I will be joining FB sometime in early December as an E5 engineer in the Seattle office. I have been hired for a generalist position and my recruiter doesn't stop yapping about the famed Boot Camp. They told me about this at least 5 times till now. Apparently Boot Camp is supposed to be some utopia where everyone gets magically matched with the team of their dreams and they live happily ever after, exceeding expectations each PSC time. I am obviously a fairy, so I want to make sure this magic works for me. Can people who have joined FB/Meta explain how it works and also share tips on what to do to get good teams? What kind of questions to ask? What resources which are available for use to get more information on the performance of the team, things which are red flags etc. Any help will be very appreciated 🤠 EDIT: I see people saying don't rush to graduate from boot camp. My recruiter says I can take upto 6 months in Boot Camp. How long a duration is a good duration? How many teams to try out before settling on one of them? If I spend too much time in Boot Camp, does that negativity affect my next perf review? TC : 380k after joining Currently : 🥜🥜 #facebook #facebookbootcamp
Plenty of info and resources once you join. Take sometime to chill for the time being. One advice: Don’t be in a rush to graduate from bootcamp.
- Ask for pulse scores. - See if they push diffs out during weird hours. - Obvious, but just socialize with the team and see how well you vibe with everyone. It's like dating, but with a team. Don't rush.
You get assigned a bootcamp mentor who will tell you everything you need to know. Relax and don’t stress until you join.
I did boot camp and it was all shit teams tbh
Headcount is super high now. You will have lots of options.
Expect to get 50-100 teams trying to get you to join them.
Just meet all the teams u felt interesting and trust ur gut and make a decision…nothing is for sure, if things don’t work out after all u made ur best choice to ur knowledge…. U can change teams after an year… Talk to people a lot, ask questions…find out shoot manager
Find out about* manager
Teams are super thirsty right now, so you should get a lot of choices. There will probably be pressure from your bootcamp mentor to graduate around week 8. But take your time. Most managers will try to give you a hard sell and do anything to convince you to join. Take a step back and decide what you want to optimize for. Is it promos, WLB, or maybe learning some new tech? Do some soul searching and match on the criteria that are important to you. Teams with okay WLB can be found, but you can also join hardcore 80hr/week 0->1 projects. Bootcamp is just team matching, so figure out what you want and optimize for it.
Optimize for WLB or learning seems straight forward, but how would you choose a team to optimize for promo?
You’d be looking for teams with projects with high business impact that you can excel at and hit the ground running. Expectations on E5 can be a little intense though compared to other companies, but sustaining at 40 hrs is possible once you’ve learned all the FB tech. First 6 months - 1 yr can be a bit overwhelming.
So I’m doing this right now. I got about 70 reachouts in Seattle. Here has been my process so far: - trimmed initial list based on product interest - further trimmed based on if reachout seemed personalized or not. At this point I decided what my priorities were before starting 1:1s. I want to maximize my signal gathering around these. Im collecting information on the project work, growth opportunities, wlb, management, and team. Most managers have a sell strategy I’ve found in those where they ask what you care about snd then tell you why their project is awesome for that. There is a certain amount here that is feel. I let them sell me hard. If I wasn’t excited at the end it was a no. Simple as that. From there I talk to the engineers, new members to get info about onboarding, tenured, and juniors to get their views. I’ve found juniors often get worked to death is a bad sign. I’ve attended team happy hours too, what is the team “feel”. Sometimes your gut just says no. I especially value the onboarding engineers views, and I’m really liking it when managers send a ramp up guide. I’m taking a task but mostly just to see the codebase it’s in, idea of workflow see if things are hot garbage or not. I’ve only finished one task since starting team matching. Now I’ve got a last couple teams as options. I’m talking to skips and directors. I want to understand how the management chain sees the team and growth. Make sure the vision they sell vibes with my world view etc. I’m going to collect all that do some numerical analysis see who comes out on top. Sleep on it and then make my decision based on my gut. I’m at the end of week 6 will probably decide next week. Staying in longer would be reasonable, but I also want to dive in and get started.
Thank you
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