absolutely are and some people are having a very hard time getting interviews, while most of the people we work with now are not having a hard time getting interviews.
2. See General Answer "This might sound absurd but consistent mentorship isn't..."
3. See General Answer "People don't click a button and pay $20K..." I'm sorry that struct as bizarre and I tried to explain it more. If I'm a rich and retired as you say I am, why would I be doing what I do if it's not mission driven? And why don't you believe me what my mission is and why would I be lying about it? I appreciate you questioning if I'm executing the mission effectively but I don't appreciate my mission being attacked when I have no idea who you are and what your motivations are.
4. Answered in General Answer "Paying our team well and having..."
5. See all of General Answer. There isn't a one line answer here good or bad, so that's why I'm here with my real name an identity to try to explain more.
u/BayleeBaylee4578 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Thank you again for the detailed responses!
RE: “Job Guarantee”, I get that you may only use it in one space, but it’s one of the most prominent spaces haha - at the top of Google!
BUT when you click the link that job guarantee line **disappears** and is nowhere to be foun
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
1. There is a thread about removing "guarantee" in that page header and we'll probably change it yeah, thanks for the feedback because we didn't ralize how confusing it might be.
2. This is the post I'm referencing: https://formation.dev/blog/outcomes-report-first-half-of-2024/. It's substantiated data, but it doesn't talk about non-success cases. These are the numbers I'm talking about that are insanely strong in 2024 compared to 2023.
3. You might not be happy if you are in the minority who didn't get a job and can't come to an agreement about paying for the value you think you got from Formation with us, but we do exit surveys, interviews and all kinds of user research and many are, so to each their own. If it's a concern for you upfront then you should talk about it with us and try to map out all of the scenarios and if it doesn't work for you, don't join!
4. Fair enough re: retired, I did say that and I didn't know you were referencing something I said.
u/BayleeBaylee4578 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Again, thanks for your responses, I appreciate them.
I get that you're small but, I mean, you've got the time to do very detailed deep dives into the data, outcomes, and staff structures and pay of other bootcamps - and post regularly about it, so it's a little difficult to beli
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
1. I do so for bootcamps because I work with a bunch of bootcamp grads later on in their careers and feel like I can combine that with my FAANG experience to give solid advice to peple looking at bootcamps. Formation isn't a bootcamp. If you are going to keep putting in that bucket despite my repeated attempts to explain the difference then that's on you, but I see no problems talking about BOOTCAMPS that have nothing to do with what I do.
2. Yeah we could come up with some kind of aggregated 'amount of time to get a job' data I think, but we have to account for week to week workload adjustments people meet (which is very frequent, vacations and pauses, offer times vs interview times, which topics people were working on and weren't at which times, time to first offer versus time to offer accepted (since people can get multiple offers and intentionally DELAY THEIR JOB HUNT to create a competitive offer situation), factor in some qualitative info, and then figure out how to aggregate and slice and dice it. In lieu of that we talk to people 1-1 right now and do the best we can because we think it's better to talk about all of this in a 1-1 discussion than show you some number. We might be wrong here and maybe we're losing out on tons of engineers who aren't even getting past the homepage.
3. The stats were that the post views are 1/10th of other posts in here. Second, you were flagged as a new user with little history and Crowd Control more aggrresively collapses your comments so people have to look pretty hard to find these deeper comments in threads. Third, about 12 pro-Codesmith accounts were permanently suspended from Reddit last time I escalated to corporate to look into behind the scenes behaviors, and there is a history of someone or some people there manipulating Reddit content.
u/BayleeBaylee4578 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Also I reread your earlier response and you said "Codesmith being a bootcamp with a fixed curriculum, made almost no changes despite trying to, only works with people with no SWE experience, and has had terrible 2024 numbers from what has been shared with me."
Where can one find
u/michaelnovatireplied·
From alumni and staff I've made friends with over the years and their stories pique my interest.
The public thing is on their homepage 53 offers in April May which is almost half the rate per day in their recent CIRR report.
u/BayleeBaylee4578 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Can you give any more info on how Formation is weaker on the raw job hunt, and Pathrise on IV prep? Would genuinely love to know more about that, pretty much why I made this whole post haha!
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
Pathrise supports people in many different jobs. You can see the distribution in their report from last year. Very wide range of technical and not technical. Your primary contact is a career coach who is trying to help you unlock your application funnel. They have way less materials and less legit mocks.
Formation is all focused on preparing for and passing interviews. We have unlimited resume reviews and tons of recruiters call prep. We have an in-house job hunt tracking tool. We source thousands of jobs a week and suggest them to based on your background. But we do NOT do a great job debugging the funnel and forcing you to document everything to get enough data to debug the funnel like Pathrise forces you to do.
For example, Pathrise will try to proactively recognize a low application conversion rate. Formation will be more qualitative and give you more resume reviews or one off advice if you identify being stuck at a certain part.
This is as of August 2024 - as I said, we are always making changes and we might do more stuff here in the future.
u/BayleeBaylee4578 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Can you explain this to me? Why would an interview prep program writing about a trad bootcamp affect their SEO? Like in what ways does it benefit their SEO?
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
They don't for companies too.I think it's advantageous to know the radar of bootcamp grads for the future so they come to you down the road in a few years but I honestly think it's just that they have a marketing person cranking these out week after week.
You can try asking them but it's not at all because they are competitors.
u/BayleeBaylee4578 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Yeah I hear you. Just spent a couple of minutes looking at Formation grads LinkedIn resumes and most of the ones I found aren't working and have been at Formation for a long time, multiple years in some cases!
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
That's correct, people who list Formation on their Linkedin are:
1. generally people with less experience and the group of people struggling the most.
2. generally people not working right now
3. generally many of the people who haven't placed yet
They represent a minority of people we work/worked with and we're proud to keep supporting them as we promised.
The typical engineer (FAANG mid-level/senior)+ engineers don't list Formation on their LinkedIns and are way more low key because they don't want their current employers knowing they are job hunting. We have CURRENT Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft software engineers, for example, who aren't going to advertise they are doing Formation publicly.
After people place, some people opt into being on our network page: [https://formation.dev/network](https://formation.dev/network)
And some people want to do a write up, like these 5 people recently:
https://formation.dev/blog/fellow-spotlight-sofie-graham-three-offers-from-faang-companies/
https://formation.dev/blog/success-story-how-drew-bartlett-landed-a-role-at-atlassian/
https://formation.dev/blog/success-story-pierre-lourens/
https://formation.dev/blog/success-story-mike-clarke/
[https://formation.dev/blog/roy-garcia-success-story/](https://formation.dev/blog/roy-garcia-success-story/)
If you are looking at LinkedIn you aren't getting a full picture, unless you are someone with minimal experience
If you have experience and are considering Formation, feel free to DM me your background and I can try to share examples of people with a similar background we have worked with.
u/BayleeBaylee4578 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Yeah I totally see what you're saying, it's some classic small print jiggery-pokery.
The SEO ranked link says "Land Your Next SWE Job, Guaranteed" but then when you click that link, that particular line disappears and in the small print terms it says, under No. 9 *"Formatio
u/michaelnovatireplied·
We removed the word "Guaranteed" this morning
u/BayleeBaylee4578 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
"*If you are looking at LinkedIn you aren't getting a full picture, unless you are someone with minimal experience*"
The way this is written, someone with minimal experience would be getting a full picture by looking at LinkedIn. Hehe
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
Yeah I would say it's relatively reasonable picture. I just did a search myself and it's quite a mix of people:
- mentors
- early career people with jobs that just haven't started yet
- early career people who got entry level jobs listed
- people who are doing well and chugging along just fine at their expected pace, regardless of what their time is at Formation (which is why again - placement time is really hard to figure out)
- people are are severely struggling to get any interviews
I'm not sure what the point is, like I'm extremely open that there are a small number of people we admitted when we required less experience (6mo to 1 year) who have been with us a very long time and we keep supporting and we've spent more money mentoring them they they will even pay us... I think this evidence that we stick to our promises and means a lot to people.
u/BayleeBaylee4578 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
It's still there. In Google type: formation.dev terms and it's the first thing that comes up.
u/michaelnovatireplied·
Google is in the process of re-indexing pages, takes variable amounts of time
u/BayleeBaylee4578 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
1. Okay well on this (I obviously don't know as much as you about bootcamps—I'm still learning about them) but this, at surface level, comes across as a bit of a double standard on transparency, but oh well, I can see I won't change your mind.
2. It'd be great if you could come
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
2. I think instead of assuming it should be easy, trying to cooperatively understand why it's not and imainge the scenarios I'm describing would help. Like if you can propose metrics that handle the cases I throw at you, I'm all ears. If you were only going to put in 5 hours a week at Formation you would want to be misled by averages sped up by people doing 40 hours weeks. If you have a bunch of interviews in the pipeline and you are intentionally delaying them for 4 months, then you both bring down the average for others without interviews on the horizon AND don't care about the average because you already have a plan. Like I said, we would like to normalize for amount of effort put into Formation, and have some ideas there, but they can't be computed in a spreadsheet.
3. The post had 1/10th the views of a normal post but your comment (deep in the threads and requiring manual expansion) had 14 upvotes within minutes/an hour of posting. This suggests that someone me OR you closely, found that, shared it with a group of people, who all came over and upvoted it. That violates Reddit's ToS.
u/OutrageousStrike3395 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Great Michael, I believe you just uncovered a DDoS attack. 14 upvotes in an hour? That will take down Reddit for sure. Reddit allows people to share comments so someone did and god forbid people found it and liked it. Case of the century here folks.
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
Reddit permanently suspended a dozen or so pro-Codesmith new accounts with various patterns (including two admins of their sub here), often attacking me and my company, but generally posting positive things about Codesmith out of no where with no context on who they were. Reddit has a small super-escalation team that can access all kinds of data needed to detect behaviors. Like fingerprinting computers and identifying people with multiple accounts from the same machine etc... and analyzing patterns on content.
Unsurprisingly, when this happened, all of this behavior immediately stopped for a few months and the Codesmith sub went quite without a post for a whole month. I don't know exactly what's going on with that comment above, but I know former Codesmith employees that explicitly said their leaders follow this sub and one who was asked to manipulate it. Their CEO is an avid Reddit user and he shared his Reddit in a talk once and his sub was right up at the top of his "recent" list, yet he hasn't commented here ONCE.
I can see how many people viewed this post in that hour, and of those people, to expand 3-4 levels deep into the comments and find that comment, AND upvote it.... it's a MAJOR anomaly.