Opinions on Formation Fellowship (bootcamp-like program)

Hi, I'm the co-founder of [Formation.dev](https://Formation.dev) and we don't tell people who succeeded to write a review there, we tell every single person that finished the program the following in an exit survey. "Would you be open to sharing your experience on Quora? Reviews are hugely impactful to help people who were in your shoes make an informed decision about joining Formation." I think that's pretty fair and neutral, and open to suggestions if you feel this is biased. Our team works tirelessly to make sure our Fellows have great outcomes. We do whatever we can to make sure people have a good experience and the vast majority do.

Hey, I'm the co-founder of Formation and stumbled upon here. I don't want to mess with the vibe of the thread because there is a good discussion here about cost and outcomes that I don't want to interfere with, but I wanted to add that that percentage is taken off of your base salary and at top tier companies (where most people end up) you receive equity and bonuses that add on to that. So most people don't have a problem paying. The last time we crunched the numbers people on average INCREASED their compensation by $80K. An example case based on numbers would be someone entering Formation making $110K with no bonus or equity, and leaving they are pushing $140K base + $25K/year equity + 10% annual performance bonus + $20K signing bonus.

Hey, I don't want to throw off the vibe of the thread, but I'm the co-founder of Formation and can give my take. 1. we only work with people we feel confident will succeed with our training and 2. if you do your part, you have our full arsenal of support (technical and behavioral mentorship, and a shoulder to cry on as well) until you get a job you are happy with. The result is that the vast majority of people genuinely have incredible/great outcomes. A small number have good outcomes that they are happy with but make some tradeoffs. I would highly recommend contacting any current or former Fellow with a similar background to yourself and find out about their day to day experience, that's the best way to evaluate any program. The secret: nothing and no one is perfect, there are numerous things we are trying to improve every day, but we have a one-of-a-kind unique program with legitimately crazily qualified team members (principal E7+ Facebook engineers - each with unique super powers - and some who taught others how to conduct interviews). Not a single other program has such as strong team. Hands down.

Hi! We just have some base comp + stock averages we computed last year on our website and no other statistics. We've been discussing how to publish outcomes though and if you have suggestions on numbers, would love to hear! To reiterate our purpose: we work with you as long as it takes, full force, until you hit your goal and are happy with the outcome. Period. So at the end of the day, if you sign up, put in the work and you have the time, you will get an outcome you are happy with. We won't accept people that have goals too narrow or who we don't think we can help achieve their goals in a reasonable amount of time. If we were to invest in making a robust report of statistics and outcomes we have a lot to think about. The guiding principles are: 1. We want to be fair and unbiased in reporting outcomes. Far too many programs throw around cherry picked numbers. 2. We want to ensure the identity of Formation Fellows is not revealed by outcomes. Privacy is important and respected. So some of our thoughts, being very transparent here, so it's a bit long: 1. Everyone at Formation is here for a different length of time, does different combinations of things, has different goals, so it's very hard to publish top level numbers without more context. Our current big number on our website is trying to focus on the increase in compensation for people that had an existing job, to try to capture the relative nature of the outcomes. To gives some examples of the "context", someone might get $300K+ offers after 2 months at Formation, tripling their income, at their 2nd choice FAANG companies but they are extremely satisfied with the outcome, would recommend Formation to everyone. Or someone else might have struggled to get a job from a bootcamp for 2 years, they wanted to make $80K as a goal, after 6 months at Formation, we helped them get an offer at great company after negotiation of $115K base + stock. Person is thrilled with this outcome and would recommend to everyone. It's really hard to capture these stories in high level 2. The last 20 accepted offers in order are: Google (pending), Amazon, Amazon, <startup, fin-tech>, Bill.com, Microsoft, Amazon, Bloomberg, <startup, fin-tech>, Front, Workday, Neato, Microsoft, <startup, crypto>, Jelly Fish, GitHub, Microsoft. (Startups are < 100 employees so masked to protect identity). We are thinking about potentially publishing the list of companies people are getting hired at unfiltered because we think that presents a fair raw log that protects identities and shows the actual places people are going, instead of people thinking we are cherry picking results. Another similar example of context being important though is we might have someone from an agency -> Workday, and someone else go from Workday -> Amazon. Both being fantastic outcomes for the people individually. 3. Compensation and salaries are quite complicated because our Fellows are receiving equity with varying vesting times, signing bonuses possibly with weird timing, and performance bonuses with ranges. I know people on Blind throw around TC numbers all over the place for specific companies, but it's very hard to summarize that for all companies at once. For example, a typical E4 Meta offer might have a $170K base, $200K of stock vesting equally over four years, $75K signing bonus, and 15% bonus target. You can crunch the numbers to get to $320K TC for first year. Now that signing bonus is just one year, and your annual bonus can be anywhere from 0 to 45% depending on performance. Now an Amazon SDEII offer might look like $180K base, $100K of stock (weird unequal vesting with most vesting in year 3/4), $100K signing bonus in year 1 and $75K signing bonus in year 2. So this has about a $290K Tc for first year. But you can't compare that to the Facebook offer without looking at the specifics here side by side, making a spreadsheet, etc... So to try and summarize all the offers from all companies and properly capture them is a challenge we have to spend some time on. 4. Satisfaction. A way to capture a bunch of complexities is higher lever satisfaction ratings, or if people would recommend Formation to a friend. All of this said if you have any specific asks I can try to see if we can quickly compute the statistic AND if won't reveal anyone's personal identity or information.

Hi legend, Michael here from Formation, we're running a small test starting this month (June 2022) with people in Canada. I'm from Canada originally too, now in San Francisco. So short answer is yes (whether you intend on coming to the USA after on TN or staying at a top tier company in Canada). Feel free to apply and DM me to make sure it gets looked at!

Awesome, thanks so much for this write up! I can give quick open answers to these: &#x200B; >time from "completion" to landing a job \[maybe shown as % of fellows who find a job within X months (3,6,9,etc.) after completing the work, for example\] I forgot to mention another thing, which is that the amount of training you get changes week to week depending on your availability for the next week. So we bucket people in to "full time" and "part time" but that quickly gets more granular down to the number of hours and can change week to week depending on your schedule (you can also pause for vacations, etc...). I do think with all of these caveats though we could give some numbers based on different average commitment levels. &#x200B; >% of job applications/interviews/etc. performed before landing a job I think this one we could do. So you can apply for jobs whenever you want and we support you, but we do have a phase where we kind of sign off that you are jobhunt-ready and we could measure how many interviews people do in that time. &#x200B; >amount of time fellow remained in first job after "graduation" before leaving Funny enough we have had a handful of people come BACK TO FORMATION after a year on their jobs. For all of them their goals changed. Maybe it was compensation before, and now it's company fit. Maybe it was getting a foot in the door, and now it's FAANG, etc... But yeah we are bit too new to have longer term numbers here. &#x200B; >% of formation.dev applicants accepted to fellowship (i.e. program acceptance numbers; lower % acceptance could drive/explain higher success numbers) This one is a tough one, because we are focused and take a fairly narrow range of person coming in. So we have a lot of applications that might not be a good fit, which doesn't mean the people themselves are not at the skill bar (in some cases it does though). But this might be a bit misleading. The skill bar is relatively high, like it's not a program for people that have no prior training - in the future it might be. &#x200B; >% of formation.dev fellows that drop out Yeah this could be interesting. We have a very small number of people leave early (you can leave the first week without paying anything, and then after that there is some fee accumulating every week you do training). So not really statistical, but in the past year or so, the reasons why are: changing life circumstances and cannot commit the time, getting a less-good job last minute before/immediately after starting Formation (these people have tended to come back in the future), changing goals - no longer wanting to go a top tier company/getting a job, in the past two (I think) people left because the program was more intense than expected and we improved expectations and ramp up to help with this. &#x200B; >total number of fellowship graduates per year / active at any given time (I'm assuming you guys accept applications on a more rolling basis since the program is more tailored than a traditional bootcamp, lmk if that's not correct) Correct, we have people starting every Monday and people might leave any time when they start their new job. We do pace people starting only at a pace we can guarantee the same quality bar and outcomes. The current numbers (unofficial) of Fellows is a low three digit number (I don't want to give the exact number right now for competitive reasons and it also changes week to week) and we have \~25 full time staff, and 50 to 150 industry mentors (also a range for competitive reasons, and it also changes as people's availability changes) &#x200B; >satisfaction like you stated, even just on a purely subjective 1 to 5 stars basis, would be interesting, but more so as a distribution, rather than just an average We track a lot of satisfaction measurements week to week for support, quality of content, alignment to goals, and we track people's overall "would you recommend to a friend" when they leave. I think that last one is relevant, and it's very high (which I don't want to quote for competitive reasons as well). It's extremely important everyone is happy with their experience and in the 3 people (a tiny percentage) I can remember that said they wouldn't recommend to a friend. One of those people has recommended us to many friends (who joined) despite the rating. One received an extremely high comp FAANG (much higher than typical) offer out of school but felt like they didn't need the frontend portion of the training they did at Formation to get the job. And the last one had a good outcome, but didn't know about all the wide range of things we offer in job hunt support and didn't utilize them, but would come back to Formation in the future.

Hi Ilias, we currently support people in United States and a small number in Canada. To be transparent, there are two challenges: 1. We work with people as long as it takes to get a really really good job so the job market in your country has to be similar to the USA so we can expect you to get that job in a reasonable amount of time. Similarly, we can’t typically support deferring based on your income (you can pay upfront) because the salaries have to be similar to here for the economics to work. If you are somewhere with a similar market to the USA it might be possible, otherwise we need to made some changes and offer a specially design program for specific countries. We currently don’t offer immigration or visa support if your plans are to move to the United States for a job. If you are authorized to work in the USA already, than this wouldn’t be a problem even if you are currently not in the USA. 2. Time zones. We are remote, but the day to day is highly collaborative and it’s essential to your success. We support everyone’s unique schedule but most most of the other peoples availability is some times between 9am to 9pm, so if you are not available for about 5 or so hours a week within that time range, it could be hard to make sure you get the best sessions you need to grow every single week. We hope to have better support for 1. in the future and number 2. is solved if enough other Fellows are available at the same times outside that window.

I’m actually not from the USA either originally and visa scenarios are very personal and very complex. So we are not equipped to help people navigate them right now. We focus on the training and mentoring being extremely effective as the priority. In the future we hope to have more resources to dedicate to visa support.

Unfortunately no :(, there's no guarantees in the job hunt because some amount is beyond your control. Our goal is to increase your fundamental skill level so that you can confidently go into top tier interviews with a stronger chance of passing, but it's never 100%. There are thousands of good companies and hundreds of great companies, and some of them you might not know about! So coming in with the goal of a range of companies, or a range of levels, gives you the most room to find the best company for you. We've worked with people that have turned down offers at their "#1 company" because they received better offers from better companies for them that they didn't know about.

Also not a good fit unfortunately :(. It takes anywhere from 1 month to 12 months but typically 4-6 months. Most people are part time at Formation though. If you need a job ASAP and send me some of the reasons why, I can give you a few ideas of where to look though.

Hi, yeah can answer! * We published a little breakdown here: [https://formation.dev/blog/2022-formation-fellow-placements/](https://formation.dev/blog/2022-formation-fellow-placements/). Most people have some experience coming in (2/3 of people) and the 1/3 that didn't, were equally split across bootcamp grads, CS grads, and self taught developers. * No upfront payment or deposit currently * Yes open to Canadians but we administer the ISA ourselves, and payments are based on and made in CAD if you get a job in Canada.

It does not. We aren't a school or bootcamp. We are very upfront (both on our website and in the fine print) that we don't have a curriculum, certificates, courses, lectures, and that everyone will have a unique training experience. The "program buckets" are based on your starting point and how much work you need to do but everyone will have a unique path. So we are not a school or post secondary education for any kind of government program, scholarships, etc...

Hi, we do run credit checks but look beyond just the score alone for ISAs, so having just a low score only won't necessarily disqualify you from an ISA. Since our coaching and training is ongoing until you get a really good job - people are generally able to pay the ISA even if their prior credit had some minor issues and this model works really well in this case. There are other payment options you can discuss after applying yeah depending on your circumstances. And we will continue to try to provide more options so people can choose what works for them!

Hey! 1. Most people do Formation part time, but you can do it with whatever workload you want. We adapt your sessions to your schedule. 2. Formation isn't currently for people without any real SWE work experience, even if you have a bachelor or masters in CS with adjacent experience. We are looking for 2+ years of real SWE work experience right now. You are paying us like a personal trainer to get in shape for interviews and for your job hunt and we aren't a short cut to a job that you can't get in any other way. 3. Unfortunately I don't have great advice for you. I would try to transition within your current company, but that's not a guaranteed path by any means.

There are a couple more nuances too that aren't on the website. All of the details change a lot as we try to create a wide range of configurations to support more people, while being fair and rational about the options. So they are all in our contract and post application flow but not on the website. 1. We have a few bundles if you want to commit to 2 or 3 months at a discount 2. If you were eligible for unlimited and chose to do the month to month, there is a cap right now too, kind of around the average of what the unlimited package might cost. All of that said,.there is an entrance bar to month to month because we have a fairly focused thing we do.... it's a super waste of money otherwise... we need to be effective and work more often than not to get positive word of mouth and support. So we strongly discourage anyone from doing month to month who isn't doing it for the right reasons. The most common reason is that someone has a couple interviews lined up for about a month from now and they want to cram as much practice as possible before then. It's absolutely strongly discouraged to join right now if you aren't able to get interviews already on your own and we are focused on preparing you for those. The people with the least amount of experience (typically finished bootcamp/CS degree and did a job of some kind but it didn't go well) are the ones that have been with us the longest and take the longest to place. Despite taking in a month or two longer to be interview ready, they might take a year longer to get a job. We don't have stats (and I've been really trying to find something useful and haven't yet) but the average time is probably, if I had to guess, 8 months to a year (from starting Formation). The people generally take less prestigious jobs if they take them sooner, and generally want more legit jobs if they are going slower. Some people get too tier jobs faster and some people struggle for over a year just to get any job. Whereas for our more experienced engineers, the vast majority are getting top tier jobs within months. I wish we had a magic wand to create jobs at scale, but we don't. We prepare people for top tier companies interviews and we feel we do a great (not perfect but great) job at that, that is usually worth the cost if you need support for those interviews.