Timeline

I have opinions on this if you want to hear those :D. I'm trying to comment with high quality answers that I strongly believe will help people. I actually know a decent amount about "the algorithm" but I'm not qualified to comment on the social responsibility of them. I have an academic and I know too many PhD grads in sociology that would make fun of me for trying to comment.

Yeah we’re small and focused on every individual having a great outcome right now . Companies do pay recruiters and agencies a lot of money for sourcing so there opportunity. We might explore it. Right now Fellows are making roughly $80K more in comp a year and our pricing is capped and much much lower than that (and is only based on base salary, not stock or bonuses) so it’s been working. But to truly have an impact on the industry and help get more underrepresented engineers into these companies, we’ll have to grow and make sure that we can support more people.

Hey, Facebook’s main backend is in HACK (PHP derivative) and their frontend is React with all the bells and whistles. You don’t need to know either to be hired as a SWE. Various backend services are also in different languages like C++. In terms of interviews you can use any language you want and they are white boarding style, meaning non compilable code. I’m not sure if they have changed this since going remote for interviewers. But people have become reliant on IDEs and whiteboard needs a little extra practice.

Hey, I think it's great you are talking your time and doing a degree over a longer period of time instead of a short bootcamp. From my observations, it usually takes people up to 2 years from day 0 to make a real transition in jobs. A few things, I think you can try to apply your background. Like maybe look at Autodesk as a target company! Second, don't choose a language based on market demand if you are willing to work remotely and/or move. Choose the language you gravitate towards to get started and build the fundamentals first.

Thanks everyone for a great AMA! I was honestly a little nervous about talking about my experiences at Facebook since there's a lot of controversy around it recently, but I enjoyed the great discussions. If you have more questions keep posting on the thread and I'll try to answer with a little slower response time! Finally, May the 4th be with all you engineers out there!

Hi! I think there's a lot to unpack so the direction I'll go in is about company fit. There's a right company for everyone (often many right companies) and finding that fit makes you 1. happier. 2. perform better. 3. not even think about work life balance - even if you have great work life balance. I personally love trying to find that fit with people. A lot of people come to us wanting to work only at FAANG or specific even smaller number of companies. And for some people that's the right fit, and for others it isn't. I love trying to help people find that fit.

It sounds a little random yeah. One thing I've noticed is that smaller companies tend to have less consistent and less well organized interview processes, which makes it more confusing for you as the candidate. A lot of companies won't tell you why unfortunately because it opens them up to legal liabilities if any of those reasons are interpreted as being because of you identify as being in a "protected class" in the state you live in/the company is in, or federally.

Replying to the whole chain here. I think the question was fair and didn't take anything negative from it, being closed minded to well intentioned questions just makes it harder to have discourse on these issues. The story behind this AMA is I did one spontaneously in this hyper-focused Facebook Group about the Facebook interview process, and people had so many questions and I loved trying to answer them all. I was looking into to a similar one on Reddit and this was the suggested place to go! Definitely scary yeah! But I actually am thrilled most of the conversations are thoughtful and good intentioned.

My L7 level impact came from not just the raw code output, but pushing the entire company to care more about code cleanliness. This started as the "Dead Code Society" (tshirts and all) to encourage people to refactor and get rid of old abstractions and tidy up. If I stayed longer that might even have evolved into L8 level impact.

Yeah that's a good start! After you are comfortable with the syntax try doing some React hands on practice: [https://reactjs.org/tutorial/tutorial.html](https://reactjs.org/tutorial/tutorial.html) If you have some engineering background already and some professional experience in a different area you might be able to do a bootcamp to switch careers. If you are a student and planning on going to college, I would consider a top CS school and focus on internships each year at top companies.

Yeah, I'm from Canada and went through the whole process. If you have a college degree in something related to engineering and took some courses in engineering, or have some number of years of experience programming (even if it's salesforce) then you have a good case to take a software engineering role under TN status. Obviously cannot give legal advice, but look into TN status in more details. The big companies will prepare TN materials for you if that's the path for you. Some experienced lawyers will vet your degree, experience, and ensure the role you are accepting is a good match for the TN rules for that role and make sure you have all the paperwork you need at the border. Otherwise you have a few other things to look at. If you do a master degree in the USA you can get a different visa through that. And you can look at working in a Canadian office, Toronto has a lot of offices f…

Hey! Haha, I'm similar and I usually spend the first hour or two (or three) in the morning working responding to others, unblocking people, and working with our Fellows to make sure they get the best experience possible. There are probably a lot of jobs like this but coding is both technical and creative. So having a short period of focus and creative juices flowing can result in not just large amounts, but solving hard problems quickly. Other times it's like writer's block and I just can't get the motivation to do something really simple. I would doubt this works generically, but when something comes up I add it to my TODO list for today and every day I work as late as I need to to clear out the TODO list until it's empty. If I misjudged the size of something, I break it up and add the rest to my backlog to be reprioritized tomorrow.

Hi, the lines are blurring a little bit. DevOps (which I'll call cloud architecture in this response) and SRE used to be a little more separate roles, and while they still are, with the shift to cloud services more companies are placing them all together in the big "software engineer" pool. It used to be back in the day that DevOps would be running scripts on proprietary machines and running around hooking up wires. Now DevOps is like writing complex software to manage generic cloud infra, like AWS, GCC, Azure, etc... So even if some companies don't call that "software engineer" there's a big and competitive market for this role. You absolutely get exposure to large scale systems and the transition to designing those systems is much smaller than other jumps. You might even find that you are already doing all the right things day to day but might just be missing the theory of why. And y…

My view is that both unit tests and end to end tests are important tools for people to work on a large common codebase. 1. Tests aren't only a tool to make sure business critical logic is correct, but they are a tool to make it so someone less familiar with your code can make changes quickly and safely by relying on the tests in place. 2. I believe testing is also a practical matter depending on the application. Tests are not the perfect solution to zero bugs. So you should always be thinking about what are the consequences of bugs in this code, what might happen, would there be unfixable damage done. So you are ready to both write better tests, and respond if things go wrong. That said, I have a reputation for not writing tests, but that doesn't mean I don't think they are important.

Hi, for Formation, it's based on your goals and your current skill level. One way of looking at it in my mind is that you are starting at point A and trying to get to point B and it will take C time (and D cost). We pattern match to your A, decide if we think we can get you to your B in a reasonable C time (3-6 monthsish) and you are ok with D cost. If all those things check out it should be a win-win. Some reasons one side or the other have not moved forward are: \- a starting skill level and goal that we don't think we can bridge in a reasonable time \- timeframes that we don't think we can work on \- goals we don't think we can get you to (e.g. we can't help with data science)

I think I benefited from joining early enough that most of the executives knew me personally by name and didn't feel like walled off people making all the decisions. I was also there when Mark Zuckerberg was positively regarded in the public, unlike today, and there was some amount of cult/worshiping type attitude towards him and the company at that time. I've been watching WeCrashed, SuperPumped, and the Dropout, and I don't remember things being that "cult-like" compared to these stories, but when they make the Facebook dramatization, I'll let you know how I feel haha. In terms of decisions, now that I work on my own company, which is much smaller, I see how hard it is to make decisions and communicate them to the company effectively. Facebook had/has an internal PR team working full time on how to communicate things within the company. I think that does make internal messages feel…

Hi! Nice to meet you. We're not a bootcamp and we're more like a personal trainer for your skills and job hunt. The main differences are: 1. We create a personal roadmap of tasks and sessions every week that fits your schedule based on how you did the previous week and the feedback we collect from mentors and assessments. 2. As long as you keep committed to your job hunt, we work with you for however long it takes until you get a new job that you are happy with, depending on your goals, so when you look at the placements on paper they are all top tier companies, the last 10 placements are at: Quantcast, CloudTrucks, Meta, Plaid, 1Password, GitHub, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Snap. And took people anywhere from weeks to months (more typical) to get there. 3. We have many extremely senior, staff, and higher mentors that are extremely successful in their own careers and really passionate abo…

Hey! * Preparing for interviews is a challenge for most people with experience. The top tier companies general ask similar style data structures and algo questions so if you practice those, you can cast a wide net. The puzzle style brain teasers are less and less common now a days though. * If you are really rusty, try a book like Cracking the Coding interview to kind of get back in the swing of things. * I'm a firm believer of the ask as many questions as possible bucket until people tell you are annoying. Most of the failures I see early on are people not asking questions and wasting too much time. So if you ask too many questions people might be a little annoyed but you'll be way farther ahead. * That said, you should still genuinely try to figure something out first and THEN ask the question about what you did, not about the original problem. e.g. Don't ask "how do I make a branch…

I didn't know him Facebook/Meta, I think we barely overlapped. In general for very senior engineers there are "archetypes" they follow and each one will have a completely different style of impact. I was a "coding machine" because I cranked out a ton of code. Some of the more industry-expert type engineers were more hands off on code. So while I can't speak about Eric, it's possible he's wasn't a prominent "coder" but was a senior and impactful engineer none the less, or it's possible he was a prominent coder! don't know!

Hey, two things I would do things at the same time: 1. Look into a short free/cheap online course, like CS50 and get a lay of the land of data structures and algorithms. 2. Look into a short free/cheap online course in React. Like Colt Steele on Udemy, or Odin Project. If you have absolutely no interest in the frontend then maybe look into a similar Python course, like at freeCodeCamp

It's really hard. Facebook managers get super stressed and spend weeks on them every year trying to make them fair and people still don't feel it's fair. I can touch on a few points that Facebook does: 1. Require specific examples in all feedback instead of general statements. e.g. rather than "Susan is always reliable when there are bugs!", "Susan jumped in to help me fix 4 important bugs in the past month, and one of them was a hi-pri bug impacting 10M users". 2. Make it mandatory to have a certain number of peer feedback submissions during the performance cycle, that have specific examples. 3. Create high level guidelines that try to match specific examples of work to behaviors listed in certain performance buckets and/or job levels 4. Most importantly, have a calibration process across different teams and different departments. This happens after all the initial evaluation is done…

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…

Hi, nice to meet you, I like to give more personal advice because every path is different and I want to find something a little unique about you that I can hone in on. My most general/therapy-like advice is focus on these four traits: 1. Grit: if something doesn't make sense just relentlessly keep trying until it does. Study the same concepts from different angels, debug something diligently line by line until you figure it out. 2. Curiosity: never be satisfied with "it just works", keep asking questions until you have a better sense of why. 3. Ownership: don't expect anyone to tell you what to do or anyone to have the definitive answer to anything, you need to ultimately be responsible for understanding or not. 4. Teamwork: help those around you who are learning. Oftentimes you get better by making the people around you better.

Hi Michael! Sorry to hear about your injury but I'm glad you found something productive that you like doing, that was probably a big unexpected life change. Yeah not to push Formation but this is the common background we work with to help fill those gaps. So even though you feel a bit isolated, you are not alone in these struggles! RE: Interviewing. There are a lot of companies out there. The top tier companies often use data structures and algorithms problems as a way to give everyone, with varying experience in varying stacks, an equal experience. If you are aiming for this level of company, you're going to have to invest some time in both learning more theoretical concepts, as well as practicing using them in interviews to pass (which is a different skill). Secondly, your practical experience sounds great, so you probably have a lot of stories to tell in a behavioral interview. The…

I can speak to my experience while I was there, but obviously not since I left, since that's all second hand. Day-to-day was extremely engineer driven. You had a lot of autonomy to work on what you wanted. The counter balance to that is that the performance review process is really intense and that's when the "impact" of your word is measured, debated, and compared to others at your level. What "impact" means is hard to define here, but at lower levels there are a lot of examples and the process is about collecting proper evidence via peer feedback to quantify your impact. Executive would review day-to-day and week-to-week work in live meetings with the team leads and give feedback and comments, but rarely top down commands at this level. That said, the high level decisions were entirely made by the executive team on a less frequent basis, such as quarterly goals. Engineers had less ins…

I can talk vaguely about this because the details might be confidential still. Facebook has a way to run a migration when you want to change an existing data model for something. I ran a migration that had a bug and overwrote billions of edges of data. Fortunately I was able to fully resolve/repair it really quickly, but it was a stressful birthday that year at 4am.

It's definitely possible! Musica.ly (which was acquired by Byte Dance and somewhat morphed into TikTok) kind of came out of nowhere while I was at Facebook and grew to tens of millions of users. That said, the large companies have too much nuanced knowledge of how to grow and sustain products and it's incredibly hard for a student without any of that knowledge to reproduce this kind of growth effect. Wordle is a recent phenomenon, but the founder worked at Reddit and had some insight into these things. I think the next big thing is going to be not "social" but something that spawns out of Web3/Metaverse/NFTs and that's why so much attention is in those areas. It's not going to be what we see today, but something new. These ideas are challenging some of the fundamental ways humans interact, so there is room for something big.

Hi, glad to hear you on the road and trying to have a positive impact! I left Facebook a few years ago and it continues to grow, so I've heard it can feel harder to see the impact. When you zoom out of the day to day, the promotion guidelines, the performance reviews, try to take a look at what impact your code has had on others. For me, I like working on user facing stuff because I see the impact (good and bad) almost immediately. I loved (and still love) working all weekend on a tool for a small non-engineering team to make their lives easier, and see them smile when they use it. I loved working on Facebook Groups and seeing the creative ways people were using the features to really have a meaningful impact on the members lives. To get up to Facebook's E7 it takes a lot of support from a lot of people, and despite being a coding machine heads-down coder, you need to build relati…

Hi, I'm a really middle of the road person, so I think that everyone has good traits, and traits they want to improve, has good days and bad. If we don't believe in the good we can do together then we have no hope, so I spent my time there trying to enable people to do more together than they can do apart. I'm really sad to see some of the recent problems and pain that people feel towards Facebook. It's so incredibly hard to bring people together who fundamentally disagree on the truth and part of me thinks Facebook is brave for trying, and part of me thinks that they need to push harder and harder to improve.

The difference between 6 and 7 is a big one. When I left about 15% of all engineers were E6 and around 1% were E7. At E6, you are basically doing an incredible job across the board. You are working on important projects, writing a lot of code, reviewing a lot of code, interviewing others, setting team goals, generally setting an example for a department. To get to E7, you need to have a "superpower" that makes you unique and have a org/company wide impact. Facebook has created something called "archetypes" to summarize those superpowers. I was the "coding machine" archetype, which was created for me actually, and is a rarer one. Other ones included Generalist, Specialist, Fixer, PM/Eng Hybrid. I commented below about E3, E4, E5: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ui98mg/comment/i7btvqe/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3

Hi, good questions. I don't think there is conscious bias, but humans have unconscious biases. Facebook runs this (I believe mandatory) session on acknowledging unconscious biases to try to help surface some of those things. They try to have the interview processes surface these unconscious biases as well. When I left, engineers were encouraged to use gender neutral pronouns when talking about candidates. I've seen tremendous efforts in recent years across all of big tech to try to get to address demographics that are underrepresented in tech and they are just starting to move the needles a tiny bit. However, even the areas that companies track in their "diversity reports" are a fraction of the hundreds of things we should be tracking and I think this will continue to be something invested in at least a decade to see the results. Formation exists to accelerate this. Open source on resu…

I was trying to use the LOC as a an example of the scope of my work. I was also a person who cranked out code and they created the Coding Machine Archetype for me to get to the E7 level. And yes, talking about LOC and PR count annoyed a lot of people at Facebook too :P. A superstar sports team needs the best people in the best positions and each person has impact in different ways.

Hey, I think that's a great stack to start with and plenty to get into your first role. I wouldn't go too deep into too many different things and I would recommend being better at a smaller number of things for your first job. Demonstrating a little deeper expertise/experience in one area will be more impressive than broad and shallow. I would recommend being really good with building projects in a single page React app, focusing on depth in React, and passable with CSS. On the backend, being able to run a node server with a simple API that the frontend calls and being familiar with a few different ways to store data would be good: e.g. SQL, Firebase, MongoDB

Hi! Try a lot of things by building a small few-day-long project (React, backend, web3, machine learning, etc...) and when something clicks, triple down on it and start building a career from it. Once you've settled in, keep exploring more areas. There's infinitely many things you can do in engineering, and when you start out you don't know what you don't know, so that's why I suggest an iterative approach and starting somewhere.

At Facebook, there weren't (and still aren't) many direct pipelines for people fresh from bootcamp backgrounds in general. I hope this answer isn't too complex or detailed but it's the thorough reason why it's IMPOSSIBLE to get a senior (or even mid level) job at Facebook directly out of a bootcamp with no prior professional software engineer experience. Levels at Facebook are not about raw skills (be it technical or behavioral) but rather they are about your scope of responsibility. 1. E3: Entry Level. day to day work at the task level. Receiving tasks from your manager and team, completing them independently with no help. 2. E4: Mid Level. day to day work at the feature level. Receiving feature level goals from manager and PM and independently breaking it up into tasks. Being the go to person for that feature and maintaining it in production proactively. 3. E5: Senior Level. day to…

Hi, entry level salaries depends significantly on the company, location, and role. Levels.fyi is a website that has a lot of information on all these dimensions to compare salaries in different locations. There are a lot of jobs though that don't pay nearly as much as the FAANG level bar. At the end of the day, the company you are working for has to be making more money by hiring you to justify paying your salary, your benefits, the HR overhead, and having at least some profit leftover. So the successful companies do indeed pay more not just because they have more money, but the impact you are having to the business is very large, even as an entry level. So you'll find a lot of engineering jobs at non-tech companies where you don't really have enough impact to the business for them to pay you a larger salary. There are also companies that take advantage of people but I wanted to focus…

Hi, I can respond to both questions separately: RE: social inequality. Before the internet, and still now to some extent, city boundaries and zoning have had a lot of problems with fragmenting cities. There are many experts who are dedicating their lives to these topics so I won't comment much, but humans interacting with humans everywhere have historically had these kinds of fragmentations, and I don't think it's Facebook's fault if they appear there as well. That said, Facebook wants to reduce inequality by hopefully reducing that fragmentation from what happens in real life by making it easier to interact with people. RE: Formation being paid. "Fellowship" is a word that doesn't really have a common definitely outside of academia, where it has a specific different meaning. We feel what we offer is clearly communicates what we do and would be devastated if people felt deceived, and s…

Hi! A lot of people have noticed these kinds of things too, even my family. So I haven't been at Facebook now for a few years, but as far as I was aware was absolutely no listening to conversations to show you ads and there also isn't a single reason you would see those ads. These are some of the possibilities: * You happen to be really similar to others in very scary ways that are almost impossible to believe. Some of these ad providers build profiles based on your demographics and have gotten scary accurate in making predictions about you. For example, if there's a trend forming of people similar to you on paper starting to go to a specific fast food restaurant, you might start getting ads targeted to you for that restaurant. And then coincidentally a friend also similar to you who just went to this trendy restaurant might be talking to you about it around the same time. * Someone in…

Hi, no Formation isn't a bootcamp. We happen to work with a lot of bootcamp grads that were some of the lucky ones who got any job out of the bootcamp to level up to a top tier job. People's negative experiences with bootcamps are one of the reasons we made Formation because we felt bad for all those people who are capable of having better careers but didn't get the personal coaching and mentoring they needed. I also wouldn't say all bootcamps are scams either. Some programs are bad intentioned, some are good intentioned. My biggest problem with bootcamps is most of them give you the promise of a job at the end and this just shouldn't be part of the offer. They should stick to training basic programming skills and they might have a better reputation.

Hi, interesting question. I believe on most platforms, definitely on Facebook, that you own your content and can do whatever you want with. You can post it on any number of platforms and Facebook doesn't own it. There are some platforms that are focused on trying to help people make money from their content, Substack is a newsletter platform, Patreon is a platform for video content. None of these have worked to make money from 100% of content and content creators often have to very strategically post content to "free" channels, or to modify content into different formats and post in different places to drive traffic to the paid sources. So to answer the question, I don't think posting content on social media is payable labor, nor do I think that people should get paid to post socially. I think the best solution is for platforms to give people many options to post content in different w…

Well there's title inflation :D. I remember I interviewed a "Vice President Engineer" once and was so confused. The candidate was a solid E5 senior engineer, and we both found the title kind of funny. Joking aside, I think the work ethics and intensity are similar, but ownership mindset is a tiny bit different. At Facebook, an engineer is an owner, responsible for their code, and they feel pride in seeing their code shipped, and then improving it to make it even better. The mindset in MBB is a little more about doing well on a project and getting good reviews from your clients and partners. I might be zooming in too much, but that's now I see it.

Hi, I've had some tenuous interactions with HR at Facebook and now that I have my own company I see how hard it is to handle private employee matters. HR's job at the company is to ultimately protect the company but protecting the company means also making sure that employees are happy and productive in order to keep the company successful. So when there are conflicts like this it becomes really hard to navigate. These types of conflicts happen at companies of all shapes and sizes and it's messy, because when you take off your Facebook hat, we are people, and people have messiness.

hey, I haven't worked on coding for the metaverse yet! ( I have something like 15,000 commits in the past two years working on Formation, so I'm busy in the non-metaverse right now) I do hop into some Oculus worlds every once and a while, we use this product called Gather to hangout casually at Formation, and Tandem to chat for work related things. If we look at the richness/engagement of online human to human interaction over time, it's gone from very limited async text, to voice, to photos, to videos, video calls, etc... I think the social side of the metaverse will be about bringing even more richness to our online human interactions. It might not be about funny looking avatars, but just richer interactions. I still have so many text-based chat interactions with customer service for example, where I get really angry and lose my patience in a way I would not in a more face to face c…

Hi! I actually didn't know I wanted to program all day when I started college. I was really into physics and the universe. I wrote a paper on quantum computing in high school. To me, engineers build things, and scientists study things. When I look for the deepest thing inside me that makes me an engineer it's that my drive is to find patterns and connections amongst very large systems/projects. So I like building things in the messy and imperfect world we live in, rather than coming up with interesting ideas on paper.

Hi, so in my experience each type of interview is hyper focused on specific things, so I can give those things for each type: * Data structures and algorithms: the "technical" (j.k.) term is "clean code". If someone naturally writes well organized code, minimal logic on the first try (no extra if statements or loops... even if they clean them up afterwards), that's always really impressive. Pro-tip: if an interviewer tells you your code looks "really clean" you probably passed that interview ;) * System design: if it feels like an exciting back and forth conversation more than interview that's fantastic. Like I'm talking to a peer casually about the problem. * Technical behavioral: this is a wider bucket, but strong career trajectory at your current company is very impressive, like being promoted every 6 months, or receiving really high (like top 5% at your company) performance reviews.

Hey! Good question. It's really hard to generalize, it's like asking "does getting a CS degree prepare you for a SWE career". There are many different bootcamps of all shapes and sizes. Ultimately it comes down to your personal goals for your SWE career and I would want to give you more personal advice. If I were to generalize, I would say that I see a bootcamp as a tool to learn basic programming, in the same bucket as things like the Odin Project, freeCodeCamp, CS50, but with more people around to ask questions to or motivate you. Unlike these alternatives, most bootcamps add an expectation to get a job at the end of them and this is concerning to me because people are uprooting their lives based on this expectation. They don't really work for people with zero experience getting any kind of tech-related job at the end and people in this bucket often continue to struggle planting thei…

I spent a lot of time working on Facebook Groups and I saw some very incredible ways that Facebook has helped people in creative ways. There are billions of people in the world and we all have flaws and good and bad aspects to us. I hope Facebook is the same and I know they are striving to improve and if we all had that kind of intense pressure to improve ourselves, society would probably be a better place.

Hi! I call DS&A table stakes, you need to meet a minimum (and high) bar regardless of the others. System design at Facebook is used to determine level, so if you are an experienced frontend engineer, you might struggle on a backend interview because you don't have the same experience there. Finally, technical behavioral interviews (Facebook calls this the Jedi interview) are extremely important. They typically are looking for flags that would otherwise be missed by the other interviews. So someone who studied their way through all the other interviews might fail the Jedi interview if they can't talk about their experience in a way that would be consistent with other people at your level on that team. To answer the question directly about being disadvantaged: it depends on the seniority of the role and the company. You may or may not be.

Good question. Facebook's interview process might seem surprisingly similar for like 10 years, but it shouldn't be surprising. When you have candidates trained in different languages, and working on vastly different companies/projects, you need an extremely consistent interview process to fairly evaluate people and compare them to each other. Behind the scenes there's even more checks and balances to keep the process consistent and fair. RE: System design. It's hard at Facebook because it's testing for your experience with different kinds of large scale products (whether it's more backend scaling, or highly used user facing products). If you don't have that experience, it's hard to fake it. They have a program called the "Rotational Engineer" program that's a mid-level program for people who never had the "scaled up" experience and need to fill in some gaps. The other thing about Facebo…

Hi nice to meet you. So at the top tier tech companies, a degree really isn't that important or a requirement to get or do a job in most cases. But that said, if you are in South America and would want to move to the United States, where most of these companies are based, then you might have immigration issues not having a degree. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm from Canada originally, and know that not having a degree can make it harder to physically go to the USA. There could be a few paths. There are some decent engineering markets in South America, like in Brazil, parts of Mexico, Columbia. I would maybe see if you can get a job at a company there is EITHER one of the leading South American based tech companies OR a company that does a lot of work for a big tech company in the USA. Once you have a year or more experience on paper that will get you more interview opportunities and you can…