This has probably been asked a million times, but what exactly is Formation? What differentiates it?

Hi, I can answer with my Formation hat on. It's a good question because there isn't anything else that operates like it, even competitors like Interview Kickstart are also super different. In one sentence, we're an interview or and mentorship platform. Our focus is job hunting and preparing you for your upcoming interviews. So philosophically we are based on the idea of mastery and helping you efficiently get form where you are to where you want to go. This means we try to spend your dollars efficiently by giving you the type of session we think you need at the right time. If you want to hire an Open AI engineer who makes $1M to be your tutor, it would cost you hundreds of a ton and they wouldn't even be able to give you the time you need. Instead, we give you mocks with those totes of people when you need it - usually when preparing for specific upcoming interviews, and when you don't need that, we do small group sessions of 3 to 6 people with mentors of varying backgrounds from staff+ all the way down to mid level, most are senior. We also set up peer sessions as well as part of this magic algorithm. You get a team of dedicated non technical staff members, called Fellow Managers, who help you navigate, make adjustments that we can't automatically figure out, be your support system, etc... Finally, we completely adapt to your availability, so your schedule and pace changes week to week and will be unique to you. What Formation ends up being is different for everyone. Some people don't do any sessions and do all tasks. Some people only do group sessions, some only peer. Some people are already strong at many things and focus on System Design only. Some people had no idea they weren't ready for hiring manager calls and spending more time there. We have a handful of current Google engineers who are doing Formation. Google managers have done it. Meta engineers do it. Amazon engineers do it. Even Mentors themselves have joined Formation when they start their job hunt. In the Intros channel you'll see a current Google engineer who wants to go to something smaller, and a 10 year experience self taught contractor who wants to work at Google. It's really a unique place. People come back for future job hunts. You'll work alongside peers who have less experience and have been struggling and you'll work with peers who work at Google like you. I wouldn't rush into joining but would recommend talking to the team and learning more about this to try to get a better idea of how it works. I can answer more questions here too.