Live data from Hacker News

Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

bloomberg.com

201–210 of 540 posts

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#201
post #153

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

They haven't asked leetcode hard problems for years, at least.

I got 3 hards only 6 months ago. How do you know what they are asking 'for years' do you have access to their questions or something.

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple tightening privacy while TikTok is eating their lunch... Not to mention the Metaverse is/was a giant distraction.

Metaverse is an interesting idea, but they're too quick to hail it as the feature of the company imo. It just looks like an expensive, boring, video game right now.

| Metaverse is an interesting idea...

It's really not though, nor is it an original one. There are real people with real problems in the world and we've seen over and over that increasingly virtualizing our interactions, with a few exceptions, is a great way of kicking those problems down the road.

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#203
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

document.getElementById??

That's the DOM API.

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> iOS privacy has killed facebook advertisements A problem I see with FB is that they don't control anything on which they run. They run on stuff from their competitors: it's either Google (Chrome / Android), Microsot (Windows / Edge) or Apple (OS X / Safari / iOS). Despite the downturn these three behemoths are still enjoying a market cap in the trillion+. Meta is actually down to $360 bn. Meta controls neither the…

You know, I've been wondering what could possibly possess Meta to be so, "FUCK YEAH, ALL IN MF'ERS!!!" about the metaverse for a while now. This actually makes a lot of sense; companies control the platforms we are on, which then determines how we must operate (read: which prevents us from invasively monitoring you as much as we'd like), so why not control the full stack as people close more doors on us? I still thin…

Perhaps they shouldn't have bailed on making phones. Android phone arena is still very messy and they could just...have good hardware and a slick skin on Android and probably make a go of it.

I know I'm armchairing the devil so to speak but I think this would have been a good long term play for them, but I imagine their expertise at the time was antithetical to hardware.

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#206

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 previously worked at Facebook/Instagram for ~10 years and conducted over 1800 interviews (got the t-shirts and hoodie to prove it). leetcode style problems are at the core of the "ninja" interviews. In fact, a lot of leetcode problems are sourced from what Facebook asked before leetcode even existed.

That being said, guidance is to ask 2 medium difficulty questions as opposed to 1 hard one.

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you seriously struggle to think of possible reasons for why someone would want to work for Meta? Yes, I struggle to think of a good reason to work for such a harmful company as Meta. People usually don't land there because of a desperate need for money, which would probably be one of the very few acceptable reasons for joining that company. And why should my question be in good faith? Why should we not call out…

> I struggle to think of a good reason to work for such a harmful company as Meta WhatsApp is an extremely useful product in my life. Instagram is nice for keeping up to date with some friends I don't get a chance to hangout in-person with often, as well as following some small local artist and museum pages. I dont care for FB as a product anymore, but pre-pandemic it was great for helping organize events with my fri…

I see a lot more negativity towards Facebook IRL than I do here on HN. If anything, the correlation seems to be that those closest to the tech industry are the ones most positive about it, while casual users are extremely negative.

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> We had to solve binary and hex division and multiplication on paper for exams

This is not ... hard. It's the same logic as decimal multiplication/division on paper.

> study Dijkstra's algoritm and binary tree traversal in highschool CS

That's more like it!

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#209
post #91

> In prior moves to reduce spending, a dual-camera watch the company was building to compete with the Apple Watch was shuttered. loool > Meta is not the only advertising company to be hit by broader economic challenges. interesting they are referenced as advertising company..

Is it ?

https://www.statista.com/statistics/267031/facebooks-annual-...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1093781/distribution-of-...

Meta and Google are advertising companies, their "products" are just a way to:

- gather data: whatsapp/messenger, maps, youtube, "like"/"share" buttons, reviews &c.

- display ads: google search, youtube, instagram, fb feed

- display a "buy" button: google search, youtube, instagram

The only "new" products they don't shutdown after a year are products that allows them to gather more data / show more ads / get more "buy" clicks. Everything else get terminated no matter what

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#210
post #71

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.

I use it on the browser to check one or two groups and on my phone for events, it's a mess. On the groups I always want to check for the most recent posts because it doesn't have a lot of activity and besides countless things I've tried it always wants to show the posts ordered with its algorithm. It's also like:

post AD post AD post AD

I'm used to ads, I grew up watching cartoons and shows on prime time old airwaves TV and listening to music on Top 50 radio shows. This is worse. No other media is as bad as Facebook ad-wise and no other media is worse than what prime TV and radio where in the 90s. They devolved.

Post reply on HN