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! 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, 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…
Yeah we’re small and focused on every individual having a great outcome right now . Companies do pay recruiters and agencies a lot of money for sourcing so there opportunity. We might explore it. Right now Fellows are making roughly $80K more in comp a year and our pricing is capped and much much lower than that (and is only based on base salary, not stock or bonuses) so it’s been working. But to truly have an impact on the industry and help get more underrepresented engineers into these companies, we’ll have to grow and make sure that we can support more people.
Hey, Facebook’s main backend is in HACK (PHP derivative) and their frontend is React with all the bells and whistles. You don’t need to know either to be hired as a SWE. Various backend services are also in different languages like C++.
In terms of interviews you can use any language you want and they are white boarding style, meaning non compilable code. I’m not sure if they have changed this since going remote for interviewers. But people have become reliant on IDEs and whiteboard needs a little extra practice.
It's really hard. Facebook managers get super stressed and spend weeks on them every year trying to make them fair and people still don't feel it's fair.
I can touch on a few points that Facebook does:
1. Require specific examples in all feedback instead of general statements. e.g. rather than "Susan is always reliable when there are bugs!", "Susan jumped in to help me fix 4 important bugs in the past month, and one of them was a hi-pri bug impacting 10M users".
2. Make it mandatory to have a certain number of peer feedback submissions during the performance cycle, that have specific examples.
3. Create high level guidelines that try to match specific examples of work to behaviors listed in certain performance buckets and/or job levels
4. Most importantly, have a calibration process across different teams and different departments. This happens after all the initial evaluation is done…
Hi nice to meet you! Good memory! Yeah Sophie spent several years mentoring at bootcamp and used to operate Buildschool to teach people iOS for free. It was a really small program and she personally worked with each person to learn iOS skills from scratch. From all of these learnings and more, we built Formation as a way to offer personalized coaching to a larger, remote audience, while maintaining the same effectiveness/results as having Sophie there 24/7. The material isn't available, but I would say the real value came from having Sophie (a staff level iOS engineer) working with you all the time.
In terms of learning iOS. The market hasn't changed that much in the past few years and it remains difficult to get a top tier iOS with no experience because it's a "specialist" role. The roles do exist! Many of the former Buildschool members have iOS jobs at top companies now, but it took a…
Hi, entry level salaries depends significantly on the company, location, and role. Levels.fyi is a website that has a lot of information on all these dimensions to compare salaries in different locations.
There are a lot of jobs though that don't pay nearly as much as the FAANG level bar. At the end of the day, the company you are working for has to be making more money by hiring you to justify paying your salary, your benefits, the HR overhead, and having at least some profit leftover. So the successful companies do indeed pay more not just because they have more money, but the impact you are having to the business is very large, even as an entry level.
So you'll find a lot of engineering jobs at non-tech companies where you don't really have enough impact to the business for them to pay you a larger salary. There are also companies that take advantage of people but I wanted to focus…
Hi, I can respond to both questions separately:
RE: social inequality. Before the internet, and still now to some extent, city boundaries and zoning have had a lot of problems with fragmenting cities. There are many experts who are dedicating their lives to these topics so I won't comment much, but humans interacting with humans everywhere have historically had these kinds of fragmentations, and I don't think it's Facebook's fault if they appear there as well. That said, Facebook wants to reduce inequality by hopefully reducing that fragmentation from what happens in real life by making it easier to interact with people.
RE: Formation being paid. "Fellowship" is a word that doesn't really have a common definitely outside of academia, where it has a specific different meaning. We feel what we offer is clearly communicates what we do and would be devastated if people felt deceived, and s…
Hi, no Formation isn't a bootcamp. We happen to work with a lot of bootcamp grads that were some of the lucky ones who got any job out of the bootcamp to level up to a top tier job. People's negative experiences with bootcamps are one of the reasons we made Formation because we felt bad for all those people who are capable of having better careers but didn't get the personal coaching and mentoring they needed.
I also wouldn't say all bootcamps are scams either. Some programs are bad intentioned, some are good intentioned. My biggest problem with bootcamps is most of them give you the promise of a job at the end and this just shouldn't be part of the offer. They should stick to training basic programming skills and they might have a better reputation.
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…
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.
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…
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.