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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

#41

Post by lbrandy »

tluyben2 wrote: post #25
kmavm wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wo…

Facebook, with few exceptions, allows you to pick your team. If you really want to work on something, you can. As for your last question, I joined a year ago, and from my experience, the meritocracy is extremely alive and well. You can go far, and get there very quickly, if the fit is right, and you are kicking ass.

Reading between the lines of your posts, I think you might have a pretty inaccurate view of facebook, as it currently is. Facebook has fewer engineers than you think, and it's -really- easy to have massive impact on features, or even the org as a whole, from day 1. Most of the teams responsible for major features/products are quite small. Some are frighteningly small. In many places, there are huge, ambitious, crazy ideas currently on the shelf waiting for 2-3 new people to join the team to take on.

Re: The new way to land a job at Facebook

#42

Post by cageface »

khuey wrote: post #27
tluyben2 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It depends. Some big but untechnical companies will think you're magic and pay you big bucks for very easy work. If you just want to collect a paycheck and go home you could do worse.

Re: The new way to land a job at Facebook

#43

Post by EternalFury »

Slix wrote: post #28
kmavm wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

PHP still runs most of the highly trafficked Web sites on the Internet.

Rails is a permanent train wreck. The other hundred of Ruby-based Web frameworks are adequate for small, CRUD-style applications. (BTW, I like Ruby. It's a neat little language.)

In the end, it's either PHP or J2EE in 90% of the cases for high-uptime, high-traffic Web destinations.

Re: The new way to land a job at Facebook

#44

Post by kubrickslair »

pepsi_can wrote: post #30
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?

Besides the excellent suggestions by the parent, I might also look at the awesome work done by Jon Kleinberg for a more theoretical understanding. One may start with his pretty concise Networks book: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/networks-book/

Re: The new way to land a job at Facebook

#45

Post by [deleted] »

larsberg wrote: post #33
jquery wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> work like animals. This is good because?

Most large mammals other than humans sleep or relax a large portion of the day and are only active a relatively short time for hunting (work) and eating. So one could interpret his statement as saying that they work short, focused hours and then go home to relax. My info is anecdotal from my wife, who has spent a significant portion of her life working with bears. But from the zoo keepers I've met, that mammal breakd…

[deleted]

Re: The new way to land a job at Facebook

#46

Post by Slix »

jc4p wrote: post #34
Slix wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm going to apologize in advance if any of this seems too stern or rude. You seriously don't have the correct mindset about this. You are thinking in a way that a lot of other people share, but it's not practical. In the real world you have to learn new technologies and languages consistently. Every day something new comes out or gets improved that makes doing a difficult task easier, and people/companies that can a…

I do want to learn lots of different technologies, including PHP! That's part of the reason I read Hacker News in the first place.

But I'm doubtful of its real-world application these days. Most news I see never mentions it, but Ruby and Python are mentioned near constantly.

I'm sure working at Facebook would be amazing. I mean, it's Facebook. But if I also got internship offers at Google and other high-tech companies, then the language I use at work will factor in.

And PHP doesn't seem nearly as significant as these other languages, so then why take a job where I'll learn and use it in-depth for months when there are other languages?

Re: The new way to land a job at Facebook

#47

Post by dhugiaskmak »

pbreit wrote: post #16
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…

Despite that this does sound like trolling: would you like to work with one of the best group of engineers in the world? Would you like to work on an uncommonly small team with uncommonly large responsibilities? Would you like to work on the biggest web property in the world? Would you like to have enormous computing resources at your disposal? Would you like a large salary and excellent benefits? Would you like to w…

Everyone who writes code at Facebook has "uncommonly large responsibilities"? Really? How does that work?

Re: The new way to land a job at Facebook

#48

Post by waterlesscloud »

i_like_my_name wrote: post #13
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…

Andrei Alexandrescu said: "One really cool thing about doing machine learning at Facebook is the sheer size of data involved; most researchers are happy to put together a graph with some hundreds of thousands of nodes. At Facebook samples of interest are in the hundreds of millions and more. It took a few of us quite a while to figure out how to distribute graph processing on many machines, but we finally did it. We…

Out of idle curiosity, who are some other big name programmers working at Facebook?

Re: The new way to land a job at Facebook

#49

Post by 3pt14159 »

pepsi_can wrote: post #30
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?

Just dive in man. Get some datasets, intelligently break them apart, and just try to start predicting who should like what movie. It isn't too hard if you've gone to university for a STEM degree or learned the math some other way.

Re: The new way to land a job at Facebook

#50

Post by 3pt14159 »

kubrickslair wrote: post #44
pepsi_can wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Besides the excellent suggestions by the parent, I might also look at the awesome work done by Jon Kleinberg for a more theoretical understanding. One may start with his pretty concise Networks book: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/networks-book/

Excellent book. Definitely recommend if you want to develop a deeper understanding.
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