Facebook team selection

Box
morrismoss

Go to company page Box

morrismoss
Jun 2, 2020 14 Comments

I recently accepted an offer for E5 in infra at Facebook and have a start date in a month. I am curious about the team selection process. I have been a backend developer my entire career with experience in distributed systems (largely in Java). I am wondering what happens during the selection process in bootcamp. What happens if there are no teams that suit my background at the time? Do I just try to pick one closest to my area of interest (no matter how far it is)?
Couple of other questions-
1. Any information on backend infra teams such as prominent tech stack, development culture, etc would be helpful. Is PHP/HACK mostly on the web / product teams?
2. I got to talk to a couple of managers. Based on those conversations, Dev culture seems to vary widely across the company. WhatsApp/Insta/FB. WhatsApp as I was told by the person I talked to focusses more on engineering process than the fast paced culture at FB. Does this sound reasonable? Any thoughts on Instagram?
3. Did anyone here join WhatsApp or know anyone who did without prior experience with Erlang. I am happy to learn but not sure what the expectations there generally are.

Thanks for any information you can provide.

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TOP 14 Comments
  • Microsoft / Eng
    γŠπŸ™

    Go to company page Microsoft Eng

    γŠπŸ™
    Ignore the tag, I'm at FB now.

    1. Tech stack depends on the team. There's a mixture of C++, Python, Go, Rust for the backend.

    For the general question - the teams do a lot of things. During bootcamp I got to work with a lot of tech and very different problems, technologies and teams. Me personally, I chose something that is quite far from my "background", ie. not what I did in my previous job. It might not be for everyone, but you can see it as a clean slate and a chance to start doing something else.
    Jun 2, 2020 2
    • Amazon
      ShadowOfAD

      Go to company page Amazon

      ShadowOfAD
      Isnt that risky? You’re not worried about being evaluated as meets-most if you cant keep up with peers?
      Jun 2, 2020
    • Microsoft / Eng
      γŠπŸ™

      Go to company page Microsoft Eng

      γŠπŸ™
      The alternative is going to be staying in the same and doing the same thing. I would not be in FB, or MS before that, if I would think like that. Take the risk, try your best, maybe fail, and go back to 1. I would get a lot of experience from this anyway.
      Jun 2, 2020
  • 2. Yes it is reasonable. WhatsApp is very different from FB, so you might or might not like it more.
    3. Don’t worry about Erlang at all, most people join without prior knowledge. Syntax is easy; OTP will take some time; beam internal is hard but fun.

    Have a list of priorities and talk to more teams/people and not just managers. Take your time take your time take your time.
    Jun 2, 2020 1
  • Twilio
    lQaC61

    Go to company page Twilio

    lQaC61
    How was your interview? Anything from leetcode tagged?
    Jun 2, 2020 4
  • Adobe
    mXIx65

    Go to company page Adobe

    mXIx65
    OP, how long did it take to get an actual offer letter after getting verbal offer? And TC?
    Jun 2, 2020 2
    • Box
      morrismoss

      Go to company page Box

      morrismoss
      OP
      It took me a few days to think about the verbal offer and a few days to make a decision. So, it was 1 week for me to accept the verbal offer and they sent the offer the next day. TC: 350. Did you get an offer recently? How did yours go ?
      Jun 3, 2020
    • Adobe
      mXIx65

      Go to company page Adobe

      mXIx65
      DMed you
      Jun 8, 2020
  • I have the same question as you. But I think we'll get better answers once we have a FB blind account and can post in the internal channel.

    You decide your team over several weeks anyways so no real rush
    Jun 2, 2020 0