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On Leaving Facebook

frantic.im

501–510 of 645 posts

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#501
post #98
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 issue is the sheer number of fradulent and stuffed credentials people have begun using, and applying, en masse to job positions. To be clear, I dislike the current way interviewing is, but do you have a better solution to screen out 7,000 applicants? The vast majority will be knocked out by the leetcode style interview, and sure, some brilliant minds might fail because they can't remember linked lists in the mome…

I agree with you. It's just not going to work to trust peoples credentials especially now that people from across the states can apply to our jobs. I'm a fan of take-home projects though. You still need to find a way to reduce the number to something meaningful but a take home gives them time to think about the task, but also gives me an opportunity to hear them walk through their code when we talk.

If they "cheat" by having stack overflow do their work for them, but they can explain it well enough, they probably understand the concepts at least.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#502
post #323
post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I lost A LOT of respect for Carmack the day he started working for Facebook.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#503

"A common question I get is about work/life balance. And I view it a little different too now. At Facebook I could get by barely working a few hours a day. But the job was so unsatisfying that it spilled the frustration in the “life” part" This is the golden piece for me. I too recently left a big corp to a smaller place, expecting to sacrifice WLB and my free time - yet I ended up feeling happier and spending less t…

> At Facebook I could get by barely working a few hours a day. But the job was so unsatisfying This is a little too first world. if the work were too sparse and wants more work, why not join interview loops or take classes/training, attend talks? Does Meta not have those options? The frustration feels almost artificial, if one does not want to get more work, then maybe just go boating or mountain biking. Watch some s…

Try reading Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs for more perspective on this

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't work like that. You have to be "on" even if you aren't working. That means you feel like you can't commit to anything substantial since you feel like you should be working. Fucking off on the internet is a coping mechanism to numb the pain of being in this limbo where you aren't working; but, feel like you should be working because you are getting paid a lot. In retrospect it's easy to see that there's thi…

Bingo. Working from home also exacerbates this, since there is no longer a physical division between "work" and "home", plus there is virtually no social pressure not to slack off.

I think that works both ways. If you want to work more, it is easier to do from home as there is less social (i.e. family) pressure to come home from the office. The key is to find a workable balance.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Why is it weird that people should spend time preparing for ask for a new job? Because that preparation, by and large, is not related to the actual job. > I mean, ask an orchestra musician how much time they put into preparing for auditions, or how much time many degreed professionals put into passing a certification (e.g. the bar exam or medical boards). Those are all instances of people being asked to do/know thi…

I'd push back a bit on the orchestra musician preparation relevance. Playing at an audition alone is very different from playing in a section. The hyper critical attention to minute details that wins you a job at, say, the New York Philharmonic, isn't what makes you good at blending with your section. Also, no one is ever practicing concert repertoire as much as they practice audition excerpts so what you hear at the audition is not necessarily representative of what you hear every week.

Granted, it's more representative than leetcode performance but still far from a perfect system.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#506
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not going to stain your CV. Not with that attitude. I refuse to hire anyone with FAANG on their resume and you can all do it too. Most of you on here are all woo woo Linux this and FSF that, but you won’t put your money where your mouth is. I won’t hire you if you work for these assholes, and I’d love for more of you to join me. To the rest of you: Sure, take that $300k total comp bro. Good luck working outsid…

Total comp at FAANG for a senior engineer who's been there a few years is more like $800k+.

That’s really only L6+ with some good stock growth. Most senior eng are L5. 350-500k is still a lot.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#507
post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people are very good at BSing their way through interviews, even technical ones. Those people also end up being very difficult to fire and are generally poisonous to culture. Asking them to code is a great filter, it’s hard to fool a compiler. It shouldn’t be the only filter, but for coding roles a coding interview is pretty critical.

Asking them to code is indeed a great filter. But is Dynamic Programming question necessary to perform the filter?

Facebook and other companies banned Dynamic Programming.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#508
post #184
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some point in your career, you have the ability to simply reject leetcode-like tests. Just politely decline.

Is this the point in your career when you have so much money that you don't actually need a job?

Finance jobs pay just as much as, or more, than FAANG and to my knowledge don't do any leetcode.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [...] having real work be tossed in the garbage is [...] demoralizing [...] This happened to me a few years ago. I got assigned to work on a small greenfield project solo. I had virtually full creative control, and it would solve a real imminent problem for the team. Sounds like a dream project, right? And it was for the ~1 month or so I worked on it, got positive feedback from the team, etc. However, with a stroke…

I find it helps to be cynical in these situations. > I felt bummed out nonetheless. Why? Don't get emotionally involved with work done for the company. They want to toss it? Why give moments care. Your time wasn't wasted. It was done doing what they asked in exchange for pay. That's it. >_That_ I could live with, but getting dinged for "being unproductive for a month" during performance review, now that really stung.…

It's ultimately not good for the spirit. Yes, some people can tolerate the bullshit. Likewise, there are people who are willing to be poop divers for sewage treatment plants (though this is an imperfect analogy I want not to offend those who are fine doing far less meaningful work). This doesn't mean everyone can or should be poop divers.

Sure, everyone should be prepared to tolerate a level of meaningless and nonsense in the corporate world. I fully agree that one should not become too invested in work that ultimately serves the company.

Nevertheless, if humans were meant to live as sysipheans, by now we would have found more straight-forward ways of doing so, and we might even take pride in doing pointless work. Yet few if anyone is openly proud of doing nothing and still getting paid even when there's no social recourse. Naturally, when enough time passes and a person has yet to be able to actually contribute to the system, they are liable to be alienated. And why shouldn't they? If they can sit around for months or years being practically useless while still having to trade one's finite time for the privilege of food and shelter, there may be a breaking point where they can't make logical sense of the situation anymore. Where's the excitement? For many, we spend more hours at work than at home, especially if you discount sleep, and those hours are usually tired. That time at work had better mean at least something at some point; how is one then supposed to feel when they've reached senior status and... the situation is exactly the same or quite possibly worse?

It would be nice if humans could get more fulfillment out of their personal lives, but that usually doesn't come by default and rather requires considerable work on top of one's day job; family, friends, and social status all require work, and may of us don't even have adequate time for those. Is it reasonable to put a sapient mind through the anguish of being irrelevant in nearly every aspect of their lives for the promise of a distant retirement and expect them to not feel a sense of disengagement because the world is constructed in such a ridiculous fashion?

This isn't to say that you are entirely wrong, but I have to wonder if you believe that in every fiber of your being, because otherwise you could have been a burger flipper or a circus clown instead of the occupation that brings you to HN. I assume that you have a set of skills that came to you at least somewhat naturally, and that if you were unable to ever properly execute those skills that those skills (and thereby you) would seem worthless to yourself.

In my personal opinion, life is way too short to deal with meaninglessness for extended periods. If your job continues to be meaningless after years of experience, chances are you are doing the wrong thing and can benefit from a course correction.

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