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Facebook recruiting and Unix systems

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Re: Facebook recruiting and Unix systems

#31

Post by gargarplex »

jdavis703 wrote: post #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 complica…

There is an extremely fine line between speaking the layperson's terminology and lying.

Wrong: "Yep, I have UNIX experience!"

Right: "These days, the phrases 'UNIX' and 'UNIX-like systems' are used interchangeably. Please double check this with your hiring manager to confirm that we're on the same page."

Re: Facebook recruiting and Unix systems

#32

Post by mquander »

eridius wrote: post #24
mquander wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Verbatim exchange: Thanks for the quick response and clarifications. Experience with Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems is largely transferrable thanks to the standardization that resulted from the POSIX specification. As a result, the terms "POSIX" and "UNIX-like" by-and-large refer to the same thing. My experiences are in particular with developing software for Linux platforms, which are the most popular o…

A professional communicator tailors their communication to their audience. Stanley's initial explanation was pretty good, but since the recruiter didn't seem to understand it, Stanley should have adjusted his approach instead of doubling down.

I'm sure he could have done a better job communicating to the recruiter. You could tell he was slightly irritated, and maybe somehow he could have figured out a different framing that the recruiter would understand. (But note that at the end, he changed his strategy and said simply that he had experience with Linux and UNIX, and the recruiter still didn't care. It really isn't clear whether there was any approach that would have worked.)

He did like a 75% good job. But the recruiter did a 0% good job. It's not easy to personally take it upon yourself to make every interaction work perfectly when the other party is trying their hardest to make it fail.

Re: Facebook recruiting and Unix systems

#34

Post by deathanatos »

eridius wrote: post #24
mquander wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Verbatim exchange: Thanks for the quick response and clarifications. Experience with Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems is largely transferrable thanks to the standardization that resulted from the POSIX specification. As a result, the terms "POSIX" and "UNIX-like" by-and-large refer to the same thing. My experiences are in particular with developing software for Linux platforms, which are the most popular o…

A professional communicator tailors their communication to their audience. Stanley's initial explanation was pretty good, but since the recruiter didn't seem to understand it, Stanley should have adjusted his approach instead of doubling down.

I'm not sure how much more clear poor Stanley can get:

> Recruiter: We're looking for students with experience work on Linux and Unix

> Stanley: I have experience working on Linux and UNIX

> Recruiter: Your email and resume say Unix-like, which is not exactly UNIX.

The recruiter, by the end of this exchange has been given the explanation of why "UNIX-like" is the correct term, why it is being used, and why it is relevant. Stanley has also tried to take a more layman-like approach, and backed off the technical jargon to state "yes, I have that", using the exact terms that the recruiter used, despite them being incorrect.

The recruiter's last email contains things that are incorrect, and the response from the recruiter is irrational.

Re: Facebook recruiting and Unix systems

#35

Post by _asummers »

mattzito wrote: post #13
throwaway2016a wrote: post #12

Somewhat on topic. Does anyone use actual Unix? Is it even something you can install anymore?

Absolutely, though it's a dying breed, and with the news of Solaris's EOL, accelerating all the time. BSD is the FOSS actual UNIX. On the commercial side there's AIX from IBM, HP-UX from HP, and probably a few other really niche-y ones I forget.

Illumos had a hard fork from Solaris in 2010 and many of the Solaris team are apparently involved in that project, Joyent uses their own UNIX for their hypervisor, too, if I recall correctly.

Re: Facebook recruiting and Unix systems

#36

Post by SomeStupidPoint »

gargarplex wrote: post #20

Facepalm. Somebody show this to Zuck. Change needs to begin at the top. EDIT: Is it possible that they actually want people with actual UNIX experience? They are recruiting students. Maybe they want someone who has used an actual UNIX system on some kind of emulator for some sort of secret retro initiative. EDIT2: http://www.jbox.dk/sanos/pdp11.htm

I was wondering if they were looking for people with BSD or Solaris experience, in addition to Linux experience -- a broader trip around *nix land.

Re: Facebook recruiting and Unix systems

#37

Post by kichik »

pweissbrod wrote: post #25
jacques_chester wrote: post #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 com…

If I'm a recruiter and an intelligent-sounding person comes to me and says theyve used Oberon which is like Modula I would do 30 seconds research and understand if that is true, maybe reach out to my peers for more info. If I didnt bother accepting anything beyond an exact keyword match of something I didnt understand then I was probably a lousy recruiter and likely not worth my paycheck.

In your experience, does it make sense for Facebook to also hire low-level recruiters to go over a mass of students? Would those recruiters be expected to do the same?

Re: Facebook recruiting and Unix systems

#38

Post by pacman128 »

noncoml wrote: post #23

True story, I once got an email from a recruiter asking for someone with experience in C, C+ and C++. No idea if it was a typo for C# or the recruiter thought, we have C and C++, why not add C+ in there to increase our hits. I found it amusing, but didn't start an argument..

Years ago I had a recruiter pull a list of questions from their technical guy to ask. The first question was something about constructors in C. I carefully explained that the question made no sense for C but would for C++. They insisted the question was correct, so I told them what the answer would be in C++.

They also asked me about if I had experience with the EMACS editor, but spelled out the letter E-M-A-C-S. Why that was an important skill I have no idea. Especially since this was for a contact that several companies were competing for and I was hired by the winning company to work on it. No special knowledge of EMACS was required. Any text editor would work.

Re: Facebook recruiting and Unix systems

#39

Post by cellularmitosis »

gargarplex wrote: post #20

Facepalm. Somebody show this to Zuck. Change needs to begin at the top. EDIT: Is it possible that they actually want people with actual UNIX experience? They are recruiting students. Maybe they want someone who has used an actual UNIX system on some kind of emulator for some sort of secret retro initiative. EDIT2: http://www.jbox.dk/sanos/pdp11.htm

Some schools do still maintain a lab of Sun hardware. Extremely weak speculation: Perhaps they are targeting those schools and/or professors, without being explicit about targeting them?
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