u/garlic_bananas wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Michael I appreciate the reply and I wanted to say that the frustration in my comment isn't aimed at you or your company but rather the state of recruiting right now, even though I completely understand the stance of big tech/yc startups! It makes sense, there's a ton of candidat
u/michaelnovati replied · ★ FEATURED
It depends on the person but in the current market if you have 2+ years of real SWE experience we can generally help you. We do a lot of job hunt and resume work but I completely agree that we can't beat the market - we used to take more people right out of bootcamps with minimal experience (like working at the bootcamp itself, or contracts, some people faked their work experience and go through) and we increased that threshold in the bad market.
But if you have 2+ years of experience in any legit SWE job you can get into big tech, I see it multiple times a month. It takes longer if your background is less strong, like in the past few weeks we had placements at Meta, Google, and Stripe of people who had been with us for like 2 WHOLE YEARS and wouldn't meet the criteria on this post. If you work with mentors from FAANG-adjacent companies for weeks and weeks you eventually absorb some of the fuzzy things it's hard to put on paper that help you bridge the gap.
So I agree with you it's harder for people of those backgrounds and it's harder for us because those people are with us for so long, people with strong background say working at Instacart for 4 years, come to Formation and are like 'whoa why is this person here for two years' and the new person gets a job in 3 months.
I want to level the playing field but to me that means systematically understanding and working with each person as a unique individual and not trying to shove a 10 week Leetcode course down their throats.