Starting salaries and offers

Salaries and compensation will vary wildly based on: location, experience, how people do the math for their offers (trust me... people use different math for stock, bonuses, and benefits and it can be all over the place), and of course: a splash of luck. I've said this many times now but your salary out of a bootcamp means nothing about your career in tech. The canonical example I give is that a $100K Dropbox Ignite apprenticeship is much better than a mid level job at an agency or bank, and possibly even an entry level job at a top tier company (I would still take entry level FAANG for the highly motivated people). Let's say you have no experience. An apprenticeship at Dropbox, or another FAANG, will teach you very strong fundamental skills for how to work day to day as an engineer. Then you can apply all your hustle to crushing it, converting full time and loving your job and feeling good about it. Facebook has a program called Rotational Engineer for experienced engineers who don't have top tier experience to help teach them some of the gaps they have to perform well at the Facebook mid level bar. It might pay $150K instead of a $250K fully loaded mid level offer, but it's a much better pathway for setting you up for success. Imposter syndrome isn't the answer to everything.. if you have no experience and you want to outperform college grads with 6 FAANG internships and four years of courses, it's hard... and you dont have all the skills you need to do it, no matter how much you want to gain those skills quickly. Do you want to have zero experience, being expected to perform at mid level at a 3rd tier company that expects you to already have certain skills, surviving with hustle and long hours, only to perform averagely on performance reviews? Formation, disclosure: co-founder, works with a lot of bootcamp alumni later on to help them fill a lot of fundamentals that were never taught or people need improvement on... and we are growing quite fast... there are clearly a lot of people down the road who find the hustle can only get so far and once you settle into the industry you'll see what I mean. Note, I'm not saying Formation is the only way to get these skills or suggesting it's for you, but just talking about the trends we are observing.

Hi, excellent point, most of them run 1-2 times a year and are extremely competitive to get into - more than entry level sometimes, and it's definitely not a secret pathway haha. Microsoft Leap is open right now for one more week: [https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/leap/pathways/software-engineer/](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/leap/pathways/software-engineer/) I'm not affiliated with this at all but it has a superset of the top tier 90K+ apprenticeships along with other options: [https://apprenticeships.me/](https://apprenticeships.me/). Look for the FAANG-level companies on there, like Asana Up, LinkedIn Reach, Twitter, Airbnb etc...

Yeah Codesmith's negotiation advice is to come in with a high ask "Just always ask them for $150K" as a way to also set the stage that you are a more senior engineer than you appear on paper... combined with exaggerating OSPs as work experience, is one of the ways SOME (not ALL) people get higher starting salaries at less strong non-tech companies. It's very effective though and not judging. Like this is a great outcome compared to almost every other bootcamp!

I wholeheartedly agree with you and spend my time every day helping people find the best companies for their personal goals and situations. This above is general advice for most people that I haven't met and I'm always happy to chat through options with people! I'm happy to talk about Formation and briefly answer the questions, it's off topic. You are new here (your account is 2.5 weeks old) so quick introduction, Hi 👋, I'm one of the more frequent contributors to this sub and try to give people the perspective of someone with 8 years at FB, E7 level principal engineer, done 450+ interviews at FB - from interns to directors, was the top contributor of all time when leaving and they created an senior engineer archetype for me, and now I help run a training platform aiming to help increase diversity in tech by leveling the field for people from non traditional backgrounds and have worked with dozens/hundreds of bootcamp grads many very closely. I feel like this perspective is useful and lacking in this sub and many others feel the same. Responses: 1. I completely agree that the tone can sound offensive to people who don't want to work at FAANG and I strongly support people turning down FAANG frequently for some of those reasons. More and more these days. At Formation we use the phrase "top tier company" to envelop a wider range of very strong engineering-driven companies with different cultures. 2. Facebook's reputation right now is based on management, not engineering. All the engineers I worked with are obsessed with privacy - it's the first thing you think about when building products and it's baked in to the lowest level of code. You have no idea how many companies have such terrible internal security and perspective on privacy that if that was revealed you would be SHOCKED. Facebook has a lot of problems they are working though company-wise so definitely point well taken. 3. You've been in "tech for a while" but seem to have only posted positive things about Codesmith, so if you are Codesmith affiliated, I'm confused. Codesmith markets "graduate outcomes of an elite grad school" and "75% of graduates get mid-level jobs", so I hold them to their own bar. Their recent wave of OSP projects have embarrassingly poor code review (in that I couldn't find a code review at all on Github) and that's not what the elite grad schools I know most intimately do. Elite grad schools, like MIT and Stanford have alumni starting "top tier" jobs and making much higher salaries than a $120K median. I think Codesmith is an incredibly strong bootcamp for preparing people for their first job, with an amazing community, I work with a bunch of alumni that I love chatting with and advising, they are doing a lot of things right over there! Just not "elite grad school" level outcomes. 4. Formation is very new relatively speaking. Sophie, the founder, has been mentoring and teaching for longer after leaving Nextdoor, but Formation itself is 3 years old and has most recently ramped up only in the past year... yes we are backed by one of the top investors in the world, but we needed some breathing room to grow slowly and make sure we set things up so that the Fellow Experience only keeps getting BETTER rather than worse. 5. We don't publish many outcomes. We have some averages on our website and that's it. We measure hundreds of points of feedback to know how we are doing, and have an industry leading NPS score for example. Formation doesn't work for everyone right now, but it works really well for the vast majority of people and we are proud to help our Fellows grow. 6. I can give you the last 15 or so placements; WePay, Amazon, Visa, DoorDash, Virgin Orbit, <top tier startup redacted>, UiPath, Amazon, Square, Instrumentl, Amazon, American Express, Zapier, Edelman, Stats Sig, About 81% of people accept top tier company offers. 7. Referrals aren't a big source of placement, no. We help people find the right paths for their own goals as it varies so wildly. Referrals are not always the answer surprisingly! 8. Formation is not a bootcamp or school, we are building a platform that competes with Interview Kickstart, Pathrise, Outco, Scalar. We help people with experience improve their skills, find great jobs, strategize, etc... The cost of these programs varies but are all in the same ballpark. The average Fellow placed, excluding people starting with $0 salary, increases their comp by $85K, so it more than easily covers the cost of training.

We are raising venture capital to hire the best people in the industry to help us build the best training platform in the world. We are building something incredibly unique and complex and I would love to share more about as we grow, but it's not easy or cheap and takes large investment with long term returns. We have several engineers with \~10 years FAANG experience. All of our recruiters are 5+ year ex-FAANG and our head of recruiting was 10 years at FB running the internship program. Our director of career services ran career services at Triplebyte and several bootcamps. We pay these people competitively and also with stock that will grow in value over time as they build and contribute value to Formation. When you start from scratch, raising VC funding is a great way to seed the funding needed to accomplish this, and if you are going to raise funding, why not aim for the best investors in the world like A16z?

A lot of them have like online assessments that are DS&A or just practical coding heavy, with some essay-like questions added on to also help tell your story and journey. So you have to pass that to talk to a recruiter, they just have too many applicants right now. After you pass that, then it varies by program. I'm always a fan of telling YOUR story they way you experienced it. Building products is really hard and creative work, and if you can apply your unique path to product building (and demonstrate that through projects), then you have a leg up.

No worries! I would practice the interviews themselves. PRAAMP, some Discord channels, are a way to do some free mocks that are not super great, since they are peers and not senior engineers. [Interviewing.io](https://Interviewing.io) you can pay to do mock interviews a la carte. Definitely not cheap, but cheaper than a more intense program. Career accelerators like Formation (disclosure, that's me!), Interview Kickstart, Outco, Pathrise, Scalar, are focused on getting interview ready as well and building skills needed to interview - both technical and not.

Hi, I'm sorry you feel that way and hopefully we can continue talking productively and positively. Sophie's life mission is to increase diversity in big tech because for products to work for everyone that have to be represented by everyone and Formation prides itself in having roughly 2/3 of Fellows from backgrounds underrepresented in tech. I'm more than happy to talk about the reasons for the concerns you brought up, not to counter them, but to add more detail for those reading. Sophie, myself, and our team work constantly on making Formation the best it can be, endless conversations dissecting every detail from the ground up. So when you say we are "hawking a glorified interview prep company" you are personally insulting the thousands of hours we put into our work without a very thoughtful discussion of the pros and cons of Formation. I'm sorry if my tone was miscommunicated but no nerves struck for me about Formation. When Formation is discussed, I have to take off my personal hat and put on my Formation hat and represent the company and write complete, super long answers for other people to read who stumble upon this. I've been here for a very long time and met a lot of interesting people here and I'm not showing up out of nowhere and advertising Formation, I'm using my experience from Formation to try to help give valuable answers to people seeking answers. I see my voice as representing hundreds of bootcamp grads from \~a dozen bootcamps. We have an open house this Saturday you can apply for if you want to see what we do! So to summarize what we do, is we work with you continuously until you get a new job you like. During that time, every week we create a completely new schedule of tasks and small-group sessions on topics we think you need to work on that week and with other people who also need to work on those. This means we schedule many hundreds of 3-5 person and 1-1 sessions every week combining thousands of people's calendars and computing all the micro-lessons people need to work on and making it all work. That's what you are paying for with Formation, not a guide, but the hyper personalization and the direct feedback from senior/staff/principal engineers at top tier companies. A $249 one-size-fits all guide of videos things you can Google on the internet sounds like a scam to me, not the other way around. Outcomes is a tough one to talk about because we are like a personal trainer and everyone has different goals. So we want you to set clear goals, achieve those goals, and feel good about your progress. That cant' be summarized in salary numbers and it can't be summarized entirely in qualitative ratings/words. We don't publish outcomes REPORTS but we publish a small set of outcomes data on our website, not audited, calculations were from July 2022, EXCLUDING private stock and options from the "stock/bonuses": ZERO EXPERIENCE: $134,000 avg first year TC ($116,000 base / $18,000 stock/bonuses) 1-2 YOE: $181,000 avg first year TC ($137,000 base / $44,000 stock/bonuses) 3+ YOE: $204,000 avg first year TC ($155,000 base / $49,000 stock/bonuses) But this doesn't tell the right story.... Someone with 4 YOE with a CS degree and 3 years at Capital One making $500K TC at their new job is much different than someone working as a contractor at Accenture for 4 YOE, bootcamp background, making $170K TC at their new job. We aren't a one size fits all program that can be measured by outcomes alone as the starting points all vary wildly too. People need to believe we can help them achieve their personal goals to join Formation. I hope this adds some more depth and I'm happy to explain more!

Hey! The YOE is years of software engineering work experience. So in this bucket people still typically have a related degree + experience, or a bootcamp, or self taught for \~2 years, it's not zero-zero. We have a handful of people who truly have zero experience and are only self taught and we decided to accept them in lieu of a bootcamp... this person specifically was looking at Codesmith and went to Formation instead: [https://formation.dev/blog/fellow-spotlight-brian-do/](https://formation.dev/blog/fellow-spotlight-brian-do/) and then this person did Formation AFTER Codesmith: [https://formation.dev/blog/fellow-spotlight-chris-guizzetti/](https://formation.dev/blog/fellow-spotlight-chris-guizzetti/) I would almost always recommend doing a bootcamp first and you are on the right track... like I said, everyone is unique and we treat you that way.

"Open Source Project". So Codesmith has 3 or 4 "personal projects" that people list as "Open Source" on their resumes and LinkedIn, and then they have the group OSP project that they typically list as "experience".

Right no professional coding experience. Some examples: civil engineer who does some data processing; finance/math background that has done some Matlab; electrical engineer that has done verilog. All of these we consider 0 YOE. Your expectations should be an entry level SWE job, even if you are mid-level already in a different profession. Which is why the average salaries are lower for this bucket. Really across the board in this thread, Amazon and Capital One have been skewing averages. BloomTech is also skewed by Amazon right now. With fewer people hiring, less diverse outcomes, and these two pay mostly in cash, hence high "base salaries". I really dislike how people quote CIRR and yell at me so much on here. There's so much more nuance to outcomes than the raw numbers.

I would say we "wouldn't reject", we still have to benchmark your current skills and talk to you about your timeline and goals. For example, we are currently focused on top tier companies, and in most cases the fundamental programming skills and being a good teammate are the only thing that matters. One of the main reasons I'm here is because people new to the industry don't really know what they don't know, and people quickly latch on to things. I fight tooth and nail against blindly following CIRR for example because Codesmith has an employee hierarchy of 50+ former students reinforcing the importance of CIRR.

Anecdotal salaries do more damage than good. You shouldn't be basing any decisions off of anonymous one-off salaries, especially when most programs publish some amount of aggregated data. Someone at Formation got a $550K offer a few weeks ago, that doesn't mean Formation is the best for everyone or for you.

I'm here with my real name and my real photo for everyone to see and judge and only comment and post from this account. I refuse to play games with fake accounts. I worked at Facebook for 8 years and I've see the kind of problems that happen with the world with fake news and all that, and I adamantly believe in being open and transparent and will challenge against any bullies who try to push me around because of it. I have access to Formation's Reddit account for ad management and I have one new throwaway account I made to follow the accounts that block me to find trends and collect some data for the future... every single one is a Pro-Codesmith new accounts with the same patterns and might even be the same person.... we'll see what the algorithms think after collecting enough data. I have no idea who the other people here are, even the ones claiming to be currently at Formation 🤷‍♂️. Feel free to DM me if you want to talk offline more, you seem to have some crazily misaligned views on things and happy to chat.

Can you elaborate? :D I've seen a lot of people first hand, second hand, and through research, fall victim to get rich quick schemes, MLMs and cults, and I feel strongly that anecdotal success (as well as failure) stories need to be interpreted in context or you are taking a big risk trusting anonymous sources and not getting much benefit in return compared to other sources of information. But my point of view is just my point of view so I'm curious to hear more about yours.