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Comment by rdtsc | Hacker News Reader

One key missing element is to let member of the team interview their future co-worker as well.

That way it doesn't seem like waste of time and it gets people invested. If they don't pick the right person they could end up stuck with someone dragging the team down and they'll eventually learn the value of having a thorough interview and being interested in it.

The other side of the coin is that they should also be allowed to influence the type of offer and how aggressive the salary negotiation would be.

I have seen a cases were a good candidate technically hasn't returned back because of presumably a low offer.

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Letting a member of the team interview the candidate may be a best practice, when possible. However, someone else said Rachel worked for Google. Their hiring practices, at least for university recruiting, is basically find all the "right" candidates, hire them, then, after they've accepted an offer, match them with a team. I know other companies, such as Facebook, actually have you begin working, then have teams court you after about a month of work, then you choose which team you want to join.

I'm not aware of how many other companies have a "bootcamp" program like we have at Facebook.

Basically all software engineers (including some whose titles aren't Software Engineer, and including managers) go through this six week process - first four weeks is mostly getting people up to speed through two or so presentations a week and doing real tasks (which may mean meeting up with some other engineers to understand enough context on how to proceed) that go through the same review and push process as everyone else, and the last two weeks is mostly learning about specific teams and a bit of a sell exercise through a set of presentations.

All through this, you share a software engineer mentor with two other bootcampers who helps you navigate the code repos and also the company.

At the end, the bootcamper decides what team to work on, with some background information like company priorities and maybe with some teams specifically reaching out to them.

That's a fairly huge investment, so I'd love to know which other companies offer this sort of program.

You're right, I don't know of any other company tht does it exactly like Facebook does. Tripadvisor, though, will let a significant portion of their candidates do a 1-year rotation through four different teams, then you get to choose the one you liked best (or potentially a different one if you're sure that's what you want). Not exactly the same, but still a larger than normal investment prior to setting you on a team.

That's pretty awesome opportunity and investment.

I wonder how they deal with understanding/measuring performance with these short engagements.

(Facebook has a "hackamonth" program which people who have been at the company for 18 months are encouraged to do - work on a new team for a month, and then decide to return, stay, or join a third team.)

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