Ex-FAANGs, what are you doing now?

👋, I was Facebook 2009 to 2017. Went from intern to E7 level (principal) software engineer. Went from 200-something engineers to somewhere around 10,000 when I left. The company's valuation increased over 100X (until the recent decline). The world changed a lot during this time. I was burned out and left a little too late. After leaving, I got married, and my wife (former Nextdoor) started a free iOS coding bootcamp, completely out of pocket. She had mentored at a bunch of bootcamps and they were not cutting it. It was small but the students all went on to do pretty awesome things, they are now at LinkedIn, Apple, Facebook, Google, and more! I have a passion for mentoring as well so I joined her about 2 years later, we raised funding, and started building out a more scaled up, paid, training and coaching service called Formation ([formation.dev](https://formation.dev)) . Our mission is to help software engineers from underrepresented and non traditional backgrounds break into top tier industry roles. Assembling everything I learned about building product for billions of people and interview and growing teams at Facebook to build something really unique and special. I was a "coding machine" at Facebook and after that 2ish year break, I'm a now a coding machine again, with \~20K GitHub contributions in the past 2-3 years. I'm working 24/7 on helping Fellows, helping my incredible team, and helping change the tech landscape. It's even harder than my work at Facebook, but the training wheels are off and I'm firing on all cylinders.

Hey Pentatonic, nice to meet you. If you are already a bit technical (I don't know what exactly you are doing, but I could imagine some scripting and/or DB querying) I would start with some online courses first - which is what it sounds like you are doing! Formation isn't a bootcamp and we work with people with typically 1 - 3 years of professional coding experience. Maybe 5 to 10% of people have no experience, and we can work with you if your skills are at a certain bar... so it's possible but more of a special case. We work on data structures and algorithms, take home projects, live coding, and a little bit of hands on simulated work if you need it. Why it works so well, three things: 1. We work with unconditionally until you get that top tier job. So if you are driven and hard working, then whether it takes 1 month or 10 months, we are working super hard with you every day. The result is that the vast majority of people get top tier jobs, and the ones that don't either had different goals to begin with, or had a time limit on their job search (and still ended up with very good jobs). 2. There's no fixed curriculum or program. We have a ton of engineering work behind the scenes so that every week we can generate a new schedule of tasks and 3-5 person mentor-led sessions we think you need to work on. We assess everything you do, and then we repeat. So it's much more efficient than anything else. 3. Our mentors are very strong. We've brought together some extremely impressive mentors who have down collectively thousands and thousands of interviews and not only give great feedback, but are also extremely passionate about helping people from non traditional backgrounds succeed. Sorry, became kind of long, but hopefully helpful!