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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

#61

Post by dinkumthinkum »

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…

PHP is one of those "developer productivity languages?" I mean, this way be just a huge sin I'm about to commit, but really? I think most of the world see this whole HipHop deal as you guys had all this PHP and you need to optimize it. The idea that the syntax and style of the PHP language is one of the most well suited languages to solving general computing problems ... I just find that hard to take seriously.

Re: The new way to land a job at Facebook

#62

Post by kmavm »

samstave wrote: post #57
kmavm wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I am 35 and have a wife and family. And it is not my first time at the tech company rodeo either.

Re: The new way to land a job at Facebook

#63

Post by kmavm »

dinkumthinkum wrote: post #61
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…

PHP is one of those "developer productivity languages?" I mean, this way be just a huge sin I'm about to commit, but really? I think most of the world see this whole HipHop deal as you guys had all this PHP and you need to optimize it. The idea that the syntax and style of the PHP language is one of the most well suited languages to solving general computing problems ... I just find that hard to take seriously.

Please don't mistake me: PHP-the-language is not well-designed. And we absolutely would never have gone down this road if we didn't have a metric ton of PHP to run and continue developing.

There are a few things PHP gets accidentally right, though, and one of them is the execution model. Each request starts with a brand new empty PHP environment; runs in a single thread to completion; and must keep persistent state off to the side in a database or memcache or what have you rather than in language-level objects. This turns out to have been a really good set of decisions. It lends itself to a nice tight development loop: instead of save/recompile/restart the server/test, you basically save/load the page. It's easier to remember what the heck you were doing when you get feedback on the code you wrote in 500 milliseconds.

Re: The new way to land a job at Facebook

#64

Post by furyofantares »

pbreit wrote: post #54
dhugiaskmak wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

reddit, pinterest, and craigslist come to mind as probably having a higher ratio. Instagram too, before Facebook bought them. Edit: And OMGPOP before Zynga bought them.

Re: The new way to land a job at Facebook

#66

Post by vicngtor »

underwater wrote: post #60
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. A…

Your comment is gold. My views on social is completely different now.

Re: The new way to land a job at Facebook

#67

Post by jpdus »

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?

I would recommend to pick the free Stanford class... great intro to (classical) ML: https://class.coursera.org/ml/class/index

Re: The new way to land a job at Facebook

#68

Post by tluyben2 »

lbrandy wrote: post #41
tluyben2 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Yes I think I have an inaccurate view; that's why I'm posting here to find out from the people inside and there are some really insightful points here.

Re: The new way to land a job at Facebook

#69

Post by darklajid »

underwater wrote: post #60
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. A…

I don't want to divert this discussion too far here and obviously you're somewhat ~biased~ by default as an FB engineer, but take this from an engineer that doesn't particularly like FB:

* Friendship for me is something offline, mostly. I don't believe that 'remote friends' make a lot of sense. That's a digital version of pen pals (email?) or collecting trophies from trips around the world. Socializing doesn't happen online for me, 'friends' that I cannot see offline will most probably not make it with me into the future. Facebook is a way to drag those people along that in my world just wouldn't have made it anymore.

* You totally ignored the biggest complaint in this discussion: Sharing stuff with a company that has a less than stellar reputation for respecting privacy. I'd argue that the bad reputation among engineers mostly stems from this issue, not from a weird kind of 'maintaining friends is a waste of time' idea.

That said, I _do_ use FB right now (living in IL, parents and family in DE) to connect with family and I have to admit that this works to some degree. I'd have preferred to do that more privately (diaspora? blogs?), but convenience and ease of use have won here.

Re: The new way to land a job at Facebook

#70

Post by silverlake »

lbrandy wrote: post #37
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…

You are vastly overvaluing experience in a particular language or technology. None of the languages you mentioned are particularly hard for someone to pick up fairly quickly (even more so if you already know one of the others). Being a good software engineer is largely orthogonal to which languages you have experience with.

Try explaining that to startups who want rockstar, ninja, sith lords in language X. Libraries, on the other hand, do take some time to learn.
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