I'm doing a live video AMA next week and would like you to come! I don't talk on camera often and I'm nervous, but I want to try to dedicate some time to answering the most questions possible, candidly and authentically and I'm going to try to do it live without preparation.

I'm doing a live video AMA next week and would like you to come! I don't talk on camera often and I'm nervous, but I want to try to dedicate some time to answering the most questions possible, candidly and authentically and I'm going to try to do it live without preparation. Wednesday October 11th, 3pm PST / 6 pm EST, on Zoom, get the link and invitation here: [https://michael-novati-ama.splashthat.com/](https://michael-novati-ama.splashthat.com/) Nothing is off limits, BUT I will only be answering questions I feel I can give more unique or useful advice on and will pass on questions that I feel I'm not uniquely qualified to answer or that you can get answered elsewhere. I'm hoping that I get asked a lot about my days at Facebook, as it grew from 200 engineers to 10,000 and I have a lot of stories to tell that are funny, interesting, and unique. **Transparent disclosure**: I'm the co-founder of a mentorship platform to help experienced engineers (1-5+ YOE as SWEs) level up their careers and achieve their next career goals. My day job is as the lead engineer and I write a lot of code and help Fellows in the program navigate interviews and job offers. We work with a number of bootcamp grads and engineers with non traditional backgrounds so there is some amount of bias posting in this sub-reddit, **but I want to be abundantly clear that we are not a bootcamp or an alternative bootcamp and we generally do not help bootcamp grads who haven't worked for a while first - I am not advertising anything to you and I'm posting this in hopes that I'll be able to offer advice and help next week.** I've been an active member of this subreddit for almost 2 years with hundreds of comments and I've chatted with hundreds of fantastic people async so I'm going to give this format a try.

lol, the AMA is next week! It's a harder question to answer than it sounds, but I don't want to misrepresent our size so I'm going to try to answer properly. First, we are a mentorship platform. We're not a school or educational program or training program or anything comparable so we don't have "students", "curriculum", "classes", "cohorts", or even "programs" (we have an ongoing project this year to try to improve marketing to be clearer what we actually are lol) We don't have any kind of fixed offerings and we work with people on a 1-1 contractual basis - for as long as it takes to get a job if you do your part - and the cost is based on your skill gaps and work experience, which we bucket into 3 tiers, but we're constantly working on new pricing models. But everyone comes in with different goals and needs. Some people need mock interviews, some need group mentorship, some need career mentorship, some need "leetcode practice", some need friends, some need accountability. Our platform and mentors strive to cater to YOUR needs and not the other way around. To make things more complicated, you can ramp up or down your schedule every week so the majority of people are working full time jobs already and doing Formation on a pace and schedule that works for them (which is great for them but harder to analyze our numbers). As a result, while we have in the high 3 digits of people we've every worked with - including people who have been placed into great jobs, people that have departed early because their goals changes or for another good reason, people that departed because they didn't like Formation or didn't think it was good for them, and of course, many people who are are currently with us.