I don't want to give specifics for privacy but several Formation Fellows have Google L3 offers with first year TC over $200K (most people have 1-3 years work experience already). You can see a good breakdown here of many other offers: [https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google&track=Software%20Engineer](https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google&track=Software%20Engineer)
Straight from a bootcamp with no experience, you'll be on the lowest end of the spectrum, unless you have competing offers to negotiate with.
Disclosure: I'm co-founder of [Formation.dev](https://Formation.dev), and we've worked with a few people in similar buckets - it's not our most common case of Fellow, but you can look into it and see if it's a good fit on your own. We have a high bar for entry skills, particular with data structures and algorithms, and people's goals are to get top tier jobs (like truly top/FAANG-tier companies), rather than any job. We are like a personal trainer, so there's no fixed length, but I would ball park 6 months to get a job.
Another bootcamp could be an option is if you are really rusty and a lot hasn't stuck from 3 years ago.
Finally, you can try doing some serious project work, like Hack4LA (volunteering) and see if that helps go somewhere.
My hunch is you would benefit from some help or some structure, and also with resume and job hunting etc...
100%! Not that you have a 100% chance, but you can absolutely get a decent job with just a coding bootcamp. The top bootcamps typically need you to qualify by having some minimal coding skills first.
The differences I've observed are more in attitude and perspective comparing the top CS students (MIT, Stanford, CMU, Berkeley, etc...) and the top bootcamps (Codesmith, Hack Reactor, etc...):
CS DEGREE: Has dedicated 4+ years to programming and have a longer term point of view. They are thinking 10 years down the road - pre-FAANG, post-FAANG, a lot want to start companies, a lot are looking beyond FAANG to the next best things. They are typically super passionate about the underlying technologies and have the time to have gone on tangents pursuing random things. Likely has done 3-4 internships already before graduating.
BOOTCAMP: People want a job and prioritize making themselves look as…
1. Yes for that specific person, without knowing their skill level, they should look into Formation. If their skills are at our bar, it would be a better choice than a bootcamp. For reference, the comment thread: [https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/viw3bd/switching\_from\_civil\_engineering\_to\_swe/idhm08u/?context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/viw3bd/switching_from_civil_engineering_to_swe/idhm08u/?context=3)
2. 80K is the increase in total compensation over people's previous job engineering, not the compensation itself (and we exclude people who don't have a previous job from the calculation as it would be very unfair). I've been trying to crunch more recent numbers and my rough calculations for median base salary is $138K for salaries submitted (not job start dates but when people submitted a form with the info) Sept 30th 2021 to May 29th, 2022 (…
80K is the average INCREASE in compensation for people that had jobs prior. Not the average compensation.
I think that's kind of proving the point, we are not competing with them and there's nothing to be put to rest. A bunch of people have messaged me here about bootcamps and I've recommended they go to Codesmith given their situation, it's not either or. Others have messaged me about Formation. No one has said "I'm choosing between Codesmith and Formation"
Again, people typically talk to us about Outco, Interview Kickstart, Scalar, Exponent, and Pathrise - some of whom don't have pricing on their websites, let alone outcomes, but have had thousands and thousands of engineers go through their programs nonetheless. We're playing different games here and I'm sorry if my involvement in this subreddit is causing this confusion.
This is the best I got for raw outcomes: last 50 offers acce…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.
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…
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 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 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.
HackReactor is another program with audited results (not following CIRR because of some drama with CIRR, but audited), where some cohorts have six figure medians as well. Other than Codesmith's fake project work framed as months of experience and the whole mid level claim that I can talk about for days, I think Codesmith had better results than HackReactor for a lot of people who haven't done much coding yet.
Formation isn't a bootcamp or school and doesn't have a "program", fixed dates, cohorts, etc... so we haven't figured out the best way to talk about results. The median base salary of the past 12 months (since May 1, 2021) is $138k and TC is much higher when factoring in stock (usually in the tens of k per year) and bonuses (5 or 6 figures). But many people start Formation making a good salary (sometimes 6 figures already) already so apples and oranges. If you want to research, tal…
Hey u/aetrides
Codesmith full bootcamp program is 12 weeks and is upfront $19,950 paid over 8 months or so. But they have various loans and scholarships to look into to spread it out further.
Formation doesn't have a bootcamp program, it's kind of like a personal trainer program. So we work with people however long it takes to get a job, typically 4 to 6 months. Our price varies from 9% to 15% of your new base salary (deferred until after you start your new job) depending on how much work you need and experience you have. Our median BASE salary for the past 12 months (since May 1, 2021) is $138K, so about $12,420 to $20,700?
So the programs are entirely different and we actually work with people who both come DIRECTLY FROM Codesmith to us and people who get jobs after Codesmith (amongst many other bootcamps) and then come to us.
People starting at zero fall in the bucket that have do…
That seems like a long time, you might be able to get into Codesmith sooner. Most bootcamps might say "waitlist" or "closed" but they have room still. Can't hurt to ask.
If you want to gauge your DS&A alone, we made this 45 assessment you can do from Formation: [https://formation.dev/join/assessment](https://formation.dev/join/assessment)
Hi, Codesmith is probably going to be better if you know how to code already, but it's still a bootcamp that covers all the basics that you might already know, so if you have to wait three months to do it, the lost time might not be worth it. What did you mean by wait three months?
If your skill level for DS&A is already at a high enough bar, look at Formation.dev as well. I'm co-founder so obviously biased, but if you do meet that bar it's probably the most effective (do your own research and don't trust me!)
If you aren't at that level yet then Codesmith sounds like it would be a better choice for you than DevMountain if you can start it at roughly the same time.
Another option to think about if you're more advanced is to do volunteer work at something like Hack4LA to get real project work. Codesmith's project work is with peers, no PMs, no designers, and not many real users, so wo…
Formation FAANG-level DS&A assessment preview/sneak peak for this subreddit
Hi all, been hanging around this community for a while and enjoyed some great discussions.
One of the most common questions here by far is "should I join a coding bootcamp" or "should I join X coding bootcamp" and people seem to have a hard time gauging their skills.
We created this assessment at Formation.dev that we are testing out making public and wanted to invite anyone to try it. It's a CodeSignal based assessment that gauges your DS&A skills and helps you benchmark where you are at. If you do extremely well your raw skills might be almost strong enough already to interview with some practice! If you are completely lost here, bootcamp might be a great option.
[https://formation.dev/join/assessment](https://formation.dev/join/assessment)
Please let me know any feedback you have! I want to launch this…
Hey Pentatonic, nice to meet you.
If you are already a bit technical (I don't know what exactly you are doing, but I could imagine some scripting and/or DB querying) I would start with some online courses first - which is what it sounds like you are doing!
Formation isn't a bootcamp and we work with people with typically 1 - 3 years of professional coding experience. Maybe 5 to 10% of people have no experience, and we can work with you if your skills are at a certain bar... so it's possible but more of a special case. We work on data structures and algorithms, take home projects, live coding, and a little bit of hands on simulated work if you need it.
Why it works so well, three things:
1. We work with unconditionally until you get that top tier job. So if you are driven and hard working, then whether it takes 1 month or 10 months, we are working super hard with you every day. The…