Had anyone here done formation.dev? What are your impressions and takeaways?

Hi, yeah I'm the co-founder (Sophie is the CEO and founder) and hang around this sub as Derek said :D. As Derek kind of said as well, Formation isn't a "bootcamp" and roughly 80 to 90% of Fellows (approx) have some kind of professional engineering work experience (typically 1 to 3 years) and are working full time while they do Formation. A lot of people did bootcamps in the past so I took an interest to this sub, and a ton of people have been asking me questions about bootcamps (we have Formation Fellows representing many different bootcamps in the past) and the industry since I became active, so I stuck around to help. I also highly doubt past Formation Fellows are in this sub, I know a few people in this sub who are doing Formation now and are on the more junior side and they might be able to comment on their experiences to help you get a better picture. Try contacting people on LinkedIn! More junior people often put it on their LinkedIn profiles and you can find them that way, and for more experienced people ping anyone who opted in to being on our Network page: [https://formation.dev/network](https://formation.dev/network) (you can also search LinkedIn for some people posting posts after they started their now job for some more experience people) I don't want to write a novel, so I'll list some things that make us a different category of things from a bootcamp or school (...we consider ourselves more like a "personal trainer"). 1. We work with people who are already at a hirable bar, and we help them get truly top tier jobs at the best companies. We do not work with most people who are at a beginning-of-bootcamp level. The last 50 or so accepted offers are, reverse chronologically are: Plaid, Sense, <startup>, <startup>, Figma, Google, <startup>, <startup>, Amazon, Amazon, <startup>, Bill.com, Microsoft, Amazon, Bloomberg, <startup>, Front, Workday, <startup>, Microsoft, BitGo, Amazon, Jelly Fish, GitHub, Microsoft, Toast, Quantcast, Meta, CloudTrucks, Plaid, 1Password, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Google, Snap, Akasa, Atlassian, Pandora, Atlassian, Amazon, <startup>, Square, Capital One, Facebook, Amazon, Bloomberg, Intel, Microsoft, <startup>, Pinterest, Amazon, Apple. Startups are all top tier teams and well funded, competitive offers and some were chosen over FAANG. 2. We don't have a fixed curriculum in our approach to training. We have created thousands of tasks and session types covering all kinds of activities, from working through a hard algorithm, to doing a practice take home exercise w/review, to 3-5 person group sessions with senior and staff level industry FAANG engineers, to 1-1 mock interviews with people who have conducted hundreds of interviews, to in-house built online assessments, literally thousands. Every week we collect a bunch of feedback on what you need to work on, grab your calendar availability, and create a unique schedule of tasks and sessions that we think is perfect for you. You'll have \~2-5 sessions (1-1 or up to 5/6 other Fellows) with very strong industry mentors (senior/staff/principal/directors at FAANG). So your day to day and week to week will never be the same and will be unique to you. 3. We have no fixed length of time whatsoever. We set a start date, and from that day forward, we continue with our full force of training, mentorship, feedback, strategizing, etc... until you sign an offer that you are happy with. So we work with people anywhere from 1 month to 10-12 months. The average is somewhere around 6ish months I believe? It's longer than a bootcamp. But that's because we have no fixed schedules and adapt week to week completely to your needs. Some people even pause and resume for a week or two for personal reasons. You might get offers you don't like and continue. Lots of things happen and it depends on you. Put another way, by joining Formation, you will get a job you are happy with, but we don't know the timeframe it will happen on. We start with an estimated plan and every week, with feedback, you get a sense of roughly how long it will be until you are top tier interview ready. 4. Our Fellows have backgrounds similar to INSTRUCTORS at top bootcamps, like Codesmith and Hack Reactor, some TEACH at bootcamps, not attend them, some mentor junior engineers in their free time. 5. We actually have a good number of alumni from a specific top bootcamp who have come to Formation to cement themselves at a truly top tier/FAANG company. We ran some data on their incoming assessments compared to hundreds of others because one of our employees noticed a pattern, and there is surprisingly low variance amongst this group. Almost all of them are coming in at a solid 2nd/3rd tier entry level job bar and we work extremely well at filling in the gaps to bring them to the top tier industry bar. This is another example to show the difference between a bootcamp and us. Bootcamps prepare you for your first job, we are filling in your gaps and training to get a top-of-the-top job. u/Icy-Association7305 let me know if you have more questions or if you are actually considering bootcamps instead I can help give you advice. If you are considering Formation, I HIGHLY recommend reaching out to people directly above (anyone you can find) since I don't know if a ton of Formation people will see this.

Hi, I'm the co-founder and I just posted a large comment and 100%++ this. Reach out to any Formation person you can find. Ideally those that have similar backgrounds to yourself and recently went through Formation. Our [https://formation.dev/network](https://formation.dev/network) has people who opted in to being public... some of the best outcomes the people don't want to be, so while that might seem cherry picked, it's a fairly typical representation of the outcomes. More junior Fellows are more likely to list Formation on their LinkedIns. Most people are working and don't want their employers to know, but they might have posted about Formation after getting their jobs and you can try finding those posts through post search to contact people as well. We have one Fellow who talked to DOZENS of Fellows and messaged ALL OF OUR STAFF before joining, and I think talking to people is the best way to see if Formation is good for you. Formation goes both ways, so you need to be a good fit for it to work :D u/Goldfishsquirrelduck

I've had over a dozen conversations in the past two weeks recommending various bootcamps to people so can you clarify what are the "dishonest marketing tactics" you are talking about? I don't know where these anonymous empty profiles come out of nowhere to criticize me. It's really hard to use my real name here and I don't love randos coming out of nowhere criticizing me for no reason. I only use this account with my name and picture for everyone to see (and have access to Formation's team account for helping to manage Ads). I've only recently started being active on Reddit and the amount of people who have criticized me FROM throwaway accounts and accusing other people of BEING my throwaway accounts (that aren't) is really weird... this sub at least has really great discussion for the most part and y'all are spending too much time trying to play games that no one else is playing.

I strongly recommend just pinging people on LinkedIn, no specific people, just ask anyone! I have two responses to this: 1. The main reason the outcomes are so great is because the timeframe is variable and the outcome is fixed. I don't know any program/bootcamp/school that is like this, which is why we are our own type of thing. You get the result you want and you get there on your own timeline rather than working on someone else's fixed timeline and getting whatever result you can get. All of the logistics I've already described are 100% accurate and talking to people should confirm that (if it didn't let me know and I will reword something) 2. Our team is legitimately experienced and senior compared to anything else out there. We have 3 ex-principal FB engineers (E7+), we have 3 more ex-senior FB/FAANG engineers (\~8 yrs each) who have done many hundreds of interviews each (Amazon Bar Raisers, interviewer creators/trainers, etc...) . We have a ex-FB 10 year recruiter who ran the internship program, and 2 more \~5 year FAANG recruiters. We have a head of career services who is a negotiation expert. We pay are our employees well and myself and Sophie take $0 salary and have made $0 from Formation, so that we can hire the best people possible. EDIT: we have dozens of senior/staff/principal/director level mentors (who are not on staff) and you work with a few different ones intimately every week. People often tell me they didn't believe the mentors would be so senior. This might sound a bit jerky, but I was extremely successful at FB. I started in 2009, was there for 8 years, was promoted very quickly and received a lot of stock. I have no financial incentive to do Formation at all and it's purely out of a mission to get more nontraditional and under-presented engineers into top tier roles and increase the diversity on these teams. It's a true mission and that's why I try so hard.

Good question. We didn't really know what to call it to be honest and **F**ormation **F**ellowship (F F) has a ring to it, and the word "fellowship" is used in a wide variety of ways without a fixed meaning. Pathrise is somewhat of a competitor (they do job hunting support, not so much technical training) and they use the word "fellows" so we figured it was reasonable.

I basically work 24/7. Believe it or not but I spend most of my time working on Formation's technology and platform and helping Fellows in their job hunt phase and I respond to things on Reddit via push notifications and often times quickly on my phone - doesn't take that much time. Today I've committed 5 fixes/improvements to our codebase and have a larger feature i'm working on right now that I need to ship before Tuesday. I've also talked to a few Fellows, gave a person advice on two offers they are looking at, and am working on accepting a new Fellow because it's a Sunday on a long weekend and most people are off. I'm sorry you feel that way.

Or to put in the language you are using, I'm busy af: http://github.com/mnovati

Hi! Short answer: no. Long answer: we accept iOS Fellows on a case by case basis. If you have several years of experience, we can focus on data structures and algorithms and system design, but not iOS specific expertise. You can use Swift for most of your practice, and Javascript/Python in group sessions. Finally, we have we have a few very senior mentors who are iOS engineers (Uber, Square, etc...) who can do one-off sessions to practice iOS system design interviews. Our most recent iOS Fellow received 5 to 10 (lost track) offers from top-tier FAANG companies, but I think having more iOS training would still help.

u/question_23 u/AHighFifth Welcome! let me know if you have any questions or feedback as you ramp up and ping me on Mattermost if we haven't chatted already, or let your Fellow Managers know if you need anything! (I have no idea who you all are on Reddit haha). For anyone else reading this, the "GUI" referred to is our "platform". Our engineers (including myself) build everything from the ground up and that's why the experience is so unique. Some really interesting stuff we've built to support Fellows, our team members, and our Mentors, and so much cool stuff behind the scenes too ;)