In situations like these you really aught to ask yourself what your end-goal with being elitist like that is really trying to serve. In engineering situations usually the purpose is some form of disguised signaling. This is the purpose of most sentences that start with "technically". But when you're talking to a recruiter that kind of move is unlikely to be effective. It's unlikely to affect your application positively, and the only effect you can expect is what happened in this interaction, namely rejection.
Be honest about why you act the way you do, and be rational about your decisions.
Facebook recruiting and Unix systems
91–100 of 497 posts
Re: Facebook recruiting and Unix systems
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
You sound like my racist grandfather: "Those that favor Emacs, Vim etc tend to be rather different than those that use Visual Studio, etc." Yeah? How are they different? O Great Arbiter of Skills, how did you come to this conclusion?
Awareness of them alone indicates a greater interest in the field imo. It obviously wouldn't be a critical factor, but it's easy to tell how enthusiastic someone is about computers in general based on whether their familiarity with them ends at the outlines of their personal experience or domain. There's tons of ways to assess this -- interest in upcoming technologies, familiarity with linux/unix history, awareness o…
I still think you'll end up selecting against a lot of great hires. Plenty of great programmers simply don't use vim/emacs, even if aware of them. The question didn't seem to be about awareness but rather about experience. I am aware of both and actively choose not to use either - I use nano if it's ever easiest to edit a file on the terminal, and otherwise, stick to IDE's and things like Sublime/Atom.
It's really popular in the startup world to care deeply about enthusiasm about the subject at home, but a lot of these litmus tests won't consistently hit that.
Even though you may generally get better programmers on average through these types of screens and companies are free to hire as they please when it comes to this, it seems rather unfair to a good programmer who simply likes to do other things in their spare time. Requiring programmers that live and breathe CS makes it feel much more exploitative.
Re: Facebook recruiting and Unix systems
#93Earlier 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…
> Beyond software developers who have programmed in the 1970s, most people do not have experience with a true UNIX OS This line is where he started to come across as a jerk. I think if he had skipped this paragraph and just replied with the "I've updated my resume..." bit, he would have been fine. > Beyond software developers who have programmed in the 1970s, .. Stanley should update his industry knowledge. My school…
Don't you think the risk you are talking about in believing a 20 year old is exaggerated? Is it that hard to go back to the manager and ask if "Unix-like" is acceptable although the job description says "Unix"? Or just do a little bit of Googling to figure out if what the candidate is saying could have merit?
From my perspective, it appears that the recruiter is the jerk and not the candidate. I have met many computer-illiterate recruiters but never one like this who would repeat the same response over and over again despite the candidate having clarified his position.
Re: Facebook recruiting and Unix systems
#94It 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…
> then it should minimally reflect on Facebook. If a business hires cutrate idiots to source candidates for the largest investment expense it has[1], I guarantee you that it will cut costs elsewhere as well. [1] Yes, people are an investment. At a quarter of a million dollars a pop for proper coding talent, multiplied by however many coders the company has, people are the largest expense Facebook has.
I dunno man. The money spent on infrastructure at companies like these is more than the GDP of most countries.
Re: Facebook recruiting and Unix systems
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm not a recruiter, but I'd hope that's how it goes normally. If you can't find someone to answer your question, or don't even know how to start to find someone inside the org, what do you do? I guess my position is that I dislike beating up on people simply for not knowing something that's not common knowledge in their own area of expertise.
> If you can't find someone to answer your question, or don't even know how to start to find someone inside the org, what do you do?
As my brother used to say when he was in the Marines in a non-combat position: "They literally pay me to move sheets of paper from the left side of the desk to the right."
Re: Facebook recruiting and Unix systems
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
So it says here you've worked with pipes in large commercial buildings and small residential buildings. But this position is primarily for pipes in park bathrooms. Do you have any experience with that type of pipe?
Please draw a triangle with 2 perpendicular lines.
Give me a sphere and I'll do it!
Two parallel lines though....
Re: Facebook recruiting and Unix systems
#97It 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…
[deleted]
Re: Facebook recruiting and Unix systems
#98This 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…
> 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. Yes, but if a recruiter is attempting to convince the smartest people at top universities to come be an intern at their company, they should know the difference (or practical lack thereof) between linux and unix. Or at least they should be smart enough to not triple-down on that…
> they should know the difference (or practical lack thereof) between linux and unix.
I hate this attitude. How can a recruiter know all the intricacies for the roles he is hiring, he would need to be an expert. He has to know everything he they have to learn a whole pile of new terms.
Re: Facebook recruiting and Unix systems
#99This is the official CMU facebook recruiter. They have done this to multiple people I know, each time they tried to explain and yet this keeps happening.
Re: Facebook recruiting and Unix systems
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I'd love to see you defend why the guy is a professional communicator with a good attitude. He's not, but that doesn't matter. You're going to be hard pressed to only ever communicate with professional communicators with good attitudes your whole career. So if you ever want to be taken seriously and have a successful career, you're going to need to learn what battles are worth fighting. Hell, maybe it was even a tes…
> What are your weaknesses? I don't play well with idiots, or nonsensical bullshit.
Recruiter is not a technical person. If you want technical people recruiting you work somewhere smaller. The real weakness is inability to communicate with non-technical members of staff.