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Facebook recruiting and Unix systems

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Re: Facebook recruiting and Unix systems

#4
It would be good to know if this was an internal or external recruiter. If the organization has contracted this out to another organization, then it should minimally reflect on Facebook and have maximum, laughable effect, on the contracted organization.

From what I've experienced with Facebook recruitment, they dragnet linkedin pretty hard and have at-least a 5-step process for interviewing that is designed to be implemented at high speed by internal people, but at-least lets you talk with internal people.

I stopped responding to their requests on Linkedin because you start over each time. Although the inquiries are interesting, it's not really fun to have a bunch of "first dates" constantly.

Re: Facebook recruiting and Unix systems

#5
post #4

It would be good to know if this was an internal or external recruiter. If the organization has contracted this out to another organization, then it should minimally reflect on Facebook and have maximum, laughable effect, on the contracted organization. From what I've experienced with Facebook recruitment, they dragnet linkedin pretty hard and have at-least a 5-step process for interviewing that is designed to be imp…

Probably internal – when I interviewed with them in the past an internal recruiter (I was familiar with through friends / on-campus stuff) gave me some super dumb technical questions on the "initial screen". Very basic pseudo data structure stuff, but still. It was obvious she was trying to map the words I had said to some pre-provided solution.

They should probably stop doing that.

Re: Facebook recruiting and Unix systems

#8
Recruiter: We're looking for someone to fix the pipes.

You: Yes, I'm a qualified plumber and can do the job.

Recruiter: Sure, but can you fix our pipes?

You: Off course, that is is what I was trained to do.

Recruiter: You keep saying you're a plumber but we need someone to fix our pipes

You: I can do it.

Recruiter: we need someone who have worked with pipes.

You: I have worked with those.

Recruiter: Sure, but we need someone to fix our pipes.

etc

Re: Facebook recruiting and Unix systems

#9
This is not the right attitude to bring in to the workplace. You'll have a range of people from executives, to clients to co-workers in other departments who don't know what UNIX, APIs and POSIX are. If you can't communicate technical matters nicely then you have not yet developed the right attitude for a professional working environment. It's the same thing with doctors when they create metaphors to explain complicated problems. You need to speak in the layperson's terminology, and if all they know is UNIX then call it UNIX and leave it at that.

Re: Facebook recruiting and Unix systems

#10
Put yourself in the recruiter's shoes for a second.

Facebook has a vast array of technologies in use, from the top to the bottom of the stack and across a wide breadth of problem domains. A lot of the time there are competing technologies.

No one engineer at Facebook is familiar with the sum of technologies worked on by engineers at Facebook.

It stands to reason that recruiters are in the same boat.

So if someone comes to you and says "I've used Oberon, which is like Modula", do you know if they're correct? You don't, really. They very well may be. But the recruiter may also be dealing with one of the three dozen hopefuls every day who are desperate to pitch that X is similar enough to Y that they should be given a chance.

The recruiter was in the wrong. But at that size, there will always be recruiters who are in the wrong. It's luck of the draw. I've dealt with two Facebook recruiters in the past 4 years: one who misunderstood my résumé, another who understands it quite well. These days I don't take it personally.

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