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“Facebook turned me down” (2009)

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Re: “Facebook turned me down” (2009)

#121

Post by sokoloff »

bduerst wrote: post #25
waterlesscloud wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if you're a giant company, hire them and don't tell them what to do. Let them run free on your dime. Own whatever they make. (Not that Twitter was a giant company in 2009, and Facebook was just getting there)

Too high of a risk for companies. Better to let the market sift out the successful founders than to payroll a hundred of them, hoping for a big win. Think of how many unsuccessful founder types that Facebook didn't hire too. Also if this guy was working for Facebook, odds are he would have ended up on messenger, and someone else would have filled the SMS market need for Whatsapp in India. Then Facebook would be acqui…

I also believe that a significant portion of the deal value is "So Google doesn't get this and buy inroads into 'our turf'".

There's nothing wrong with that, of course, but it supports the idea that not only do you let the market pick the winner, but that once the market HAS picked a winner, sometimes you have to buy that winner partly as a defensive strategy; it's not enough to find a cheaper way to "play offense".

Re: “Facebook turned me down” (2009)

#122

Post by michaelt »

JamesArgo wrote: post #104
gscott wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They won't hire you but are begging to get more H1b workers...

Yeah, how awful it would be for America if the world's brightest become citizens.

I'm all for the best and brightest becoming citizens, but we should offer visas for the most in-demand, high salary professions first. We can tell from salaries that the shortage of CEOs, lawyers and hedge fund managers is much more acute than the shortage of programmers and engineers.

Re: “Facebook turned me down” (2009)

#123

Post by pm90 »

prostoalex wrote: post #96
gscott wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point was more that he was here, is good enough to get past all of the phone screens, probably did pretty well in person, but was passed over. My thinking is more that large companies with many open positions might want to consider the person for another position at least.

In 2007 Facebook was not in the club of "large companies with many open positions", just another startup on University Avenue with some series B in the bag.

...and therefore would have even more of an incentive to hire local.

Re: “Facebook turned me down” (2009)

#124

Post by marvin »

kkowalczyk wrote: post #22
waterlesscloud wrote: post #8

Turns out false negatives can be pretty costly too, it seems.

If he was hired by Facebook, he wouldn't have (co)developed WhatsApp. If Facebook hired him, he would most likely be worth (to Facebook) as much as any other random Facebook programmer. Unless he's the one who started WhatsApp, it would have been developed and successful anyway and Facebook would have to buy it for the same amount of money. The reality is that product/market fit is much more powerful force than progr…

I think the real issue is that when Facebook didn't hire him, he went on to found a competing company which Facebook felt compelled to pay 16 billion for. That's a big cost.

Re: “Facebook turned me down” (2009)

#125

Post by mjn »

a_bonobo wrote: post #64
shutupalready wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Turned me down in 07 Telling the story now is an interesting historical anecdote, but you probably didn't blog or tweet about it in 2007, right? I can't quite understand why Brian Acton was so public about the companies that turned him down. Isn't this bad for him if he's in a job search? Doesn't this send out a negative message (assuming any employer bothered to look)?

You could see it as a badge of honor that Google or another large company, which purportedly hires only the best of the best, deemed you worthy of an interview. The mere fact that you have been considered for a position might raise your standing with potential employers [citation needed].

I see that in academia occasionally. People will semi-publicly mention that they didn't get the job at MIT, which is a kind of roundabout way of advertising that MIT was considering them for a job.

Re: “Facebook turned me down” (2009)

#126

Post by jpatokal »

alexeisadeski3 wrote: post #115
barry-cotter wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buddhism is not Hinduism. Other dharmic religions that disavow castes include Sikhism and Jainism.

"...various forms of the caste system are practised in several Buddhist countries, mainly in Sri Lanka, Tibet, and Japan where butchers, leather and metal workers and janitors are sometimes regarded as being impure. However, the system in these countries has never been either as severe or as rigid as the Hindu system and fortunately it is now beginning to fade away. The exception to this is Nepal where Tantric priest…

Japan's feudal-era caste system was part Confucianism and part Shintoism. Buddhism had nothing to do with it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edo_society#Four_class_order https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kegare

Re: “Facebook turned me down” (2009)

#127

Post by mjn »

rodgerd wrote: post #38
bduerst wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too high of a risk for companies. Better to let the market sift out the successful founders than to payroll a hundred of them, hoping for a big win. Think of how many unsuccessful founder types that Facebook didn't hire too. Also if this guy was working for Facebook, odds are he would have ended up on messenger, and someone else would have filled the SMS market need for Whatsapp in India. Then Facebook would be acqui…

> Too high of a risk for companies. The problem with PARC and AT&T labs wasn't that having a bunch of really smart people doing interesting stuff failed to produce brilliant, world changing ideas, it was that the companies in question weren't always good at capitalising on them (arguably for the better, in the case of Unix).

AT&T Labs wasn't too bad at capitalizing on their inventions, though they didn't do equally well on all of them. For a pretty long time the lab was definitely in the black, though. Their most profitable invention, which came about halfway through the Labs' existence, was probably the transistor, which made AT&T a ton of money. I don't remember where I read it, but some old Bell Labs people calculated that it made AT&T so much money that that single invention paid for something like 40 years of the Labs' operating costs.

Re: “Facebook turned me down” (2009)

#128

Post by vog »

eru wrote: post #110
a_bonobo wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could see it as a badge of honor that Google or another large company, which purportedly hires only the best of the best, deemed you worthy of an interview. The mere fact that you have been considered for a position might raise your standing with potential employers [citation needed].

Nah, Google interviews anyone with a pulse.

Related HN thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7128458

Re: “Facebook turned me down” (2009)

#129

Post by Taurenking »

curiousDog wrote: post #63

In this case, he was probably rejected more for fit/pay/cultural reasons but this should be a reminder for candidates to never be dejected when they're turned down by these companies. I have a friend who tried to kill himself because he failed the Google interview. Rejection by the "smartest" engineers at this companies is by no means an invalidation of your abilities. At the end of the day, none of them are solving…

[ have a friend who tried to kill himself because he failed the Google interview.]

WHOA, talk about extremes

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