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Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

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Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#131

Post by bee_rider »

TylerE wrote: post #71
Ozzie_osman wrote: post #53

Our startup spends a little bit on Facebook Ads (across FB, Instagram, etc). It's very clear over the past few months that there's trouble in the ads engine. Attribution is a mess, ad efficiency fluctuates randomly, the UI and API are flaky. I don't know whether this is a result of the ios privacy changes, the broader economy affecting ad spend, or internal issues... Maybe a mix. But it's clear that Meta's main reven…

They've gotten so damn greedy. On the mobile app literally over half my feed is ads.

My feed is mostly not posts from people I know (for some reason it has started sending me tiktok length clips of standup comedians). Actually it is not so bad, some of the clips are pretty funny, but I could get that sort of content from tiktok or youtube I guess, I just happen to use the facebook app because it is already installed.

Their fundamental advantage was network effect, I guess that is dead now that like 1/5 posts I see is from a friend.

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#132

Post by spaceman_2020 »

myth_drannon wrote: post #116
brentmitchell25 wrote: post #11

They should only keep the engineers that remember how to solve leetcode hard problems /s

I was wondering if there is a correlation between hiring engineers who spend their lives memorizing leetcode hard problems and a company's ability to innovate and execute? Did they really optimize for hiring the top 0.001% of engineers or it's just that the fish is rotten from the top.

It seems to me that the selection process favors Indian and Chinese engineers who are used to cramming for rigorous entrance exams to top universities.

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#133

Post by burai »

nobleach wrote: post #21
brentmitchell25 wrote: post #11

They should only keep the engineers that remember how to solve leetcode hard problems /s

Have you ever interviewed with Facebook/Meta? They don't do leetcode problems. Say what you want about them as a company, but I've done quite a few interviews in my career and their process was one of my favorites.

I interviewed for them. Questions were Front End related. One of the questions were "how could you find a node in an hmtl by id", to which I answered "using the DOM api, a querySelector would do a good job". The interviewer started hypothesising that the querySelector is not available, so we had to start discussing a whole binary traversal algorithm. If that's not leetcode I don't know what qualifies as it

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#134

Post by stonogo »

filoleg wrote: post #95
dessant wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

I legitimately cannot see this question in the current context as anything but being made in bad faith. Do you seriously struggle to think of possible reasons for why someone would want to work for Meta? Something like "high pay, interesting/difficult challenges and problems to work on, large scale rarely found elsewhere, and lots of learning opportunities (including loads of great engineers to learn from)" never cro…

I always think of the same question when I talk to someone who goes to work for Meta. High pay, sure, but that's available elsewhere.

Scale, by now, is surely an operations matter. If they're still having to innovate to perform at their current scale, what the hell have they been doing? In other words, aside from the VR distraction, what interesting challenges remain at Meta?

I know they have to rebuild their ad platform since Apple devastated it. But is "convincing people to look at advertisements" really still an interesting challenge? That's the point of view I don't understand, and would like to!

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#135

Post by nsenifty »

ceejayoz wrote: post #33
nice_byte wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have interviewed with them more than a single time, and this is simply not true.

This thread leaves me wondering if, perhaps, interviewing differs within the organization. Lots of confident "nuh-uh"s on both sides.

They don't ask leetcode questions for Front-end engineers AFAIK. It's mostly practical Javascript/DOM/browser questions.

Funnily enough though, I heard once you join as a Front-end engineer, you are pretty much a regular SWE and can join any team and work on any tech, even backend/systems.

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#137

Post by nobleach »

arduinomancer wrote: post #83
nobleach wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe? 2020 for me. The first wave had me write code to solve a problem.... pretty far from Amazon's rebranded HackerRank/Leetcode nonsense. I was talking to a human being the entire time. They were great about making me feel like they WANTED me to succeed. Next round was more conversational/System Design stuff.

I think you're confused, when people say "they ask leetcode questions" they don't mean they do automated tests The questions the human is asking you come from a big question bank and a lot of it is listed on LeetCode under the meta company tag because people leak them. People use Leetcode to practice for those interviews, they don't use the leetcode site in the interview

I guess I am just saying I didn't feel like herded cattle like I did with Amazon's automated leetcode/hackerrank rebranded system.

I mean, now I'm just here to watch the downvotes pile on....

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#138

Post by mrkramer »

bpodgursky wrote: post #62
jeffbee wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their main product sucks and their Boomer user base is literally dying. The acquisitions are keeping them in the game, but Insta has intense competition from TikTok and Snap and YouTube. They don’t have an unsinkable critical product that everyone uses and will continue to use through good and bad times, like search or mail.

Snapchat is walking dead fwiw. TikTok is strong, but realistically will be banned across the west next couple years b/c of security problems. You might hate Instagram, and that's very understandable, but it's going to be fine.

Snapchat is still doing fine considering how much competition they have all over the place e.g. Instagram, TikTok, YouTube etc.

TikTok won't be banned because US will force it to relocate all their relevant servers to US and hand in US citizens' data to US agencies. And realistically speaking TikTok is no different than Microsoft, Google and Facebook; instead all data going to one superpower it flows to another and majority of this data is garbage that's inefficiently used to target you with personalized ads. Personal data is mostly garbage like I said but data about specific groups and overall population might be more valuable and important taking in consideration economic competition and arms race between US and China.

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#139

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #132
myth_drannon wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was wondering if there is a correlation between hiring engineers who spend their lives memorizing leetcode hard problems and a company's ability to innovate and execute? Did they really optimize for hiring the top 0.001% of engineers or it's just that the fish is rotten from the top.

It seems to me that the selection process favors Indian and Chinese engineers who are used to cramming for rigorous entrance exams to top universities.

And also Eastern European or ex-USSR countries where highschool STEM curriculum is more difficult than in the west and participation in STEM competitions and olympiads is encouraged for kids.

We had to solve binary and hex division and multiplication on paper for exams and study Dijkstra's algoritm and binary tree traversal in highschool CS. Ugly stuff for a bunch of 16 year olds who just wanted to make Flash games. Really made me hate CS.

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#140

Post by spaceman_2020 »

gumby wrote: post #14
jvanderbot wrote: post #3

My uneducated opinion is this company had some downsizing and restructuring coming. But the leading edge of a big wave of downsizes might look like this, too.

I doubt it. My guess is Google/Alphabet will do the same, as they have too high a proportion of people doing things that are neither basic research or contributing to revenue in any way. You can see how that can happen when you have an unconstrained gusher of money. There's effectively zero feedback. However given the weakness of their management (see: gusher of money + lack of focus) it's unlikely that the cuts will…

Netflix looks shaky as hell. They need a huge bet, like Rings of Power or House of Dragons. The entire programming looks so completely awful cookie cutter at the moment.
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