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On Leaving Facebook

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Re: On Leaving Facebook

#321

Post by em500 »

shroompasta wrote: post #285
elb0w wrote: post #79

It always blows my mind how most interview in our field. When I first started in tech I was afraid to talk about not knowing leetcode to my peers. 15 years in and I now can confidently say I’ve yet to meet someone who thinks these are a valid metric. Why do we make this the gate keeper to our industry when we know (except for the very specific roles) we will rarely need leet code type problems. When we do we just goo…

the reason why FAANG/M companies do ds/algo interviews is because they get an ocean of applicants and it's necessary for these questions to be the immediate filter. Most startups I have applied to previously rarely asked ds/algo interview questions. It's not that they want to, it's that they have to.

Indeed, all those complainers about the process should maybe try to answer this as their first business case interview question:

You have 10 dev positions in your team. You receive 5000 applications, where 3000 look like a suitable match based on the CV. How do you proceed?

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#322

Post by ZephyrBlu »

zionic wrote: post #318
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the ballpark of 1x pay in this example?

1x would be 1x market rate IMO. Let’s say your skill is worth $125k avg. I’m not exactly interested in the people who can be that, and there’s a lot of them. I want the people who can make me feel like $250k is a steal etc.

The median salary for devs in the US is ~$110k, which is pretty close to your $125k. 200-250k TC doesn't seem like top-tier compared to the top of the market though.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#323

Post by em500 »

zionic wrote: post #209
throwaway2333 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can make it into a FAANG/MAMAA/whatever flavor of the year acronym, you can make it into most tech companies (and still make a salary that's more than enough to live a dignified life and support yourself, and family if you have any). Working at Facebook as a software engineer is a choice; just like working at a bulge bracket investment bank is a choice. The type of people that choose to work at either of these…

> The type of people that choose to work at either of these two are (more likely than not) people who do not have morals or a sense of character and values. Thank you, exactly this

It's hilarious reading these anonymous hiring managers discussing how they'd hypothetically snub people like Rob Pike, Ken Thompson, Andrew Morton, James Gosling or John Carmack for lack of morals and values.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#324

Post by eclipxe »

zionic wrote: post #187
yumraj wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I cannot trust folks who have spent more than 1-2 years at FB to make ethical decisions and I will not hire them. Similarly, I will not go to a company if people up the chain, including my immediate boss or the CEO are ex-FB. If the CxOs are ex-FB I cannot expect it to be an ethical company. But, that’s me.

Thank you. A lot of mercenaries here are posting coopium all over this thread. They just don’t get it, we don’t want them. We believe they’re evil. We see them, and their skills, as a liability and not employable asset.

lol.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#326

Post by eclipxe »

pkdpic wrote: post #104
throwawaylinux wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You hire people with two years experience out of college for $400k/yr package? Is this in SV? What kind of job, what experience is needed?

Yeah seriously hire me. Ive never heard of 400k for two years exp but Im into it. Are you talking about coding roles or management or what?

levels.fyi

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#327

Post by chillacy »

sofixa wrote: post #239
throwawaylinux wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Most corporations" don't do global surveillance on the scale Facebook does. It's that simple. It's never that simple. What corporations are okay to work for, in this unidimensional worldview? Exxon Mobil? Philip Morris? Pfizer? Dupont? Boeing? Nestle? BHP? Fox News? Volkswagen? Nike? HSBC? Is it okay if your employer's owners or executives have appeared in the panama papers? Are or have been on the boards of FAANG…

Everybody decides where to draw their own line. For some it's Raytheon or Bayer or Boeing, for some it's HSBC, for some it's Facebook. Doesn't matter, you can't invalidate a person's moral compass with whataboutism. There are plenty of small and medium businesses that aren't terrible.

I think this has to go both ways, many in this thread use phrases like "lack of morals" implying One True Morality scale, presumably one where surveillance capitalism is.. most evil?

I'd personally love to know what everyone actually works on. In real life I know people who work on guided missiles and ICBM-adjacent tech who manage to sleep well at night.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#328

Post by vanusa »

em500 wrote: post #317
vanusa wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

from 7,000 -> 70 Do you have any hard data behind that ratio? Or are you just kind of ... making those numbers up? Because they, you know, "feel right"?

Google receives about 3 million applications per year, and hires less than 1% of them. Not all of them for dev positions, but still probably at least a million. Google is probably the most popular, but even the maligned Facebook gets a few hundred thousand applications per year. I concur with the parent's point. HN is perpetually complaining about tech interviews, but nobody ever suggests a viable alternative that ca…

Google (and all the other companies with similar net hiring ratios) use multiple factors to narrow their pre-interview pool; including standard techniques such as resume and phone screening. And then there's in-person interview itself, which involves broader cognitive and personality assessments (apart from in-person LC recitation).

The parent poster was literally saying that LC screening by itself will get you your 99 percent reduction.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#329

Post by nhoughto »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #308
voakbasda wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somebody here on HN recently shared the notion that leetcode tests are a legal way to discriminate by age or lifestyle, as older and well-rounded developers do not have the time or inclination to grind on such things.

As a successful developer well past middle age, I find this to be nonsense. The most common complaint I hear around this is "yeah, that discriminates against people who don't have time to grind to do the preparation." Why is it weird that people should spend time preparing for ask for a new job? I mean, ask an orchestra musician how much time they put into preparing for auditions, or how much time many degreed profes…

Was going to disagree but ended up coming around to the argument. I guess the difference is at a certain point preparation turns into a wasteful arms race, it’s not just a reasonable amount of effort put into your next gig but too much effort on things that don’t really represent real day to day / reality. Not sure where the line is, but there is definitely waste and it definitely favors those with spare time.

Does seem like there is a growing movement to explicitly not do leetcode style reviews at many places which is good.

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