Formation.dev suitable for career transition in adjacent fields

Hi, I'm a co-founder of Formation and can give my opinions from what I've seen. Your case is borderline and it depends on your Data Engineer experience and your goals. If one of your goals is to be a Data Engineer at Netflix or Meta (where it's a distinct job but very SWE-adjacent/related and compensated the same) and then convert internally at those companies, then I would say MAYBE. We have a handful of people in that bucket and we can help, but we don't do any data-specific interview prep. We have a handful of mentors who are Staff+ Data Engineers at FAANG but we don't have any practice materials for it. If you strictly want to be a backend engineer, then I have more questions. If you are already getting INTERVIEWS at some solid tech companies on your own and need a boost or help preparing for the interviews then 100% yes. If you are struggling to get interviews then I would recommend not joining. Perhaps considering month to month or 3 months to boost your technical interview skills and complement your Master's but not joining with the expectation of us magically getting you a job. Don't get me wrong, we have a lot of innovative resume review work with senior engineers + AI tools and a good amount of sessions and practice for the spectrum of non-technical stuff, but if your raw experience isn't being received on the market, we can't fake it. We can enhance it and strategize on how to use your experience to find different angles into companies, but can't change the reality, and in this job market, nothing gets through the cracks (which is why it's so hard for coding bootcamp grads with no experience to fake their way into a job like they used to).

If your current role was more infrastructure focused I think it's worth at least applying and talked to us in more detail, I'm not going to say it's a sure thing, but it's a possibility and our team will talk though things very transparently to help you figure out if it's worth it or not.

In terms of general advice, if you have a current job, I would try to contribute some general code, or write some code to build software tools that help you do your job - ideally in the main codebase using the main stack - and getting code review from SWEs. If you do that already then you have an even better shot at transitioning. Maybe obvious, but do you have the option at your startup to talk to them about transitioning and maybe doing it there over time too and not switching companies?

Formation isn't a bootcamp, it's an interview prep platform for experienced engineers, and with how competitive the market is, it directly gives you a leg up over people that don't have guided mentorship.