This could be two questions, so I'll answer both:
1. Last summer we ran a smaller program and many people received offers, and those that didn't found all the training was did helpful in other interviews and I think people unanimously found the program very helpful according to the exit survey they all do, and anecdotally. These engineers were preparing for full time roles though and not internships.
2. If you are asking if a non-Netflix program Formation Fellow has gotten a job as Netflix intern, then no. In the paid Fellowship, we work with people with existing SWE work experience and we don't work with college students looking for internships, so it wouldn't be expected for them to get internships.
The SDE 2 role at Amazon is for people.with generally 2+ YOE as an SDE 1 or equivalent so you are much better off posting somewhere else.to get advice because most people here haven't been to a bootcamp yet, nevertheless worked already in industry.
Now if you want SDE 2 onsite advice, I'm quite qualified to provide that.
1. Your coding interviews are standard LC style,.usually medium to hard questions and occasional touching on very hard topics like DP. At Formation, we benchmark and practice exactly what you need to know for this but outside I would say you should be able to solve any LC Medium you haven't seen before in 25 minutes or less with a very clean solution.
2. Ping me if you get an offer for negotiation,.so I can compare that to other SDE 2 offers I've seen at Formation this month and let you know.exactly what to ask for. They are unique offer structures. Don't trust Blind o…
Here are 15 changes we made, which is a subset of roughly a hundred: https://formation.dev/blog/year-in-review-2023-at-formation/
Obviously we're not a bootcamp and I'm not comparing apples to apples but just giving some examples of things people need that changed in 2023.
Codesmith's take is that they didn't change because they are the best and the world is changing because non tech companies are now hiring engineers and paying them a little less but close to what they used to.
They are making a narrative that fits the outcomes instead of making changes to fit the market. The types of companies hiring haven't changed whatsoever and the companies hiring engineers haven't changed.
Again, this sounds critical and insulting, but it's meant feedback. Most other bootcamp leaders just talk to me and I give my opinions privately, so maybe it's a weird way to give feedback, but people tell m…
Thanks, a lot of people see Formation as something Codesmith grads would do in their 2nd, 3rd, etc... transitions if they are leveling up from a solid SWE job to a top tier SWE job and in a lot of ways it could be a great and supportive partnership where we complement each other... imagine that!
For example, Formation Fellows who want to work on projects could help make OSPs better and act as mentors to Codesmith residents. We could help Codesmith with DS&A and SD - two areas they are extremely weak at for top tier companies (but are one of the best at for a zero to 1 bootcamp). We could at a minimum collaborate on public content and sessions.
But for some reason, staff/former staff members report to me that Codesmith's leaders (particularly Eric K and occasionally Will) firmly believe that I'm trying to take down Codesmith and get people to go to Formation and that I'm personally sip…
We don't cover CICD or DevOps and we also don't have mentors I would say who could do mocks overing those topics specifically. We have some mentors which an do iOS and Android mocks, so while we don't cover those skills either day to day, there's at least some practice available.
There's no fixed curriculum and you'll do different things at different paces. But the overall areas we cover are:
1. CS fundamentals/DS&A, up to all the topics needed for the hardest interviews (including DP, advanced graphs). How much you do will vary by your goals but you can go all the way up to the hardest of the hard.
2. System design. This is full stack system design preparing for top tier company system design interviews.
3. Technical Behavioral. Preparing your resume, pitch and practice hiring manager interview and things like the Amazon Bar Raiser
4. Minor areas: frontend (practice and mocks), softwar…
Hi, I'm happy to answer questions and always like to hear what others have to think. I'll list just a couple of shorter comments to help answer, but feel free to me, I'm very open with people about if I think Formation is a good option to consider or not, and ultimately you have to decide.
1. It sounds like you are somewhat familiar with it at least, but just to clarify that we're not a bootcamp and have no fixed curriculum, lectures, classes, lessons, etc... We are a practice, benchmarking, mentorship, job hunting and mock interview platform. You do practice by yourself in in small mentor-led group sessions, you get feedback in those sessions and through benchmarkings, and you trust us to move you through topics and skill areas at whatever pace you go at, and you trust us to tell you when you are at the top company bar. So you are paying to reliably get your skills (from DS&A to System…
I can answer this very transparently, apologies it might be long or over detailed, but trying to explain clearly and openly.
Originally we worked with Leif to administer "classic" ISAs, which is something like, don't pay anything until you get a new job, then pay X% a month for Y months, capped at Z dollars, e.g. 10% per month for 15 months, targeting 15% of one year's base salary. These also had caps so if you make over $165K base salary, you won't pay more than the cap. If you didn't make $65K or more then your payments are paused until you do, or until a year passes in which case the contract is cancelled.
There's a lot of good things about classic ISAs as they really help people pay who otherwise wouldn't be able to afford, or be approved for an upfront cost or a loan.
The flip side is that, as I've said many times, the job market was particularly rough in 2023. Since we work with…
Tangent: this is timely, but you should apply to this if eligible: [https://formation.dev/partners/netflix](https://formation.dev/partners/netflix) (disclosure, co-founder of Formation), but you should not apply to Formation otherwise if you are still in school - this is a special program for Netflix.
The best thing you can do is to get an internship this summer. If you can't get an internship, then volunteer for Hack4LA or for a professor. If you can't volunteer, make a "startup" and build that all summer super disciplined and try to find others doing that to join with, like Coding for Callie, 100Devs community, etc....
Codesmith is more for people who are almost job ready to brand and market themselves for the job hunt, it's not really a strong learning experience itself in my opinion (I can go into why, but it's 6 weeks of curriculum, almost all instructors went to Codesmith itself…
Haha, so Formation isn't a bootcamp or an option to consider instead of a bootcamp and doing so would be a huge mistake. Formation is an interview prep and mentorship platform that doesn't teach any specific skills and instead is about practice - benchmarking - feedback - and mock interviews/job hunt support.
From my best estimates, there are somewhere between 5 and 10% (i.e. 2 to 3 people per Codesmith cohort out of 30+) that might BARELY be candidates for Formation - and only if they understand what Formation is and it's genuinely the right move for them.
In this market that has become rarer and rarer and it might even be almost 0 overlap because the number of people with under 1 year of experience we accept now I can count on one hand, and the people spend a ton of time talking to our team and determining that Formation is indeed the objectively right fit.
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# RE: "CODEMI…
📌 Netflix x Formation Program is back for 2026 grads in the USA aiming to do SWE internships at Netflix in summer 2025. It's a free part time program over the summer (paid for by Netflix) and the goal is land an internship at Netflix! Applications close Feb 16th.
Hi all sharing this with the community if you haven't seen it already! This is a competitive program to train all summer to get ready for Netflix internship interviews in the fall, and hopefully land a coveted Netflix internship for 2025!
See the details here on LinkedIn and let me know if you have questions: [https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7160354895420604416](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7160354895420604416)
From the announcement:
>[Formation](https://www.linkedin.com/company/formation-dev/) and [Netflix](https://www.linkedin.com/company/netflix/) are joining forces to help un…
Yeah I know when Formation started, Outco was a big player, along with Pathrise and IK, but a lot of benefited from the tailwinds of the market.
In the toughest market, we had a notable drop in top tier placements (down to about 50% of placements from 70%ish) and first year TC increases dropped to 80K on average. I think our numbers still justify the cost of the program for us, but we can't change the market, I wish we could, but we're way too small!
But that said, I can see how it's harder for the teams to say focused and motivated. Employees might leave or do new things, or there might be layoffs. I know a couple of people that did Outco that came to my company later on and they felt like it didn't have the heart in it that they expected from the past (completely anecdotal personal reflection, ask people for yourself).
It's why every program is different. Like me and my partner have…
Yeah I totally get where you are coming from and we can and want to share more.
The hesitation is that people truly do have unique journeys at Formation. They do entirely different things at different paces and it's something noted by many people who go through, and it also makes it hard to review as no one else will have the experience you did again. You can go on leave and there is no expected timing. Some people have really demanding jobs already and need to ramp up and down completely unexpectedly... this is surprisingly common and I don't think I've ever seen a Fellow who hasn't adjusted their involvement because of unexpected things.
So we have to be super careful that people don't get misled by making assumptions about their experience or their self assessment of their skills or how fast they think they can do stuff, and we really want to give more personalized data and estimate…
No one has a right to any data, but they have a right to say CIRR's data is outdated, sorry if that wasn't clear.
I don't think I'm pedantic about why we don't report CIRR results or other reporting standards, I'll try to explain again very bluntly and directly.
Formation is a mentorship and benchmarking platform and not a program or school so we don't publish CIRR-like outcomes data. We really want to publish more data but when we sit down and look at it, it's just almost impossible.
We had two $500K+ seniors Meta offers in the past three weeks - for people with a many years of experience and we recently had someone with a few months of experience get a role paying much less at a startup that they are thrilled with.
It's super meaningless to publish CIRR-like data that doesn't take background into consideration.
Sounds easy, publish data by experience level right? Now because we wo…
I can't speak for the commenter, but I can say that in this market Formation is ideal if you can get some interviews yeah, and we help you prepare for them and increase your chances of passing (the primary goal is to help you level up in general, but more practically speaking, that's how I would frame it).
We are seeing hiring slowly "resume" at the top companies, and have more recruiters to backchannel people through - a small number of people get jobs this way! But it's a nice to have and not a guarantee or something you should expect coming in. The market hasn't recovered enough for that yet.
We have some exciting programs launching soon for people in college! And we have a handful of formal pipelines established recently (apprenticeship, formal recruiter backchannels, 3rd party recruiters). But for these pipelines again still edge cases and DO NOT JOIN to be handed interviews.
We…
Sorry to hear, yeah one of the reasons I talk about Codesmith so much is that they have a very polarizing brand of people who will fight tooth and nail for Codesmith and people who do not like it at all.
My opinion is the people that don't like it shouldn't have gone in the first place and chose to go because of the super positive promoters talking superficially about how life changing it is, but without going into the nitty gritty of how it all works and realizing it probably isn't the right thing for them. The info sessions tout $120/$130.... $180K salaries, and it gives hope to people who aren't a perfect fit that maybe they'll be one of those people. Maybe you will be but maybe you'll also win the lottery and people need to understand what THEIR OUTCOME might look like, and I talk to a lot of people about this because Codesmith does not help with this.
I highly recommend Codesmith…
FWIW, I don't recommend the vast majority of people who do Codesmith do Formation and the vast majority wouldn't be accepted.
I know a couple of people (literally 2, one dropped out and the other just chose Formation but was very close to going to Codesmith) that did this and it was well over a year ago and it was the correct decision. Both got FAANG-level jobs that were the perfect jobs for those two people.
I also know someone who dropped out of Formation and did Codeamith, and they did not get a job after and went back to school.
These are all edge cases and people reading this should not generally be considering Formation over Codesmith. You should absolutely consider Formation over Codesmith if you have 1+ year of SWE work experience already.
I want to reiterate that Formation is not a bootcamp or school and we don't teach anything. The people we work with with no experience al…
Interesting. Yeah I work with a number of people at Formation that have 1. done Outco before, 2. mentored at Outco. (Disclosure: Outco is a direct competitor to my company)
I used to recommend people look into Interview Kickstart, Pathrise, Outco, and Coachable, (and to some extend Interviewing.io if not looking for a holistic program) as the set of competitors around DS&A and interview prep.
But I removed Outco because they removed their application online and their website is wonky and seems not maintained.... it still says Copyright 2017.
Someone who did Outco recently before Formation also affirmed that in their experience Outco seemed to be running on autopilot with recordings and peer mock interviews and they felt like it wasn't really operating anymore.
I know they are a competitor so I want to triple emphasize this is just what I've observed and heard about Outco in my perso…
Hi, interview prep sounds exactly like what you are asking for. I'm the cofounder of Formation.dev and would recommend looking into Formation and Interview Kickstart if you are aiming to level up to a top tier company. Both are about the same price and take around the same amount of time.
BUT, both are super different day to day so feel free to ping me to ask questions.
I would recommend hoping on an IK info call they have every day to learn about IK and then applying to Formation and talking to a recruiter and then deciding if either, or neither, are a good fit.
Would you be doing this part time? And with 16 years of dev experience you probably have a ton of ability to pick things up quickly that you might not realize.
I would recommend doing a big project in a modern stack like React and Node.js and learning little things along the way as you get blocked.
I know Amazon will pay for a program but this approach would be more effective IMO.
When the time comes to job hunt, I would then look at interview prep programs like Formation (disclosure: co-founder) and Interview Kickstart. Something that recaps CS fundamentals and gets you interview ready.
Hi, thanks for sharing your experience and I hope we can/are helping you find a great next job.
This is correct that we don't force you to take a job or not. If you accept a job, you can often continue with Formation (if you continue job hunting) but it's case by case and not contractually obligated so we can protect against anyone taking advantage of us.
All we want is to see you in a great job you love, and it's completely correct that you are paying us and we need to make sure you get a return on investment but we're also small and over time well hopefully get better at helping people who are else comfortable voicing what they want/need even if they are less naturally comfortable doing that.
Hi all, I don't want to step on the discussion (I'm the co-founder of Formation) but will share my thoughts too. I think it's very important and healthy to talk openly about the pros and cons of programs so people can figure out what works for them, so feel free to ask me questions and I'll give the most transparent answers I can!
I also post the feedback with the Formation team because there are a couple of points of feedback that we can make improvements on and thanks for sharing that!
My personal thoughts:
1. I wouldn't say you HAVE to be extroverted but you do have to interact with people and one of the selling points is face time in 3-6 person small group sessions, and 1-1 mock interviews with legit industry engineers to get their perspective. The amount of sessions and types of sessions can adapt to you, so introverted people can get by, IMO, but you should expect to interact wi…
👋 Hi friends (specifically bootcamp grads), we just launched TIRA by Formation on Product Hunt and I wanted to share it here as a useful free tool and also to get your feedback. It's a dynamic 45 min benchmark to see how interview ready your DS&A skills that you hopefully find useful!
Hi all, I'm sure many of you know me already but I'm a long time group member who comments daily here and I've me a ton of what I would call friends along the way! I'm the co-founder of Formation.dev and I've done hundreds of DS&A interviews at Meta and a number of people on my team have as well. So we put our minds together and to come up with a solid tool to see how interview ready your DS&A skills are!
I would LOVE to discuss your experience in the comments here, and suggestions to improve the tool.
The benchmark takes 45 mins and is free, and it will tell you what areas you are strong and weak at, a…
Hi, DM me who! Our Fellowship recruiters are former FAANG recruiters and not really salespeople so it might be different from other programs. But no one should be a jerk to you and most people comment that the recruiters are helpful to talk to even if Formation isn't a good fit.
A weakness of our model though is that everyone is a industry engineer or recruiter and not a trained teacher or salesperson. You'd be surprised how many times a day we get session feedback where one person thought the mentor was the best ever and disliked them so much they requested to not have sessions with them again.
Pros and cons, you get to work with a ton of different people, but it takes some time to figure out who you get along with and who you don't.
But there is a bar for attitude where we would remove a mentor or an engineer.
Yeah I mean at Formation people pay us explicitly for interview prep mentorship so you can get resume reviews and mock interviews on demand (when you need them or ask for them), usually within a day, often same day, definitely same week, almost a 24/7 clock of availability across dozens of mentors across a dozen+ interview types. Occasionally people cancel mocks, or resume reviews take longer on rounds of feedback, but that's the bar for "career support" that people should expect if they are being promised career support.
The Codesmith career support is:
1. A handbook with a ton of very good resources, including the 'Codesmith Style Resume' and 'Codesmith Style Application' walkthroughs
2. 8 alumni you can book 1-1 sessions with who have varied schedules, some available in days, some in weeks, some never.
3. 2 alumni you can book for technical algo mock interviews who also have only…
One part of the polarization with Codesmith is that a handful of people do land FAANG jobs, even in 2023. Context matters. Someone got a job at Netflix, but it was a non-SWE job and it was in the field that the person had 8 YOE... which 100% CODESMITH HELPED THE PERSON, but this was not an outcome that anyone should EXPECT, it was a unique situation.
Someone got a job at LinkedIn recently, but the FAANG placements are really rare, because FAANG isn't interviewing bootcamp grads with no experience right now. If someone has experience then you might get a FAANG job.
\+1 to getting a good job at another company, they have a couple placements at Mavis Tire making in the mid six figures.
We (Formation) have formal and informal pipelines with FAANG companies and recruiters, and they are extremely picky about who they interview and I wish they would interview everyone, but they won't in this…
This is correct, I say 2+ YOE myself but maybe it's the definition of "difficult".
It's absolutely more competitive. I know Formation is working with a number of CURRENT OR FORMER FAANG ENGINEERS who are rusty and want to give interviews their best to stand out.
I'm super bias so I would argue that any current engineers benefit from mentorship to various degrees, but I am seeing it more competitive to get the offer.
People doing a great job on interviews but getting rejected is more common than in the past.
But if you have 2+ YOE, eepecially at FAANG, you'll get interviews for sure and you shouldn't have that difficult of a time. If you are come talk to me about Formation, Interview Kickstart, Pathrise, etc... because you might benefit from extra mentorship. If you worked at FAANG for 3-6 years, $5-$10K won't be a huge cost from your savings to save a ton of "difficulty" if that's w…
Hi, did you have any internships during school? If so I wouldn't do a bootcamp and would do a career accelerator like [Formation.dev](https://Formation.dev) (bias disclosure, my company) Interview Kickstart, Pathrise, Coachable, etc... (all different but worth looking into)
If you have a CS degree from a top tier university and are aiming for top tier companies, you need to be good at DS&A, and all of those options above help get interview ready with that, and a bootcamp won't help.
If you don't have any experience or projects of note then I would consider a bootcamp and aim for a non-top tier role. Codesmith is a pretty good option for this bucket for CS grads to get a six figure non-top tier tech role. Rithm, Launch School are other options of good bootcamps that you can research and compare to Flatiron.
Happy to answer more, I'm tight on time and can't right now, but feel free to D…
Ah, I can't give an answer for you and my advice depends on you and your background/circumstances.
Launch School Capstone will support you in building really good structured projects, optimized for the job hunt. I think this is something that Launch School, and Codesmith have really focused on (i.e. making these projects marketable and helping you market yourself in a super nuanced way).
100devs (i.e. an official cohort) is fantastic for free, and the approach isn't all thaaaat different, but there is a little less machinery involved in the resume part. Like Launch School/Codesmith/etc... will guide you through producing a very specific resume and many grads looks look the same. 100devs has a wider variance of resume outputs from the ones I've seen. If you do real client work, then that's also fantastic for a resume.
I don't know that many people who officially did a 100devs cohort, b…
It might be a conflict of interest because I'm the co-founder of an interview prep platform. I didn't disclose that above because it wasn't relevant and I genuinely wanted to answer with my Meta hat on, not my Formation hat, but I'll disclose here because now it is if we're talking about paid/free interview prep.
RE: "If you want something better – then you’re going to have to make it. That’s what I’ll be doing."
I know a couple of bootcamps that started for just that reason. I think one thing many people fail to realize when starting a business is that the skillset needed to run a business, manage, people, grow people's careers, etc... is completely different from that needed to make a "better bootcamp".
So it's more than just the skillset to make something better, but a large set of skills that I have not seen land all in one place.
I think Lambda School in my opinion WAS best marketing (almost so good everything else fell behind and caused a lot of problems). Codesmith in my opinion is like best at community building. Rithm in my opinion is best at live instruction.
We see all of the building a "better bootcamp" efforts turn into program that are the best at one thing and that's exactly wh…
At Formation we also believe in the value of peer mock interviews and do those too, but imagine having unlimited mock interviews with actual senior FAANG engineers who run them like the real deal... just a different level of prep for a different target role.
Again, just illustrating the difference and this is with my Formation, biased, hat on because my team has received some nasty emails from Codemsith grads like 'Never email me again, Codesmith gives us all we need forever' and such so clearing that up is self serving for me but I feel compelled in this context.
I've seen people get a little help with mocks and negotiation from Codesmith for future job transitions and not use any paid service, so I'm absolutely not saying anyone needs or doesn't need this, it's ultimately a personal choice, but just want the options out there as clear as possible so people can decide on their own.
I've worked with a couple dozen Codesmith people later on who have paid for Formation for their second, third, fourth job transitions and many still get advice from Codesmith at the same time. The main problem is those support engineers are like your PEERS at Formation and the mentors are actual FAANG-level recruiters and engineers who give better perspective for how top tier companies.
For example, someone's Codesmith mock interviewers told them to "practice their buzzwords more" and they have two mock interviews who focus on DS&A - who could be peers at Formation, versus dozens of FAANG-tier senior, mid, staff, manager level engineers you can choose from to do mocks with at Formation.
These alums have found the Codesmith network useful for referrals because people tend to stay connected for years after graduating.
If you get an offer on your own, free negotiation help from Eric K is…
\+1 to therapy not as a joke but as a tool to strengthen your emotional state.
At the same time though, just like you can have a therapist for your emotional state, a personal trainer for your physical state, a nutritionist for your dietary state, you might also benefit from a personal trainer for your SWE fundamentals.
Again (see my comment), I need to disclose that I'm the co-founder of Formation which was mentioned and I'm bias, but just like some people benefit from help in these areas and others don't, some people benefit from help with their CS fundamenals, be it Formation or Interviewing.io or Exponent or LeetCode Premium, or Structy, or reading a 200 page PDF someone shared on LinkedIn, and others don't, but it's something to consider)
I have seen a number of people in this position who have gone both ways. Note: I'm the co-founder of Formation, which you mentioned, that works with people with 1+ YOE as a SWE, you are the target demographic but I'm not commenting to talk about that and I'm purely trying to give you advice based on your post and wanted to preface with that before I get accused of ulterior motives. Genuinely trying to help here and I hope I have some useful insights.
Overall advice: don't quit your job, but what you are experiencing likely isn't just you and is indeed a long term consequence of crammed/12 week bootcamps that focus on getting a job over fundamental skills (this is a bias statement but my opinion).
\- having at least exactly 1 YOE or more at a single company is a good sign for recruiters that you weren't fired within that time so it's a sign you are a decent performer, so that's one good…
(I realize this comment might attract all kinds of haters from all sides but please understand that I'm trying to give this person good advice for them and it's in my opinion a neutral comment, with no ulterior motives. I've been getting harassed with downvote campaigns and trolls for the past two weeks after posting about Codesmith's recent placements, so please read the content and evaluate it fairly before downvoting this or making a snarky comment)
Codesmith indeed is a lot of work to get into but if you are already working in a stable job, then putting in that work will definitely be worth it if Codesmith is the right program for you. It will be a waste of time if it's not. So the question I think you should answer first is is Codesmith the right program for you, and if it is, put in the work, and if it isn't, I would encourage choosing another program.
Some context that it sounds…
It's based on the experience level and how much work we think you need based on your benchmark. The longer you are at Formation, the more money we spend mentoring you, so if you need more work, the fee is higher.
I need to reiterate emphatically that Formation is not a "program" and what you do will be different from what everyone else does (like the same topics and skills, but completely different pacing and focus areas).
So we want the fees to be based on how much delta we think you have to getting to the top-tier bar and to pay a fair amount based on what others with similar background and starting point are paying.
Generally speaking if you have several years of SWE work experience, maybe an interview or two on the horizon, you'll be on the lower side and less than a year of contract/internship/freelancing on the higher side - most people in the middle. We only take people with un…
"FAANG canonical levels" are just the leveling system that the majority of TECH industry currently adopts. So if you want to be an engineer in the tech industry, you should be familiar those levels or you'll have trouble navigating the industry, even if you use other names yourself. Other industry use other words, like in the banking industry you can be a "Vice President Engineer" which is a tech industry "senior". But if want to be in the tech industry and you insist on a vice president title you'll struggle to navigate (from what I've seen for exactly the Vice President case while I was at Facebook)
My advice has been extremely consistently to get a an appropriate job for your experience and skills and then over-perform and have steady career growth from there. The levels don't matter, it just so happens that no bootcamp gives you the experience needed to go beyond entry level. If yo…
2024 Bootcamp Predictions Mega Post. Revisiting my 2023 prediction post and exploring what I see ahead for 2024. 2023 was a rough year for bootcamps and the future doesn't look great for traditional programs - 2024 will be a year of caution, but I'm optimistically excited to see what happens!
Hi all 👋 for those that don't know me, I'm Michael, daily commenter here for about two years. Congratulations to the sub on hitting 40K members today! It was around 10K when I first joined!
**Background**
I'm the co-founder of a mentorship platform and work with a large number of bootcamp grads later on in their careers in their 2nd, 3rd, 4th, job transitions. Before this I worked at Facebook from 2009 to 2017 as it grew from 200 engineers to 10,000 engineers and leveled up from an intern to an E7 principal engineer in about 5-6 years. I did over 450 interviews of everything from interns to dire…
This is correct, the OP didn't properly quote the price. Formation's unlimited packages are currently $**7500 to $13500 flat fee**s and you receive continuous technical mentorship and support until you get a job, which might be months or over a year, and it's significantly cheaper than many bootcamps for the amount of time for most people.
Formation is not me doing mentorship. We have a team of two dozen people who are building a platform and product that supports dynamic mentorship by giving you practice, benchmarks, and 3-5 person or 1-1 sessions with over 200 industry mentors (who are individual engineers and recruiters, many of whom are seniors plus engineers).
We have thousands of tasks you can do, hundreds of sessions across dozens of types, over a dozen mock interview types.
I'm not involved in the actual technical skill side nor do I run sessions, I build the platform and I help people that typically have senior or staff FAANG interviews with advice on preparation and helping navigate the job hunt process.
This reply is mostly for other people reading it to clarify what Formation is and that it has very little to do with me. Sophie is the founder who steers the direction of the company, she's just not on Reddit…
Hi, I wrote a more through reply about Formation on the thread but didn't answer these questions yet, so I'll do my best here:
\- How many paying customers ever? I don't want to give the exact amount for competitive reasons, nor do I have it right now, but it's the high 3 figures / low end of 4 figures of people who have been accepted and joined
\- It takes people about 6 to 8 months (it's gotten longer in the weaker 2023 market) on average to find a job, but the range is very large because of these factors:
1. We work with people who usually have 1+ years of SWE work experience but it varies from 0 to 20+ and people with 0 come in with no interviews in sight and the people with 2+ or more come with with interviews lined up.
2. People do Formation part time on their own schedule and put in whatever time they can, so it takes people variable amounts of time to find a job based on thei…
u/michaelnovatireplied·DELETED · archived copy★ FEATURED
I wrote a long comment on the top level post, but all of this is correct. We don't disclose much information about our membership base and because of the flexibility of Formation, it's hard to come up with useful numbers that you can use. I usually suggest to find people with a similar background and goals to yourself that did Formation or are here now and find out more about their experience. There are people who get jobs in 2 weeks, people who struggle to get a job in 2+ years, and everything in between, and the experience those people have are wildly different - mostly resulting from different backgrounds and goals.
We aren't a school or bootcamps and we have a dynamic program so everyone's experience is unique, we also don't ask people to write reviews. But we have a lot of strengths and weaknesses that I'm happy to elaborate on.
Hi I can comment, I'm one of the co-funders and heavily involved day by day, so my answer is super biased, but I can tell you about what we do and why we do it.
First off, we're not a bootcamp and we don't have a curriculum or teach anything. We're a mentorship platform to practice, benchmark, and prepare for interviews and become a stronger engineer while doing it. Everyone does different things with us and the personal trainer analogy below is pretty good imo... we help you get from A to B with your job hunting goals and your path to get there will look unique to you.
Second off, the vast majority of people we work with have 1+ YOE as SWE (often more) and are currently employed and doing Formation part time on the side. Our platform supports you ramping up or down your commitment every week, so people practice at their own pace and it tends to take people about 6 months or so before…
I'm sorry you feel that way but respect your opinion.
I've been here day in day out, giving people advice on all kinds of things and I'm sorry if you feel my tone has changed, but when I was first around - I had some way more intense conversations with some Codesmith alumni who claimed I was "stealing here with the secret motivation of stealing studetns to Formation".
I am here to provide a unique lens of industry perspective + bootcamp perspective (having worked with hundreds of bootcamp grads from many programs but also interviewed 450 people at Facebook, built interview programs, observer of hiring committees, work on peformance review tooling,, etc...)
Quick story. There was a period of time when I had a goal of connecting with 10 grads a day from 20 different bootcamps on LinkedIn and I was accused of "Tracking down Codesmith students and trying to steal them to go to Formation…
Thanks for sharing.
I agree to some extent that showing what others in the industry do would be useful to know in general but I also think the analysis is very clear on how it should be used, and lack of this doesn't cancel out the value.
There are two reasons I focused on Codesmith:
1. Codesmith very publicly considers itself in a league of it's own. They claim to be the only non-traditional program to take people from zero to mid-level/senior and compare themselves to "elite grad schools". I therefore hold them to the bar they are presenting for themselves and don't think they should be compared to others.
2. As I said in the disclaimers, I have been following their placements passively for almost two years now and my friends and colleagues in industry (specifically engineers and recruiters) feel that Codesmith grads representation is anecdotally far more exaggerated than the rest.…
I appreciate your challenges and it gives me a chance to explain how things work instead of one offs and generalizations.
1. Just like Codesmith we give guidance on Formation and you can see that below, copy pasted from our notes (I think it can be improved but that's as of 12/7/2023) and I don't think this is misrepresenting in any way what Formation is or tricking anyone into thinking it is something else.
2. Adults are adults, we are not responsible for anyone's LinkedIns just like Codesmith isn't responsible for them. The reason I did my post was because it was a pattern of 92% of recent Codesmith placements.
3. If someone said that 92% of Formation placements were listing Formation as a fake job and people were all not following our advice and going rogue by presenting Formation some kind of full time software engineer job experience, and that was the reason they were getting jobs…
In all seriousness, the reason for Codesmith alumni's heavy, anonymous presence on Reddit is becasue people [exaggerate to get jobs](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/18cpq98/analysis_of_52_most_recent_codesmith_offers/) and if they out themselves on LinkedIn or somewhere else or give more details about who they are, they risk getting "found out" by colleagues and losing those jobs. I talk to my friend at a recent hiring and asked them if they knew a specific Codesmith grad the company just hired a few weeks ago had no experience (obviously friendly and off the books) and they said no idea from the resume or interview. So it's totally in people's interest to not share their success in any way that might reveal who they are, if it's based on stretching the truth.
At Formation, we had someone start at Meta this week and she happily participated in a blog post about her job…
This is a common problem with the Codesmith approach (not the majority, but it's a common thing to happen) and there's a number of people at career accelerators like Formation, Interview Kickstart, Pathrise, etc... as a result.
The Codesmith approach can really throw off your mental model of the industry because you hustle into roles many people are not ready for or the right fit for, and have a hard time understanding what to do next. It works if you keep the hustle going until you land a solid legit tech job, but it doesn't handle the other cases so well.
This market is making Codesmith grads learn quickly that you are not a mid level or senior engineer at top tier companies. So you get stuck with not getting these interviews, not knowing why, and then failing the mid-level/senior top tier interviews you do get. (This is the pattern I've seen).
With the exaggerations seen in most r…
Analysis of 52 most recent Codesmith offers LinkedIns and trends on who is getting a job right now and why. Summary: an average of 11.7 months of experience claimed for 3 week long projects (lacking evidence of additional time spent). Majority claimed to have prior SWE-adjacent experience.
Hi all, I was recently made aware of the 52 most recent reported Codesmith placements (not saying when this was provided to protect identities, but it's from a window within the past couple months) and did a summary of how those people present themselves on LinkedIn. Please note that this is an UNOFFICIAL ANALYSIS based on an ordered list of placements during a 2 month time window. I won't be DOXing anyone on the list, and because this is just my personal analysis and not an official study, you should use this information for illustrative purposes only. There are numerous ways you can try to reproduce…
There is a lot of negatively directed towards the job market and not the bootcamps themselves IMO.
Chris from Launch School said it well, their outcomes in later 2023 will likely be lower than in the past, but the education is the same, the experience is the same, and the graduates have the same technical bar, it's the market that's changed.
The programs complained about the most were often complained about even in the good market.
I did an analysis of the 52 most recent Codesmith placements (which I might publish soon) and people are getting jobs! But that average person claimed their 3 week group project was 11.7 months of "experience" on their LinkedIn and the majority (about 2/3) claimed to have some kind of relevant past experience (systems engineer, developer, tech project manager, data analyst, etc...) so I'm sure people are still having great experiences, but clearly the bar t…