"Big companies put junior engineers through training programs, send them to advanced classes, and make them sit through certification tests, but I’ve never seen any of those at a scrappy startup."
They do? Is employee training (outside of on-the-job learning) even a thing in engineering anymore?
The company I work for puts every engineering hire through "the U", a 3-9 month training program (depending on developer aptitude), geared towards bringing all engineering hires up to a relative even ground, with regards to the necessary skills to be a software engineer here.
The training is always in flux and adapting based on feedback, and has pretty consistently turned out developers that are able to jump in and start developing in any given team. Developers then gain further domain specific knowledge through mentorships and regular 1-on-1 meetings with team leaders and mentors about goals and progress.
Overall, it works pretty well based on my interactions with other developers here.
Facebook has several formal and informal training opportunities available for engineers (and all employees, really).
There's Bootcamp, primarily for New Hires, but which anyone can go to if they like. I teach a class there about how our Traffic management works - load balancers, and so forth.
There's also classes about learning to program on iOS or Android (those are generally a week long), or on Haskell or C++ or D (these are generally a few hours a week for a few weeks), and smaller ad-hoc 1-4 hour classes on things like the data pipeline tools, debugging and performance tools, and so forth.
There are also ad-hoc "Tech Talks" which just discuss general topics without a specific "learning" focus.
And then there are non-technology but career-oriented courses about time management, technical leadership, managing your manager, how to give good feedback, how to have difficult conversations, and so forth.
It is a six-week program, although the last week or so is a bunch of teams pitching themselves to the new hires, and the new hires meeting with the teams they're choosing between.
They do? Is employee training (outside of on-the-job learning) even a thing in engineering anymore?