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Comment by packetslave | Hacker News Reader

> I need to meet the team I'll be working with before accepting an offer. It's the only way to know if they're competent, can communicate, and are not assholes.

This is exactly how Facebook's onboarding process works (at least in engineering). You spend 3-4 weeks in "bootcamp" classes (React 101, IOS 101, etc.). After that, you spend another 3-4 weeks auditioning teams -- you sit with teams that have open headcount for a week, attend their meetings, and work with a mentor on a coding project. Once you decide which team is the best fit, you "graduate" bootcamp and join them.

It's not perfect -- if there's no open headcount on your dream team, you'll have to pick another, but it's the best onboarding process I've seen from an employee standpoint.

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Is this process for new college grads or senior engineers? I can't imagine principals go through this process, do they?

> Is this process for new college grads or senior engineers? I can't imagine principals go through this process, do they?

Good question. It's definitely not just for new grads (I went through team selection as an IC5/senior engineer). There is a process where you can be hired directly onto a specific team, but I got the impression that it's the exception rather than the rule.

I would guess that someone joining at a super-high level like a principal engineer would be doing so to work on a specific team or technology.

I've seen a lot of senior folks go through the same process.

All engineering hires go through bootcamp, period. The only engineering hires that don't go through team selection are domain experts hired for a specific team/role ahead of time.

> The only engineering hires that don't go through team selection are domain experts hired for a specific team/role ahead of time.

Is this a significant fraction of hires? Because I find it really odd to waste the time of a say an embedded software engineer trying to teach them React when they're pretty set on working on something else anyways…

Someone joining to work on embedded systems would probably be "pre-allocated" during the hiring/offer process ... so they go through bootcamp, but skip team selection and go straight to their team. There's also a separate hiring pipeline for AI/ML roles since those require specialized domain knowledge vs. a "generalist" software engineer.

Generally speaking, the bootcamp process has a wide variety of different "classes" to take, covering a broad range of the Facebook stack, and no one engineer is ever expected to learn everything. So in this case, an embedded engineer would likely attend primarily backend focused classes, and would then choose from backend or embedded systems teams to work with, while someone interested in mobile or web frontend technologies would each have completely different experiences from everyone else. And ultimately, your experience coming into Facebook has far less to do with which classes or technologies you learn in bootcamp than what you're personally interested in. If you're interested in mobile, but only have experience in backend applications, that's fine – that's exactly what bootcamp is there for! We want to help you learn the technology or context that you're interested in so that you can find a role or team that you'll be happy to work on.

I'm sure they do. This is pretty standard at lots of big tech companies (Airbnb, most likely Uber, etc).

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