My company might be a good fit if it's technical preparation that's blocking the person, but I'm happy to chat with the person async on LinkedIn just to get an idea of what's going on more and give my personal advice. You can give them my LinkedIninfo, same name there.
Right off the bat I would ask if they got promoted and if their resume demonstrates this promotion well, because that's a sign to check off the boxes for E4/L4/SDE II mid level roles.
If someone is at a FAANG and stuck at midlevel then I would focus on getting to senior THERE. I have worked with people that try to transition to title bump and it doesn't often work out that way within FAANG. People tend to get senior titles but at smaller companies and they don't get senior at other FAANGs.
Even if your current FAANG isn't "the one", the other FAANGs want to see that you can get to senior at any of them (except Google which is fine to stop at L4) as common ground signal.
Once you are at senior e5 and close to staff e6 then sometimes changing companies can help in certain circumstances.
u/ProfessorPlum168 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
L4 to L5 after a couple of years…my guess is that he is dissatisfied with doing too much of domain work and not enough of the hands on. Me personally I would think that that’s great progress but he doesn’t think so.
u/michaelnovatireplied·
L4 to L5 at Amazon? and if so yeah I can talk to them just to give them advice, I wouldn't pay for something until you have strong believe it will be worth the cost.
u/ProfessorPlum168 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
That’s the question though. When is it worth it? Is there a scenario where it is worth it? I personally think it’s a scam.
u/michaelnovatireplied·★ FEATURED
Well for Formation, the average placement **increases** their first year total comp by over $100K (see our website for how that's calculated).
Now granted most people are non-FAANG ->FAANG and FAANG -> FAANG is different.
But if you are a little lost or struggling on your interviews, then paying like roughly $10K to be handholded through the preparation process and then handholded through negotiations to increase your offer by more than $10K typically can be mathematically sensical.
The reason we don't charge $100K is because it's impossible to know what the same people would do on their own and presumably they can get prepared for free or cheap too, so how much of that is attributed to Formation? I don't know, that's up to you, but if they typical increase is THAT much and the negotiation support pays for it, it's definitely not a scam or insane to do it.
It's more a personal choice - if you want to do it alone, how much time and effort will it take and do you want to do that. A lot of people don't and they stay at their jobs and that's totally fine. A lot of people don't and want to cram Hello Interview and LeetCode for free, and that's totally fine too.