How do you select your team at FAANG?

At Google, you go through a process called team matching where you talk to a bunch of EMs and you land on a team if both you like it and the EM likes you. Since Google is doing cuts, team matching is actually super hard now as there's not enough EMs hiring.

I think Google recently updated their policy so that you don't get the official interview pass/acceptance until you successfully pass team matching. Before, you could "pass" the interview but get stuck in team matching for literally 6+ months and never join Google. This actually happened to my little brother.

Meta has its famous bootcamp system where it's Google team matching but your offer is not contingent on it and it's even more flexible for the engineer. So after you pass the interview, you get the offer, get thrown into bootcamp, and the company hopes you find something.

However, it looks like bootcamp culture at Meta is slowly dying and more teams just traditionally hire engineers directly, which I personally think is kind of sad.

If you want to learn more about how Meta bootcamp works: "Which team and stack should I choose in bootcamp?"

For all other Big Tech companies, I think they just hire traditionally and don't have something like Google's team matching or Meta's bootcamp system. So you interview for a role on a specific team, and if you pass, you go to that specific team.

When it comes to finding a good team, I recommend this: [Masterclass] How To Choose A Good Company And Team As A Software Engineer