Hi! Sorry, I had answered in other threads but not here and happy to provide more context.We do referrals but they are more limited than before because companies are hiring less and have more rigid criteria (which tends to disadvantage people with less experience). In the very limited scenarios where we do refer people, they remain high hit and effective. We constantly change the website as the market changes.
We are far from perfect, but I think some of the negativity in this thread stems from the market changing suddenly in Fall 2022. A small number of people joined during the hot market when many people they spoke with who did Formation at the time were referred to the canonical FAANG and they expected to follow the same path. They trained hard, got their skill level up and then things changed suddenly and all those pipelines shut off. They are understandably frustrated, which I symp…
I think a larger problem is that a small number of people joined during the hot market when a lot of people they spoke with at Formation were referred to FAANG and saw no reason why they wouldn't follow that path. They were in Formation long enough to get their skills up during the hot market and are in job hunting mode. Then things changed very suddenly, they currently have no path to FAANG (and few do), and they are frustrated, which I totally understand and sympathize with and a lot of people in this bucket are working with us productively to strategize about what to do.
There are two things in my opinion about the website though that people who are not at Formation have been referring to:
1. We have adjusted our website over months to the market. The overall structure hasn't changed at all, but it used to have one statement about 'high hit rate referrals' and another about 'getting…
We don't force you to take any job and if you want to work at FAANG, **no one is kicking you out and I challenge you to leave Formation and find another path to FAANG right now.** We never promised how long it would take, and we work with people as long as they want as long as they do their part and keep intending to job hunt.
We've had a jump in placements in the past three weeks and people gave very high satisfaction ratings despite more people choosing to take non-FAANG jobs, like Chegg, Citibank, and others. For example, one person chose to change their target away from FAANG companies and was thrilled with how Formation supported them doing that and thrilled with the job they received.
I think this is very fair and is a top reason people come to Formation. If you really want to work at FAANG, you can come to Formation, don't expect to get a job on any timeframe (which I believe we…
It sounds like you aren't on the same page about the value and reasons to do Formation, for example, we try to be very clear that we feel that there are hundreds of thousands of hours of content out there already that you can get for free and having original content is not a large value add - you shouldn't have joined for that reason. My offer remains open to personally and confidentially handle the refund on your ISA and remove you from the program to take responsibility for the misunderstandings that are ultimately our fault.
Otherwise if you don't want to leave and want to make the best of it, you have Daniel, Danielle, Selena, Sophie, ALL of the FMs, all with open arms wanting to talk to you and support you and help you keep chugging along in this challenging job market until you get a job - we all genuinely care.
Like I said, no hard feelings and no judgement if you want to turn t…
You sound extremely frustrated in your job hunt and with Formation, but taking it out on the team and portraying us a money hungry individuals repeatedly is offensive. Sophie and I have not made a penny from Formation and pay ourselves $0 from day 1. Sophie has pledged any profit from Formation's stock to reinvest into others in the future and to not benefit personally from.
What makes you think we are money hungry and preying on the weak? When people pay upfront we have cash flow, and when people pay with ISAs we generally get paid far in the future, and it's a lot better for people to pay upfront for a small company like us even if we get paid more on an ISA down the road. So I think you have a big misunderstanding about ISAs. If Formation was 100% upfront only, it would be tremendously better as a business model. We offter ISAs to support people that don't have thousands of dollars l…
Hi, I haven't read the entire post yet! We collect feedback on every interaction you have at Formation, as you know, annoyingly so, and I'm really heartbroken that you have been feeling negatively for a while and this hasn't been surfaced, or if it has been and you don't feel it was actioned, I apologize and want to make it right.
Who did you talk to about a refund or adjustment if you want to leave early and can you message me about that? I don't think I saw this ever reach my inbox and want to launch an investigation of what happened.
We can't control the job market and referral opportunities obviously, but we have been investing in adding FAANG/ex-FAANG recruiters as career coaches to try to level up our career support in these hardder times (and this was intended to be a benefit), but I'm happy to jump into your private channel and help advise if you are open to that!
My hunch is it's just a human error mistake and they will refund you eventually and I would suggest reaching out... someone has probably already seen this post and will get it done ASAP. Of all the programs and sketchy things with other bootcamps fine print, Codesmith's run really well and I have zero doubts they will refund you fully.
I know personally, when someone leaves or backs out of the program I work on that you want to make sure they are refunded promptly and leave on good terms, partially for this reason \^\^\^ because it looks like you don't have your operations in order, and while it wasn't the right program for you, it might be for your friends, or for you in the future :D
Hi, we do run credit checks but look beyond just the score alone for ISAs, so having just a low score only won't necessarily disqualify you from an ISA. Since our coaching and training is ongoing until you get a really good job - people are generally able to pay the ISA even if their prior credit had some minor issues and this model works really well in this case.
There are other payment options you can discuss after applying yeah depending on your circumstances. And we will continue to try to provide more options so people can choose what works for them!
Hi, yeah can answer!
* We published a little breakdown here: [https://formation.dev/blog/2022-formation-fellow-placements/](https://formation.dev/blog/2022-formation-fellow-placements/). Most people have some experience coming in (2/3 of people) and the 1/3 that didn't, were equally split across bootcamp grads, CS grads, and self taught developers.
* No upfront payment or deposit currently
* Yes open to Canadians but we administer the ISA ourselves, and payments are based on and made in CAD if you get a job in Canada.
BloomTech is formerly Lambda School and changed names as a result of a trademark lawsuit. Their founder, Austen, is a natural marketer and grew the school way too fast. I have thoughts here but they are just opinions and not relevant. BloomTech in its current form is nothing like Lambda School so the past reviews and bad press are somewhat irrelevant.
CourseReport is a supporting member of CIRR and accepts payments from bootcamps to promote them. Switch Up makes money by referring people to specific bootcamps. Career Karma also pays fees to refer people to specific bootcamps. So all three are biased as their success depends on the bootcamp industries success and you have at their content through that lens.
CIRR is another irrelevant source nowadays because no one is in them. If a bootcamp takes part in CIRR you can trust the numbers they report to CIRR. But CIRR's most recent standard…
Hi, the ISA is based on eligibility to work yeah so I don't know if/when that would change, but our mission is to have training that works for everyone just no timeframe I can give.
We don't rely on special relationships necessarily for jobs. We help you find the best path we can for companies to meet your goals. Sometimes that is referrals and sometimes we just help people apply to the right places. But we don't have specific pipelines that you automatically get placed in with specific companies. Referrals also don't guarantee interviews always, and referrals come in many shapes and sizes as well. Targeting most companies in Canada that have a presence or connections to the USA (which is a lot of the top companies) is reasonable. We are less connected with Canadian specific companies.
Ping alumni and ask! You ideally want to learn about the experiences of people who had a similar background to you and how they felt about the program.
It's really hard to trust any kind of "ratings" overall.
Course Report is a supporting member of CIRR and accepts sponsorships from bootcamps.
SwitchUp has a disclosure that they get paid by bootcamps that they send people to.
Career Karma gets paid by bootcamps to send people there and has sponsorships.
CIRR itself is founded by a bootcamp loan company and supported by a bootcamp review company (Course Report).
Reddit is full of anecdotal experiences from anonymous people without much context.
And bootcamps do all kinds of tactics to encourage positive reviews and discourage negative ones. In fact all businesses do.... like I saw at a bank even: "If we weren't a 10, talk to a manager first to work out any issues you had with your…
That sounds like a very stressful situation, but it also sounds like a Lambda School problem.
Some ISAs (like Pathrise and Formation) explicitly only look at BASE salary on a new job to prevent this kind of thing from happening because its awful.... especially to take the money without any heads-up or warning. As you said, because there is no regulation, an ISA is just a contract between two people, and some people can be trusted more than others, and you are ultimately banking on your trust with the specific program.
Sorry this happened to you :(
I co-founded a technology company called Formation.dev but we are building a technology platform to train engineers that's nothing at all like a school.
We offer ISAs as a choice to engineers who train on our platform to pay for that training, yes, but it's fairly irrelevant, it's a choice people wanted and we are indifferent. As long as you put in the work, we work with you for as long as it takes to get a new job you love, so people like the ISA model to wait until that transition to pay.
I'm here with my real name, my one account, giving people advice day in and day out and I'm sure some of those people will back me up. I'm here consistently being helpful and reasonable in all my discussions about all kinds of topics and not once have a not given genuinely helpful advice to someone.
**On the other hand, you work at Codesmith on the side (or worked recently), do not disclose it, and keep defaming me and my company when I talk about Codesmith in any way that is perceived negatively. EDIT: the person denies they worked/work there and claims this is false.**
Responses to statements for other people reading this:
1. Formation doesn't cost at least $20,000+. I don't know where you are getting that number or if you know how ISA caps work. We have several paths and several payment options. Only one pathway, if paid with an ISA, can exceed $20K and it certainly is not the mini…
cc: u/Yak_Overflow as well, RE: ISAs.
I can give my perspective on ISAs in general (they aren't unique to coding bootcamps), this might be a bit long and boring but it's a very interesting topic and a lot of ISAs are full of problems.
TRANSPARENT DISCLOSURE: I am the co-founder of a non-bootcamp training and mentoring program that successfully offers ISAs.
"Scam" is a strong word, but most bootcamps that offered ISAs have stopped offering them because they are absolutely terrible for the company, especially when a lot of bootcamps don't have great placement rates. Lambda School (BloomTech) used to be a pioneer of ISAs and recently stopped offering them. About 50% of people who start BloomTech get a job within 6 months of graduating, so 8 months + 6 months = 14 months for HALF of the people that started to even START paying for their education. Meanwhile BloomTech has to pay its staff…
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…
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…
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…
Nope, the ISA is just a convenient way for people to pay. We often advise people to turn down offers for all kinds of reasons. Our ISA is only based on your base salary and people will very often accept offers with lower base salaries but with way more equity and higher total compensation. Sometimes people just accept straight up lower offers because of company fit (i.e. someone's dream company, and another company tries to compete and outbid them with a larger offer). I've seen time and time again (even to myself at Facebook) where while these FAANG-level offers sound absurdly high in the moment, your long term income will be dictated by choosing the right company that you succeed at.
It's actually a challenge because we work with a decent amount of bootcamp grads later in their careers who had ISAs with like crazy fine print (5 year paybacks, onerous requirements for job guarantees,…
In my opinion, the problem with ISAs and coding bootcamps is that an ISA only works if you are actually guaranteed to get a job at the end, then it's a win-win. Unfortunately, like you pointed out, so many people don't get jobs out of bootcamps and break this model. The win-win approach of both sides giving 100% until the day you get that job has been working really well for us at [Formation.dev](https://Formation.dev), but we're not a bootcamp or eduction program so it's a little different.
u/Comfortable-Cap-8507 do you think it would make a difference for you if GA was 100% training you until you got that job without stopping or do you still think you it would be a bad idea to do an ISA?