Facebook Engineering Bootcamp 3/27/11 12:55 PM

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by Andrew Bosworth on Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 5:51pm

One of the statistics we are most proud of at Facebook is our ratio of users to engineers.
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. We have more than
doubled the size of our engineering team every year since then, but our user growth has
far outpaced us. Today there are roughly 1.2 million users per engineer.
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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. 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. That program is called Bootcamp.

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. We have high expectations for our engineers and part of Bootcamp is making
sure those expectations are met. 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. 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.
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.
Even with all this support, most bootcamp graduates agree that the most valuable part of
bootcamp is the tasks they are assigned. 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.
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.

Bootcamp 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. 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. 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. 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. We believe Engineers are at their most productive when they work on things they
are passionate about. 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.

As the program has developed we've noticed a number

of additional benefits. 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. In

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Facebook Engineering Bootcamp 3/27/11 12:55 PM

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.
The Bootcamp mentor program is also great opportunity for developing leadership
internally, essentially serving as a meta-bootcamp for potential managers and technical
leaders. Perhaps one of the most surprising and positive results has been the fact that
bootcampers tend to form bonds with their classmates who joined near the same time and
those bonds persist even after each has joined different teams fostering cross team
communication and preventing the silos that so commonly spring up in growing
engineering organizations. Finally, bootcamp provides us with a unique opportunity to take
our experiences working with new engineers and use it to fine tune our interview process
in a very tight loop to figure out what types of things to look out for in resumes,
references, and interview feedback.

The Bootcamp program, like most things at Facebook, is constantly evolving to better fit
our needs. Some of the improvements are just a matter of incorporating feedback we get
from the many talented engineers in Bootcamp at any given time. Perhaps more revealing
about the program, however, is the fact that many former graduates of the program have
returned as mentors to help improve the program that helped them when they first joined.
Together, we work hard to make sure that every engineer has all the tools, knowledge and
support to be able to hit the ground running and make changes that positively impact
hundreds of millions of users, whether it is your 1st week or your 201st like me.

Andrew Bosworth is the Bootcamp drill sergeant.

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196 people like this.

Clarence Joseph Goodbeer Yes! I am sharing this!

November 19, 2009 at 6:52pm

Royyan Assalam ok.. siip

November 19, 2009 at 6:59pm

Pranav Prakash Although I'm not en engineer in facebook

team, but yeah in my organization the ratio is about 25,000
users per engineer. :-)
November 19, 2009 at 7:30pm

Jocke Berg Whoaa, that way sounds a hundred times better

to introduce a member to a dev-group than I experienced
when I was 16 or so. Keep up the good work!
November 19, 2009 at 7:30pm

Maxi Ngari i wanna be an engineer too!

November 19, 2009 at 9:22pm

Lance Quejada ​:) redefine engineering

November 19, 2009 at 9:56pm

Ricardo Villamil Simply amazing, keep up the good work!

November 19, 2009 at 9:59pm

Joey Lam sounds like a great place to work..

November 19, 2009 at 10:15pm

Prakash Dodeja can we get a measure of # of users per

server?
November 19, 2009 at 10:16pm

Samuel Ssempala really nit is aplace one dreams to work.

November 19, 2009 at 11:31pm

Thielvy Chourio Nuñez go more more..........

November 20, 2009 at 6:12pm

Carlisa Hoover how do we know if these chain letters are

true from what is being said in the letters
November 23, 2009 at 1:31pm

Arman Uygur hey guys, how can we send a message to all of

our friends on facebook? I thnk they should put a button for
it !
November 24, 2009 at 12:33pm

Guilherme Gomes Costa engineering, never stops

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