RE: career change. How much experience do you have already coding? We have a civil engineer at Formation.dev right now with a similar background but who has been self studying for some time now and crushing it. It could be a good path to consider if you are already at our bar and I can ask them if they would talk to you to give you advice. If you already have your plans set then ignore me and keep going.
RE: job market. I can comment on what we've seen at Formation. We have seen zero offers rescinded or layoffs. We have seen a very small number (under 10) of cancelled interviews (specifically at the headline companies that have rescinded offers/hiring freezes). On the other hand we've seen a lot of companies aggressively hiring and compensation has been increasing. If anything we've seen a pickup in hiring. We've had more people got to Google, Amazon, Microsoft than ever.... 15 out of t…
I'm very familiar with this process in the United States at least. It's called "team matching".
So if you do well on the onsite, the recruiter will send your packet to the hiring committee review. If that committee "recommends hiring", you passed the interviews! You will go into a big pool of people who passed to get matched with teams and the recruiter can also help you match.
During team match, the goal is for a team to see if you are a good fit for their needs and then if they want you, you will get an offer officially with numbers shortly after.
This process will vary depending on you and the teams. An earlier career candidate might have an easy time because the teams they are marching with are looking for someone junior who seems good to work with.
If you are very senior, the team might be more selective about who will join because you will be a leader with more influence and…
Adding this for future reference as well to show how drastically different we are. Codesmith posted a blog announcing their CIRR results that explains the job hunt differences quite well
The TLDR: this reinforces how Codesmith is a bootcamp program to teach people using structured lectures and curriculum and Formation is a program to give you unique "personal trainer"-like development and mentoring.
THIS IS AN ENTIRE QUOTE FROM SOURCE BELOW WITH INLINE COMMENTS IN BOLD MARKED "FORMATION" TO HIGHLIGHT DIFFERENCES
During Codesmith’s **Hiring Program**, you can expect:
* Tailored Resume Guidance and Feedback
* Residents attend lectures covering resume best practices and are pushed to craft their experiences in a way that is both technically sound and authentic to them. Residents receive three revisions with specific feedback from an engineering fellow to ensure the content and quali…
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.
Apologies if this sounds like product placement but you should consider Formation.dev to see if it’s a good fit or not. You may or may not need it but we have worked with a couple of people in this bucket (one is on our formation.dev/network page in the top row) and had very strong results. Again, not meant to be salespitch, check it out on your own and do your research but you should know all your options. Some other programs that exist to help get interview ready are Outco and Interview Kickstart. They all cost about the same and Outco and Interview Kickstart have fairly similar fixed training models. At Formation, we work with you full force for however long it takes to get a top tier job and your training will adapt personally to you week to week to efficiently get you there, but it’s fairly intense (10 to 20 hours a week minimum up to full time 40 hours).
Companies have nothing to do with ISAs so I would be curious to know what’a really the problem. At Formation, we have ISAs for a different purpose - we aren’t a bootcamp, but we train and mentor people (many who went to bootcamps and are now working at their first job) until they get a new job and then they start paying back their ISA. Because we keep working with people until they get that job, no matter how long it takes, everyone has been happy with this model and not once have people been turned away from jobs because of this. People are going to Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Dropbox, Figma, and dozens more and not once has an ISA come up.
So I have some follow up questions:
1. Why is this even coming up in conversation, no one should know or care about how the person paid for their program?
2. Perhaps the person’s resume hides that they went to a bootcamp? and it’s the r…
Do you have any experience already? I agree with someone else below, reading about things will barely help you here as this interview is testing for your real world experience.
I highly recommend reading this to get a better sense of what these interviews are all about: https://formation.dev/blog/how-to-prepare-for-a-system-design-interview-and-pass-it/
I have a lot of thought on them and have been following for a while. They have audited outcomes that are really not great (something around 50% of people who start get a job within 6 months of graduating and the median salary is quite low compared to the national averages for engineers).
So this is a bit of secret but they use to have this webpage where they listed all of their new grads who were available to hire. I was monitoring that page month to month and something in the low dozens out of many hundreds were hired every month. Their CEOs tweets make it seem like a lot more people are graduating and getting top tier jobs.
I have a minor beef with them personally. One of their alumni came to Formation 2 years and 2 jobs after leaving Bloomtech. We helped them very briefly to interview and negotiate their top tier offer and then Bloomtech shouted out this offer as a success case for…
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…
Ah my favorite topic haha. So one resource is CIRR. It's a business group started by bootcamps to develop standards for reporting audited outcomes that they all agree with.
Unfortunately it's down to only 5 bootcamps reporting in the recent results and has been on the decline each half. Quite frankly, the results other than Codesmith are not great so people have little incentive to keep publishing results as they will probably be used against the bootcamp.
HackReactor and BloomTech publish their own audited reports as well, but just following their own metrics rather than CIRRs.
I have a strong stance on metrics and don't love any of the above reports as they focus on medians and averages.
You want to know what someone with a similar background felt about the program. These numbers get juiced up by people with CS degrees and experience attending and getting high outcomes.
I would…
Formation doesn't have public any "reports". We don't aggregate a lot of numbers either internally. We are focused on meeting or exceeding each person's individual goal. I'm more than happy to try to answer questions you might have.
Some notes about why. The summary is that since we aren't bootcamp, course, or anything like that, it's very nuanced to summarize numbers and we would need to invest a lot of time and energy in figuring things out:
1. Bootcamps have a consistent A starting point and a report is a way to measure how well they develop people from starting point A. Formation is focused on someones goals, so our outcomes are relative to that. For example have Senior Microsoft engineers who want to go to top tier smaller companies. We have new grads who want to go to FAANG. We have self taught people looking for apprenticeship. Our most common Fellow will have 1-3 years of exper…
Hi, what are your job goals for your first job?
You can self teach backend. You can't really self teach scaling backends but you can make solid backend progress on your own.
I've worked with people who are self-taught/cheap courses (at Formation.dev, which is paid "personal training" and quite expensive, but not a bootcamp or course) and they have gotten top tier FAANG-level jobs with zero experience. If you have the raw skills and a strong alignment to the right company, then the right referral to the right person can get you in the door. It's extremely personal and nuanced but it's worked and I've seen it happen. Here's one of the best cases who is public on our website: [https://www.linkedin.com/in/mpay/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/mpay/) (this is a full blown SWE role and not a contractor or adjacent non-SWE role). Some of these people have had stronger outcomes than people who we…
It depends on what you need to work on. We have hundreds of small group session types, thousands of tasks, hundreds of assessments and assignments, and you do what you need to do :). We bundle them up into these different "challenges" so you work on one (or sometimes two or three) larger area(s) of stuff at a time.
In terms of practical work, we forked a production codebase (in the tens of thousands of lines of code) and people work on bugs and tasks in there, get mocks, code reviews from mentors and our team, follow an engineering process that simulate real work. You might do 20 to 40 of these tasks and bugs if you really need more experience.
People will put this on their resume as project work if they are lacking, but any kind of real work experience (or volunteer experience) will be better on a resume. The goal of it is not a big shiny project to show off, but to develop your engin…
My understanding is that there was a small cohort that was their "test" cohort for remote but that was back in 2020. I saw a video they did possibly on Course Report (I have YouTube running in the background almost all the time and consume a ton of stuff) where they discussed this test period.
But this is for people that started it H12021 which presumably would be a much larger number of people. Someone on good authority said cohorts have about 35 peopleso 25 is an odd number.
Would love someone that knows the answer to come in. Maybe more people dropped out and were fully refunded to be nice during COVID and we're excluded? Maybe the program indeed had only one or tiny cohorts and what not at capacity? I have no idea, but remote programs in general have much lower engagement and higher dropout rates in industry in general.
Does anyone know anything?
What do you mean by signing up for "hacker rank?" Are you talking about the platform for online tests. At Formation we send out thousands and thousands of CodeSignals and HackerRanks assessments we have developed, and there's nothing wrong with signing up and doing their practice materials, it's a very common legitimate service.
You can use their examples to practice and learn for free! They cover all kinds of topics.
I chatted with someone about System Design and can use that as an example, please CORRECT ME IF THIS HAS CHANGED AND WILL EDIT IT
​
**Codesmith's System Design**
* 1 week long, fixed classes
* 2 hour lecture from Codesmith staff (not necessarily with industry experience) (entire cohort, 35 people)
* 3 hour working sessions working through problems and materials (unknown size)
* reading materials
**Formation System Design**
* Variable length until you passing system design mock interviews w/ senior/staff/principal level engineers (typically 4 to 6 weeks)
* Specific topics for the following depending on what you need to work on from the previous week, collecting feedback for all for next week:
* 1-2 weekly 1 hour workouts with a senior industry engineer working through a specific problem with 3-5 other Fellows
* 1 weekly 1 hour session reviewing a topic in more depth with…
I do think down the road we will compete head on but still disagree we do now. Our technology right now works for taking a range of A to a range of B outcomes in C time (which is the variable). We have a few hundred different micro sessions, and a few thousands different tasks, a few hundred assessments, a few dozens types of mock interviews. And every week we pull out a set of things that fit your schedule that you need to work on to improve that week. This is all the stuff to get from "1-3 years industry experience at decent company" to high performance top tier company. But if we expand this library of tasks and sessions we can really support a much wider range of transitions.
I'm happy to go over more details about what we do specifically or maybe chat with Chris G or another person you can find that went through the full gamut.
Maybe on paper these words sound similar but our bar…
Codesmith just released their 2021 H1 data last night, and the percentage of people who got jobs within 3 months and 6 months improved (over already good previous numbers) and is quite good:
LA (130 people): 48% in 90 days, 85% in 180 days
NY (123 people): 51% in 90 days, 89% in 180 days
Remote PT (25 people): 71% in 90 days, 88% in 180 days.
There's some wiggle room that these are of the people who GRADUATED, which is 96+% so doesn't impact much right. And some people stopped reporting their data after 90 days, again very small number (0 to 7% stopped reporting after 90 days depending on the program).
Anyways, yeah you should try to find how long it took people with a similar background to yourself to get a job so giving a bit more info about your background could help others chime in anecdotally.
Thanks for sharing. Yeah we lose a lot of context on Reddit and my writing might come across more mean than it's meant. I love that Codemsith has helped so many people and had a major impact on people's lives. We need way more people working to make tech a better place. Thanks for writing this out and I'll be more cognizant of this in the future.
100% compared to other bootcamps, there are so many bad apples out there that are genuinely not great intentioned. Sophie, the founder of Formation was a mentor at different programs and wanted to do better, which is why she started Buildschool all by herself - a free iOS bootcamp. That evolved into Formation when I joined on and we realized we needed to raise funding to hire top tier engineers in the industry (mostly from Facebook, so we can debate that haha) to help scale out truly one-of-a-kind approach to training. I think we need more peop…
Hi, I appreciate the non-crazy tone, but I have some corrections and other responses:
1. I'm not the CEO of Formation. Sophie is the founder and CEO and the true driver of the mission. I'm here because I have a personal interest in helping people early in their careers after doing so for many years and seeing what impact it can have on people.
2. Formation is not a bootcamp no matter how you frame it. We relentlessly provide technical training until you get a new job you are happy with, no matter how long it takes, I think the average is around 6 months (not sure). We refuse to work with people looking for a quick bootcamp to whip them into shape for an upcoming interview, for example.
3. Codesmith is not our competition. I lose sleep over Interview Kickstart, Outco, Pathrise, Scalar, Exponent, etc... and not about Codesmith.
4. The day to day is nothing like a bootcamp or any kind of f…
You have a throwaway account that's 2 months old with 10 comments, 6 of which are on this thread.
This is either a giant troll or you are grossly misinformed about the industry.
We have an assessment process to help figure out people's starting point at Formation to get the ball rolling. Our team has more experience than anyone else with this stuff and obviously we don't know everything, but every team member is passionate about sharing their experience with people from non traditional backgrounds to help them get top tier jobs and achieve their goals. Like these are some highlights of our full time team:
\- 3 engineers who have not only conducted countless interviewers but trained hundreds of interviewers at Facebook
\- 3 principal level engineers from Facebook, one of whom who reported directly to the CTO.
\- 1 staff level Nextdoor engineer, who did extensive interviewing and cr…
This is kind of proving my point. All of the 10+ year experience people we work with are talking to recruiters BEFORE starting Formation and they need help navigating the market and making sure they get the best job for them out of all the options.
So a Codesmith alumni who gets contacted days after graduation could be a great person to then go to Formation to talk to people with years and years of FAANG industry experience to help them make the next best steps.
Finnigan, I'm sorry but you don't understand whatsoever what Formation does and if you look into it, I'm happy to answer questions rather than respond do your factually incorrect statements.
Our purpose is not to get people mid or senior level jobs at FAANG but to help people with their own career goals. We have helped people go from FAANG -> startup. One person from Agency -> X and at the exact same time time someone went from X -> FAANG. One person's goal might be another person's starting point.
We're playing different games here.
Hi Crafts :D Thanks for adding the info again, appreciate civil conversations haha.
I totally agree with understanding who is posting information and understanding where they are coming from. Reddit is a tough place because everyone is anonymous (and it's easy to attack people anonymously) and I insist on using my real identity, have an open mind, stand behind my statements, and engage in good discussion.
Now for the expected reply hahaha:
I disagree about competing with Codesmith. If someone at Codesmith told you this it means they are probably concerned about us competing with them but not the other way around. I don't think I've interacting with anyone who said "I'm choosing between Formation and Codesmith", whereas I've interacted with many people who have done Formation AFTER Codesmith (either right after or a few years later), or who wanted to talk about if it was the right thi…
We have a lot of people go to Formation right AFTER going to Codesmith, not INSTEAD of. People who WORK at Codesmith come to Formation. For the large majority of people starting Codesmith, they do not qualify for Formation or meet the bar. AFTER Codesmith, most people are right at the middle or low-middle bar for our full program track. I love working with Codesmith alumni!
No throwaway accounts people, have a real discussion without baseless angry accusations!
‼️ CIRR is audited but it's far from unbiased. The board of directors and founders are all affiliated with bootcamps. It's not a 501 3c non profit because that's a conflict of interest. It's registered as a "business league/lobbying organization". Now I'm super middle of the road person, and don't judge those groups, but lobbying groups are not unbiased.
I wrote a long post about Formation's data will paste here because believe it or not I spend most of my time helping Fellows and making Formation great. **We are not a school or bootcamp. We compete with things like Pathrise, Interview Kickstart, and Outco.** Talk to any current Fellow or alumni. We are not perfect, but care about every single outcome, we have by far the most experienced team, we work with people with full technical training as long as it takes to get there, and it works really well.
We are a mission driven organizatio…
I agree that if the people perform well, which they are, then you could argue that it doesn't matter.
At Formation, before we hired dedicated ex-FB recruiters, I used to interview every Fellow. We handful of Codemith people, the ones with industry experience didn't even talk about it because they already had a job, and the ones that did not have industry experience were quite covering up the fact that it was open source but not lying, and it very quickly unraveled that it was not real work experience. We hired a Codemith alumni went through our own program so it's really not meant to be a criticism of the program, so I don't mean that it necessarily reflected poorly either.
Thanks additional info about Fellow Program, that clarified a lot and much appreciated.
Yeah by CIRR being on life support, absolutely not a criticism of Codesmith in any way, it actually could free them to publish more information faster! Their results are great, I'm sure they should want this to be published sooner!
Oh sorry I've been talking about this elsewhere over time.
SUMMARY: I audited over 200 Codesmith alumni, documenting LinkedIn and GitHub commits, and noting the number of years of "work experience" as a "software engineer" that was claimed at the open source groups projects Codesmith runs, like Reactime and Spearmint. I have a large spreadsheet, but the majority of people claimed 6 to 18 months of "work experience" but commited 2-6 commits over 1-3 weeks on the projects (my understanding is this project is a 6 week unit in the course). The most extreme being someone that claimed 6 months of work experience and their only commits to the project were changing an image file and updating a README. In addition, these projects have no activity outside of Codesmith, no issues or feature requests from outside Codesmith, and it's not clear any of the tools or projects are used outside of Codesm…
I'm going to write up my free flow thoughts as I'm reading through it. I'll focus on Codesmith because it's the most talked about bootcamp on here and I don't have much time. 5 minute recap!!
1. CIRR is basically dead. Only four schools in the USA reported. Only one school in SF/NY reported.
2. Codesmith's numbers don't including an auditing report. I'm assuming they were audited.
3. Codesmith LA:
1. Similar graduation and placement rates
2. Solid increase in median compensation
3. They changed the buckets but it looks like a $10K increase in salaries across the board.
4. Increased number of graduates by 40 is almost 40% and maintained strong numbers, which is a good sign
4. Codesmith NY:
1. Similar number of graduates from previous report, no growth
2. Large jump in percentage placed within 6 months from 80 to 90%
3. Kept same salary buckets, easier to compare tren…
We aren't a bootcamp but we offer ISAs at Formation and reasons people can get rejected are:
1. Low credit score
2. Past loan defaults
3. Other existing ISAs, such that you will owe too high of a percentage of your income
4. Too high of a debt load
5. Other reasons: bankruptcies, educational loan problems
6. Failed identity check: wrong birthday or SSN
The program has the ability to override these criteria, but if they are selling off or financing your ISA, it won't be eligible to be financed.
So you might be able to try other bootcamps that might be willing to take a risk. To be completely honest the biggest problem with failing the above is not that they don't trust you, but that you might have creditors on your back higher up on the list and might not be able to pay the ISA back.
If your problem is something in the past that you have mostly resolved, you might be able to find a pr…
I would take it gauge your interested before spending a ton of money on a bootcamp. You can't use it to get a job after.
Completely going rogue here, unrelated analogy to the question entirely:
One of the challenges with learning programming is that the growth is exponential and once you get there, you lose perspective. It's like skiing. A black diamond seems impossible and terrifying at first. But by the time you do them, they seem fine. And those blue runs that previously looked terrifying as well are so easy you don't even break a sweat
The problem and confusion is that our words to describe things are flat. I've heard expert skiers say "oh that black diamond over there is an easy one to warm up today" or some beginner skiers say "getting down that steep blue will be the accomplishment of the day, it was so hard last time we fell constantly"
All bootcamps (including Codesmith and…
Awesome, thanks so much for this write up!
I can give quick open answers to these:
​
>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.
​
>% 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…
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!
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…
I haven't attended either, I've coached and mentored alumni from both, either right after or later in their careers.
I hope you get other responses answering your specific questions but just want to pre-emptively discuss outcomes because in the past people have said for similar questions 'Codesmith has the best outcomes choose Codesmith'.
First, will put the best numbers at flagship locations for both.
Codesmith (H2 2020): New York median salary $120,000, 80.2% placed within 180 days (CIRR)
HackReactor (H1 2021): San Francisco median salary $107,500, 73% placed within 180 days (self reported audited)
HackReactor has a slightly lower bar to entry so more people drop out.
I believe both have people with experience attend, but a Codesmith exec reported about "a third" of people at Codesmith have a CS degree or work experience or another bootcamp (source Course Report interview with…
This is going to sounds like I'm plugging my company, but try out our (free, just put in email address) assessment if you haven't already [https://formation.dev/join/assessment](https://formation.dev/join/assessment). If you score over 1400 - 1500 you are in good shape for random stuff thrown at you.
Keep practicing in their environment as well to make sure it doesn't trip you up.
Ok great, Codesmith is good for people who are more advanced in their journey so I would probably look at prep before going there. I would suggest doing some more intense self teaching or doing a free or cheap bootcamp prep course (freeCodeCamp, App Academy Open, Codesmith CSX, CSPrep, etc...) to test the waters first before committing to a bootcamp. Most bootcamps do full stack, but lean front end.
I can share my answer to this. Context, I did NOT do a bootcamp, I did traditional CS and have been working in the industry for 13 years since graduating (first 8 years at FB). However, I now work with a lot of people from a lot of different bootcamps a year or two into their careers to help them level up to top tier roles.
So a few controversial points:
1. Outcomes are hard to judge and often skewed. The reports people produce are a good starting point to narrow down the handful of bootcamps with better results. But there's a lot of reading between the lines. A Codesmith executive in a Course Report video about two years ago that about 30% of people have a CS degree or prior experience 1. (not sure if this is still the case), and their median salary is one of the highest. But people tend to have more experience going in, so the results for people with no experience might be different…
Hi! Behavioral interviews are a tough one to give advice on because they depend a lot on your company's goals and what they are looking for in the interview.
For example, at Facebook the behavioral portion was aiming to measure:
1. Scope of responsibility in past job. This is important for determining someone's level. Trying to ask questions so you can compare their previous responsibilities to the different levels at Facebook and pattern match.
2. Past performance. I don't remember if Facebook explicitly trains for this, but I like to try to guage how the person was performing in their last job in some kind of measurements. Like performance ratings, relative performance to peers, awards at previous job that we're rare, etc...
3. Values alignment. When I was at Facebook, the values we're things like 'move fast and break things', and 'nothing is someone else's problem'. I would ask abo…
I work with a lot of people to break into big tech, specially top tier companies.
We have a small number of self-taught developers who we have helped land top tier roles specifically. At Formation.dev , if you have a decent starting point at DS&A, we would probably work with you for 6 to 9 months to be FAANG-ready... that's the range of the people self-taught people we have worked with.
I do actually think NuCamp is more competitive to Udemy and Udacity. Their materials are almost all hands off except for the Saturday sessions. And many of their instructors are kind of like TAs at a bootcamp. So I think positioning it as a "Udacity with more hands-on support" isn't a bad position given the cost.
\+1 if you want to go to Codesmith or a better bootcamp to do their in-house prep first instead of a separate bootcamp.
I would try. It's good practice. You typically don't need to solve "hard" problems to pass at most companies. Or if you are given hard problems, you aren't expected to 100% solve them.
We have a test you can use for practice and benchmarking if you haven't done an OA recently and want practice first: [https://formation.dev/join/assessment](https://formation.dev/join/assessment) (DISCLOSURE: I'm co-founder, I do coaching and training, I'm sharing this to genuinely help you benchmark before doing this OA and not soliciting anything)
It's a 45 min CodeSignal and you'll get your score after to get a sense of if you are ready.
I can speak from the other side. [Formation.dev](https://Formation.dev) (I am co-founder) isn't a bootcamp but do turn people down who want to join us (sometimes really really want to join).
The typical reasons we have turned people down are:
1. Misalignment of goals. If you want something out of your training that we don't think we can achieve with you, we won't move forward. We would only take someone we are confident we can help achieve a top tier company role, because we commit to training you all the way until get a happy result.
2. Not at the technical skill bar. We have a fair technical assessment to help us assess starting data structure and algorithms skills, if you aren't at the bar, or we don't see enough potential, then we will typically not move forward. In this case, we would want you to join in the future though if you can get to the skill bar necessary.
3. Other reason…
Not about money no. We operate at a loss right now and I don't make a salary or any money from Formation. I own a large amount of equity and if it becomes a very successful I plan on using the proceeds to invest and help others. Made enough money from the evil large scary corporation. We pay mentors so they take sessions seriously, just not $300 an hour and a lot don't want to get paid, but we have to pay people fairly for compliance and doing things by the books.
Yeah +1 to helping people find what they want and supporting them. See we can agree on that!
Hey I love your bluntness and edge. Something at Formation we haven't figured out is how to talk about mentors. We have many mentors that are like paid (the equivalent of) '$300+ an hour at their day jobs' and they work do mentorship with us for the mission. Genuinely very unique in industry mentors. And then we try to make sure people get sessions with many mentors and get more from the right people. I think this is a good way to work around a lot of the problems you mention.
RE: Facebook, I can comment on my experience. I left Facebook after eight years, the stock is up 100X since I started so financially it worked out, I built really cool things, met a lot of amazing friends who are doing awesome things outside of Facebook today, I had some life changing experiences, I met my partner!, I learned product insights you can't learn anywhere else. I left right after the 2016 election when…
Expanding access: Formation's coding benchmarking assessment to see if you are ready for FAANG DS&A interviews (free 45 min CodeSignal test)
Hi all, I shared this assessment with a smaller sub last week and wanted to expand the early-access here if that's ok!
We are working on a free assessment to help people gauge if they are ready or not for FAANG interviews. I've been hanging out here for a while now and I'm hoping it will be really useful for people!
Background: our team has 5 ex-FB engineers with average 8 years each at FB, commutatively thousands of interviews, trained hundreds of interviewers, so we feel qualified in the FB DS&A bar.
To Try it out, go to [https://formation.dev/join/assessment](https://formation.dev/join/assessment) and we will automatically/instantly send you a personal CodeSignal link to the test.
Let me know if you have feedback or comments about it and esp…
Yeah possibly we can, bootcamp grads coming to Formation is a small percentage but it happens. Our training itself is full or part time, it's scales to whatever your schedule is.
Yeah we work with you 1-1 to craft your story, help you find the right jobs, refer you where possible, etc... So I'm sure there is some value in your 8 years to get credit for.
It could be a good follow on to a free bootcamp yeah, the main hurdle is the bar is pretty high to enter. Like I said, most people have work experience already, but if you can show you can learn a lot on your own and do well on that assessment for example, we can work with you and be effective.
In terms of practical work, for people with no experience, we have a production-derived codebase, tens of thousands of lines, and you get code reviews from solid engineers. This is very minimal for a resume, but it gives people the confidence t…
Yeah I would look at something like that, Codesmith, Formation and those accelerators above.
We have this assessment at Formation you can do to help guage where you are too. If you get a very low score definitely consider the more bootcamp style programs. If you get a high score you can probably lean towards interview prep.
https://formation.dev/join/assessment
Hmm. I co founded Formation.dev and people sometimes call us a career accelerator amongst other things. Quite frankly we are quite unique so this is an edge case. We work with people with 1 to 3 years typically of professional experience to make a leap to a top tier company.
But would you call Outco, Pathrise, and Interview Kickstart career accelerators? I hear that used for these and I want to make sure we're talking about the same thing.
The Headstarter sounds like it's in the bootcamp bucket based on their website. It sounds like Codesmith demographic, which is people typically without professional experience.