Facebook Bootcamp is the best thing in the World
After 5 years at Microsoft I joined company, which product I’ve been using for last 12 years :O
Before I forget how amazing it was, I wanted to drop a few lines about Facebook Engineering Bootcamp.
When you are about to join typical company you have to make a decision whether it’s a good fit for you. Usually it’s based on 4 or 5, hour long LeetCode sessions with different members of the team. Of course you talk to your future manager, HR is telling you how great it’s gonna be etc.
Facebook does it differently! Your are being interviewed by people from different teams across the company. Not necessary from the team that you are going to join. It’s actually very unlikely that you gonna end up working with any of them. This allows to remove bias, and make interviewing a fair game. Microsoft and Amazon have huge variation between teams. Somebody who wouldn’t pass interview in one team can be a rockstar in other team.
After you pass the interview and join Facebook, you start as bootcamper. You have usually 6-8 weeks to learn facebook engineering systems, and to find a team. You can to talk to as many teams in the company as you want. These are not interviews, but informal chats. Usually short 30 mins meeting, quick coffee or lunch. Some people call it “Facebook Dating” 😀
Once you determine that there is “chemistry” between you and your future manager, or somebody from the team, then you usually work with that team for a couple of days or a week. Like a real work! They give you desk in their open space area, you get some easy task that is related to what they are working on, and you are a team member for the time being.
Don’t worry about good and bad teams. At Facebook there are only different teams 🙂 I was surprised how everybody I met during bootcamp had slightly different interests and all of us decided to join different teams :O
Usually you want to “try” a few teams to have comparison, and to make connections that might help you in the future. E.g., when you will need to work with different team, or when you will be changing teams. This is the best part of the bootcamp. You can literally give you future job a trial run.
I graduated from bootcamp last week and joined Facebook Marketplace Growth team.
I’ll probably drop a few lines about Facebook Engineering systems in separate post, but I’ll just tell you this: imagine that you can have all your wishes regarding engineering systems fulfilled, and it’s better than that 🙂
If you want to learn more about bootcamp check this note 🙂
