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Does the experience you have with certain programming languages or technologies matter during FAANG interviews?

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Senior Software Engineer at Taro Communitya year ago

Does your experience with certain technologies matter during your interview or team selection process at FAANG companies?

Does your experience with certain programming languages affect your compensation?

I am asking because I saw that some roles at Microsoft that are focused on C++/C# or other OOP languages have a higher compensation range that roles requiring JavaScript/React experience.

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    Tech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
    a year ago

    So as I've mentioned a couple times before: FAANG is not a monolith. This also applies to how language-agnostic each company is:

    • On one end of the spectrum, you have Meta and Google where candidates (usually) aren't tied to a specific team in the interview stage.
    • Meta is the most relaxed historically about just letting smart people in and they can pick whatever team in bootcamp.
    • On the other end, you have companies like Netflix and Apple which tend to hire more specialists where specific technical expertise is extremely important.

    If you want to learn more about FAANG, watch our masterclass here: [Masterclass] Should You Work At FAANG? - What Big Tech Is Like For Software Engineers

    This makes my answers the following:

    Does your experience with certain technologies matter during your interview or team selection process at FAANG companies?

    It depends. Usually yes, but the degree will vary.

    Does your experience with certain programming languages affect your compensation?

    It also depends, but many companies pay certain stacks more than others. For example, Google tends to pay MLEs more than SWEs. However, this doesn't mean you should just pivot into the stack that makes more $$ as I talk about here: "If my main goal is compensation, would it be wise to learn blockchain tech since it will potentially be the tech of the next couple decades?"

    I am asking because I saw that some roles at Microsoft that are focused on C++/C# or other OOP languages have a higher compensation range that roles requiring JavaScript/React experience.

    In general, C++/C# developers get paid more than other engineers because the supply of them is lower. However, there are downsides to being in these stacks:

    1. There are far less roles available compared to JavaScript/React.
    2. You need to write C++/C# 😂. I started off writing C++ (it was the core language in UCLA's curriculum back in my day), and I'm never going back.
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    Senior Engineer @ Amazon, Founder @ Roman Yusufov Coaching
    3 months ago

    The best way to answer this question is to look at job postings. They should have specific requirements for each role. As Alex said, there's variance across FAANG companies and even in roles within each company.

    My experience

    As someone who's interviewed 100s of candidates at Amazon, I can share my perspective for Amazon specifically. These guidelines should extend to other FAANG companies as well.

    Rather than thinking about skills and stacks, it's more helpful to think about roles. Historically, Amazon only had one general software engineer role. However, over time it's evolved into separate roles:

    • Software Development Engineer (SDE)
    • Front End Engineer (FEE)
    • Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET)
    • ML Engineer (MLE)
    • and others I may not be aware of

    General SDE roles

    In the general SDE role, the tech stack and language don't matter. Even if you're hired for a specific team, there's mobility within the company. If you come in on a team using Java and then transition to a team using Ruby, you still have to be able to perform.

    So, the interview focus is on fundamentals. Do you know how to code in any modern language? Do you understand important design patterns (like OOP)? Can you problem-solve? Do you understand system design and some specific technologies?

    Here's an from an example SDE posting:

    Experience programming with at least one software programming language.

    Having said that, there might be specific teams that look for specific skills. For example, when the Alexa team was hiring for their device team, they looked for SDEs with hardware experience. But these are the exception, not the rule.

    Specialized roles

    In specialized roles, the tech stack and language do matter. This should be fairly obvious since the job responsibilities are different. For example, as a FEE, you're more likely to be working in frontend languages and frameworks like JS, Node, React etc.

    Here's an excerpt from an example FEE posting:

    Experience using JavaScript frameworks such as angular and react

    For the Microsoft roles you mentioned, I'd be curious if the pay was related to the language or the team/role that uses that language.