Yeah I would look at something like that, Codesmith, Formation and those accelerators above.
We have this assessment at Formation you can do to help guage where you are too. If you get a very low score definitely consider the more bootcamp style programs. If you get a high score you can probably lean towards interview prep.
https://formation.dev/join/assessment
Hmm. I co founded Formation.dev and people sometimes call us a career accelerator amongst other things. Quite frankly we are quite unique so this is an edge case. We work with people with 1 to 3 years typically of professional experience to make a leap to a top tier company.
But would you call Outco, Pathrise, and Interview Kickstart career accelerators? I hear that used for these and I want to make sure we're talking about the same thing.
The Headstarter sounds like it's in the bootcamp bucket based on their website. It sounds like Codesmith demographic, which is people typically without professional experience.
Yeah excellent point! It is by far the best results compared to other bootcamps, and I actually think their program and results are very good (other than the work experience and mid level thing... sorry I have to qualify this every time so this statement is not quoted out of context).
Maybe Codesmith should just go the HackReactor route and publish their own audited results. I don't think they really need CIRR anymore as a stamp of approval. It's kind of like the Olympics where one country keeps winning everything and the other countries don't want to play anymore haha. If all the other bootcamps stopped reporting for example, that's what would happen.
Sorry if I came/or come across harsh on CIRR, I'm like truly very open minded to arguments both sides and love this discussion!
HackReactor is another program with audited results (not following CIRR because of some drama with CIRR, but audited), where some cohorts have six figure medians as well. Other than Codesmith's fake project work framed as months of experience and the whole mid level claim that I can talk about for days, I think Codesmith had better results than HackReactor for a lot of people who haven't done much coding yet.
Formation isn't a bootcamp or school and doesn't have a "program", fixed dates, cohorts, etc... so we haven't figured out the best way to talk about results. The median base salary of the past 12 months (since May 1, 2021) is $138k and TC is much higher when factoring in stock (usually in the tens of k per year) and bonuses (5 or 6 figures). But many people start Formation making a good salary (sometimes 6 figures already) already so apples and oranges. If you want to research, tal…
Hey u/aetrides
Codesmith full bootcamp program is 12 weeks and is upfront $19,950 paid over 8 months or so. But they have various loans and scholarships to look into to spread it out further.
Formation doesn't have a bootcamp program, it's kind of like a personal trainer program. So we work with people however long it takes to get a job, typically 4 to 6 months. Our price varies from 9% to 15% of your new base salary (deferred until after you start your new job) depending on how much work you need and experience you have. Our median BASE salary for the past 12 months (since May 1, 2021) is $138K, so about $12,420 to $20,700?
So the programs are entirely different and we actually work with people who both come DIRECTLY FROM Codesmith to us and people who get jobs after Codesmith (amongst many other bootcamps) and then come to us.
People starting at zero fall in the bucket that have do…
That seems like a long time, you might be able to get into Codesmith sooner. Most bootcamps might say "waitlist" or "closed" but they have room still. Can't hurt to ask.
If you want to gauge your DS&A alone, we made this 45 assessment you can do from Formation: [https://formation.dev/join/assessment](https://formation.dev/join/assessment)
Hi, Codesmith is probably going to be better if you know how to code already, but it's still a bootcamp that covers all the basics that you might already know, so if you have to wait three months to do it, the lost time might not be worth it. What did you mean by wait three months?
If your skill level for DS&A is already at a high enough bar, look at Formation.dev as well. I'm co-founder so obviously biased, but if you do meet that bar it's probably the most effective (do your own research and don't trust me!)
If you aren't at that level yet then Codesmith sounds like it would be a better choice for you than DevMountain if you can start it at roughly the same time.
Another option to think about if you're more advanced is to do volunteer work at something like Hack4LA to get real project work. Codesmith's project work is with peers, no PMs, no designers, and not many real users, so wo…
Formation FAANG-level DS&A assessment preview/sneak peak for this subreddit
Hi all, been hanging around this community for a while and enjoyed some great discussions.
One of the most common questions here by far is "should I join a coding bootcamp" or "should I join X coding bootcamp" and people seem to have a hard time gauging their skills.
We created this assessment at Formation.dev that we are testing out making public and wanted to invite anyone to try it. It's a CodeSignal based assessment that gauges your DS&A skills and helps you benchmark where you are at. If you do extremely well your raw skills might be almost strong enough already to interview with some practice! If you are completely lost here, bootcamp might be a great option.
[https://formation.dev/join/assessment](https://formation.dev/join/assessment)
Please let me know any feedback you have! I want to launch this…
Give yourself 3 - 6 months of learning on your own with CSX, and other online sources... CSX is ok but a little light when I took a look.
Highly recommend CSPrep to get a taste of what you are in for If you go all in it will be very intense for the 12 weeks.
And then leave 6+ months to get a job afterwards to be safe. About 90% finish on time and 80% of graduates get jobs in 6 month. So depending on your risk tolerance, factor that in. If you are 100% in starting earlier is better.
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…
👋, 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…
I started Formation.dev and I would check it out and compare it to other options. We've worked with some CS grads effectively in a similar position. We typically work with people with more experience (\~1-3 years work experience), but if your skills are at a certain level it could be a good fit. If they aren't I would consider a bootcamp.
RE: your question. People who get the best jobs out of bootcamps typically have some experience or a CS degree, so if you do go the bootcamp route I think you have a better chance of success.
As an alternative, while cranking out job applications, try building out and launching a product that people use, even if they try it once and never again. Getting real people using something and treating it like a mini-company rather than a project, can help you a bit. Devote many hours a day to this.
And finally, +1 you are correct that it's tough without in…
Thanks, point taken and thanks for the feedback, very much appreciated!
I normally just tell people to do their homework and talk to people about Formation (both for experiences, but also because you need to know what you are getting into). Sometimes people are even still concerned because they haven't heard any red flags and generally hear anything from good to amazing things. To make that list I literally just went to an internal chat channel and typed out the last 20 logged accepts, very simple, no report, not audited.
So we are doing ourselves a major disservice if we can't communicate the outcomes properly so that people believe them.
Once again thanks u/RobSteinsVoice the feedback!
EDIT: regarding the cost of an audit. We are a company backed by one of the top investors in the world, Andreessen Horowitz, and we have fairly expensive lawyers, accountants, etc... so it's not a fe…
u/RobSteinsVoice thanks for sharing that well written response! I definitely agree comparing on CIRR Codesmith is by far the best results and at a slightly larger scale.
Good question about Formation. We might in the future actually! The problem is we aren't a school or bootcamp and we work with people for wildly different amounts of time (I've seen anywhere from 1 month to 12 months) and people all do different things. So there isn't a single experience we can summarize.
But the outcomes are extremely strong and we want to figure out how to communicate that better because people assume we cherry pick the best results.
Here the last 20ish offers accepted, in order, no filtering or editing: Bloomberg, Paperclip, Front, Workday, Neato, Microsoft, Bitgo, Amazon, Jelly Fish, GitHub, Microsoft, Toast, Quantcast, Meta, CloudTrucks, Plaid, 1Password, Microsoft, Google, Meta.
This is also an in person bootcamp in Punjab which is a specific market for a group that's primarily US based bootcamps.
I think we're on the same page here about Code Camp, but would love to chat about CIRR audited results seperately because I've seen you post a few time about how important audited results are. The TLDR: it was founded and is run by primarily bootcamp executives and while it's fantastic to have at least some audited data it was also crafted to make you need to do a little extra work to read between the lines. Like Codesmith's report says the median salary for NY on 2020 is 120K. Now if you actually crunch the numbers in the report itself based on graduation rates, number of people who supplies information, and number of people employed, it's not the median salary. It's the median salary of people who graduated, people who got jobs, and people who reported their salarie…
I might get some negative responses on this but I would consider a computer science degree. BloomTech is constantly talking about it as an alternative for College, but not everyone going to college wants to get a job right away and college provides a safe place to learn things for the sake of learning.
Bootcamps across the board don't train people with the fundamentals because they make job guarantees and everything they do is focused on getting a job so I disagree with the comments about how you can do what you want to do at a bootcamp and learn what you want to learn.
A lot of bootcamps are taught but recent grads and not people who deeply understand theoretical computer science. Even the ones with great practical instruction, like Codesmith. Although maybe I'm over pivoting to theory and history and you are somewhere in the middle.
I wouldn't over index on the headlines. I'm an insider in the industry and there is definitely a lot of stress, but definitely a lot of demand for engineers. We've had several six figure starting with a 2 offers this week at Formation at top tier companies that are not in the headlines and going strong. So don't give up.
That said, don't quit your job and go all on, be smart about it, but the world needs a lot more engineers.
Hey thanks for the thoughtful reply.
regarding GitHub, I’m speaking specifically about the fake work experience project contributions. People also often have separate "open source" experience with 3 other projects. I have all the raw data carefully logged and can share with you but it's specifically the fake company experience listed on LinkedIn and contributions to those specific projects.
That said I do agree with you about the ends justify the means argument. Like I said, I work with some awesome Codesmith alum that I love and support dearly (AND HIRED ONE MYSELF). The people are performing well then is it really so wrong?
I do have anectodal evidence that people have challenge Codesmith leadership about it being implied, but not directly told, to fake the experience, as well as to pass background checks. Not going to mention who, but I'm sure Codesmith alumni reading this know a…
I'm not sure in interviews actually. I had interviewed E6s and M2, D1, but never E7s. Back when I was there there were very E7s and most rose from within. At the time, some of the E7+ that were hired in, left after no too long. Part of the problem was that this level is paid so highly at other FAANG and the people have a lot of respect and influence, so it was incredibly hard to get them to leave their companies. Not sure if that changed since 2017... a lot has haha.
So for me, they created coding machine for me and I pushed on my side to have that impact recognized. I have friends who had more naturally recognized superpowers. One person wrote very few lines of code but when he did, it saved tens of millions of dollars. Another was just brilliant. The most straightforward path was archetecting infrastructure that was industry leading (in terms of performance or feature set at scale)
A…
Hey, E6 -> E7 is a very large jump. Approximately 15% of the company is E6 and under 2% is E7. At Facebook they have these "archetypes" which kick in at E7, so you have to be solid all around and like exceptional in one of the areas. For me, I was the "coding machine" because I cranked out ungodly amounts of code and motivated others in the process.
I can't comment about Twitter's process, but in Facebook speak, you might be doing great at everything, but you need to now build momentum around your superpower. Are you solving problems no one else can solve? Are you cranking out tons of code? Are you saving millions of dollars via elegant solutions no one else can think of? If you can keep doing what you're doing and then triple down on your superpower that might be the difference.
u/Cheese12345678901 Yeah I find this sketchy too. I pulled LinkedIn experience and GitHub histories for 200 Codesmith alumni on their flagship projects and diligently made a big table. The vast majority claim 6 to 18 months of experience and actually commits in GitHub over 2 to 6 weeks, most 3 weeks. Speaking with alums it sounds like the project is a 6 week unit and that their leadership actively encourage people to exaggerate this experience because they are "putting in 12 to 16 hour days" so it "counts as months of experience". The more people I talk to, the most frustrated I get, so I stopped haha.
I'm pretty sure this is Codesmith and a posted a very long summary below. They do have an audited median salary in NYC from 2 years ago of 120K, but they also muddle that up with "mid level" titles. No one can go from zero experience to mid level FAANG. I worked at Facebook for 8 years and it's impossible there. So they are combining people who get $150K CONTRACTOR jobs at Facebook (not SWE, and not "mid level") with people who go to startups and get mid level titles but are compensated less... but 1 + 1 does not equal 2 here.
The mid level titles at smaller companies is a result of a bit of a sketchy behavior and you can read about that in a long post I did here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/un1cyf/is\_there\_a\_good\_bootcamp\_besides\_codesmith/i85flg0/](https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/un1cyf/is_there_a_good_bootcamp_besides_codesmith/i85flg0/)
This is probably Codesmith because they make these promises.
I did a deep dive on 200 Codesmith students/alumni that I will repost here. The summary is that 120K is their median salary in NYC from 2 years ago, and that is legit, but that they also mislead people into thinking they can get mid level roles right out of the bootcamp. They base these claim on salary and it’s impossible to get a mid level FAANG role out of a bootcamp with no experience.
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I'm not affiliated with any bootcamps but I work with a lot of people who have gone to bootcamps in the past. I was also an E7 level principal engineer at Facebook, where I worked from 2009 to 2017, and interviewed hundreds of people. I run coaching and training for experienced engineers to help them level, but I've heard a lot of problems with bootcamps from people I work with and started hangout in this subreddit. I can give my asses…
Hi, I'm from Toronto but have been in SF for about 13 years now. I know the founder of Rithm and did an investigation in Codesmith because of some concerns that I heard about their students lying about work experience.
First, Codesmith is LA/NY based and has very few ties to SF.
I can help the best I can here:
1. For remote, both work for EST to PST so you'll be fine.
2. I have zero credibility on this one, but Toronto comp is so much lower than SF in general. An entry level decent but low end SF junior engineer is paid more in CAD than a mid level engineer in Toronto. So I wouldn't extrapolate anything from the outcomes of these bootcamps in the US.
3. I could totally be wrong but I can't imagine employers in Toronto knowing about Codesmith and Rithm, or knowing enough to hold them to a higher bar. If you obsess over bootcamps you would know of both, they both have generally positive…
Hey, I don't want to throw off the vibe of the thread, but I'm the co-founder of Formation and can give my take. 1. we only work with people we feel confident will succeed with our training and 2. if you do your part, you have our full arsenal of support (technical and behavioral mentorship, and a shoulder to cry on as well) until you get a job you are happy with. The result is that the vast majority of people genuinely have incredible/great outcomes. A small number have good outcomes that they are happy with but make some tradeoffs.
I would highly recommend contacting any current or former Fellow with a similar background to yourself and find out about their day to day experience, that's the best way to evaluate any program.
The secret: nothing and no one is perfect, there are numerous things we are trying to improve every day, but we have a one-of-a-kind unique program with legitima…
Hey, I'm the co-founder of Formation and stumbled upon here. I don't want to mess with the vibe of the thread because there is a good discussion here about cost and outcomes that I don't want to interfere with, but I wanted to add that that percentage is taken off of your base salary and at top tier companies (where most people end up) you receive equity and bonuses that add on to that. So most people don't have a problem paying. The last time we crunched the numbers people on average INCREASED their compensation by $80K. An example case based on numbers would be someone entering Formation making $110K with no bonus or equity, and leaving they are pushing $140K base + $25K/year equity + 10% annual performance bonus + $20K signing bonus.
Hi, I'm the co-founder of [Formation.dev](https://Formation.dev) and we don't tell people who succeeded to write a review there, we tell every single person that finished the program the following in an exit survey.
"Would you be open to sharing your experience on Quora? Reviews are hugely impactful to help people who were in your shoes make an informed decision about joining Formation."
I think that's pretty fair and neutral, and open to suggestions if you feel this is biased.
Our team works tirelessly to make sure our Fellows have great outcomes. We do whatever we can to make sure people have a good experience and the vast majority do.
I wouldn’t trust LinkedIn because it’s self reported. Similarly Codesmith discouraged people from putting it on LinkedIn they are not captured, other programs do similar things making it a bit hard to trust LinkedIn only. Finally, as you can see in here, people’s experience varies wildly before starting bootcamps and mapping outcomes from past experience would be interesting.
Hi all, I wrote a good summary of Codesmith here if you are interested https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/un1cyf/is_there_a_good_bootcamp_besides_codesmith/i85flg0/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3
I’m not saying it’s not a quality education, but I don’t think any current student of any program can comment on the quality of the education until you look back and reflect later on. If you knew what you didn’t know then you wouldn’t be needing training.
When I work with alumni it’s a challenge to retrain people around the fake work experience because Codesmith taught them the ends justify the means and that their project work should count for more credit because it’s so intense - it is not by top tier standards.
Hey, you can look at Formation.dev (disclosure, I’m a co-founder). We generally work with people with 1-3 years work experience but occasionally work with people who have other experience or significant self taught experience. Check it out, not sure if it’s a good fit, but it might be. DM me if you have questions or ask here!
EDIT: I re-read and missed the part about scripting experience. I would definitely consider Formation in that case. Otherwise, 100% not a bootcamp, it sounds like you’ll waste your time and money since you have no problem picking up programming languages. I would self teach over bootcamp for sure.
[Formation.dev](https://Formation.dev) (disclosure: co-founder) isn't a bootcamp, so it likely isn't a good choice, but it's a program that supports any schedule. Every week a new schedule is generated for the next week depending on your exact availability. There's no reason we couldn't work for bootcamps either we just don't support people without any experience yet.
Hey, yeah sure I can answer that about Formation.dev. The way it works is every week you get a new set of tasks and sessions scheduled to work on based on the areas you need to work on and your availability for the upcoming week. There are some example weekly schedules here: [https://formation.dev/program#week](https://formation.dev/program#week) "A week in the Fellowship"
It's not a program/course, it's more like having a personal trainer for working out, but for your interview prep and job hunt. So you'll work with many different people at different times. Towards your job hunt you'll do more 1-1 mock interviewers and feedback sessions. Throughout you'll do a lot (2+) sessions a week with an engineering mentor and up 2-4 other Fellows. These vary in format but the group is typically given a problem (algo/frontend/etc...) and work with the mentor collaboratively to work through it. The…
Sorry, you’re right that this is focused on Codesmith and not the alternative. I work with many Codesmith people and have a spreadsheet of hundreds of alumni and I went with that because I feel confident based on my research. It’s not a great answer to the question about alternatives. I’ll think about this a bit more overnight.
Formation doesn’t work with people who don’t have experience, sorry if that came across as comparing it to Codesmith. Entirely different things.
Contractor roles are entirely different from the SWE pipeline, I should have mentioned this in more detail. I have definitely seen some misunderstandings happening because of contractor vs full time, software developer vs SWE, etc... There is no way that's it's possible to get an E4 SWE offer without system design nor can anyone say you are at the E4 SWE bar without doing a system design interview. I've sat in on dozens of VP level final offer review meetings and it's just not possible.
I'm not affiliated with any bootcamps but I work with a lot of people who have gone to bootcamps in the past. I was also an E7 level principal engineer at Facebook, where I worked from 2009 to 2017, and interviewed hundreds of people. I run coaching and training for experienced engineers to help them level, but I've heard a lot of problems with bootcamps from people I work with and started hangout in this subreddit.
I can give my assessment of Codesmith, the good, the bad, the warnings. Overall, for a bootcamp it's think it's a solid consideration, just look for this level of detail in any bootcamps you consider.
GOOD:
1. Instructors are good teachers and care a lot about teaching. They publish a lot of videos and run a lot of free sessions, and they get really great feedback.
2. They've scaled pretty well. Like most bootcamps, recent grads immediately teach the current students, but…
Hi, at Formation you need to have some experience right now. Most people have 1-3 years of professional experience and we focus on amplifying your strengths and filling in your unique gaps. When people are starting out, you tend to need a little more experience to start figuring out those strengths. Experience can come in the form a real job, but could also be a related job, internships, previous bootcamps, freelance work, or \~2+ years of self study with projects. We don't overpromise anyone anything, so that's why we focus on what we can deliver on and we haven't invested yet into developing the materials and support for helping people a little earlier on in their journey.
Ok long paragraph haha, but the second thing you said is very important to look at. Don't trust any "job guarantee" for any bootcamp, period. That's not to say they are a scam, or they are all misleading, but someth…
Nope, the ISA is just a convenient way for people to pay. We often advise people to turn down offers for all kinds of reasons. Our ISA is only based on your base salary and people will very often accept offers with lower base salaries but with way more equity and higher total compensation. Sometimes people just accept straight up lower offers because of company fit (i.e. someone's dream company, and another company tries to compete and outbid them with a larger offer). I've seen time and time again (even to myself at Facebook) where while these FAANG-level offers sound absurdly high in the moment, your long term income will be dictated by choosing the right company that you succeed at.
It's actually a challenge because we work with a decent amount of bootcamp grads later in their careers who had ISAs with like crazy fine print (5 year paybacks, onerous requirements for job guarantees,…
Hey yeah you are on the right track. There are a lot of factors and it depends a lot on you, what your options are etc... So as you might expect it's a nuanced and multi prong approach
1. Through Formation you'll do a lot of interesting group (3 people) sessions to talk about your experience, background, etc... and help you get the ball rolling with becoming more self aware of what makes you unique. Towards the end you'll do some more intense technical behavioral prep.
2. In the job hunt, it's really case by case and we are driven to help you find a great match as the ultimate goal and do what we need to to have that. So for some people it might be trying to set them up with someone we know who had a similar path to talk to at a company before you interview. Sometimes it takes a little push for options we think would be good but you might not know about. Sometimes it's about how to ask…
Hi @Space-man_! I'm the person at Formation.dev that worked in this! It's an interesting story and absolutely a challenge.
Our designer came across someone that built something similar as a demo. The person, I can't find the link, basically wrote up something about this particle effect and published a really rough demo website as a fun project. Fortunately he created a custom license for the project that allows any kind of use, personal or commercial, and any kind of derivate works, so we were able to make significant modifications to rework the code and use it for our site. The only thing you can't do is sell his code directly but with your name on it.
The project was based on Three.js for the canvas. The demo was really not reusable. So we broke it apart and used the underlying particle logic and shading logic. We generalized a component that could fit in any shape and size rather…
Hey, yeah I'm busy but trying to answer questions!
Regarding finding company fit its both algorithmic matching and your Formation Team human effort (you have a dedicated Fellow Manager and your own private channel with a career coach and engineers, so literally a team of humans to help). The algorithms help make the humans more efficient, so you can get great advice from very experienced people and we can scale the cost associated with having so many senior people on your side.
Everything you do week to week, both the individual activity and the sessions with mentors are mostly algorithmic and again, with your Fellow Manager and our technical team fine tuning things by hand to make sure we dot all the Is and cross all the Ts. Algorithms are much better at scheduling hundreds of unique hyper focused sessions fitting into everyones schedules every week than a human could ever be haha.…
Oh ok cool sorry! Yeah I just didn't want people thinking any bootcamp will sufficiently prepare them for DSA at a top tier level and saw your Codesmith comment below (consolidating comments here). I don't know every bootcamp everywhere and I only want to comment on things I feel confident in, but I havent seen one yet that prepares for top tier DSA well.
I know Codesmith and some others well because I work with a lot of bootcamp grads a year or more into their career who need a lot of support in getting to that bar.
Codesmith grads get good jobs because they do large scale group projects that they leverage as work experience and get supported with references for background checks to maximize the legitimacy of those projects. It's a model working pretty well and I don't dispute the audited outcomes, BUT the DSA is absolutely not sufficient.
I'm very familiar with their DSA program, have interviewed many Codesmith grads, and have helped many Codesmith grads strengthen DSA to get top tier jobs. I was an E7 principal engineer at Facebook for 8 years, interviewed hundreds of people and am very familiar with the bar necessary.
I agree that that is a different model it's a good point and you are right. The algorithms are similar though, I don't really know how to convince you :D. Youtube recommendation algorithms are optimized to keep you watching endless videos. Amazon's algorithms are optimized so that you have such a consistent experience that you subconsciously choose Amazon whenever you need something. There is a lot going on here. Each case is completely different as you said and that's why we can't generalize anything about "the algorithm".
Amazon does similar things with promoted products. If you watch IMDB TV on your Amazon Prime video you get commercials for competitive products. Behind the scenes it's the same kinds of algorithms.
I agree it's all about buying stuff so it's limited in scope and that is very different from social content.
I have a lot of friends who watched that documentary and were like Michael I can't believe Facebook does X, Y. It's really a very large spectrum and thousands and thousands of independent things going on that is characterized as a person sitting in a control room watching everything you do and manipulating your behavior. That thinking it only polarizing things more and doing exactly what people are accusing Facebook of doing.
Hi! That's a great question.
There's this ongoing tension that's been around for a while and I don't think what we resolved immediately between a traditional college path and a more self-taught alternative path. Colleges have had a hard time keeping up with the latest and greatest skills that you need on the job, but the top tier colleges still have the most consistent deterministic outcome to getting to a top company out of school. Part of the reasons is top tier colleges accept highly competitive students from top tier high schools and those people might just succeed on their own regardless. But the result is a very strong network of people that keep the cycle going.
Another difference about college is that the top-tier schools focus on academics and to some degree they would love it if you went to do a PhD and stay in academia, so their goal isn't necessarily even to get you into…
Hey, good question. I feel like this question comes up as well for seed-stage tech investors as well and they all have different answers to how to spot someone with high potential.
I have two different approaches:
1. Pattern matching against others. So people who had similar projects/experience in the past and seeing how they performed, and projecting if the person might follow a similar path.
2. Particularly unique or interesting experiences/projects/career progression. This might sound like 1. and somethings might overlap, but this is about looking for anti-patterns. People who are so far different from the observed patterns that you want to dig deeper.
Finally, I think everyone is high potential in some ways and finding the right environment to express that is the missing piece that I hope to help solve.
I don't know where it came from! Good question. The difference between an engineer and a developer is that typically engineers are solving problems instead of implementing solutions, and coming up with more general solutions instead of using existing ones. At the lower levels, these are more similar, but it's why most higher level people are "engineers".
I might be overanalyzing though, it's ultimately up the company to call it whatever they want.
Hi, I haven't worked there for a few years now, so I'm sure the culture has changed, but when I was there software engineers had a lot respect and leeway to work on their own schedules and prioritize their day to day. The expectations for impact were very high, so people who were not having impact definitely felt under pressure. A lot of people I worked with were used to get good grades in school and they put a lot of pressure on themselves to deliver.
The reason why I see people go there now is the scale. Working on giant systems, working on incredibly hard problems. You can see from some comments how much negative sentiment there is towards Facebook, and people genuinely want to try to make Facebook better.
Most things that happen at that happen at the office are covered under confidentiality so I'll be more vague.
When I started in Palo Alto, out of school, from Canada, it was pretty cool to see celebrities and important public figures come visit the offices and walk right by. Especially tech role models that most people might not know.
A memorable moment was when a fleet of shuttles showed up during a surprise all hands meeting and took the whole company to see a movie and rented the entire 10 screen complex.
I think it varies company to company. The general trend is that you have expectations for impact (you are paid a lot and presumably have to be generating more value to the company than they're paying you) but you also get a lot of freedom of how you do your work, as long as it gets done well.
Work like balance is definitely something to ask about when choosing a specific company.