Feels about right

I'm not sure about bootcamps specifically, but at Formation we have seen more people than expected interested all across the spectrum in the past month. I think it makes sense that people who are more experienced and nervous about their job, or were laid off, or are trying to get a leg up in the super competitive market would come... that one's easy. But we're also seeing more people who are already at a LeetCode "Easy" level of DS&A problems, asking about Formation INSTEAD of going to a bootcamp (i.e. forgoing our 'we work with you until you get a job' promise and paying much less than a top tier bootcamp in return).... it's something we are pondering. We are WAY TOO SMALL to generalize from, but I do think a lot of people just really like programming and didn't realize it until later in their careers, and if they have the passion, stick with it, they will get jobs eventually. Life's a marathon. Unfortunately not everyone's in the financial position to take their time, so if you don't have time and you think a bootcamp is your solution to getting a high paying job quickly, I would strongly advise to consider things more closely and give yourself more time than expected to get a job.

So Formation isn't a school or bootcamp because we don't have a curriculum, we don't teach anything like lectures/presentation or tutorial style, and it's kind of a more unique type of training. It's all practice based from day 1. The sessions with senior engineer mentors are 3-6 people and highly collaborative around going through a problem together. You are given problems to work on and then various resources to help unblock. There are infinite problems to solve and really you could train for anything on Formation in theory, but it's currently focused people with work experience (and in some cases, people with prior education but no formal work experience yet). So if you don't have any work experience, you have to be able to have some decent understanding of fundamentals, like arrays, strings and be able to solve "LeetCode Easy" level problems as a benchmark and maybe dabble in harder concepts. If you haven't worked on any fundamentals yet (like data structures and algorithms) then I would highly recommend NOT looking at Formation and going to Launch School.

Yeah it's [Formation.dev](https://Formation.dev). If you think you are a good fit, you can checkout the study guide, apply and do the assessment, read the blog, and try to ping some people with backgrounds like yourself that you can find. Note that most experienced people don't list that they went to Formation on their LinkedIn because they already have jobs and want to be discrete... so you can also ping people from out network tab on our website (which people that opted in to being listed on the site). There are also some sample schedules on the "How it Works" tab to show what a typical week could end up looking like. Sorry, lots of info, but we're still fairly small, and the day to day is pretty unique compared to anything else so trying to throw it all out there for you haha.

I think Codesmith's results will continue to be better on paper than most bootcamps even though they will be lower than the 2021 outcomes. We won't know until at least June 2023. I expect H1 2022 to be fairly strong, especially in terms of compensation with so many people going to Capital One and Amazon... two companies that compensate mostly in cash compared to other high comp companies. Several people have noticed that they seem to have 6 fellows per cohort now (BootcampBen disputed, but I'm going off the 56 fellows on their website) and that might help slow the drop in placement percentages as well. I also think if their results tanked it wouldn't change much about how people feel about them. It's not like they can control the market and are failing at it. The only thing that would change that is if they had a loophole that only works in good markets and not bad and people turn on them all of a sudden because of a lack of quality day to day.

Good question! For people who have no or little experience we give them tasks and bugs to fix in a forked production codebase. You get assigned tickets, fix issues, send PRs, get code review from industry engineers, complete your tasks, etc... This is important for helping people ramp up in an unfamiliar codebase, follow a real engineering process. The goal of this work is to help you hit the ground running on your job and NOT to build a portfolio. Sometimes Fellows will list their contributions here as project work on their resume and use it for examples in interviews, but it's not something you can put on a website and show off. You obviously also do all the fundamentals (e.g. DS&A), resume, behavioral, job hunting practice that is the bread and butter of all engineers. We've gotten feedback that people think the above task and bug fix practice should actually be supported more for resumes. Specifically many direct bootcamp grads who say it's much more valuable than their bootcamp projects and they spent more time on it than they did their projects. For example, Codesmith OSP's are \~3 weeks of coding and Codesmith helps people get every single last drop out of those projects. We could adjust our practice (typically is 1 to 2 months of this, completely adaptive to each person though) to be something much more "flashy" on a resume. But really we're focused on the skills. What drives us it hyper focus on getting your fundamental skills to the top tier bar, and not on any trendy framework or language that you want to leverage short term to get a leg up. We give you ten legs up by helping you become a stronger problem solver and generalist that has impact in the world long term. I should add that most top tier companies don't evaluate any practical skills and they don't expect entry level engineers to have any substantial experience. So the best of the best problem solvers openly walk into these interviews telling everyone they have no experience, and passing regardless because of their abilities. This is one of the reasons I'm so tough on the bootcamps who have a strategy of telling their graduates that they are more senior then they are and to advertise that, and drill it home, leading those people to exaggerate. This approach can work for pretty good (but not best) companies and the less good companies, but for the top tier companies it's the opposite of what you should do. Don't equal high salaries with how good a company is either :D

Hi! Yeah happy to explain more or answer questions over DM that pertain to your specific circumstances. What you wrote summarizes exactly my overall stance on Codesmith and also what Formation is trying to do so I'm happy you pieced that together from your experience and from my posts. I really admire Codesmith leadership for scaling the program that they have, they just don't have the experience needed in the tech industry to really solve the right problems that the industry needs, and if they did, maybe they would be more on the right track instead of the rabbit hole they've gone down focusing on going through the motions to put things like a "tech talk" (which are big jokes among students) on your resume. At Formation, we think we need to get the most experienced people in the industry who are passionate about mentoring to answer the question of what it means to be a truly great engineer and how do we train people to get on that path. I don't want to sound like a gatekeeper but you just can't fake/outsmart/accelerate the experience needed to meaningfully work on these problems. We have 5 staff/principal 10yr+ FAANG engineers we hired full time who have done hundreds of interviews, mentored interviewers, evaluated and hired engineers. We have 3 5yr+ FAANG recruiters on staff full time who evaluate Fellows for Formation and give them advice to see if Formation is a good fit. And we're just getting started! Formation is a living and breathing platform and we hope to continue to grow, improve, and help more and more people improve as engineers.

Hi, sure, happy to respond with thoughts. RE: Formation. It is absolutely harder to get FAANG interviews right now than in the past. The goal of Formation is to increase the chances of passing these interviews and to help you get these interview. When the companies are hiring, it's easier for us to send over some profiles to a recruiter and get you in the pipeline. When recruiter jobs themselves are at risk it's harder to do that. But we help you find the right path to companies given the market, and occasional one offs happen and occasionally a recruiter will respond to you. RE: OSP. Honestly the projects are not good and everyone knows it. They are open source and anyone can look at the code! Non functional, commented out code, reviewed and mentored by someone who just graduated Codesmith and has no experience. I know the vision of the projects is much greater, but in reality they are nothing more than a very good group project. Regardless of what Phil or Eric K says, everyone on the ground knows this and expresses it privately, but unfortunately people are really quick to judge based on outcomes alone. Just because Codesmith has good outcomes doesn't mean everything they do is right. Not saying anything about the integrity of their outcomes or marketing. RE: Formation practical work. Yeah we can do a lot more to help people get resume value. But we don't care at all what you do for show.. we care that you actually improve your skills and believe if you improve your skills continuously and never stop, until you become hired at a good company. Since we work with you however long it takes, it works, just not on a guaranteed timeframe.

Yeah Launch School's Captone projects are definitely better than Codesmith's. I would say they are similar but the attention to detail and legitimacy is higher on the Capstone. RE: Formation, we aren't a self paced program, it's actually the opposite, you do no work in deciding what to do, and every week we tell you what to work on! And what you get adapts based on how you do. We are working on predicting time frames better based on other people who did Formation but right now, it's too hard for a human to estimate precisely given how unique each person's experience is and we need to do more complex predictions. It works best when you have a job and do Formation part time so there is less financial pressure.