With my FAANG-hat on, If you don't have any experience you should be aiming for entry level roles for truly top tier companies. The Facebook/Google/Dropbox/Apple/Netflix/Microsoft/etc.... bar has multiple levels of cross-company calibration going on to make sure your level is based on your work experience and scope of responsibility and not on your raw skill level. If you are very skilled you will get very good performance reviews and bonuses at your level and take on more responsibility quickly to get promoted faster. But levels at FAANG are based on scope of responsibility.
To answer the question, at Codesmith there are are combination of different things going in the "non-entry level" statement:
1. Somewhere between 10% and "a third" (different people have said different things) have some experience before Codesmith. Those people might be able to get "FAANG-level" mid-level roles de…
Just to clarify for other people reading this. Codesmith vs Formation is not a choice for most people. The vast majority of people are Formation are working as engineers and doing it part time, or have worked for 1 - 3 years and taking a pause). We have one person I currently know of that felt Formation was a better fit than Codesmith, and 10+ Codesmith alumni at various points in their careers. Most of these alumni come in at a middle of the road junior DS&A skill bar, slightly above the minimum we are confident working with but still clearly in the middle junior bucket and that is our lowest experience bucket. So the vast majority of people before Codesmith aren't choosing between the two. I recommend Codesmith to a lot of people who have no experience a couple times a week in DMs.
I do believe there are a very small number of people at Codesmith (I heard recently one or two in each c…
Hi!
Short answer: no.
Long answer: we accept iOS Fellows on a case by case basis. If you have several years of experience, we can focus on data structures and algorithms and system design, but not iOS specific expertise. You can use Swift for most of your practice, and Javascript/Python in group sessions. Finally, we have we have a few very senior mentors who are iOS engineers (Uber, Square, etc...) who can do one-off sessions to practice iOS system design interviews. Our most recent iOS Fellow received 5 to 10 (lost track) offers from top-tier FAANG companies, but I think having more iOS training would still help.
Sorry you feel that way, and I appreciate the candid feedback. I'm genuinely here to help people and give advice.
Having worked with hundreds of people, maybe half or so(?) who have done bootcamps (of all kinds) years ago (and some recently) I do feel like I have a perspective that is useful for people.
Being the engineer at Facebook with the most raw output in the entire company, and being at the principal E7 level (highest leveled 1.5% of engineers at the company) I have a perspective that might be useful for people.
I spend all my time on Formation and certainly have biases, but I also do feel my perspective can be valuable and I'm here with my real name, for open and candid discussions, and I genuinely appreciate pushback and discussion.
I haven't been to any bootcamps myself, that's where I also appreciate hearing other people's perspectives and hopefully together there is a lot…
Hi there! What kind of job are you aiming for?
In general, having a CS degree without internships/experience can be tough: hundreds of applications and few responses. At FB we would go through piles of resumes and people who didn't have several top tier internships were instantly skipped over (this was when I was involved in 2010). Unfortunately bootcamp grads have it pretty similar, so I don't know how much a generic bootcamp will help at this point.
Georgia Tech Master's is good. The downsides are it will take longer and it won't necessarily help with getting a job. It might reset the clock and you can reconsider new grad jobs and hopefully have more direct access to recruiters is GT is a good CS school.
I would only go to a bootcamp if you feel like your skill level is not at an entry level bar yet. If you have the CS fundamentals to get hired and need job hunt help look at these o…
Hi, yeah I'm the co-founder (Sophie is the CEO and founder) and hang around this sub as Derek said :D. As Derek kind of said as well, Formation isn't a "bootcamp" and roughly 80 to 90% of Fellows (approx) have some kind of professional engineering work experience (typically 1 to 3 years) and are working full time while they do Formation. A lot of people did bootcamps in the past so I took an interest to this sub, and a ton of people have been asking me questions about bootcamps (we have Formation Fellows representing many different bootcamps in the past) and the industry since I became active, so I stuck around to help.
I also highly doubt past Formation Fellows are in this sub, I know a few people in this sub who are doing Formation now and are on the more junior side and they might be able to comment on their experiences to help you get a better picture. Try contacting people on Linke…
That’s not bad. It’s not linear, so even though 1400+ means you are pretty close to ready for the stop tier interview raw skill bar (obviously you need to practice) 700ish is borderline ready for Formation to get there, obviously the low end but depending on your goals it could be sufficient. So you should look into it and see if it could be a good fit for you. The goal would be an entry level job top tier job or apprenticeship and you’re probably looking at 6 to 8 months. It’s very different from a bootcamp but you can weight your options between self teaching more, bootcamp, and Formation.
So they get FLOODED with applications. Which is why that Google recruiter was brave to post the other day haha.
Most of them send out some essay style questions in the application and more importantly a hackerrank or codesignal test. The tests I've seen (second hand through Fellows) are classic DS&A/leetcode and medium-hardish. The problem is because there are so many applications, you basically have to be perfect or very close to perfect to not get filtered out. I've heard of some people cheating (and they detect that too) and trying to really "pass the test" mentality... which is actually the opposite of what these apprenticeships want.... there are just so many applications it's the best they can do to filter.
You can try a sample test we offer at Formation: [https://formation.dev/join/assessment](https://formation.dev/join/assessment)
You'll get your score after completing. Since…
Hi all, I've gotten a lot of DMs about my comments asking for more advice. I work with a lot of bootcamp grads a bit down the road in their journeys to achieve roles at the top companies including Google. I probably don't have as many messages as Mike has thought ;) but I'll share some thoughts on here.
1. Google is one of the top companies in the world and has one of the hardest hiring processes and highest bars for data structures and algorithms. This post isn't about a special program for bootcamp grads. This is an opportunity to connect with a recruiter who is supporting the "Early Career" (a.k.a. "New Grad") L3 pipeline. The bar hasn't changed and remains very high.
2. The interview process is the normal L3/Early Career process. You'll do 1 technical screen covering 1-2 medium to hard data structures and algorithms problems, not much talking. Sometimes you'll do a second one if th…
Also to clarify for Codemsith grads (Codesmith advertises that it prepares you for mid-level and senior jobs) you will not be considered for mid-level (L4) and senior (L5) jobs at Google out of Codesmith with no prior work experience regardless of your interview performance. You can take a shot at early career (L3).
(Again, do not work at Google, making these statements from extensive industry experience and extensive experience supporting people whose dream company is Google)
80K is the average INCREASE in compensation for people that had jobs prior. Not the average compensation.
I think that's kind of proving the point, we are not competing with them and there's nothing to be put to rest. A bunch of people have messaged me here about bootcamps and I've recommended they go to Codesmith given their situation, it's not either or. Others have messaged me about Formation. No one has said "I'm choosing between Codesmith and Formation"
Again, people typically talk to us about Outco, Interview Kickstart, Scalar, Exponent, and Pathrise - some of whom don't have pricing on their websites, let alone outcomes, but have had thousands and thousands of engineers go through their programs nonetheless. We're playing different games here and I'm sorry if my involvement in this subreddit is causing this confusion.
This is the best I got for raw outcomes: last 50 offers acce…
RE: career change. How much experience do you have already coding? We have a civil engineer at Formation.dev right now with a similar background but who has been self studying for some time now and crushing it. It could be a good path to consider if you are already at our bar and I can ask them if they would talk to you to give you advice. If you already have your plans set then ignore me and keep going.
RE: job market. I can comment on what we've seen at Formation. We have seen zero offers rescinded or layoffs. We have seen a very small number (under 10) of cancelled interviews (specifically at the headline companies that have rescinded offers/hiring freezes). On the other hand we've seen a lot of companies aggressively hiring and compensation has been increasing. If anything we've seen a pickup in hiring. We've had more people got to Google, Amazon, Microsoft than ever.... 15 out of t…
Adding this for future reference as well to show how drastically different we are. Codesmith posted a blog announcing their CIRR results that explains the job hunt differences quite well
The TLDR: this reinforces how Codesmith is a bootcamp program to teach people using structured lectures and curriculum and Formation is a program to give you unique "personal trainer"-like development and mentoring.
THIS IS AN ENTIRE QUOTE FROM SOURCE BELOW WITH INLINE COMMENTS IN BOLD MARKED "FORMATION" TO HIGHLIGHT DIFFERENCES
During Codesmith’s **Hiring Program**, you can expect:
* Tailored Resume Guidance and Feedback
* Residents attend lectures covering resume best practices and are pushed to craft their experiences in a way that is both technically sound and authentic to them. Residents receive three revisions with specific feedback from an engineering fellow to ensure the content and quali…
Apologies if this sounds like product placement but you should consider Formation.dev to see if it’s a good fit or not. You may or may not need it but we have worked with a couple of people in this bucket (one is on our formation.dev/network page in the top row) and had very strong results. Again, not meant to be salespitch, check it out on your own and do your research but you should know all your options. Some other programs that exist to help get interview ready are Outco and Interview Kickstart. They all cost about the same and Outco and Interview Kickstart have fairly similar fixed training models. At Formation, we work with you full force for however long it takes to get a top tier job and your training will adapt personally to you week to week to efficiently get you there, but it’s fairly intense (10 to 20 hours a week minimum up to full time 40 hours).
Do you have any experience already? I agree with someone else below, reading about things will barely help you here as this interview is testing for your real world experience.
I highly recommend reading this to get a better sense of what these interviews are all about: https://formation.dev/blog/how-to-prepare-for-a-system-design-interview-and-pass-it/
I have a lot of thought on them and have been following for a while. They have audited outcomes that are really not great (something around 50% of people who start get a job within 6 months of graduating and the median salary is quite low compared to the national averages for engineers).
So this is a bit of secret but they use to have this webpage where they listed all of their new grads who were available to hire. I was monitoring that page month to month and something in the low dozens out of many hundreds were hired every month. Their CEOs tweets make it seem like a lot more people are graduating and getting top tier jobs.
I have a minor beef with them personally. One of their alumni came to Formation 2 years and 2 jobs after leaving Bloomtech. We helped them very briefly to interview and negotiate their top tier offer and then Bloomtech shouted out this offer as a success case for…
I chatted with someone about System Design and can use that as an example, please CORRECT ME IF THIS HAS CHANGED AND WILL EDIT IT
​
**Codesmith's System Design**
* 1 week long, fixed classes
* 2 hour lecture from Codesmith staff (not necessarily with industry experience) (entire cohort, 35 people)
* 3 hour working sessions working through problems and materials (unknown size)
* reading materials
**Formation System Design**
* Variable length until you passing system design mock interviews w/ senior/staff/principal level engineers (typically 4 to 6 weeks)
* Specific topics for the following depending on what you need to work on from the previous week, collecting feedback for all for next week:
* 1-2 weekly 1 hour workouts with a senior industry engineer working through a specific problem with 3-5 other Fellows
* 1 weekly 1 hour session reviewing a topic in more depth with…
I do think down the road we will compete head on but still disagree we do now. Our technology right now works for taking a range of A to a range of B outcomes in C time (which is the variable). We have a few hundred different micro sessions, and a few thousands different tasks, a few hundred assessments, a few dozens types of mock interviews. And every week we pull out a set of things that fit your schedule that you need to work on to improve that week. This is all the stuff to get from "1-3 years industry experience at decent company" to high performance top tier company. But if we expand this library of tasks and sessions we can really support a much wider range of transitions.
I'm happy to go over more details about what we do specifically or maybe chat with Chris G or another person you can find that went through the full gamut.
Maybe on paper these words sound similar but our bar…
Thanks for sharing. Yeah we lose a lot of context on Reddit and my writing might come across more mean than it's meant. I love that Codemsith has helped so many people and had a major impact on people's lives. We need way more people working to make tech a better place. Thanks for writing this out and I'll be more cognizant of this in the future.
100% compared to other bootcamps, there are so many bad apples out there that are genuinely not great intentioned. Sophie, the founder of Formation was a mentor at different programs and wanted to do better, which is why she started Buildschool all by herself - a free iOS bootcamp. That evolved into Formation when I joined on and we realized we needed to raise funding to hire top tier engineers in the industry (mostly from Facebook, so we can debate that haha) to help scale out truly one-of-a-kind approach to training. I think we need more peop…
Hi, I appreciate the non-crazy tone, but I have some corrections and other responses:
1. I'm not the CEO of Formation. Sophie is the founder and CEO and the true driver of the mission. I'm here because I have a personal interest in helping people early in their careers after doing so for many years and seeing what impact it can have on people.
2. Formation is not a bootcamp no matter how you frame it. We relentlessly provide technical training until you get a new job you are happy with, no matter how long it takes, I think the average is around 6 months (not sure). We refuse to work with people looking for a quick bootcamp to whip them into shape for an upcoming interview, for example.
3. Codesmith is not our competition. I lose sleep over Interview Kickstart, Outco, Pathrise, Scalar, Exponent, etc... and not about Codesmith.
4. The day to day is nothing like a bootcamp or any kind of f…
‼️ CIRR is audited but it's far from unbiased. The board of directors and founders are all affiliated with bootcamps. It's not a 501 3c non profit because that's a conflict of interest. It's registered as a "business league/lobbying organization". Now I'm super middle of the road person, and don't judge those groups, but lobbying groups are not unbiased.
I wrote a long post about Formation's data will paste here because believe it or not I spend most of my time helping Fellows and making Formation great. **We are not a school or bootcamp. We compete with things like Pathrise, Interview Kickstart, and Outco.** Talk to any current Fellow or alumni. We are not perfect, but care about every single outcome, we have by far the most experienced team, we work with people with full technical training as long as it takes to get there, and it works really well.
We are a mission driven organizatio…
I agree that if the people perform well, which they are, then you could argue that it doesn't matter.
At Formation, before we hired dedicated ex-FB recruiters, I used to interview every Fellow. We handful of Codemith people, the ones with industry experience didn't even talk about it because they already had a job, and the ones that did not have industry experience were quite covering up the fact that it was open source but not lying, and it very quickly unraveled that it was not real work experience. We hired a Codemith alumni went through our own program so it's really not meant to be a criticism of the program, so I don't mean that it necessarily reflected poorly either.
I haven't attended either, I've coached and mentored alumni from both, either right after or later in their careers.
I hope you get other responses answering your specific questions but just want to pre-emptively discuss outcomes because in the past people have said for similar questions 'Codesmith has the best outcomes choose Codesmith'.
First, will put the best numbers at flagship locations for both.
Codesmith (H2 2020): New York median salary $120,000, 80.2% placed within 180 days (CIRR)
HackReactor (H1 2021): San Francisco median salary $107,500, 73% placed within 180 days (self reported audited)
HackReactor has a slightly lower bar to entry so more people drop out.
I believe both have people with experience attend, but a Codesmith exec reported about "a third" of people at Codesmith have a CS degree or work experience or another bootcamp (source Course Report interview with…
Hi! Behavioral interviews are a tough one to give advice on because they depend a lot on your company's goals and what they are looking for in the interview.
For example, at Facebook the behavioral portion was aiming to measure:
1. Scope of responsibility in past job. This is important for determining someone's level. Trying to ask questions so you can compare their previous responsibilities to the different levels at Facebook and pattern match.
2. Past performance. I don't remember if Facebook explicitly trains for this, but I like to try to guage how the person was performing in their last job in some kind of measurements. Like performance ratings, relative performance to peers, awards at previous job that we're rare, etc...
3. Values alignment. When I was at Facebook, the values we're things like 'move fast and break things', and 'nothing is someone else's problem'. I would ask abo…
I can speak from the other side. [Formation.dev](https://Formation.dev) (I am co-founder) isn't a bootcamp but do turn people down who want to join us (sometimes really really want to join).
The typical reasons we have turned people down are:
1. Misalignment of goals. If you want something out of your training that we don't think we can achieve with you, we won't move forward. We would only take someone we are confident we can help achieve a top tier company role, because we commit to training you all the way until get a happy result.
2. Not at the technical skill bar. We have a fair technical assessment to help us assess starting data structure and algorithms skills, if you aren't at the bar, or we don't see enough potential, then we will typically not move forward. In this case, we would want you to join in the future though if you can get to the skill bar necessary.
3. Other reason…
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.
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…
👋, 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…
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…
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.
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…
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.…
Hey, it is indeed! I'll go by interview types:
1. DS&A bar is the same. Often times more senior engineers are a little rustier, but they need to be at the bar.
2. System Design. The candidate needs to have a very strong performance. Both in terms have have many alternate solutions for many parts of the system, but also communicating the solution with clarity and appropriate depth.
3. Technical Behavioral. The candidate needs to very clearly demonstrate that the scope of their responsibilities was on par with a typical Facebook E6 engineer. Typically a higher level engineer or manager would be running this interview.
Overall, a staff engineer doesn't walk in off the street randomly, they have a lot of experience at one or more companies. So very critically evaluating that experience, and checking with references if necessary, will be crucial. Often times someone who claims to be at th…
Hey, this is a really good series of questions that I have thoughts on.
* RE: Formation/the time it takes/business model. Our mission is to get people who have non traditional backgrounds, underrepresented in tech level up into these top tier roles. It takes everyone a variable amount of time. If you are committed to putting in the time you think you need, you are paying us to spend that time more efficiently at Formation. You are paying us for the outcome - to get a top tier job you are happy with. The gaps that are needed vary from person to person. We've built technology to help us figure this out and fine tune the training for these needs. So the interview fashions of the day aren't really that relevant to our business.
* RE: Types of interviews. Data structures and algorithms interviews level the playing field. Google gets like a million job applications a year or something and the…
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.
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.
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…
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…
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…
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.
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…
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.
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).
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
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.
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.