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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

#51

Post by pixie_ »

Slix wrote: post #46
jc4p wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 compani…

Wow, this could be a troll.. don't know.. clever.

Re: The new way to land a job at Facebook

#52

Post by jc4p »

Slix wrote: post #46
jc4p wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 compani…

You're going to be sorely disappointed when you find out that the majority of user-facing applications at Google are in Java, which you'll hear even less of on places like here.

The reason you don't see mentions of PHP all the time on places like here is that Python and Ruby are considered "hip" languages right now. Every one and their mother wants to learn it to show off how cool it is. Which is freaking awesome because the more people that learn nice scripting languages the better, but it means people aren't being driven to build new services on PHP to show off because instead of listing off 10-20 buzzword plugins by other people, you have a limited amount of mature things you can use to make a PHP application. This is not saying that Python and Ruby don't have mature platforms and extensions.

Have you done any professional programming in the past? I absolutely guarantee that even doing an short term internship at a company using a programming language you don't know, the nuances of that specific language won't be what you take away from you but rather the different ways to think about a specific problem.

Maybe once every month I face a problem at work or on personal projects where I can say "Hey, I remember this, it's a really obscure PHP fault!" versus many many times a times a day when I think "hmm I could build this as a singleton or a factory or a ....." and can use my previous experience programming in those fashions at previous jobs to figure out what the best way to do it currently is.

Learning a new language isn't about dedicating your life to it. It's about learning new methods of completing tasks, which you can almost always apply to other languages.

Re: The new way to land a job at Facebook

#54

Post by pbreit »

dhugiaskmak wrote: post #47
pbreit wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Addressing both replies: Facebook continues to have perhaps the highest ratio of users (choose a metric if you wish) to engineers, quite possibly by a large margin. I believe that's a good proxy for responsibility.

Re: The new way to land a job at Facebook

#55

Post by capsule_toy »

Slix wrote: post #46
jc4p wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 compani…

It's fairly easy to construct a portfolio of web applications in whatever language you want to use and/or demonstrate competency in a language (eg contribute to open source), but it's much more difficult to say you worked on an application at the scale of Facebook. That experience is invaluable and the lessons you learn there are applicable even when you move on to applications in other languages.

You should also probably look at surveys of language adoption b/c PHP has much greater market share. Hacker News is a very skewed sample.

Re: The new way to land a job at Facebook

#56

Post by underwater »

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…

No one at Facebook is under the impression that PHP is a particularly good language, but it does the job. What really matters are a libraries and abstractions that you'll actually be interacting with. At Facebook these are leagues ahead of any other PHP codebase I've seen.

You should read what Andrei Alexandrescu has to say about the language here: http://www.serversidemagazine.com/news/10-questions-with-fac...

Re: The new way to land a job at Facebook

#57

Post by samstave »

kmavm wrote: post #39
jquery wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> work like animals. This is good because?

Because I find it fun. If you don't, that's perfectly cool, too.

That is totally cool, however - just for perspective, other people are not in their early 20s, fresh from college with no experience in other large silicon valey companies for the past 20 years.

Others: they ave 2+ kids, have been through many IPO/M&A debacles and may have gone through ridiculous divorces, major swings in their marketability or simply been screwed over by certain companies...

They hype around making tons of money can be subdued by the realities of life in between these relatively rare miollionairing events.

Thus, qualities of work other than "working myself to the bone because this company will be the next google IPO" become a big factor. This is why HP, Yahoo, MS, and others continue to attact talent - although it might represent an aging trend.

There will always be more wily generations in the tech industry. Learn, earn and avoid smugness.

Re: The new way to land a job at Facebook

#58

Post by marvin »

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…

My anecdotal evidence from the startup world, though, says that most people in a "startup" like Facebook work very hard and very long hours at the same time. I think your description is a very good way to work, but I sort of doubt that this is an accurate description of life at Facebook :P

Re: The new way to land a job at Facebook

#59

Post by benjaminwootton »

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…

Then again, you could try something completely left field and creative.

People who know anything about machine learning will follow conventional wisdom and potentially miss out on a step change in quality of results.

Re: The new way to land a job at Facebook

#60

Post by underwater »

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…

I work at Facebook. I think that social networking unfairly gets a bad rap from many engineers. Maybe this is because many of us view, or viewed, socializing and maintaining friendships as a waste of time. I think that is a mistake. Socializing is something that's a core part of what it is to be human, and Facebook is a tool to help people to do that.

My entire family and many of my friends live in another country. Apart from infrequent Skype calls the only way I can interact with them is via Facebook. I am closer to them now than when I lived an hour's drive away and we communicated by email. The first pictures my parents will see of their grandchildren will be on Facebook. It's awesome to think that I've helped build something that is helping millions of other people in the same way.

Social networking isn't a fad, about sharing cat pictures, or something bored teenagers do. Engineers look at Facebook and see a web site built in PHP with "a nice tech stack". Everyone else sees a way to fulfill their need to connect with people.

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