Recruiters can make enticing promises that no one will explain or apologize for. I had already accepted that taking a job at FDM meant moving away, but a recruiter had alluded to the fact that there was an opportunity in my city he'd tell me about once I had signed up. This, of course, never materialized, and I was pushed into another role in a city over with no explanation on what that was about.
Little/nebulous amount of choice in which company you work for. It felt like I was thrown at whoever said yes first with very little interest in what other opportunities I had. I was assigned a role in Week 2 of training. (My advice to people in interviewing during training is to keep interviewing regardless of who they think you should say yes to. Or even if you have a role already.)
Training courses taper off in quality after the first 6 - 7 lessons. one course ended in an unsupervised algorithm self-study when the lecturer was apparently also tasked with an important presentation.
Assignment can have nothing to to with your training. In fact, it can actually be a whole other pipeline of training. I went through 8+ weeks of training in one technical pipeline (when it had been know since week 2 that my assignment was something else entirely) and then given 3 week to get two technical certifications, one of which claimed to have required 2 years of experience with a certain technology to be able to obtain.
While FDM allows the company you're contracted with to hire you at the end of two years, it's unclear how interested they are in helping that process along. There's nothing in writing encouraging the other party to make this process timely, and I know of a case where FDM (unbeknownst to the employee) extended a contract with the company without asking. Moreover, FDM seems widely absent from the conversion process.
