How to skillup to be ready for FAANG job?

Question

Most people spend a tone of time prepping for FAANG interview but once you have the job, you need a different set of skill to be competitive and exceed the job expectations as a SDE. It would have be nice if we had also took the time to build up the skills to do the job better  before joining the company. Any recommendation on material to  skill up for FAANG job

Alex Chiou · Accepted Answer

I like this question: It's important to be forward-thinking! It is much, much harder to survive at FAANG now than ever before (stack rank percentages and PIPs are being cranked all the way up), and the people coming from non-FAANG type companies are the most at risk to fall behind and into the grinder.

Contrary to popular belief, you don't need to work at a top tier company to develop the skills necessary to do well at a top tier company. A lot of it really is mentality. There are 2 core angles I've seen non-FAANG engineers struggle with after breaking into FAANG:

Technical quality - 99% of companies don't have the same technical rigor that Big Tech does due to a mixture of apathy and not needing to. While a 1% edge case usually isn't a big deal for a product with 100k or even 1 million users, it's a massive deal when you have 3 billion users like Facebook does (1% = 30 million people!). To dive into this topic, I recommend these courses:
- [Course] Level Up Your Code Quality As A Software Engineer - The tactics around crisp PRs are immediately applicable, even if nobody else on your team does them.
- [Course] System Design Masterclass: Shipping Real Features To Production - This is especially applicable at more senior levels where you are expected to play more of a role in high-level design. Once you get the higher end of L4 (mid-level), you will need to know how to do this. Again, this is something that can be done anywhere, even with your side projects!
Communication - From my own personal experience (I worked at 2 companies that are lower than Meta on the totem pole IMHO before going to Meta) and observing countless others, engineers at less cutting-edge companies tend to be more silo-ed (product is very separate, design is very separate, QA is very separate, etc). However, FAANG generally gives a lot more ownership to engineers and hence a higher communication burden. I recommend this classic course to help here: [Course] Effective Communication For Engineers

At a higher level, succeeding at Big Tech is largely centered around being more thoughtful and deliberate with your actions. 50% of it really is just a mentality shift - I have noticed that the majority of engineers who can never break into a FAANG-level company simply don't care enough about the quality of their work. If you do care, you are already better than most.

How to skillup to be ready for FAANG job?

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