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 nice to meet you! Good memory! Yeah Sophie spent several years mentoring at bootcamp and used to operate Buildschool to teach people iOS for free. It was a really small program and she personally worked with each person to learn iOS skills from scratch. From all of these learnings and more, we built Formation as a way to offer personalized coaching to a larger, remote audience, while maintaining the same effectiveness/results as having Sophie there 24/7. The material isn't available, but I would say the real value came from having Sophie (a staff level iOS engineer) working with you all the time. In terms of learning iOS. The market hasn't changed that much in the past few years and it remains difficult to get a top tier iOS with no experience because it's a "specialist" role. The roles do exist! Many of the former Buildschool members have iOS jobs at top companies now, but it took a little longer. I would suggest trying the apprenticeship path. LinkedIn Reach has a Mobile Apprenticeship for example. There's actually a Fellow at Formation now who started an iOS app from scratch that got hundreds of thousands of installs and became a business for the person (we are working with person on DS&A and not iOS). That's another option and a great thing about iOS, you can ship your app to the app store and people might actually use it! Try building an app from scratch and get it in the app store and just jump right in without studying the language first! You'll eventually have to come back and fill in some of the language fundamentals, but it's a good way to get the ball rolling.