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The new way to land a job at Facebook

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Re: The new way to land a job at Facebook

#21

Post by ramchip »

tluyben2 wrote: post #6

I'm not trolling here, but I have to ask i'm seriously wondering what is 'so great' about landing a job at Facebook? They have a nice tech stack, but it's a social networking site. How is it interesting to be a cog in the machine that is Facebook? Again; serious question; I'm curious. I'm a bit older :) and I would not want to work for any company other than a startup; I learned in life it is not the right dope for m…

It's one place that accepts non-native engineers (I live in Japan), and it's very well-known/prestigious, so I could have a job at other places much more easily after working there. They also pay a lot more than most local employers. This is in addition to the technical challenge, etc. that other people already explained.

Personally I'm not hugely excited about it but it can be a good way to start a career.

Re: The new way to land a job at Facebook

#23

Post by utlanning »

tluyben2 wrote: post #11
planetguy wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're a top-shelf coder who can write his own meal ticket to anywhere: nah, working at a post-IPO facebook doesn't sound particularly worthwhile. If you're a so-so coder then, hey, big company, steady paycheck! What's not to like?

But why jump through hoops? You can be a programmer at Exxon (or another big company outside Google or Fogcreek :) and get in sleeping. If you are a so-so coder that sounds more interesting?

Prestige.

Re: The new way to land a job at Facebook

#24

Post by dsl »

picklefish wrote: post #7

"The challenge is to recommend missing links in a social network. Participants will be presented with an anonymized, directed social graph from which some edges have been deleted, and asked to make ranked predictions for each user in the test set of which other users they would want to follow." When has this kind of data ever been successfully anonymized? From Netflix's attempt: http://www.securityfocus.com/news/1149…

You deleted the important part from your quote: directed social graph (no, not Facebook, keep guessing) from which some edges have been deleted

My guess is the data is either something public or a non-user facing dataset they collected internally (like what coworkers have you bought lunch for)

Re: The new way to land a job at Facebook

#25

Post by tluyben2 »

kmavm wrote: post #19
tluyben2 wrote: post #6

I'm not trolling here, but I have to ask i'm seriously wondering what is 'so great' about landing a job at Facebook? They have a nice tech stack, but it's a social networking site. How is it interesting to be a cog in the machine that is Facebook? Again; serious question; I'm curious. I'm a bit older :) and I would not want to work for any company other than a startup; I learned in life it is not the right dope for m…

Hey, my name is Keith Adams, and I'm an engineer at Facebook. I work on the HipHop virtual machine, a dynamic compiler and runtime for the PHP language. It is the hardest challenge I've tackled professionally, and the people I'm working with are brilliant and work like animals.* I think the larger significance of our work on HipHop is in the context of software as a whole. PHP is one of those "developer productivity…

Thanks for posting this! That's what I was looking for I guess; people who actually have concrete points why they like this. I think Facebook is doing a great job at gathering talent and that's something I would like to learn about.

I like your work definitely. Guess a lot of engineers would; I'm curious to know how much significant work you'll be doing if you apply now (jump through the hoops), get in and want to work on HipHop (as recent graduate). What are your options within Facebook; how far can you grow?

Re: The new way to land a job at Facebook

#26

Post by jquery »

kmavm wrote: post #19
tluyben2 wrote: post #6

I'm not trolling here, but I have to ask i'm seriously wondering what is 'so great' about landing a job at Facebook? They have a nice tech stack, but it's a social networking site. How is it interesting to be a cog in the machine that is Facebook? Again; serious question; I'm curious. I'm a bit older :) and I would not want to work for any company other than a startup; I learned in life it is not the right dope for m…

Hey, my name is Keith Adams, and I'm an engineer at Facebook. I work on the HipHop virtual machine, a dynamic compiler and runtime for the PHP language. It is the hardest challenge I've tackled professionally, and the people I'm working with are brilliant and work like animals.* I think the larger significance of our work on HipHop is in the context of software as a whole. PHP is one of those "developer productivity…

> work like animals.

This is good because?

Re: The new way to land a job at Facebook

#27

Post by khuey »

tluyben2 wrote: post #11
planetguy wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're a top-shelf coder who can write his own meal ticket to anywhere: nah, working at a post-IPO facebook doesn't sound particularly worthwhile. If you're a so-so coder then, hey, big company, steady paycheck! What's not to like?

But why jump through hoops? You can be a programmer at Exxon (or another big company outside Google or Fogcreek :) and get in sleeping. If you are a so-so coder that sounds more interesting?

There's value in working at a company whose primary business is what you do. I expect that programmers are treated better at $AVERAGE_SOFTWARE_COMPANY than at $AVERAGE_NOT_SOFTWARE_COMPANY.

Re: The new way to land a job at Facebook

#28

Post by Slix »

kmavm wrote: post #19
tluyben2 wrote: post #6

I'm not trolling here, but I have to ask i'm seriously wondering what is 'so great' about landing a job at Facebook? They have a nice tech stack, but it's a social networking site. How is it interesting to be a cog in the machine that is Facebook? Again; serious question; I'm curious. I'm a bit older :) and I would not want to work for any company other than a startup; I learned in life it is not the right dope for m…

Hey, my name is Keith Adams, and I'm an engineer at Facebook. I work on the HipHop virtual machine, a dynamic compiler and runtime for the PHP language. It is the hardest challenge I've tackled professionally, and the people I'm working with are brilliant and work like animals.* I think the larger significance of our work on HipHop is in the context of software as a whole. PHP is one of those "developer productivity…

One thing that turns me off of seriously pursuing a career at Facebook is PHP.

I haven't learned PHP yet (and I'm only in college), but I've heard bad things about its design, and it seems to be overshadowed by Ruby and Python in my programming news sources.

Is PHP a dying language? Even if it is, it makes sense for Facebook to continue using it instead of throwing out all their code.

But it seems like it might be a waste to spend time at Facebook using PHP if the rest of the tech and start-up world has moved on.

Re: The new way to land a job at Facebook

#29

Post by tluyben2 »

ramchip wrote: post #21
tluyben2 wrote: post #6

I'm not trolling here, but I have to ask i'm seriously wondering what is 'so great' about landing a job at Facebook? They have a nice tech stack, but it's a social networking site. How is it interesting to be a cog in the machine that is Facebook? Again; serious question; I'm curious. I'm a bit older :) and I would not want to work for any company other than a startup; I learned in life it is not the right dope for m…

It's one place that accepts non-native engineers (I live in Japan), and it's very well-known/prestigious, so I could have a job at other places much more easily after working there. They also pay a lot more than most local employers. This is in addition to the technical challenge, etc. that other people already explained. Personally I'm not hugely excited about it but it can be a good way to start a career.

That makes sense and that's what I can see; it's a good first stop. At least in the coming 10-15 years no one probably will fault you for having worked there as an engineer. Maybe longer.

I didn't know they accept non native engineers; that's another thing I forgot about; if a company really would like top talent, what's with the closed-border mentality? If Facebook doesn't have that, then kudos to them. If you want talent, it shouldn't matter where someone is from right?

Re: The new way to land a job at Facebook

#30

Post by pepsi_can »

3pt14159 wrote: post #15

They are asking you to build a recommendation engine. One tailored for a specific type of problem. Using some startups api aside (spirit of the competition and all that), anyone interested in completing this should pick up the Springer book Recommender Systems Handbook, it's a very good place to start. Depending on the size of the Facebook dataset, you will need either a graph library like networkx or a graph databas…

You seem to be very knowledgeable in this area. May I ask what your background is? I would like to take on some self study in this area. Would you have any advice?
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