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…
I'm not entirely qualified to comment but can give some information from from what I've observed.
1. There isn't like a single "algorithm" somewhere making decisions. Elon Musk talked about open sourcing Twitter's algorithms after (if) the acquisition goes through and I think this will be really hard. The "algorithm" is a complex set of many pieces. Some of which are indeed more algorithm-like processes that can be written out. Some of them are extremely subtle and nuanced product decisions that impact how people use the product. Knowing just the algorithms I mentioned won't really help anyone with anything, because user behavior is impacted by all kinds of non-algorithmic product decisions. Even seeing the entire source code would not give a good look into this.
2. There are people who care at the companies. The way intellectual property treated in the United States, where most of thes…
[crosspost] I’m Michael. I was a principal engineer at Facebook from 2009 to 2017, where I was the top code contributor of all time and also conducted hundreds of interviews. I recently co-founded Formation.dev, an engineering fellowship that trains and refers engineers directly into big tech. AMA!
I'm running a Reddit-wide AMA today, ask your questions about breaking into the tech industry on the official AMA thread:
[https://redd.it/ui98mg](https://redd.it/ui98mg)
When you say IT, I'm not sure if you mean like hands on programming, or other roles in the IT space. You absolutely have a chance at joining a top tier company. I've seen people from all kinds of backgrounds do it. There's someone who was in his 30s, 40s, was a tattoo artist amongst many other things, and was a great engineer!
My only concern would be if you run out of money and can't get the time you need to prepare and focus. Maybe taken a simpler low paying job for a while so you can prepare?
While I haven't pivoted careers, I did have a pivot in college. My college program was structured to let you choose a career direction in your 3rd year. I was expecting to go into Physics or Nano-engineering and hardly took any computer programming course in my first two years.
For me: passion. I loved reading articles about nano-engineering and black holes, but I would get distracted and my mind would wonder. When I start programming on something that I'm passionate about I almost can't stop. I dream about ways to make the code better. I think it's a very privileged position to be in to even explore these passions, which is why I try so hard now to help people who discover that passion later on to efficiently nurture it to make it a career.
There have been some pretty intense internal debates over product features - privacy/information related or otherwise. There are a lot of ambitious employees at Facebook who are also humans who use Facebook and other services and push for different ways of looking at things.
This is exactly why I'm fighting so hard now to help people from more diverse backgrounds get into companies like Facebook. We need need qualified engineers to fight for their views as well.
I totally understand the controversial nature of this and I think it's going to keep being a topic all of us, and all big companies have to deal with. All I can say is that even though Facebook is a business, people do genuinely care about this stuff so much more than I've seen people caring at some other companies that have a ton of information on you, so I hope that they can keep working on this productively.
Hi! At Facebook the interview process is the same for all individual engineers (ICs) E4+. In the onsite you'll do 2 coding interviews, 1 half coding/half behavioral, and 1 system design (SD) (sometimes adapted to your role, like product or frontend).
The key difference is the expectations in the SD interview. A more junior person will be tested on their approach and more basic knowledge of various pieces of a large system. A very senior candidate will be tested on their ability to give more alternates, more pros and cons, and more thoughtful examples leveraging their existing experience. Experience with big scale products can't really be faked, so this interview is aiming to test and calibrate that experience against Facebook's bar.
I left in early 2017 and had plans to leave around the US federal election end of 2016, so I missed a lot of this on the inside and am not qualified to comment on that unfortunately.
I can add one thing that's interesting. While I was there, Facebook really wanted to be a neutral party. When one person said something offensive to another person on Facebook, Facebook wanted that to be handled like it would be in real life, person to person. I don't think anyone was expecting people to want Facebook itself to have more of a voice and opinion on information and they have been working hard to figure this out.
Great question, I have seen a few standout projects. A few points:
* It has to be something you are so passionate about that this shines through when you talk about it. e.g. a former musician who made a machine learning based tool to generate sheet music based on famous composers music.
* It's better if you launch the thing publicly, e.g. app in app store, live website on a real domain you bought. Real people giving feedback helps you learn and gives you more interesting things to talk about in interviews.
I don't think we'll fully cover this topic here but I have one thing to add which is that all the engineers at Facebook take privacy very seriously when building products. Sure there have been bugs reported and engineering mistakes, like at any company, but focus on privacy first when building new features and products was paramount.
Facebook's biggest mistake was in not understanding how a lot of people interpret the word "user data" differently across the world. Facebook's primary goal with user data is to keep it safe, secure, and protected.
When the press said things like "sell user data", people took that literally and were appalled because no Facebook employee would betray the users like that. But a lot of people interpret "sell user data" as making money in any way from the way data might be matched up, even if that's done safely and anonymously.
It wasn't so giant when I started haha. The people I worked with were really smart, hardworking, and passionate about building things that the people using Facebook loved and found useful. For example, I started a product to support private college campus communities on Facebook and it was really rewarding to see the value that students got from having these safe spaces.
I’m Michael. I was a principal engineer at Facebook from 2009 to 2017, where I was the top code contributor of all time and also conducted hundreds of interviews. I recently co-founded Formation.dev, an engineering fellowship that trains and refers engineers directly into big tech. Ask me Anything!
PROOF: https://i.redd.it/e74tupgktbx81.jpg
I have a lot to say about what it's like being an engineer in big tech, how to prepare for technical interviews, and how to land engineering roles at these companies. I would also love to hear your stories and give you personal advice on this thread! But feel free to ask my anything!
As an E7 level principal engineer, I made thousands of changes to Facebook across dozens of areas, impacted the entire Facebook codebase, modified millions of lines of code, and interviewed hundreds of engineers. Looking back, the most rewarding part of my time at Face…
I would add two general pieces of advice to 1 and 3 that I always give people as well (I’m the cofounder of Formation.dev which is not a bootcamp, but I worked with a lot of bootcamp grads a few years down the road)
1. Check who the instructors are and if they or the TAs are recent graduates. A lot the programs that have recent graduates teach while their job hunting have a lot of churn and the TAs leave the second they get a job. Second, a recent grad who doesn't have any professional experience might be able to help in some ways having recently gone to the program, but you won't be getting professional level code review from very experienced engineers that you're aiming to work with in the future.
3. I always strongly recommend people try to find alumni as you suggested, but focusing on those with backgrounds similar to themselves. There are always a few people who have prior experi…
Can you add more details about your background and your goals? There are no objectively good choices.
If you have more experience Codesmith is probably better for getting a higher paying job than Flatiron. In terms of education, all material you ever need is available free online (or for much cheaper than a bootcamp) so I would weigh that less. Codesmith relies heavily on former students to teach, but have scaled this better than other bootcamps that rely on former students to teach by making the "Fellows" program a prestigious fixed term role for the best students, rather than a backup role for the ones that didn't get jobs where the teacher might leave suddenly when they get hired.
If you have decent experience, or your goal is a top tier/FAANG level company, you might just need a more interview-focused coaching and feedback (not a school or bootcamp).
It's very case by case and depending on timing. Right now there is a rumored hiring freeze on E3 and E4 (and possibly more), they haven't said anything publicly.
I can't emphasize enough how unique each person's background and path is, no one could read this and get THE answer for how to get a job at Facebook. That's part of the value we offer, Facebook, or otherwise, we use all of our expertise to help craft your path to YOUR goals (a lot of people really don't like Facebook and don't want to work there). Similarly as you start interviewing, pass/fail, your timing changes, your preferences change, remote vs in person stuff, we adapt to what you want, and we're a shoulder to lean on for advice (and sometimes proactively give advice as a lot of people have misconceptions as well). At the end of the day every person at [Formation.dev](https://Formation.dev) wants to see you in a super imp…
I found two people that got into Google from Codesmith without experience listed on LinkedIn so it might be possible there too!
[https://www.linkedin.com/in/cameron-greer/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/cameron-greer/)
[https://www.linkedin.com/in/andieritter/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/andieritter/)
One lists their open source projects as work experience and the other doesn't. Not sure what their resumes looked like pre-Google though.
So Facebook doesn't even interview new grad E3s who didn't come from internships or the schools they recruit at. They experimented with an E3.5 program but that required 6 months of work. And the E4 rotational program also required more work, just where the experience is not at the normal E4 bar.
Sorry, I geek out over this stuff haha
Sorry not to pile on here, but I was looking into this "mid-level FAANG" statement more because I've been involved in every aspect of hiring at Facebook it's just not possible at Facebook to get a full blown E4 SWE job with zero experience. If that happens, eight people made mistakes: the recruiter, 3+ engineers, the hiring manager, and the two VP/directors who have to approve the offer. It has nothing to do with raw skill and there's no way to game this without them making a mistake or a very large and coordinated lie.
It was bothering me that people would think this could happen so I want to set the record straight. I can't speak to other FAANG and Amazon definitely has a less consistent process where I could see this happening. I also know contractors via Global Logic get Senior Engineer titles sometimes. But it's bothering me!
If you have specific feedback on how we can improve our coaching, let us know. We support you until you get that outcome, but time is the variable, and we are always trying to be more and more efficient.
We coach people on DS&A, System Design, frontend and live coding, technical behavioral, negotiation. It's all personalized and if you talk to a former Formation Fellow you might get a better idea since I might not explain clearly what we do. I would love to clear up any misunderstanding.
>So is the goal to present this final project as work experience?
In my experience talking to Codesmith grads about their projects, most could not talk about them at the Facebook, full blown SWE level behavioral bar for entry level roles. (I posted above but I worked at Facebook for 8 years as one of the most senior engineers, trained Facebook engineers on how to run these interviews and many of my current co-workers have as well). The projects are not run like real companies so people don't have real answers for many critical questions and raise a lot of flags.
A good example is a project where the team chose to rewrite their project using a brand new open source framework instead of a super reliable framework (not disclosing details to reveal anything personal). The team had no idea about the tradeoffs of using something stable and reliable for a large scale project vs using someth…
Yeah we have. Most people have some professional experience, but there are a few people with zero experience that have gotten top tier jobs (Facebook included).
Again, it varies so much by person so there aren’t definitive patterns, but these are some examples:
1. We have a production level internal codebase where people complete tasks and bugs and get code reviewed by our team. People with less experience often work on this area, whereas people with experience do not. The goal of this is to learn professional level git, and how to communicate with engineers. So while employers know this is a project and not a job, people have examples for team-based stuff to talk about.
2. Some people have extremely impressive personal projects (this is an entire thread topic hahaha) and we help you practice talking about them very impressively.
Overall, using our extensive Facebook experience, we kn…
One point of clarification that is critical is that it depends on what role at Facebook (SWE vs other roles like Solutions Engineer) and if it's a contractor role or a full blown role. I can only speak the the full blown SWE bar, which is the highest and most consistent as well. The contractor bar is very different and I could see the above approach not being a problem for those roles.
For the SWE bar, absolutely we prepare you. We have extremely senior and director level former FB mentors preparing people in a variety of ways (1-1, small group) for the behavioral SWE interviews. We coach more experienced people so each person has to prepare differentlty and needs unique feedback and a unique strategy to the behavioral interview. We also have several full time team members who taught engineers at Facebook how to conduct these interviews.
One thing to consider more than the numbers alone for any program is to find people at the bootcamp who had a similar background/profile to yourself and see how they did.
Two things to consider specifically for Codesmith's numbers:
1. They have more people with some kind of experience before joining than a lot of other programs, and those people tend to make higher salaries coming out, which brings up the median.
2. Students are encouraged to put their open source projects as work experience, so they tend to get more real engineer interview opportunities than other bootcamps. Whereas at other bootcamps people get more junior, apprenticeship opportunities, and internships.
So you really want to try to see what people that look like yourself on paper have done rather than the overall stats.
In my opinion, the problem with ISAs and coding bootcamps is that an ISA only works if you are actually guaranteed to get a job at the end, then it's a win-win. Unfortunately, like you pointed out, so many people don't get jobs out of bootcamps and break this model. The win-win approach of both sides giving 100% until the day you get that job has been working really well for us at [Formation.dev](https://Formation.dev), but we're not a bootcamp or eduction program so it's a little different.
u/Comfortable-Cap-8507 do you think it would make a difference for you if GA was 100% training you until you got that job without stopping or do you still think you it would be a bad idea to do an ISA?
I have some neutral comments on the project-as-work-experience debate. I was a E7-level Engineer at Facebook for 8 years, interviewed hundreds of people, read thousands of resumes. I'm co-founder of Formation.dev now which does mentoring and coaching and I have worked with many Codesmith grads and alumni and am familiar with their program. We also have recruiters at Formation with 10 years recruiting experience at Facebook as well who review Codesmith applicants to Formation. We also hired a Codesmith alumni who we worked with at Formation as well.
1. If you put something on your resume that says Software Engineer for a "company", where the company is an open source project, it's a little grey area/pushing the limits of what people deem acceptable at top-tier companies. Here's an example of a prolific open source contributor and what their resume looks like with things clearly labelle…
It's great to see so many supportive comments on the thread, and the fact that you got some interviews means there is hope and it sounds like you have some fight in you!
If you DM me your LinkedIn/Resume (or provide a little more details about what you've done in the last 7 months here), I can take a quick look for more detailed advice (I'm co-founder of [Formation.dev](https://Formation.dev), and was a E7 level Engineer at Facebook for 8 years, interviewing hundreds of people and reviewing stacks and stacks of entry level resumes).
\+1 to all the people who said you probably need coaching and interview prep more than a bootcamp. There are two things to deep dive into, 1. benchmarking your raw skill levels to see if you are interview ready or not yet. 2. you need help getting the interviews.
Given you are applying to 100 jobs a week, I think you absolutely need some help on your approach.
There are different options for all of these goals, [interviewing.io](https://interviewing.io) is good for doing one off interviews without any training or job hunt help, and [Formation.dev](https://Formation.dev) is much more expensive and is your one stop shop (disclosure: I'm co founder) for assessment, skill building, job hunting, negotiation.
There are some other options for coaching, like Pathrise and Outco and you should do your research, and figure out what's right for you, but I would strongly suggest something like t…
Hey, I'm the co-founder of Formation that the commenter below mentioned a few weeks ago. We are indeed busy and growing the recruiting team... we are a small team focused on the quality of our training, so we want to grow sustainably.
If you are still interested DM me and I can follow up and see what happened.
I'm a co-founder of Formation, you should do a lot of research and make informed decisions. Most importantly, we work with you for however long it takes until you have a great job and you have our full support the entire time. As of writing this, our last 10 offers signed, in order, are from great companies: CloudTrucks, Plaid, 1Password, GitHub, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Google, Snap, Akasa. It's not cheap, but it works.
I would try to contact current and former people we've worked with to see what their experience is like. Some of the people with less experience list Formation.dev on their LinkedIn and if you are more experienced it's a little harder to find people, but you can look on our network page and ping some of those of those people that have a similar background.
If you have been self studying DSA and that’s your main gap, I would absolutely not look at a bootcamp, and instead look at more interview prep. I’m the founder of Formation.dev and an 8 year E7 engineer at Facebook and have helped many bootcamp grads with some work experience level up to top tier jobs. While we support you all the way until you get a new job, and it’s intense,it’s also not cheap so I would carefully look at your options and figure out what’s best for you.
Leetcode is a great way to get some kind of benchmark. For example, you want to be comfortable solving medium level problems to have a chance at top tier roles.
Everyone has a different path. I would look at Formation.dev (disclosure: I am a cofounder) if you are trying to fill in CS fundamentals and your goal is a job. If you are already getting interviews I wouldn’t consider a bootcamp. A masters degree has the advantage of being considered for new grad roles, but is costly and will take the most time. All options are very different.
At Formation, our recruiters are all super experienced former top tier company recruiters (e.g. Facebook 10 years) and they can talk to you about your goals and give you genuine advice based on your specific journey.
If you haven't already made a decision, check out Formation.dev (disclosure: I'm a co-founder). It might be a good fit and you should look into it and do your own research. It's not a bootcamp with a structured curriculum, nor is it a job hunt only program. We work with people to fill in whatever gaps they have across the board (technical and behavioral), refer you to top tier jobs, help you interview and negotiate, etc... And we work with you on your schedule all the way until you get your new job.
Our last ten placements (at time of writing) were at Plaid, 1Password, GitHub, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Google, Snap, Atlassian. Many of these engineers went to bootcamps in the past.
I also don't really know any other programs like this at the time of writing, perhaps having several private mentors who is are senior engineers at top tier companies and paying them directly?
I've worked with several alums who got their first job after Codesmith and it can get you there. However, if you are targeting top tier roles with a ton of impact and very high comp I would absolutely suggest a "2nd bootcamp"/more training.
At Formation.dev (disclosure: I'm a co-founder) where we do exactly this kind of additional training, our last ten placements (at time of writing) were at Plaid, 1Password, GitHub, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Google, Snap, Atlassian. And at one of these people was a Codesmith alum, many did other bootcamps in the past. I don't want this to sound like an ad, so please do your own research about [Formation.dev](https://Formation.dev) and other programs that do additional training and make an informed decision.
So people who want to achieve this truly top tier bar absolutely can benefit from more training.
I’m the cofounder of Formation. The other commenter below summarizes the value proposition well: if you do your part, we do ours and we work with you until you get a new job, through the entire journey, and never decrease our support. Many people drastically increase their income such that the cost of the program is a fraction of the compensation increase alone (and we help negotiate offers where a 5 min email counter offer can pay for the program).
If anything, the time and energy you dedicate should be a bigger factor if you are working already. We are your coach and adapt your training week to week to push you to grow, no shortcuts.
Hi, I’m the co-founder of Formation and specifically for this question of if Formation would be good for someone from CodeSmith… we have worked with a handful of CodeSmith alum at Formation and I would recommend trying to find them on LinkedIn and asking them about their experience. It’s hard to find people that list CodeSmith and/or Formation on their LinkedIns but some recent outcomes were Snap, Facebook x2, and some still job hunting.