I’m Michael. I was a principal engineer at Facebook from 2009 to 2017, where I was the top code contributor of all time and also conducted hundreds of interviews. I recently co-founded Formation.dev, an engineering fellowship that trains and refers engineers directly into big tech. Ask me Anything!

Hi, I can respond to both questions separately: RE: social inequality. Before the internet, and still now to some extent, city boundaries and zoning have had a lot of problems with fragmenting cities. There are many experts who are dedicating their lives to these topics so I won't comment much, but humans interacting with humans everywhere have historically had these kinds of fragmentations, and I don't think it's Facebook's fault if they appear there as well. That said, Facebook wants to reduce inequality by hopefully reducing that fragmentation from what happens in real life by making it easier to interact with people. RE: Formation being paid. "Fellowship" is a word that doesn't really have a common definitely outside of academia, where it has a specific different meaning. We feel what we offer is clearly communicates what we do and would be devastated if people felt deceived, and so far we haven't seen that be the case. Now to answer why we charge: 1. If you do your part, we work with you indefinitely until you get a new job, and those jobs have been paying roughly $80K more in compensation on average a year for people. So people see this is an investment in themselves, like personal training, and it's been working well. 2. We considered what it would look like to be a non-profit, but we decided not to because we wanted to hire the best engineers, recruiters, coaches in industry. We've been succeeding on this, but those engineers are paid extremely well at their current FAANG-level companies and we have to pay them well. So charging helps up bring the best talent to the company that then helps deliver those win-win results we are aiming for.