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Hey, it's Formation.dev We do mentorship and training for people from non traditional and underrepresented backgrounds with experience to help them level up to top tier roles. Strong bootcamps grads are the most junior starting point to work with us and most people have 1 - 3 years of experience already. But we have a lot of people who have done bootcamps in the past and I know a decent amount about some of the top ones.

I haven't done Codesmith but can answer the question from working with Codesmith alumni. With Codesmith you get lifelong support in their community. After you officially graduate, you get continued check-ins, practice, access to the community for support and referrals, and ongoing lectures for interviewing and negotiation. While normal Codesmith is 9am to 8pm every day, this phase is way more hands off and on your own. I cant answer when it ends. Around 90% of people get a job within 6 months of graduating. The 10% that don't, someone else can hopefully answer. From what I've observed, most Codesmith people are ambitious and hard working and a lot of people find jobs. At Formation we've worked with a range of alumni from those who need extra help to find any job to those who are really solid but need extra support to achieve top tier jobs. One downside of the job hunt support is…

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 ;)

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.

cc: u/Yak_Overflow as well, RE: ISAs. I can give my perspective on ISAs in general (they aren't unique to coding bootcamps), this might be a bit long and boring but it's a very interesting topic and a lot of ISAs are full of problems. TRANSPARENT DISCLOSURE: I am the co-founder of a non-bootcamp training and mentoring program that successfully offers ISAs. "Scam" is a strong word, but most bootcamps that offered ISAs have stopped offering them because they are absolutely terrible for the company, especially when a lot of bootcamps don't have great placement rates. Lambda School (BloomTech) used to be a pioneer of ISAs and recently stopped offering them. About 50% of people who start BloomTech get a job within 6 months of graduating, so 8 months + 6 months = 14 months for HALF of the people that started to even START paying for their education. Meanwhile BloomTech has to pay its staff…

100%, we are all impacted by our surroundings. Sometimes I feel like all my peers are better than me and I don't deserved to be here. At least that feeling doesn't really go away the more you progress in your career. But over time, you build confidence in the things you are good at! My goal is for all the people I work with to surpass me years down the road and would love nothing more :D I love reading other people's perspectives and I hope I don't portray my perspectives as "the source of truth", I want them to be a point of view to help people.

Yeah in my opinon, Nucamp is a good alternative/competitor to Udacity and alternative to a weaker bootcamp (especially for the cost), where M-F are self-taught and Saturdays you do a multi hour live session with an instructor to fill in gaps and get feedback. If you know nothing about coding, get started with a good Udemy course, like a Colt Steele intro series. Don't worry about absorbing everything but just follow along to see if you even like programming and if you like React/frontend or if you like data engineer, etc... Then after a few months, I would consider if quitting your job makes sense and which program is right for you. If you advanced quickly you might be a candidate for some of the top bootcamps, like Codesmith, Rithm, HackReactor, etc... which require a very basic level of understanding to join, or if you want to Nucamp first while you work, to re-evaluate bootcamps a…

Thanks for this candid feedback! I appreciate it a lot. Lot of stuff I will reflect on and try to incorporate into my responses. I got feedback I didn't disclose Formation so maybe I went too far haha. I'm extremely thankful you gave that example of the two quotes because I didn't realize that came across that way. Yeah I don't know what to say but I'm here to help people. I joined Facebook in 2009 and my stock 100x'd so I originally semi-retired a few years ago. The lack of diversity and people from nontraditional backgrounds in tech is such a huge factor contributing to the problems that big tech is facing today, so I came back with Sophie to give 150% on helping solve this problem. I have made $0 from Formation (no salary) and while I'm a partial owner, we lose money every month right now. I want to help more people get into the industry and find the right path for them. This is…

Sorry you feel that way, and I appreciate the candid feedback. I'm genuinely here to help people and give advice. Having worked with hundreds of people, maybe half or so(?) who have done bootcamps (of all kinds) years ago (and some recently) I do feel like I have a perspective that is useful for people. Being the engineer at Facebook with the most raw output in the entire company, and being at the principal E7 level (highest leveled 1.5% of engineers at the company) I have a perspective that might be useful for people. I spend all my time on Formation and certainly have biases, but I also do feel my perspective can be valuable and I'm here with my real name, for open and candid discussions, and I genuinely appreciate pushback and discussion. I haven't been to any bootcamps myself, that's where I also appreciate hearing other people's perspectives and hopefully together there is a lot…

No, Formation is not a bootcamp, we have a handful of people with no experience and 80-90% of people have worked for one to many years. That is an example. I've been criticized for not disclosing Formation, if you feel this is promotional, that's good feedback, I guess I can't make everyone happy, but I can try. I edited to give an example of what I mean, it's a little off topic now but 🤷‍♂️

This is one of the dark secrets of bootcamps. Some basically let anyone in and that means people who they shouldn’t of let in might have a bad experience and don't get a job, which lowers their outcomes on paper. So the bootcamps that are more selective have more success cases and have stronger outcomes on paper. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that the education is better or worse it’s just one factor. At Formation.dev we haven’t published these kind of outcomes because of this (like a staff engineer making $400K TC isn't really relevant for a bootcamp grad who has contracted and aiming to make $150K TC at a solid company, and aggregating these numbers into medians and averages isn't that useful imo). HackReactor is a great example of this where they are owned by a big company and have pressure to hit numbers and their outcomes for qualified people are actually really good and they ha…

One thing to watch out for is their CIRR remote outcomes are for their first test cohort and only contain 25 graduates (a typical cohort in person is 36). In their announcement about remote way back when, I felt it was implied they were going to be more selective for the first cohort to ensure the experience met their high bar and outcomes were high. Presumably the quality will continue or they would have stopped, but just something to note as their outcomes in the generally are partially due to having a very high bar to begin with (20% over 140K but also 20% under 110K)

The title is a overgeneralizing. Open Source projects vs Short Internship is different than Codesmith's projects vs Rithm's internships. The one liners are that Codesmith's projects are curated learning experiences branded as work-like experience. Rithm's internships are real work, but tends to be understated on resumes, and people get hit or miss experience. I'll do a quick Pros and Cons: Codesmith's Open Source Projects: PROS: * They have optimized the heck out of talking about these projects. They look like real work on a resume, they have a lot of buzzwords, it's very effective for getting interviews. * The projects are almost all tools, which is a great thing to work on in general because it's solving a developer problem. CONS: * The actual projects, people spend 6 weeks on and most people commit only a few commits over 2-3 weeks. * Not many people use the projects outsid…

Not all mentors are created equal. I strongly believe in the idea that people don't need a single dedicated mentor, but rather need the right mentor at the right time for the right reason. If you can get this just right yourself while doing a Udacity course, you are essentially outsmarting these expensive programs that you are paying 15K to do this. Now the reason it's hard to navigate because some programs charge 15K to be almost entirely taught by alumni of the program. Alumni can actually be better a teaching some topics! But there are also very rare times you need a $500 an hour mentor as well.... and most things fall somewhere on between. When you are starting out, you don't know what you don't know and you just have to trust a program to make good use of your $15K. At Formation, we actually think about our fees as a fee that you could easily pay to mentors directly on your o…

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.

Hi there! What kind of job are you aiming for? In general, having a CS degree without internships/experience can be tough: hundreds of applications and few responses. At FB we would go through piles of resumes and people who didn't have several top tier internships were instantly skipped over (this was when I was involved in 2010). Unfortunately bootcamp grads have it pretty similar, so I don't know how much a generic bootcamp will help at this point. Georgia Tech Master's is good. The downsides are it will take longer and it won't necessarily help with getting a job. It might reset the clock and you can reconsider new grad jobs and hopefully have more direct access to recruiters is GT is a good CS school. I would only go to a bootcamp if you feel like your skill level is not at an entry level bar yet. If you have the CS fundamentals to get hired and need job hunt help look at these o…

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 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 B…

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.

Lambda changed it's name because of a trademark lawsuit. They were fighting it for 2 years or so (another company has a Lambda trademark and was being negatively impacted by bad press and reviews around Lambda School - which didn't have a trademark). They even bought this company in Florida called Red Lambda (which has a trademark) to try to fight back. They settled the suit after depositions and changed their name. I'm surprised no one talks about this story! A chunk of thir $120M of finding probably went to this. Regarding fundraising. So two things in general. 1. Even though Lambda had so much funding, they were losing a ton of money. We call this the "VC funded discount". Uber was similar, where they were losing money on every ride so that they could grow by giving people cheap rides. The investors were basically paying for thoss cheap rides. Lambda's case was different. They had…

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 b…

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 Linke…

I wouldn't recommend choosing a bootcamp based on the languages or the stack. Choose the one that you feel is aligned with your goals. You might not realize it yet because learning programming is hard, but your engineering powers grow 10X every year in your career and years down the road no matter which bootcamp you go to, be it App Academy or Codesmith you'll see how the stack and language don't matter. Codesmith has very solid instruction, has scaled really well, and is a great choice to get into the field. They have a very strong culture, and if you have friends there and feel like you fit, go for it!

Both Codesmith and Rithm care a lot about their curriculum and their instruction in general. So even though Codesmith has like a hierarchy of former students teaching, they do a good job and have a high bar for sure. Both teams have employees with lots of instruction years of experience and comparatively little industry years of experience. They both prioritize the learning experience. Codesmith wins handsdown on the job profile preparation. Codesmith grads usually don't list Codesmith on their resume, they post about their projects, their talks, and come across as accomplished industry engineers, etc... Rithm grads post graduation messages proudly stating they graduated from Rithm and are on the job hunt. Very different approaches that show the difference in approaches.

At the end of the day, no school will get you a job, you are the one that gets the job and if you are driven, smart, things will work out. Maybe your FIRST job will be better or worse depending on the school, but you'll be on a good long term trajectory and you sound like you are on the right track.

I know the founder of Rithm and they are very focused on quality of education because of negative experiences at other bootcamps. They run very small cohorts with lots of face time. They care a ton about the quality of curriculum and education. I haven't talked to them since they went remote though. We have a few Rithm alumni who we worked with a Formation.dev and they were a pleasure to work with. I can't reply to RobSteinsVoice, a current Codesmith student, because they blocked me. But I'll add some notes here. If you go to Codesmith's website about page, and look at the LinkedIn for all the instructors (junior, mid, senior, lead), they all went to Codesmith. They either graduated and stayed on for sometimes many years, or they worked somewhere and teach part time. I'm not sure if this is what was meant above about hiring back students. From what I understand "Fellows" are hired on…