Persistence is key

I've been working with someone for well over a year now, almost two, who just signed a FAANG this week after a log of ups and downs, it's truly different for everyone and I think you have the right attitude of continuing to learn and develop and grow and get stronger and stronger. You never know when the next opportunity will arrive or how.

Hiring is picking up for mid level engineers. Disclosure: I'm co-founder of a mentorship platform for SWEs with 1+ YOE under their belt. We have seen 4 or so Meta offers in the past few weeks and many more interviewing. It's definitely not easy but if you have a legit 2+ YOE (like full time SWE job, not projects, not open source, etc...) then you should be getting interviews in a reasonable timeframe in this market. There are many more challenges in passing the interviews and with headcount, but the gears are turning. That's not at all the case for new comp sci grads and new bootcamp grads (including Codesmith and Launch School and other programs that have these kind of "open source work experience" projects) and the market remains incredibly hard just to get interviews without lying about that experience. The exception being CS grads from top tier CS school - they have a lot of choice and I'm hoping that we see expanded new grad headcount in the new year, but we don't know yet if that will happen.

It's called Formation, but just to be clear, it's not super relevant for this sub (it's meant for people who have been working as a SWE already for 1+ years and generally more) and I'm here to try to give helpful advice because I have both extensive industry (including 8 years at FB as it grew from 750 employees to like 20K) experience and have worked with hundreds of bootcamp grads later on from all kinds of bootcamps (and helped my partner run her own free in person bootcamp for 2 years), and synthesizing these, I feel gives me a unique point of view to share. You can look up more about Formation.dev and ask me questions. It's a unique type of approach that not a single other program is doing and we're working on updating our website to try to explain better what it is haha, but definitely ask questions.

Nice, yeah we are far from perfect and it's not the right program for everyone, but we have a great team of people (6 full time team members have 10+ year FAANG experience each many more in the 5 year range) working very very hard to help people prepare for interviews and have a great experience. I would ready some of the "spotlights" on the blog too because people talk pretty openly about their backgrounds and the specific ways we helped the most. Right now maybe 95% of people have actual paid SWE (or related job with significant programming) experience and it's strict. Experience for being accepted can be anything like: contracts, self employed, open source, 2+ years self taught, freelancing, internships, legit volunteer coding (with documented hours in lieu of pay), etc... but you do need to have something. The main reason is we don't actually teach any marketable practical skills like bootcamps do! We aren't a school and we don't have classes or lectures. We are a practice-based mentorship platform and your mentorship sessions are all about mentor-guided practice and problem solving and not lecture-style teaching. Our system design is focused on helping you bridge gaps from things you might have worked on/with and how think about systems from the perspective of large tech companies. We obviously link to reference materials to help people "learn" concepts they might have never heard of, but the actual human-face-to-face time is all about practice and feedback. So it's NOT a good fit for: 1. If you want to learn a new part of the stack 2. You can't find a job and you already have practice everything in the world for months and months and just want to get hooked up with a job (we have a very very strong network, and the 100+ mentors are all very well connected too, but you shouldn't join just so you can ask a Google engineer for a referral in a session, that's just not how it works haha).