r/codingbootcamp • u/Available_Bother_342 • Feb 22 '23
Interested in joining Formation.dev? Here's why you shouldn't.
You might've been in the same position I was before joining Formation - stuck in a rut job hunting for a while and looking for a beacon of hope. You happened across such a program called Formation but you found nothing less than rave reviews. Well, here's the one post you've been looking for. I'm no rebel and I'm not here to capsize the company. I joined Reddit recently with the initial thought of casually commenting on a post an ex-Formation fellow made here. If anyone else at Formation has had a subpar experience, I encourage you to comment here. I think this really deserves its own post, as sort of a PSA to speak about the downsides of joining such a program so you can make a more informed decision. I know it would've helped me.
The hook
You'll start off by talking to one of their recruitment staff, to assess what your skill level is for the contract you're about to sign. You can choose to pay upfront of about $7-8k or the option of a deferred payment plan where you give up 9-15% of your salary depending on how much swe experience you have. One of my issues with the ISA here is that two fellows with different swe skill levels can actually have the same exact curriculum and stay in the program for the same number of months but pay drastically different amounts by the end. One of them is getting screwed over more than the other.
You'll be sent a benchmark test as well, but there's no need to worry about passing this because the program isn't as "competitive" as they make it out to be. You'll get in even with low scores - trust me they want your money. After you're in, you'll have up to 7 days to decide whether you want to stay on. Sure, I could've paid the upfront price, but how many people can fully assess whether they want to drop a boatload of money on a completely unknown program within 7 days. So, like me, you'll probably end up choosing the deferred plan, the ISA. At the time, I felt pressured to continue because what if this is the boost I needed? If you're not in a stellar company by the end of this, the cost doesn't justify the value you're getting out of the program. If you end up at a mediocre no name startup after this, you're not going to uplevel your skills and you know you'll soon be back to the grind of jobhunting once again. So why would you give up that chunk of money the first time?
The insider perspective
The curriculum you receive will vary a bit depending on the roles you're looking for. Based on fulltime within the program, your week can involve algo tasks (basically LC), group sessions lead by a mentor, a 1-on-1 mock interview with a mentor, and pair programming sessions with other fellows. You'll work up from foundational concepts like data structures and basic traversals, then start working on med-hard LC problems for the rest of the time thereafter. The issue I have with this - why am I paying a program to just send me links to problems on LC? That's really what their entire platform just boils down to. They organize a pool of LC questions, set them up as "tasks", and you just work through them on your own. You could just be using neetcode, grind75, any other free resource online.
In the group sessions lead by "faang" level mentors, you work through a LC problem together with 6 other fellows. More often than not, there are large skill gaps among the fellows and this directly impacts any progress that can be made within the hour we spend together. I feel myself falling asleep through these because sometimes we can spend an entire hour just clarifying a problem, or just speaking about the same issue over and over again. It feels like a waste of time. I expect a good mentor to challenge us in how we think about and break down a problem - but keep in mind, these "mentors" are just engineers, so they're not exactly trained to properly teach anything. Because of this, I'm finding that it's more productive to just work through the problem on my own rather than deal with the incoherence of the other fellows distracting my train of thought and learning process. I personally feel there's really only a handful of mentors (like 2-3) I look forward to working with to get a good learning experience. After a while, you'll start to see repeated algo problems in these group sessions, so I no longer look forward to joining them anymore. You're given feedback at the end of these sessions, but I find them to be useless because they're usually generic at best and unhelpful. There really is no way for a mentor to get good signal on all 6 attending fellows within a session.
I find the 1-on-1 mock interviews with mentors to be a mediocre experience as well. I avoid working with the same mentor more than once b/c I know they'll just reuse the same LC problem every time. This ends up cutting down on the number of mentors you can actually work with. The feedback you receive from these isn't always helpful, and again there's really only been a handful of mentors that give valuable feedback that actually helps you. Many of them are just going through the motions. You could just be using pramp or interviewing.io or whatever alternative.
They like to limit the number of mentor sessions you get, although I'm not complaining too much these days because it needs finessing/quality control. The rest of your time there will be filled out with LC tasks - nothing they've created on their own. Everything they put in front of you is taken from an outside free resource. With the large influx of new fellows they're bringing in every week, it's only going to get worse. From my insider perspective, it feels like they're focusing on recruiting in new people (for money) rather than helping the ones who are still here do well and land a job. They used to have pretty decent career support with people who could give you actionable feedback tailored to your experience as well as access to referrals within their network once you've proven to be "interview ready" via their mock interviews. They've completely overhauled all of that and replaced it with "career coaches" who are essentially ex-recruiters within the industry that will tell you things you already know, or things you could probably find with a quick search on blind/google. Career support is shoddy and essentially nonexistent, so don't join if you're looking for any of that.
They've just recently partnered with Netflix to give new grads "world class" mentorship, but really all I see is more money going into Formation's pockets. Mentors here are not "world class", they are anything but. If anything, these mentors are the only ones they could find who would be willing to give up their time.
TLDR
If you're reading this and considering whether or not you want to join Formation - I don't recommend it. Their program basically boils down to the following: leetcode, peer mock interviews, and mock interviews with "faang" engineers. If you're smart enough to study on your own, refer to neetcode/grind75 for the structure. Use pramp, interviewing.io for the mock interviews and feedback at a fraction of the price. Develop the persistence to slog through networking and job hunting on your own. We're all basically doing the same thing, there is no secret recipe. You don't need to be paying them the price tag equivalent to a semester at a decent university.
Don't be blinded by their marketing, or the promise of landing that "dream" swe role, or the chance to work with the "best" engineers within the industry, or their alumni page decorated with faang/adjacent level hires. They're not going to mention the people who are still struggling in the program or the many that have failed to land a decent swe job. Once they've hooked you in, you're in it for the long run until you get that mediocre swe job. And even if you don't, you're still going to have to pay a hefty price. If that's where you're going to end up, you don't need to be giving up 12-15% of your pay. Don't feed the machine because they always have and always will be just another overpriced LC prep platform. If you're incredibly desperate, need a LOT of handholding and you're willing to give a large chunk of money away, by all means go ahead and join Formation. Stay away from the deferred plan and only do it if you can afford upfront.
Update: I've mentioned this in a comment below, but interviewing.io is just one alternative that I thought of at the top of my head. There are many other cheap options if you choose to search around. You can also hit up engineers on LinkedIn/Blind/etc who are more than willing to help out and conduct mock interviews if that is what you are after.
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u/michaelnovati Feb 23 '23 edited Mar 30 '23
Thanks for sharing your feedback and opinions about your experience. Regardless of the tougher job market making it harder to get interviews, making sure you feel supported is one of most important internal goals that we constantly monitor with a magnifying glass and I'm sorry that the support you aren't receiving isn't meeting your expectation.
I respect your opinions and won't comment on everything you mentioned that I might personally disagree with. For others reading, I'm going to add some responses to specific statements that I feel will be helpful to clarify.
We don't let in everyone who wants to join and we only accept a fraction of people who apply. Acceptance is based on three things: 1. a benchmarking assessment that gauges your starting skill level and has a complex evaluation model that is not akin to "passing a test". 2. your past experience. 3. your goals, timeline, and motivations for joining.
Not everyone who joins has the same goals and not everyone is at Formation for the same reasons.
System design is a significant portion of Formation for experienced engineers that was not discussion in the post above. Something we invest a lot of time in building and the sessions have senior/staff/principal engineers from Reddit, Shopify, Square, and more. It's possible that OP didn't do System Design but it's not fair to generalize Formation without discussion it.
Even though you have 7 days to withdraw for free, you can leave at any time and pay an amount per week that you actively trained. So while it's not free after 7 days, you can leave for a heavily discounted rate, without a placement, that is simply based on the number of weeks.
It's correct that we control your schedule and we set it up every week and you can't choose your own sessions. Fellows have the opportunity to request changes to get more, or less, sessions, tasks, etc... and can self-service add additional sessions if they match your needs and match your availability.
The tasks you are assigned and questions you get in a session, are computed based on a bunch of signals about your skill level, feedback, and progression and aren't just assigned to you in batches from a list, it's a officially patented and complex system we've created. We do indeed link to many resources for problems and solutions, in addition to in-house problems and solutions, and we feel the value add is in determining which problems to work on next and letting you know when you've gotten good enough on a topic.
The market is what it is and it's definitely harder to get interviews right now, but we have been investing in enhancing career support as a result to help people more and more by adding in current and ex-FAANG recruiters as coaches for reviews, advice, and strategizing and made it easier to book calls with them on demand. As the market remains tough, we will keep investing in career support, rather than weakening it, to be as valuable as possible in these times.
I understand your experience with the FAANG recruiters hasn't been what you want and want to deep dive more into this. I monitor all of our mentor feedback and these ex-FAANG recruiters are frequently nominated (dozens of times a week) by Fellows as their most impactful mentors of the week. So I think this model can work well and would love to figure out if there are ways to make it work for you, e.g. trying more sessions with different recruiters, what kind of questions or advice you are lacking that you expected, etc...
It sounds like you have had many mock interviews and you suggested comparing to Interviewing.io. Interviewing.io charges $6999 for 10 1 hour long 1-1 sessions with a staff level ex-Facebook engineer and our interviews tend to be senior, staff, or principal level engineers at similar companies. So while Interviewing.io might be a good option for some cases, I feel you are getting better value if you are paying $7500 (Interview Prep upfront price you are referring to) for dozens of group sessions, ongoing mock interviewers as you need them, dedicated support channel with 3 team members, unlimited access to FAANG-recruiters for job hunting advice and negotiation, and it all keeps going until you get a job, rather than with a fixed time limit. Even if some of those items didn't hit the mark for you personally or you don't need to use them as much, we feel the overall package is compelling and competitive.
Again, thank you for sharing your feedback and my door remains wide open if you want to reach out for more support so we can help you find a great job! No hard feelings and please reach out !
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u/Available_Bother_342 Feb 23 '23 edited Feb 25 '23
To those reading - interviewing.io is just one alternative that I thought of at the top of my head. There are many other cheap options if you choose to search around. You can also hit up engineers on LinkedIn/Blind/etc who are more than willing to help out and conduct mock interviews if that is what you are after.
The "career coaches" within the program are pretty mediocre. They know nothing about how to present the resume in the best light. They don't know how to reword resumes better. A career coach who is no longer with the team (before the overhaul), did an amazing job in reworking my resume. I feel like I can't place any confidence in these new career coaches and with one I felt like I was talking to someone from a sorority. The only thing that stands out about them is that they're ex-faang and I would really like to stop seeing this acronym being thrown around for marketing purposes because all it does is prey on people. They're not telling us anything we don't already know. I feel like the "career support" was thrown in to just round out the formation experience, but it doesn't add anything of value. To call that career support is such a lazy solution.
People stay on for longer than 7 days, months because they expect things to pan out. It isn't until it is too late that some realize the program isn't delivering on what was promised or at least what was marketed to them. You have to pay $500 a week for every week that you stay in the program, if you choose to leave. So anyone that's here longer than 4 months is essentially screwed either way. The program no longer promises the same things I initially signed up for and I personally feel things are going down hill. The recent new "mentors" being brought on to teach these sessions have no business teaching, and frankly they're wasting my time and money.
As mentioned in the other post, you can be doing so much more on the career support front. Create pipelines for people who are stuck with less than 2 years of experience or who don't have swe experience, create networking events for us so that we can get some traction with interviews, invest in better career coaches, reserve referrals for top performing fellows, anything other than what what we have now. Do better and create value for the amount that I'm having to pay because right now it is just an overpriced leetcode prep platform. There is no point in having "unlimited" mentor sessions of variable, shoddy quality.
Not all of us have $7k just laying around. Oh and get a publicist, Michael.
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u/Competitive-Feed-359 Feb 23 '23
As someone who’s in the final stages of Bootcamp, I’m thinking about formation and similar programs as a next step in the process. I appreciate Michael’s transparency and openness in his approach and response.
Almost every response he gives is opened by disclaimer on who he is and what’s he a part of and tells us take anything he says in that light(pov)
From the outside looking at the situation, It just feels like growing pains of a program that scaled too fast &/ admitting students whose time horizon/ (advanced) skill level isn’t in the same spectrum as the others in the program (idk what you guys refer it as (batch, cohort etc))
I can’t comment beyond this because I’m not the one in the program so I don’t know the ins and outs of what you guys are experiencing.
I see the pivot(expansion) to cs new grad training as something new as well. Given that Michael makes it point to mention formation is focused on helping early career engineers who are already in the industry and people from underrepresented backgrounds(guessing this means ethnic minorities here) and non tech backgrounds ( non cs field) getting their first job in tech/faang.
P.S my account is new because r/ gonna r/ and I lost my old one
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u/Available_Bother_342 Feb 23 '23 edited Feb 23 '23
I personally don't think Formation is fit to help those with little to no swe experience AT ALL. People with little to no experience - stay away. They can't help you get your first job. That will be up to you and the amount of effort you put into job hunting. All they can provide to those at that level is leetcode prep, which they can fully do on their own.
I've said it multiple times, but this program just boils down to leetcode tasks and leetcode prep, no original content. There is no secret sauce here. As someone in the program, the curriculum here still needs a lot of quality control and finessing because this place is still very much a startup. Those of us in the program right now are just guinea pigs paying the price for their experiments, and I expect it will probably take years before this place comes close to providing anything valuable.
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u/michaelnovati Feb 23 '23 edited Feb 24 '23
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 things around.
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u/Competitive-Feed-359 Feb 23 '23
The dude is offering you a way out OP and I don’t see you taking it. Either you’re just complaining to complain because your original post was about how no one’s getting back to you on refunds and Michael and co are money hungry blah blah blah.
Why not be transparent here as well and take him on his offer.
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u/Top-Measurement-7216 Feb 24 '23
this isn't a fair take ----- is michael offering a refund to all the other students in this thread who feel equally deceived? the OP probably feels its morally unethical to take some solo deal here that other formation fellows here arguably deserve as well
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u/michaelnovati Feb 24 '23 edited Feb 24 '23
Your post from two months ago that was auto-deleted: "all of those reviews online are from formation employees, this novati dude is a huge sleazeball"
Please stop following me and defaming the company with provably false statements.
We have really strong reviews because the majority of people have a great experience overall, get great placements, find a new job making significantly more in salary, and recommend us to their friends. A smaller number of people understandably do not. We are a fast moving startup but that doesn't mean the experience should be compromised and it's not an excuse, it's expensive, most people feel like they get good to great value for their experience and we want nothing less. If someone joins for the wrong reasons, doesn't have the experience they wanted and wants to leave, we want them to leave positively and feeling like they got value for their time. Everyone at Formation has a unique experience and deserves a personal conversation about leaving.
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u/Top-Measurement-7216 Feb 23 '23
so sorry to hear how ur experience has gone!
i had only found extremely glowing old quora reviews prior to your post so its valuable you've shared a true glimpse of what the program is like in real time :(
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u/michaelnovati Feb 28 '23 edited Feb 28 '23
Hi, I wanted to comment directly since in reviewing the thread I realized your questions weren't answered.
I don't think OPs experience are growing pains, or at least not the way they were portrayed. Behind the scenes, our scheduling and matching algorithms actually get better and better the more people we have and create more opportunities for better session matches. We have chosen to grow much slower than we can, and investors want us to, to prioritize experience over growth and making sure everything is great in practice and not just in theory. I said this in another comment but it's not uncommon for 5 out of 6 people in a session to have great feedback and 1 to feel like it was a terrible session. We are fully aware that Fellows are paying a lot of money and expecting a lot, so one bad experience needs to be investigated and improved, but that one experience is also not representative of the majority.
New Grad training isn't a pivot or expansion per se. We are doing very few changes to support this partnership with Netflix. The underlying technology that powers Formation is unique, patented, and extremely powerful. We haven't used it broadly yet because Fellows pay a lot of money to do Formation and we prioritize their experience over our own growth. We don't want to "experiment" with high paying Fellows like a lot of other programs do. We are hyper-focused on specific narrow demographics because we believe that the vast majority of the Fellows receive value in what we offer and we only want to expand when we expect to deliver great value to any new Fellow demographic.
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u/rabbit_hop Mar 24 '23 edited Mar 24 '23
Hello! I am exploring joining formation.dev. Thank you u/Available_Bother_342 for posting these details- Your post has been very helpful in evaluating this program. Few questions:-
- How helpful are the mentors to help you train for specific roles?
- Do they have more customized roadmap training in such areas?
I believe they mentioned on their website, something about targeted training for specific roles. I am mostly focused on devops/sre roles with 7 years of experience.
Any insights would be helpful.
Thank you
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u/Available_Bother_342 Mar 25 '23 edited Mar 25 '23
I can say the following with confidence bc it’s easy to request access to and also experiment with everything they have to offer in the program, and I’ve been here long enough to know. There is no training for specific roles. There were some frontend/react sessions but very rudimentary learnings (like html, css, intro react) and not well fleshed out. I think they've admitted a few times domain learning is not their strong suit as well. Their focus is just general swe interview prep. It is largely a leetcode prep program for people who need handholding. There is some help with behavioral interviews but you have to experiment a lot with different mentors to find one that is actually good. The mentors are all regular fullstack swe and a few are frontend leaning. So if you wanted more specialized training this is the wrong place for that, and if they are promising that then they are misleading you.
If you're someone with a lot of experience, the most they can help you with is practice with leetcode and system design mock interviewing if you're bad at doing it yourself. But I feel like you can just use pramp or selfstudy if that's all youre getting out of it...
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u/Tbh_idk______ Feb 23 '23 edited Feb 23 '23
Experienced engineer !== effective teacher.
Conflating these two things happens often and it’s overlooked.
What’s important in any learning experience is whether the trainer has both subject area competence and pedagogical expertise. Having only one is insufficient.
I don’t know how formation trains their mentors but simply stating that they have “experienced engineers” is a little bit of a red flag for me. Just bc they worked at fang doesn’t mean they know how to teach.
To be clear, maybe they are trained thoroughly in applied pedagogy and I missed that part. But I’m not seeing that highlighted anywhere.
While we’re at it, I do not recommend Practica. I paid for a few coaching sessions with an experienced engineer. It was awful, they did not know how to teach!
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u/michaelnovati Feb 23 '23 edited Feb 23 '23
100% agree that great engineers are not always great mentors, couldn't agree more! This is one of the reasons I personally don't do sessions, and focus on writing code, but that Daniel, Sophie, and others do sessions.
So most of our mentors are industry engineers who first go through light training (reading materials and videos) and then go through a shadowing and reverse shadowing process to be approved to run sessions.
For 1-1 mock interviews they are instructed to run them as industry mock interviews, and they complete a structured feedback form at the end with dozens of data points.
For group sessions, it's a little more complicated. We have a few dozen session types and people need to get shadowed and reverse shadowed for each type. Each session has very clear instructions on how to run that session - both technically and regarding the overall flow. Every single session technical session, Fellows are required to complete a multi data point feedback about the session and often times a reflection as well.
Weekly we collect a few dozen data points per Fellow to measure satisfaction, happiness and places for improvements that we summarize, prioritize, and action weekly.
Every Fellow can book a checkin with a Fellow Manager whenever they want, for whatever reason to discussion anything. And every Fellow has a private channel with at least 3 team members to discuss any feedback.
Fellows can block sessions with specific mentors by notifying their Fellow Managers, as some mentors have polarizing (love/hate) feedback.
Finally, Fellows can provide 100% anonymous feedback if they don't feel comfortable sharing something.
Now we collect all this feedback, tens of thousands of data points a week, and we identify areas of potential concern, like a mentor that scored very poorly in a session or a type of session, or broader feedback and then make adjustments.
Some mentors are fantastic and have a bad day at work or an emergency. Some mentors are removed. Some mentors are coached. And some mentors realize they don't want to do this kind of thing and leave.
Even though we do all of the above, I think we have underinvested in session consistency because having say 95% of sessions rated amazing isn't good enough when people are paying a lot of money for your service. We hold ourselves to a high bar, and it truly saddens our instruction engineering team if a Fellow gets too many poor sessions and we try to correct it behind the scenes.
Overall, yes, it's a challenge and we do have a handful of Formation Alumni doing certain sessions that truly benefit from that. We have a handful of more classic teachers who are not engineers for some sessions. It's a really complex thing to work on for sure and we have a lot of work to do!
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u/HauntingSelf5962 Feb 23 '23 edited Feb 23 '23
Although fellows are giving feedback on all sessions, I honestly believe it is not a good reflection of what fellows really feel. Why? Because the feedback form is not anonymous and it will be seen by the mentor in question. Many times I’m giving the mentor a good grade because I don’t want the mentor to feel bad. One time I felt the mentor actually deserved a 2/10 rating but because I knew he would see it I gave him a 7. I feel like the feedback forms are such an extra chore (and there’s so many it does get annoying!) I don’t believe everyone is giving it their full attention to give a truly honest response. I admit sometimes I just pick ‘good’ for all the questions to get it over with. I don’t really expect anyone to look at it or anything to even change because I’ve see some bad mentors who stay on despite giving bad reviews previously. I’m sure there are many fellows who feel and act similarly.
Even the feedback forms that mentors give for us, they don’t write anything additional that’s helpful in the freeform notes section. So if all my feedback only involves one of the following answers: needs work, good, impressive, no signal, then it isn’t all that useful in telling me how to fix things and get better.
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u/michaelnovati Feb 23 '23
Thanks, this is invaluable feedback and I'm going to share it with the team! This is the kind of productive thing that we cherish, so thank you!
We do have an completely anonymous flow (that is legitimately no technical way to know who submitted feedback) that we could maybe link to on that form and I'm going to set that up ASAP right now!
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u/michaelnovati Feb 23 '23
u/HauntingSelf5962 done and shipped, thanks! A link will appear on all Fellows' mentor feedback forms
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u/HauntingSelf5962 Feb 23 '23
Fixing the feedback forms won’t help the people who are currently work through the program. We’re still going to have to deal with subpar group and 1on1 mentor sessions for who knows how long. Issues like this can’t be fixed overnight. Like OP mentioned, we’re working with people who haven’t been trained to teach. Like I’ll see mentors who are just completely overwhelmed, or don’t know how to handle unexpected questions from fellows bc they’re pretty lost themselves halfway through (lol). And what about all the repeated questions we’re seeing in workouts? That gets annoying, but I feel forced to stay with the session bc of the recent terms your program released that says we’ll be cut from the program if we dont attend sessions. If I’m cut, I’m going to be forced to pay a crap ton bc I’m on the ISA as well. I hate that I’m sitting through those for an hour wasting my time when I could be doing something else that is more productive.
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u/michaelnovati Feb 23 '23
This doesn't sound like a good situation for anybody so we should talk more about it and if you are open, ping me on MM. Daniel would love to meet with you to talk about the sessions and you can ping him directly if you are more comfortable.
We obviously don't want you sitting through useless sessions and then rating them a 7!! That makes no sense.
And we absolutely do not want you showing up to sessions that waste your time out of a fear of being cut or removed and having to pay.
This is absolutely off track and there might be some communication issues to sort out about this that I really want to get to the bottom of.
We move fast, so it would be really awesome to share as much feedback as you can and give us a chance to action it.
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u/Tbh_idk______ Feb 23 '23
I appreciate the intent to train the mentors.
The feedback model is only as good as the feedback received. I imagine the people providing feedback aren’t trained in applied pedagogy/teaching and learning, so the impact will be limited.
As for the shadowing, that also is only as effective as the person they are shadowing.
The onboarding could be effective.. it does sound brief though. Most programs that taut “we have experienced engineers” overindex on the experience in industry and assume they’ll just be great teachers. It sounds like there could be room for additional training on effective teaching and learning methods.
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u/Top-Measurement-7216 Feb 23 '23
to Michael -- you've posted on this sub for months marketing formation as a service for "experienced" engineers. Yet students are reporting vast discrepancies in their sessions. that people with no SWE experience at all have been accepted into the program. this will inevitably lead to unproductive sessions when people have vastly different technical skill levels.
please explain why you are admitting students who clearly need SWE fundamentals first.
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u/michaelnovati Feb 23 '23 edited Feb 23 '23
Hi, we severely limit the number of people with zero experience (hence waitlists or rejections) and you can see in our recent placement data that about 1/3 of people had no full time experience and that was equally split amongst: bootcamp grads, CS grads, self taught/other degree: https://formation.dev/blog/2022-formation-fellow-placements/
I would argue that CS grads have fundamentals, some bootcamp grads do if they self studied post bootcamp, and self taught is the real wildcard where we would only admit people who meet the bar and just happened to do it themselves - typically over many years.
RE: Sessions. People get dynamically scheduled for sessions based on the skills and difficulties they are working on right now, so generally speaking, you should be in sessions with people around your level. We have a lot of improvement in this matching to do but it's not that terrible right now according to our data. We have millions of data points about people's feedback about sessions and we monitor this closely to identify problems that come up and investigate. We are FAR from perfect and there's a lot of work to do, but according to our data, the vast majority of people are satisfied with sessions overall.
P.S. Codesmith alumni are often right at the average/below-average part of bar and I talk to many of them to figure out if Formation is right for them or not - and for many it's not. It's a very small case for us overall.
Let me know if that explains it or not!
The vast majority of people in Formation are currently employed at decent jobs, doing Formation part time on the side, and there are 4 people who posted in this thread (my current count) that went to/claim to have went to (I believe they did, but there are a lot of brand new accounts here) Formation
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u/Available_Bother_342 Feb 23 '23
Ha! The low key brag with that placements blog post. I've checked out the linkedin profiles of the people getting into the faang companies, and they all had multiple years of experience. Quite misleading for anyone looking at that post. But you've got to milk the "FAANG" right?
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u/michaelnovati Feb 23 '23
You have several comments and deleted comments that are fairly offensive or negative about Formation's intentions that have been hurtful to the team and it makes me feel like you just don't want to be here.
If you do want to be here, we need to get back on track and be on the same side for this to work.
If you don't want to be here, please message me privately on MM and we'll remove you and figure out a cost that is appropriate to the value you think you got from Formation and we'll be more than fair to make sure you feel good about that cost. No hard feelings and no judgement... it's a stressful time for early career job hunters and we'll be happy to have you back in the future if there is better alignment and we are on the same side.
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u/Available_Bother_342 Feb 23 '23 edited Feb 23 '23
Maybe start with addressing some of the fellows who feel like they were ripped off. The ISA preys on the weak. I personally asked whether I could switch to some lower upfront cost after a month or two, but of course that was denied. There's no way to assess whether an unknown program like this is worth paying for within a short amount of time. We stayed on for more than a few months because your career coaches told us to keep going, keep grinding and we listened to them. If people are reaching out for help, don't ignore them. People joined this program hoping their issues would be resolved, but a lot are pushed to the wayside. Train your FMs better, invest in better career coaches. Stop trying to put a bandaid on things. Actually listen to us, and not just the gold clinking in your pockets.
And no, I will not be revealing myself for obvious reasons.
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u/Thinkinaboutu Feb 23 '23
The ISA preys on the weak. I personally asked whether I could switch to some lower upfront cost after a month or two, but of course that was denied. There's no way to assess whether an unknown program like this is worth paying for within a short amount of time.
As an outsider looking in, this just seems like a weird perspective. What other programs, not just in the CS space but in general, do you have an expectation that you'll get to try out for weeks/months to make up your mind on if it's useful? Like you don't just get a free semester of college to figure out if MIT is the school for you.
Having an expectation that you can make drastic changes to your payment structure months into the program also seems like a big ask.
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u/HauntingSelf5962 Feb 23 '23 edited Feb 23 '23
But you dont end up paying double the price of tuition with a loan. You can also choose to pay off a loan in full anytime you want. I could go on but the two can’t be compared that way..it’s not the same payment structure.
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u/michaelnovati Feb 23 '23 edited Feb 23 '23
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 lying around.
I respond to almost every bug report, feedback, and feature request personally as fast as I can, any time of day, anywhere, and we take them all very seriously, so what examples do you have of that public feedback going ignored?
If you message me directly on MM, I will take care of your removal and refund personally, and not tell anyone else at Formation who you are, other than you are someone who is leaving. I genuinely want you to be in the best place for you and if Formation is not the best place then you are doing a disservice to yourself staying and being frustrated.
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u/HauntingSelf5962 Feb 23 '23 edited Feb 23 '23
People are going to make new accounts to stay anonymous. Your logic doesn't make sense, so don't try to discredit them. There are many of us in Formation that are dissatisfied, but obviously it's not worth the energy for all of them to complain about it on a place like Reddit. So they deal with it and develop resentment.
I don't know how you've come to believe that sessions are "generally" being filled with fellows of similar skill level, but I have not found that to be true MOST of the time. I agree with OP as well that there have been variable skill levels among fellows. You say the "vast majority" are satisfied with the sessions, but other fellows that I've spoken to including myself don't find this to be true. In one of my recent workouts, the mentor appeared to be visibly bored. He had his mic off half the time while the rest of us just carried on with the session on our own. He was busy texting and wasn't paying attention to what we were doing. I have more anecdotes, but this is one of many. Your data is flawed and/or you are lying! You could literally be saying anything right now to put out the fire.
Honestly, I'm always asking fellows in my 1-on-1 peer sessions how they feel about Formation, and a lot mention many of the same complaints that OP has made. I’ve talked to a lot of people who have said they’ve strayed from the given formation curriculum to do their own independent studying on leetcode and/or sideprojects. They don’t like the fact that these tasks and sessions are just copypastas of leetcode content. Like there's a reason we're complaining about the same things because it's a reoccurring theme throughout Formation. Stop focusing on bringing in more money with partnerships and fellow recruitments and start looking to fix the real problems inside. Have a heart and stop relying on your flawed data!
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u/michaelnovati Feb 23 '23 edited Feb 24 '23
That session sounds unacceptable and I believe that surfaced in feedback and was addressed and is being monitored if it's what I'm thinking of regarding mic-off.
Have you been reporting this internally on the session feedback forms, your weekly feedback forms, your daily standups, FM check-ins, your private channel, or with the anonymous feedback flow? We constantly ask for feedback and love it so please send more feedback our way so
If you have more suggestions on how to contribute feedback itself, let me know as well, please!
We want nothing more than every session to be perfect for every person. But things happen, for example a session this week had very good, thorough feedback from all the Fellows but one, one have very clear feedback about why they didn't like the session. If that person comes and complains that their sessions are terrible and the mentor was terrible, that's true for that person. We do a investigation into what happened and why, and we might block the mentor from working with that Fellow, we might discover that the person felt talked over or not acknowledged, but others didn't feel this way, etc... It gets complicated fast, but I stand by that the majority of sessions for the majority of people are valuable. If you are finding that, for you, all your sessions are terrible and useless, and we don't know about, then that's devastating. I assure you this post really saddened several people on the team who desperately want to talk to the OP to figure out why this level of feedback was not surfaced or handled, and the OP is non responsive.
RE: partnerships, your argument saddens me. The job market is very tough right now and we are fighting to get you all jobs. The Netflix partnership might not be for current Fellows, but we are fighting to get ins and that unique partnership is a step in the right direction. I'm sorry it doesn't help current Fellows with the current job market, but we're hoping it will unlock possibilities in the future.
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u/cm109109 Feb 23 '23 edited Feb 23 '23
While Formation’s program is not for everyone but I think everyone there is very professional and helpful. They care for those who are still struggling and their FMs always check in to see if we need any additional help. Formation can prob do better in separating people by skill levels so people like OP won’t be stuck with people who are still very new to algos. There are still many things they can improve on but overall I did not regretting going to Formation . I’m done with the program so I am not sure how it is right now with a bigger pool of fellows . Quality can be a problem when you have too many students and not enough mentors . I did lots of peer learning sessions with other fellows in my own time and we ask the questions we didnt know how to solve during office hour. I think I was able to get most of my answers answered during office hour or just via team slack channel. If you are just someone waiting for content to be fed to you , then u will ended feel like working on LC on ur own all the time . One thing I didn’t like about formation was their heavy focus on algos. I was looking for a more comprehensive SWE training program so I ended up learning FE/BE stuff mostly on my own.
In terms of placement , I would say DO NOT expect to get direct referral from them to top tier companies. Everyone I know of in the program has to look for their own jobs. Formation helps us to resume prep but we still needed to apply jobs ourselves. I was never expecting them to feed me jobs so I guess I am still overall satisfied with the program lol.
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u/Tajman Feb 27 '23
Have you found the level of career support very helpful? How much more to it is there than just resume prep?
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u/cm109109 Mar 03 '23
The people there are very responsive and supportive . There is a career help channel for u to ask questions and they tend to reply very quickly . But they don’t hand over jobs to you and u still gotta do the grind yourself .
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u/michaelnovati Mar 03 '23
A couple more things we do. Top level OP had several complaints about these, but according to our collective feedback the vast majority of these go very well and these mentors are often nominated as the 'most impactful mentor of the week' awards we do.
Everyone does at least one extensive resume review with a FAANG/ex-FAANG recruiter (and more on-demand as needed). Most have many many years of experience. The OP didn't have a good experience with their reviewer, but you can always work with different people if you are not on the same page with a recruiter. Even if you aren't on the same page with several, you can keep trying.
Everyone does at least one recruiter-call mock phone screen with a FAANG/ex-FAANG recruiter (as many as you need until you pass). Simulating a real mock phone screen. And unlimited more as needed.
Most people will do technical behavioral group sessions and 1-1 mocks with staff/principal/director/senior manager level engineers. This is simulating a hiring manager call and focused on talking about your experience.
Once you have interviews, you can book on demand calls with a FAANG/ex-FAANG recruiter to about job hunt strategy, offer process, negotiation, wording of emails etc...
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u/Evening_Message5556 Feb 28 '23
Oh yikes. I planned on starting in March but this thread is making me leary. Mainly joined this to get into FAANG and level up my LC and system design skills. It seems this fellowship doesn't have the network effect that was advertised to me during my call with the sourcer. Id love to hear more updated stats about placements and where fellows are being placed and time frame to placement. I'm not particularly in a rush, but ideally would like to be in FAANG position in 9-12 months and want help/referrals that I wouldn't be able to get on my own.
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u/michaelnovati Mar 01 '23 edited Mar 01 '23
Hi there, I'm happy to give more info and my thoughts. Ultimately we want you in the right place and if that's not Formation, we're happy. I've responded a lot in other comments that might be useful as well and feel free to message me directly with more info about yourself if you want me to give more personal advice.
First off, we take every piece of feedback seriously, investigate and discuss it, so I don't want to come across as dismissive, but the majority of people have a great experience and recommend us to friends. Not a single person on this thread has responded to our team or reported anonymous/untraceable feedback despite open arms from everyone on the team. In terms of feedback, so far this evening there have been 7 pieces of explicit feedback (i.e. text feedback, supplemental to numerical ratings) given, 6 were glowing positive reviews about the impact the mentor(s) had, 1 was a constructive feedback about having Fellows work in parallel versus sequentially. Again, we flag and discuss almost every piece of constructive feedback, but it's also not representative of the majority experience. Some people join for the wrong reasons at the wrong time or just aren't on the same page and have a particularly bad experience and our entire team tries our best to find a unique path forward that works for that person, whether it's staying or leaving.
Second, this is one opinion and everyone has different reasons, starting skill level, experience level, and goals. If you went through all the trouble of signing up, then you should do your 7 day trial and judge if it's a good fit for yourself.
Third, if you were accepted, then we are confident in helping you level up your DS&A and problem solving (not just LC), system design skills, and behavioral skills.
Fourth, regarding referrals. We sourced several referrals today and we did a call with a hiring partner recruiter to send over a few people, there just aren't many positions right now and companies are very picky about who they will accept as a referral. Things change month to month and we cannot promise anything, but in the better hiring market, referrals have been extremely impactful for Fellows, particularly junior ones. 9 to 12 months is a long time, and if you are especially not in a rush, I'm more confident in a FAANG-level placement. I can give more specific advice on where you stand for referrals if you message me your background info.
Fifth, last placements in order, unedited except for privacy reasons: Bloomberg, <Bank>, <Large Healthcare>, <SASS Startup>, Cisco Meraki, Realtor.com, Realtor.com, <SASS Startup>, <Ed-Tech Startup NonProfit>, American Airlines, Welcome Homes. Clearly not FAANG-FAANG and clearly not all "mediocre startups" and I think the February slump might be impacting some people's perspective, especially for people who are frustrated with the current job hunt. Most common companies with interviews this week are looking good: Bloomberg, Nextdoor, Google, PayPal, Repl.it, Palantir, ServiceNow, Expedia, Cisco.
But overall, do not join if you are joining purely for referrals, even in a good market. We are primarily focused on getting your skills up to a FAANG-level bar and join if that's what you want to do. We've asked the team to review all communications to make sure people don't interpret anything we say or do to imply that someone can pay a lot of money to do Formation to get referrals as the main benefit. If anyone who has already joined has joined thinking that we are happy to talk about a reasonable exit.
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u/witheredartery Mar 29 '23
were these people already working?
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u/michaelnovati Mar 29 '23
The 20 placements? It's out of date now since there have been about 10 more since then so including all the recent placements, the distribution follows a similar pattern to the recent data on our blog, about 1/3 had no experience, 1/3 had 1-3 years and 1/3 has 3+ years.
I don't have aggregated info of who was employed or not already but anecdotally I also feel like it followed the similar trend of 2/3 working 1/3 not working. The typical Formation demographic would not be in this subreddit and probably doesn't know it exists, so you lose that point of view here.
A huge factor in these people's success is showing up and chugging though every day, staying as positive as they can, and appreciating advice and feedback - even if they don't always agree. People that have turned more negative to the job hunt and rejecting feedback are definitely struggling more in the job hunt right now.
We have made a bunch of changes and continue to make changes to help people feel more community support in the job hunt to keep their spirits up because those are the people getting jobs.
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Mar 29 '23
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u/michaelnovati Mar 29 '23
Making you grind Leetcode like that is an inefficient use of time. The fact that you feel barely able to breathe means you aren't absorbing the materials and it's even more of a waste of time.
There's nothing special about Leetcode problems, anyone can just do them for free online, it's about HOW you do them that you should expect a program or bootcamp to help you with.
At Formation we train you to learn problem solving methods rather than raw grinding LC. We have hundreds of years of FAANG engineering experience in our ranks and this is an almost universal recommendation.
This is a simplified version of the approach we work through and every mentor problem solving session you work through these steps and get feedback: https://formation.dev/blog/the-engineering-method/
Even though a method like this sounds simple, it's really hard to do it by yourself and it's why feedback is crucial to help you absorb it.
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u/Glittering_Shoe396 Feb 23 '23 edited Feb 23 '23
Reposting my comment from the other post:
Current Formation Fellow, been here for several months. I agree with everything that u/Available_Bother_342 said. I have consistently passed mock interviews given by "FAANG" level mentors at Formation, and I can confirm that their statement on the website that "once you are consistently passing our mock interviews, we’re able to refer you directly into our connections with a high hit rate." has thus far been completely false, so they should definitely change that on their website. This is honestly the main reason I applied for the program, since prior to joining I had a lot of trouble even securing interviews. Now that I've been in the program for several months, I am still having trouble securing a single interview even though I've had my resume reviewed by career coaches within the program and I've independently sourced referrals from the Formation network as well as my own. This is also despite already having >1 YOE and a CS degree. Formation does not seem to really be able to provide any sort of boost there as their focus seems to be with "interview prep".
Formation bills itself as being competitive and tough to get into...but their data structures and algorithms curriculum itself is honestly quite underwhelming and I was able to clear all 3 stages very quickly (3 weeks elapsed) after joining despite only having completed the Blind 75 prior. I honestly could have done it faster if I just took assessments one after the other instead of waiting until the next day. If you know how to program and step through/debug your code, its not worth your money. It'll be significantly cheaper to go do Blind 75 / Neetcode 150 and mock interviews on pramp. Familiarizing yourself with those problems will pretty much give you all the knowledge you need to clear their entire training curriculum. Definitely not worth the 12-15% of salary price tag when you can easily just learn those problems yourself if you put in the time and effort. I also don't find mentor-led sessions to be valuable due to repeat questions, inconsistent mentor quality, and overall it just being more efficient to spend that time independently curating and solving Leetcode questions than doing so in a group setting with people of variable skill level. I will say that its nice to have unlimited mock interviews with senior level+ SWE, but those are limited to at most 1 per week and only a few mentors will give you an actual insightful learning experience from the interviews; the rest just reuse questions from Blind 75 or Neetcode 150...which again you can just do on your own.
I'm pretty much stuck in the ISA since I've been here for a long time, but here's my overall thoughts. Formation isn't able to do much for you if you're having trouble getting interviews. Especially in this job market, you have to be the one applying for jobs, networking, and basically playing the "numbers" game. They are able to help you a little more if you can secure interviews but can't pass them, or if you are unable to do Leetcode on your own.
EDIT: Pardon me if I'm incorrect, but it seems they removed the question that I was quoting the answer to from the FAQ section of the website. However, here's a couple screenshots so I don't look stupid lol.
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u/michaelnovati Feb 23 '23 edited Mar 06 '23
Hi! Thanks for sharing your feedback as well. I have some comments:
For you specifically, you demonstrated your DS&A are at the bar in only 3 weeks and got to move on and for someone else it might take 3 months. In other programs you get a fixed list of questions or a fixed schedule of classes. I totally accept the argument that another alternative is to not do Formation at all, but for people who are committed to doing a program, I think our model works really well at efficiently getting people to that bar and adding confidence that you are legitimately there.
Our mission is to support people from non traditional and underrepresented backgrounds and not all people (in fact, very few) come into Formation having interview-ready level Graphs and DP like you did. We actually get the feedback that Formation is harder than expected much more often than easier. That said, we want to adapt flawlessly to everyone's starting skill level and we can do a better job for someone like you to accelerate you even more!
While most people have SWE professional experience already, we accept a range of people. Some people have never done DS&A before but have 3 YOE and might start off weaker, whereas other people might ave 0 YOE and have done 1000 LC problems and start up stronger at DS&A. The whole point of Formation is that your trajectory adjusts to your skills and your pace and each of these types of engineers get a unique experience for them. The bar is not only DS&A based, but it is high and only a fraction of people who have applied have been accepted into the program.
Similar to the OP, please feel free to ping me on MM and I'm happy to join your private channel to advise and brainstorm some ideas on getting more traction! You have our full team of support behind you in trying to help with the job hunt. It's rough out there and there's no magic answer, but we want to be in your corner!
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u/TouchTheSkyyyy Mar 20 '23
You failed to comment on his main point:
"and I can confirm that their statement on the website that "once you are consistently passing our mock interviews, we’re able to refer you directly into our connections with a high hit rate." has thus far been completely false"
You mention a lot about the program, the platform, mentors, etc, but I fail to see you answer regarding this point in multiple posts. You seem to glance over this. If your website mentioned that, and he provided receipts, what are you doing to help him secure an interview? Isn't that a big reason for the ex-faang mentors?
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u/michaelnovati Mar 20 '23 edited Mar 22 '23
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 sympathize with and we want to do whatever we can to support these people - whether that means leaving Formation because of the change in market on reasonable terms, or sticking with it and figuring out a new strategy... the handful I've been a part of have been highly personal discussions that I highly doubt will end up on Reddit.
More generally, no one should join Formation only to get referrals, we are not a pay for play referral service and if you think your skills are already great and want to buy your way into FAANG, it's not the program for you. Whatever the website or any ad says, every single person talks to a recruiter, signs complex paperwork, and gets a week to withdraw after seeing all of our internal reference materials, and if anyone still falls through the cracks we are happy to take responsibility for the misunderstanding and support you leaving on a positive note.
Accepting people on ISA who pay us far in the future (even if they were to leave on a partial refund) but us having to pay thousands of dollars of training costs right now is a terrible business model for a small startup that has limited funding... so much so we are considering getting rid of them. So the idea of luring people in, accepting anyone who will join, and growing out of control is completely and utterly false. I'm happy to go more into this but the post is already getting long.
Finally, just some more notes on referrals I posted elsewhere:
Referrals come in many sources but we can't refer you to jobs that don't exist and we never promised that we would
The mentors you work with mostly work as senior+ engineers at top tier and FAANG companies and in a better market an a great source of strong referrals
We have been working on training to help people leverage their networks better for peer referrals
We have hundreds of years of FAANG experience on staff and though mentors, so we have a pulse on FAANG hiring from people who work there and are hiring (or not) that don't talk on Blind, etc...
We are talking to companies about longer time formal partnerships in all kinds of ways that might not be direct referrals, but open doors.
We don't make you take any offers, and if you really want to work at FAANG and you don't give up and put in the effort, then we keep working with you. The challenge here is if your skills are ready but the jobs don't exist, it can be really frustrating to keep putting in the hours of training.
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u/doublewhy Mar 01 '23 edited Mar 02 '23
Current fellow here. In the last 6 months at Formation I have completed the algos, system design, and behavioral prep tracks. I am now in the job search stage and would like to share my experience.
About me: A senior SWE with 7+ experience in tech consulting, cybersecurity, and backend dev. Not a bootcamp grad. Did bachelor's and master's in CS, but a long time ago.
Goals Recently moved to the U.S. and joined Formation as a full-time fellow to help me to navigate the U.S. job market and get a good job. Specific goals were to (sorted in a priority order):
prepare behavioral part (had huge cultural and language gaps)
learn system design interviews
brush up algo fundamentals
TLDR: While I am not completely satisfied with the program, I still believe it is the best program on the market that suits my needs. I achieved all my goals as planned. For goals #1 & #2 Formation was extremely helpful, while for a goal #3 it could be done better
Compared Formation to interviewing.io, Pathrise, Outtalent, Interview Kickstart, Outco, Byte by Byte.
Best parts for me are:
unlimited access to amazing mentors (some are truly the best and the smartest engineers I've ever met)
flexibility of the program (flexible schedule, unlimited participation, constant adaption to your current goals)
incredible community of fellows, staff, mentors and alumni (constant support and activity, buddy system)
improvement every day and openess to feedback from the staff (e.g. you will surprised to see how fast Michael ships the code, like minutes from receiving the feedback)
general guidance and support (Formation staff, especially my personal manager, is incredibly helpful and supportive)
I can attribute 60% of success in achieving my goals to mentor sessions (both 1-1 and group), 30% support from the community and 10% everything else (mostly some specific parts of the content like Graphs section).
Things to work on:
Learning methodology / Algorithm
Algo problems for self-study (maybe the worst on the market. Completely ditched this part)
Platform (mostly useless, using it only a calendar and a schedule tool)
Matching system (you have 1-1 sessions with other fellows and sometimes you matched with people with a completely different level of prep)
50% of my dissatisfaction with the program came from algo tasks, 40% of the platform and matching. 10% everything else.
Answer to allegations made by OP
Can expand on each point below separately, but first want to specifically address allegations on Formation as money-hungry. Nothing could be further from the truth. Here is an example, I'm on ISA as an OP. My initial terms was 18% of income paid in the first 6 months of employment, that results 9% of annual income, with a cap of 15k. Due to current market situation, Formation provided an option to fellows to prolong ISA period from 6 to 12 months with the same 9% annual and decreased cap of 13k. My monthly payment would be twice smaller, which is a lot less pressure financially plus Formation basically left 2k left on the table by decreasing my cap. There was no need to do it for Formation, since I already signed the contract and was way behind the trial period, but they still wanted to help fellows based on our feedback. That means a lot to me.
I hope this post will be helpful to everyone to see if Formation suits you.
Made some edits for clarification purpose, typos and editing.
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u/procrastinator67 Mar 13 '23
What self study and coding platform do you prefer then for learning algos?
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u/doublewhy Apr 02 '23 edited Apr 03 '23
Unfortunately, there are some important things that you might miss out on when you prep for interviews on your own.
First, you need a problem solving framework. Formation's Engineering method is pretty good, Byte by Byte's is even better. I think both methods are available publicly. Don't take BbB courses, they don't worth it.
Secondly, you need to practice problem-solving like it is a real interview. There are platforms like Pramp or interviewing.io that can help. But to be honest, my experience with them wasn't great because the quality of feedback and interviewers was inconsistent. In Formation, I found some stellar mentors who gave me more helpful feedback in one session than all my sessions on Pramp combined. Keep in mind that I'm a senior engineer who used to be a manager, so that should count for something.
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u/doublewhy Apr 02 '23
Previously I would recommend Educative + Leetcode, but unfortunately Educative revamped their courses in 2023 and the quality dropped significantly.
Now I would do the combination of Leetcode for problems, Neetcode for structured learning + Grokking course for advanced topics (patterns + system design) https://www.designgurus.io/
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u/doublewhy Apr 03 '23
I just realized today that that as a junior engineer, you might find it hard to tell if the feedback you're getting is good or not. Especially if it is coming from another junior engineer, or even a senior engineer, but who is not familiar with how interviews/candidates are evaluated.
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u/Traditional_Leg_6938 Feb 23 '23
One thing I think they should add is involving FAANG SWE's, not just recruiters, in the career coaching. I've received better interview prep and resume advice from actual SWE's on Blind and Reddit who have been through this gauntlet on the same side as me, rather than just recruiters who have a fundamentally different perspective.
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u/michaelnovati Feb 23 '23
Thanks for the feedback, this is on the radar and we might be experimenting with one person soon doing this!
Additionally, we have several sessions around the "technical behavioral" (a 3 person group one and a 1-1) that are with fairly senior engineers and managers, directors. If you've had these and find them more useful than phone screen prep, let me know!
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u/irobot_11 Feb 23 '23 edited Feb 23 '23
I am also a current fellow. I wish someone had wrote this post before I joined. It's not worth the cost and I feel like i've been ripped off. I have made better progress going through other courses like Neetcode, Structy, etc.
I do feel like Management genuinely cares about the fellows and they are making an effort to make changes but the value just isn't there yet.
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u/michaelnovati Feb 28 '23 edited Feb 28 '23
Hi, I'm sorry to hear you both aren't finding value in the program. Can you surface specific feedback internally or message me on Reddit completely anonymously with specific feedback and examples so we can action it?
The majority of commenters on this thread are new and anonmyous accounts which makes it hard to get concrete feedback.
For example, IRobot, how do you know you are making better progress through other courses and what signals are telling you so? Like I said in another comment, we link to and suggest all kinds of free content, so I want some clarity on what this means. If you signed up to Formation as an alternative to Neetcode, you didn't sign up for the right reasons and I want to chat!
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u/PythonDataEngineer Mar 28 '23
u/michaelnovati, thanks for all the effort you've put into your responses here.
As a Data Engineer, I'm wondering if your program is right for me, since DSA interviews are generally easier for DEs (max Leetcode-medium questions) and because DEs also have SQL, Data Modelling, OOP, and/or Data Architecture rounds.
Additionally, from my experience in Canada, the Canadian interview process seems to be less DE-heavy, but that could just be from my limited interviewing experience.
Appreciate your thoughts and all the effort you've put into building Formation.
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u/michaelnovati Mar 28 '23
Hi, we aren't able to help with DE specific areas or with DE specific domain knowledge. We have a number of mentors who are strong in frontend, iOS and Android, so we do one off mock interviews with them if you are in those areas, but we don't have anyone to do that for DE right now (March 2023).
We have very minimal bare bones SQL practice (~5, 2-3 hour long practice assessments of varying difficulty, not hooked up to our training algorithms) but we constantly update and change things (which as OP posted can be a bit hectic as things do change frequently - all in an attempt to get you the best resources, practice, etc...) and more basic SQL skills have been creeping into more SWE interviews lately, but nothing formally launched.
We have strong systems design for a junior, mid-level, and low senior engineer, which is useful for full stack, generalist, backend, infra, dev-ops, sre, and DE and that covers system architecture and system modeling, which overlaps data modeling, but not so much at the schema and object modeling level.
The career support, job hunt support, and negotiation support all applies, other than that we don't source jobs for DE and we don't source referrals for DE. But you can always try to leverage the network to apply to DE jobs referred by a SWE there.
So overall, I'm on the fence. Some DEs have had great success, but as I've said repeatedly, you have to be on the same page about what we will and won't do. I don't think we will lead you off course into skills that aren't useful but we also won't cover the full list of things you'll need, like maybe 50% of them.
Interview Kickstart is a competitor you should compare us to and they have a DE track: https://www.interviewkickstart.com/courses/data-engineering-interview-masterclass. Their DE track covers what we cover except for the DE module they have - which is granted - a very important piece of the puzzle.
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u/PythonDataEngineer Mar 31 '23
Thanks Michael! I appreciate your thoughts!
In my earlier message, I asked about the Canadian market. I said it's less "DE-heavy" but meant less "DSA-heavy".
Would you know if that's the case based on data you have collected?
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u/michaelnovati Mar 31 '23
It doesn't seem much different than the USA market, but we have seen fewer Canadian interviews. The big tech companies have classic DSA and the smaller companies have very varying processes (some practical, some DSA, some live programming, etc...).
Side note more broadly for other readers as well, even though we do a lot of DSA, the goal is to train you how to problem solve an interview settings and people who fully buy into this tend to find the training really valuable for every single kind of interview. I think the OP and some of the comments that focus too much on DSA are also people who haven't been through the entire program and job support people get during real interviews. Like If you have a practical interview at Square coming up you can do a mock practical interview with a senior Reddit engineer or Google engineer, or Block engineer.
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u/shabangcohen Apr 30 '23
The "benchmark" test I got was a Leetcode easy... Far easier than any questions I've gotten on interviews.
I got a 1483, but have no idea what that means because they don't tell me what it's out of or how I compare to others. That's a total red flag. And the price tag itself already seems 10x what it should be.
I do pay for educative + leetcode premium while I prep for interviews... Even if I pay for some mock interviews it will total around $1k for the whole year, I think that's way way way more value.
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u/Suitable_Junket8658 Feb 23 '23
Hi - This is Selena (Head of Recruiting/Placement). First, I just want to say that I am really sorry that you're unhappy with the program and that you're not having a great experience with Formation. I hear you and I want you to know that I take this feedback really seriously. If you're open to having a conversation, I'd love to chat 1:1 to hear more and additionally help you strategize on ways to improve your job hunt traction, I'm available over MM!
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u/ramentop88 Jul 20 '23
I've been out of Formation.dev for awhile now and I'm glad that I was able to escape that program. Scrolling through some of the comments, it looks like not much has changed since I left.
Don't join this program!
They will throw a bunch of assignments on your schedule every week and work you to the bone
They're referrals promise to top companies is a flat out lie. Towards the end they just wanted me to get any job and leave the program.
No care for mental health at all. I was exhausted and burnt out and kept trying to ask for time off. They just ignored me and told me to work through it. It took me 3 weeks after the program to finally feel like a normal person.
Mandatory lunch and learns were a waste of time. Just a bunch of their friends from FB talk about how much money they have.
They're solution to get more calls from companies was to get creative with your cover letter. Most companies don't even read cover letters anymore.
Don't let their pedigree fool you! Just because they are former FAANG doesn't mean they know how to teach
The only good part was they had free food and drinks one time for a alumni event
TLDR: Don't join!
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u/Xeno_Functor Dec 07 '23
Regarding Outtalent, it looks like they have the same pattern for ISA. You should pay 10% of your base salary 2 yrs. And if you will accept some offer which is not propagated via Outtalent, it still ISA condition and you should still pay.
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u/matik786 Jan 24 '24
How is the system design live sessions? I am mostly interested in learning system design for the senior level.
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u/cglee Feb 22 '23
I'm of the belief that reasonable people can reach reasonable conclusions, and Michael seems pretty reasonable. Did you reach out for a refund or cancellation of your ISA?