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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

#71

Post by andralex »

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…

This is Andrei. You'd be surprised; the interview was very difficult and I might have failed it just as easily. I got no C++ question (we seldom ask language-specific questions). Instead, my interviewers asked me questions related to my research and had me implement a classic algorithm on a very large data set and a simple ML algorithm. I recall at a point I got the curve ball of an NP-complete algorithm that had a polynomial approximation.

Bottom line, the Facebook interview is not easy, and we're determined to not make it easier even though we're hiring intensively. The upside is that you get to work almost exclusively with very bright people, which makes for a very palpable difference from the typical corporate experience.

Re: The new way to land a job at Facebook

#72

Post by pbreit »

furyofantares wrote: post #64
pbreit wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

All attractive places to work but not sure any have higher ratios (except Craigslist perhaps, which has its own peculiarities).

Re: The new way to land a job at Facebook

#73

Post by andralex »

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…

There are plenty of eng jobs at Facebook that require no PHP. In more than two and a half years there I wrote probably 50 lines of PHP.

Re: The new way to land a job at Facebook

#74

Post by ramchip »

tluyben2 wrote: post #29
ramchip wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Employees at Japanese companies typically don't speak English (this includes engineers), so they're hesitant to hire someone who may cause communication/cultural problems.

They also generally don't have the same attitude towards hiring and are definitely not hiring for top talent. People are hired because they fit in the company culture first, and because they have potential second. Young engineers are paid cheaply and are not expected to be skilled; they are trained on the job.

Somewhat related: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3845850

It's definitely possible to get hired as a foreigner in a Japanese company, but it's not easy and the conditions are not great, compared to Facebook et al.

Re: The new way to land a job at Facebook

#75

Post by ahupp »

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…

I felt the same way when I started at Facebook. The thing I've learned, though, is that your language choice is very far down the list of important factors. Most important: the problem you are solving and the quality of the engineers you work with.

Underlying your question is the idea that the specific language you work with is an investment that's critical to future success. Whether this is true depends a lot on what kind of career path you want.

I've found that lower quality jobs are the most specific about languages - "Must have 5 years of Java 1.5 or above experience" should be a huge red flag, because that place is hiring based on years-of-ass-in-chair rather than skills.

Some companies seem to be looking for specific language skills - "We're looking for great python hackers" it might say. But this is often just marketing and doesn't mean they won't take a someone who can show excellence in other ways.

There are exceptions of course - if you are doing low-level systems work, it would be expected that you know the ins and outs of C, and I'm sure there's other examples in other specialties.

One last thing: it's always useful to get experience with a range of languages, and that will pay off down the road when you have to learn language N+1. At Facebook I've written (in descending order of volume): PHP, Javascript, Python, C++ and Haskell.

Re: The new way to land a job at Facebook

#76

Post by ckc »

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…

Avoid smugness indeed.

Re: The new way to land a job at Facebook

#77

Post by rherb »

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…

My name is Ralf Herbrich and I am an Engineer at Facebook. I work on large-scale probabilistic models for ranking - the "stuff" that is used to determine how likely a user is going to engage with a story or ad.

I have worked for over 10 years at Microsoft Research before on large-scale problems, for example, the TrueSkill ranking and matchmaking system used in Xbox Live and the Halo series as well as ranking systems in Bing. I can honestly say that the current projects I am working on are professionally the hardest I worked on so far and it is amazing how much gets done by a very small team of some of the brightest and most talented people in the industry.

I echo Andrei's comments that the interviews were very difficult. I got no specific C++ or PHP question but more general questions to translate algorithms into working code (being able to pick any language). This IS very important when you work here and everyone at Facebook carries a lot of responsibility so having a high bar is the right decision.

Re: The new way to land a job at Facebook

#78

Post by 3pt14159 »

benjaminwootton wrote: post #59
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.

I've seen a couple step changes in the quality of results and they are usually from people that have immersed themselves in current methods, identified the problems with the current methods, then stepped back 100 meters to try to reason about the problem in a different way.

Unlike, say, selling something online, machine learning has strong underpinnings in mathematics. You do really need to stand on the shoulders of giants in order to move the needle forward. It is more in common with building a bridge than it is with coming up with something revolutionary like renting dvds through the mail instead of a brick and mortar store.

Imagine a bridge building contest where the goal was to something that could take a train across a river. I should hope someone coming along and suggesting the rough concepts to an aspiring bridge builder would be lauded. "If you use suspension, be sure to check for systemic wind loads" "Don't forget about the foundations at the end of the bridge" and "If you use concrete, remember to give the concrete enough cover over the reinforcing steel bars so that it doesn't become unsightly" are all good pieces of advice that someone should know.

Now, once you learn the basics and can do what has already been done - absolutely push the field forward.

Re: The new way to land a job at Facebook

#79

Post by sireat »

It does seem strange that the only reward is a chance at an interview. Most other contests at Kaggle at least offer something tangible. One of the first contests at Kaggle was a chess ratings prediction which offered signed book by Kasparov, Karpov et al.

I suppose it is one way to weed out those who would not be likely to apply to Facebook even if they did well at the contest.

Re: The new way to land a job at Facebook

#80

Post by furyofantares »

pbreit wrote: post #72
furyofantares wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

All attractive places to work but not sure any have higher ratios (except Craigslist perhaps, which has its own peculiarities).

I believe all those companies are above 1M users per engineer, my estimation for FB was just under that. Is my estimate for FB way off?
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