The Bootcamp mentor program is also great opportunity for developing leadership internally, essentially serving as a meta-bootcamp for potential managers and technical leaders. In addition to that, by centralizing the mentoring and onboarding responsibilities, we’ve greatly decreased the costs hiring has on the rest of the organization in terms of time spent showing people the ropes and keeping our standards consistent, which allows us to take our rapid organizational growth in stride. One of the most obvious perks is that we now have a pretty large workforce of highly motivated and talented engineers working on bugs that might not otherwise get engineering attention. Matching engineers with the teams that they are excited to join and where they can have a big impact is one way of achieving that goal.Īs the program has developed we’ve noticed a number of additional benefits. We believe Engineers are at their most productive when they work on things they are passionate about.
They also have access to Facebook’s strategic priorities so they know where they will be able to have the largest impact and can weigh that against their interests.
#SOFTWARE ENGINEERING BOOTCAMP CODE#
This gives them an opportunity to meet with the various teams and even fix some bugs in the different code bases before committing to join a team. Instead of assigning engineers to teams arbitrarily based on a small amount of interaction during interviews, bootcampers choose the team they will join at the end of their six weeks. Whether it is fixing bugs from the live site, building internal tools, or making improvements to our infrastructure, most bootcamp graduates agree that there is simply no better way to learn than by diving into the code.īootcamp also helps educate engineers about the many opportunities at Facebook, ensuring that they wind up on the teams and projects that they are most passionate about and where they feel they can make the biggest impact.
Engineers have real work assigned to them the first time they open their laptops and many push code to the live site within their first week. Senior engineers from across the engineering team also give a bunch of tech talks on a broad range of the technologies we use from MySQL and Memcache to CSS and Javascript.Įven with all this support, most bootcamp graduates agree that the most valuable part of bootcamp is the tasks they are assigned.
The mentors review all the bootcampers’ code and even hold office hours to answer any basic questions that engineers might otherwise be too timid to ask.
#SOFTWARE ENGINEERING BOOTCAMP HOW TO#
A small number of rotating senior engineers serve as mentors and meet with the new engineers regularly to coach them on how to be more effective at Facebook. We have high expectations for our engineers and part of Bootcamp is making sure those expectations are met. The primary goal of Bootcamp is to get people up to speed on our all parts of our code base while promoting good habits that we believe will pay dividends in the long term, such as fearlessly fixing bugs as we come across them rather than leaving them for future engineers. Every new engineer that joined Facebook, whether a recent college grad or a new director, would go through an intensive six week program designed to immerse the new engineer into our code base, give greater flexibility in choosing a project, and promote the types of habits that would allow us to scale up our organization. In the summer of 2008, as the engineering team was poised to pass Dunbar’s number, we decided to try something new to help us scale.
Today there are roughly 1.2 million users per engineer. We have more than doubled the size of our engineering team every year since then, but our user growth has far outpaced us. When I joined the company in January of 2006, we had 5 million users being supported by about 15 engineers, a ratio of about 300,000 users per engineer. One of the statistics we are most proud of at Facebook is our ratio of users to engineers.
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