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The new way to land a job at Facebook

kaggle.com

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Re: The new way to land a job at Facebook

#11

Post by tluyben2 »

planetguy wrote: post #9
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…

If you're a top-shelf coder who can write his own meal ticket to anywhere: nah, working at a post-IPO facebook doesn't sound particularly worthwhile. If you're a so-so coder then, hey, big company, steady paycheck! What's not to like?

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?

Re: The new way to land a job at Facebook

#13

Post by i_like_my_name »

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 should be able to publish the method soon."

http://www.serversidemagazine.com/news/10-questions-with-fac...

Edit: On the other hand, I doubt he had to jump through any hoops to land a job at facebook.

Re: The new way to land a job at Facebook

#14

Post by sparknlaunch »

Really like the kaggle platform. First heard about them from a techzing with the founders.1

The challenges can help corporations and others from solving complex problems. No reason why Facebook cannot take advantage of this process.

1 http://techzinglive.com/page/927/166-tz-interview-anhony-gol...

Re: The new way to land a job at Facebook

#15

Post by 3pt14159 »

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 database (there are many).

You should probably use python because, let's face it, nothing else will have as many opensource libraries, be as fast, and as accessible from C as python is (use cython for painless compiled code and to link to other C libraries).

Don't use recursion unless your language is specifically built for it. Stay away from ILP graph traversal unless you really know what you are doing.

If you are using some sort of context token/vector similarity approach, be sure to know that the number of tokens you are going to need will be huge, and furthermore you will likely need some hard coded rule sets for low follower/following users.

Try to introduce a time-based decay factor or something similar, and of course take advantage of degrees of "closeness" if there are repeated interactions between nodes.

One last thing: if your approach uses some sort of map reduce solution, it might be better for real world applications, but it will significantly slow down your progress. Just load a box up with RAM and use fast algorithms.

Best of luck to all you out there!

Re: The new way to land a job at Facebook

#16

Post by pbreit »

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 work for a very large, very successful company that actual does still feel startup-ish?

Really, yours was a serious question? And by "jumping through hoops" you mean "programming...something you (should) love to do"? Sheesh.

Re: The new way to land a job at Facebook

#17

Post by wglb »

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…

Um, as one of the three people in the world who understand all of C++, i also doubt if he had to do any jumping.

Re: The new way to land a job at Facebook

#18

Post by tluyben2 »

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…

Good edit :)

But yes that makes sense; my, maybe cynical, outlook is that most people will not actually do that work there. Most will do their stinking best to end up working on some (seemingly) insignificant stuff. I read some newsgroup post from a Windows (person on the actual MS Windows team, not someone who devs Windows apps) developer once who said something like 'I WISH I had programmed the clock in Windows, at least then I could show my parents I do something remotely interesting'. For Andrei and many others it is obvious, but for a lot more people it is completely weird why they do the things they do. And I love to read their stories.

I can rant on forever about a guy I met on a summer job at a supermarket distribution hub (yeah; in the 80s as a 15 year old programmer you couldn't get on freelancer and do something cool); he worked there for 20 years and he was very happy. Because of him, people could get their food every day and he felt valuable and lucky to have landed that job. It was a great example and I like hearing stories WHY people like their job, but not only from people we all know (and love or hate).

Re: The new way to land a job at Facebook

#19

Post by kmavm »

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 languages," like Python, JavaScript, LUA, etc. And, though I was skeptical before I came here, developers really are more productive in these languages. It would blow your mind what world-class people working in this medium can accomplish in compressed timeframes. This means that increasing these languages' performance is incredibly leveraged; to the extent we're successful at making PHP faster, we change the set of problems that PHP can address. Moving a problem from the "must be solved in C++" category to the "can be solved in PHP" category frees up our fellow developers to get more done with their finite professional lives.

*Edit: By "like animals", I mean, "with a survival-level sense of urgency." It doesn't necessarily mean long hours.

Re: The new way to land a job at Facebook

#20

Post by tluyben2 »

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…

Yes, not sure, yes, yes, sure, i'm not sure if that's through. Yes it's a serious question. I find it interesting to hear why people get so excited by this. I'm saying that I wouldn't (not in this life), but I like to hear why others would. Nothing wrong with that right? You answered my question somewhat, although I believe that you might not land like that; Facebook is not big, but a new person in a crew of 3500 doesn't sound like you're going to get those large responsibilities or those enormous resources or that large salary. And yes, successful or not i'll leave to the trolls.
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