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Facebook recruiting and Unix systems

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Re: Facebook recruiting and Unix systems

#291

Post by ricardobeat »

L_Rahman wrote: post #214
aspyrx wrote: post #128

Hey folks, I'm the student writing the emails in the post here. Thanks to everyone for their criticisms. While I was initially kind of shocked by the recruiter's response, I've had a lot of time to think about it today and have realized that I was being pretty damn condescending and spoke out of line without regards to the context. It's been a hard lesson learned. I honestly regret the whole exchange, and posting it…

Hi, I think you could have massaged the snark in the sentence that says "Beyond software developers who have programmed in the 1970s, most people do not have experience with a true UNIX OS" but other than that I think you should walk away thinking that your communication was clear, straight-forward and respectful. Here's what happened - the recruiter had a list of keywords, received a large volume of inbound resumes…

That's the most cringy part - in the second iteration you'll note he did list UNIX as a skill, but then the recruiter went on about the lack of Linux experience (which he had just replaced)! Like playing whack-a-mole.

Re: Facebook recruiting and Unix systems

#293

Post by zaphirplane »

xlii wrote: post #235
autokad wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because of the monopolies that have been allowed to exist, getting black listed by FB is akin to chopping off a large portion of the quality tech jobs out there. Its not that he was factually wrong (or even wrong in etiquette) , but as my mom said you can be right and dead right, which is why he recognizes he needed a better approach to leave the most opportunities for his career going forward

There is an old joke about janitor who couldn't work for Microsoft because he didn't get an email. (Link: http://www.angelfire.com/oh3/momathome/janitor.html ) What has been done has been done and there is no place for regrets. Facebook might (along with its partner and associates) be a big workplace but it definitely isn't the only launchpad for a happy & successful career. He came a little bit snarky, true, but I y…

Anglefire wow it's still going! I was certain the page wouldn't exist. (Goes to lookup if GeoCities still exists)

Re: Facebook recruiting and Unix systems

#294

Post by pwdisswordfish »

L_Rahman wrote: post #214
aspyrx wrote: post #128

Hey folks, I'm the student writing the emails in the post here. Thanks to everyone for their criticisms. While I was initially kind of shocked by the recruiter's response, I've had a lot of time to think about it today and have realized that I was being pretty damn condescending and spoke out of line without regards to the context. It's been a hard lesson learned. I honestly regret the whole exchange, and posting it…

Hi, I think you could have massaged the snark in the sentence that says "Beyond software developers who have programmed in the 1970s, most people do not have experience with a true UNIX OS" but other than that I think you should walk away thinking that your communication was clear, straight-forward and respectful. Here's what happened - the recruiter had a list of keywords, received a large volume of inbound resumes…

> the recruiter had a list of keywords, received a large volume of inbound resumes and filtered for == 'UNIX' and dumped everything else

To be fair, I wouldn't expect this kind of 'recruiting by grep' to happen at Facebook of all places either.

Re: Facebook recruiting and Unix systems

#295

Post by ricardobeat »

bodz wrote: post #283
nulagrithom wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> refused to put exactly that on his resume. But he did!! And the recruiter still gave him flak! Stanley said, "POSIX is more-or-less a standardization effort for UNIX/Linux systems, so I've updated my resume to reflect this." And then he shows a screenshot that just lists "UNIX", not "UNIX-like". Then the recruiter bats at him again! I think he was more interested in being as honest as possible, not being right .

He didn't, though. At first, his resume included "Linux". The recruiter asked him to update his resume to include Unix as well. Stanley changed it to read just "UNIX", but no Linux. The recruiter asked him to fix this by specifying both Linux and UNIX in his resume. Stanley updated it to say Linux and UNIX- like . The recruiter, very professionally instead of just dropping the conversation immediately, then asked aga…

Good luck on your candidate search. Despite a bit of stubbornness, it's clear that he had good intentions, which can't be said of the recruiter.

Re: Facebook recruiting and Unix systems

#296

Post by 3131s »

aspyrx wrote: post #182
chis wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This follow-up shows a lot of maturity. Both sides are obviously at fault here, although you instigated it. I suspect you could still get the internship if you send an apology like "Sorry for my previous emails they were out of line. You're essentially correct and here's an updated resume to reflect that."

Thank you - I actually did send an apology email, but since I'm pretty sure I'm not quite qualified for the position, I didn't bother pursuing it any further than that.

Oh it hurts my soul that you apologized to that clueless tool. Why do you want to work at Facebook anyway?

Re: Facebook recruiting and Unix systems

#298

Post by kev009 »

ktta wrote: post #288
kev009 wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most appealing thing to me about that is performance based pay. It's not hard to imagine closing dozens of hires a year in a moderately interesting company. It probably feels great too, as you're greatly helping individuals and managers and the company by landing talent. In an engineering org, I typically see low salary multiples for the lowest and highest performers. The lowest may be barely responsive while the…

Your thoughts don't seem wrong, but I'm reminded of the phrase 'Grass is greener on the other side'. In a recruiter role, networking might be everything. You can be great and know the domain specific knowledge, but missing out on one contact might cost you your salary. To me it seems to be a very risky job. Isn't this similar to being a real estate agent in a way? Sure, we see the successful ones, but obviously there…

Yeah most things follow a Pareto principle, and I'm sure this is no different.

Whatever I do career wise, I aim to be one of the best at it, at least the best that I can personally be. I suspect it would take a while to learn all the soft skills and what candidates and managers are looking for, but I don't think I'd have any trouble rising up. Likewise for sales, that is likely a very grueling job, but I think it comes with commensurate pay for high performance.

The real gap here from my perspective being in a deeply technical role, you really don't have high upside, even at lauded companies, vs these other roles at those /same/ companies.

Maybe I am just looking for excuses and entrepreneurism is the answer, but on glance it seems like the path to becoming a {talent,sales} rainmaker is far less risky for a good piece of the pie?

Re: Facebook recruiting and Unix systems

#299

Post by lazaroclapp »

Aeolun wrote: post #89
foobaw wrote: post #53

This is a tricky exchange. Both sides could've done better. To be honest though, a company like Facebook gets so many resumes that these mistakes are inevitable. Not saying it's acceptable, but it's just the nature of recruiting.

Unless you have competent recruiters. Are you saying that incompetent recruiters are the norm?

In all fairness, at scale. it takes one incompetent recruiter out of literally hundreds, or one badly managed case from an otherwise very competent recruiter, out of thousands a day, to get something like this to happen. Any large enough system will have component-level faults.

Sure, it is Facebook, they know how to build systems that are tolerant to faulty components. If they cared about preventing this, they could send resumes to multiple recruiters and proceed based on some sort of consensus. But that's the kicker, turns out their recruitment organization is already a fault tolerant system. The particular fault tolerance mode here is that they don't care about a certain rate of false negatives, no matter how egregious in hindsight, as long as they have few false positives. Sucks at a human level, but in some ways it probably is the optimal system based on what the objective function is for a large company.

Re: Facebook recruiting and Unix systems

#300

Post by isostatic »

lloydde wrote: post #88
umeshunni wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> switching over to Linux (mostly because it was free/cheap) only in 99/2000 Your school was trail blazing! At my uni, UVic, it was still all Sun and IBM Unix labs (with plaques) when I graduated in 2000.

When I started uni in 2000 (exeter) we had some Solaris workstations (with CDM), and some redhat ones. The printing system was all redhat based, but the server with the fast 10mbit internet connection I ran BitchX on to DCC voyager episodes on was irix. The student radio station was some form of Linux on the tx side (in addition to the AM transmitter)

There was even a room with NT4 - I went there once.

When I started work as a trainee at a major UK broadcaster in 2003 the news production system ran in Solaris, radio was on some vax thing, the image store ran on irix, the logging system was on aix, and there were half a dozen distros across about 20 servers with no real standards. The majority of staff were either windows IT staff (who got outsourced), help desk staff, or broadcast engineers with limited computer knowledge.

Over the next few years I changed the news system, others followed suit, and there's now 1200 ubuntu boxes/vms over 6 continents. Hooray for monoculture. Looking back it's amazing how quickly things change.

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