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Facebook recruiting and Unix systems

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Re: Facebook recruiting and Unix systems

#311
post #91

In situations like these you really aught to ask yourself what your end-goal with being elitist like that is really trying to serve. In engineering situations usually the purpose is some form of disguised signaling. This is the purpose of most sentences that start with "technically". But when you're talking to a recruiter that kind of move is unlikely to be effective. It's unlikely to affect your application positive…

As a tutorial for those of us like me who sometimes stumble in situations like this, could someone who found the OP's responses to the recruiter unprofessional please post example phrasing of what the OP should have said? Let's assume the constraint that the OP will refuse to lie (so they won't just change their resume to 'Unix' instead of 'Unix-like'). This is a genuine question; I often can't think of how to phrase…

> Let's assume the constraint that the OP will refuse to lie.

This constraint is invalid. People need to use contextual awareness. The recruiter is most likely not a technical person, so splitting hairs won't help. And based on a bit of knowledge about Facebook, it's highly unlikely that a company that prides itself on building its own data centers from scratch will actually use a creaky AIX 7.1 for their backend, so you just "lie". Heck, it's not even a lie, it's a white lie which you'll tell the engineer interviewer down the line, while explaining that you have POSIX/whatever experience.

In my opinion this whole exchange shows a need for improvement regarding people skills for OP, at least in writing. Considering it's an internship, this was probably a good moment for a wake-up call.

Re: Facebook recruiting and Unix systems

#312
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about recruiters that recruit for a role at Facebook of all things just learn what the hell they are recruiting for instead? I don't think the onus is on developers here to explain why Unix and Posix are interchangable. It's like the carpenter telling the recruiter that yes, his skills in building a chair transfer to building a table.

if you're not autistic you just say "yes im an expert in unix" and move on your with your life. it isn't worth it to do anything else.

He may have assumed that at some point someone in the hiring pipeline would _not_ be an idiot (or in your words, "would be autistic") and may notice his false claim. Especially for a college student applying for an internship, it's a little much to expect him to know exactly where lying on your resume is appropriate. (At some point he said "I have experience in Linux and UNIX" and the moron on the other end still referred to his resume saying Unix-like).

I think you may be extrapolating your own experience of "not being autistic" (by your definition) a little too widely.

Re: Facebook recruiting and Unix systems

#313
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All I am saying is that when technology people like us are debating about terminology, we can cut the recruiter some slack, be nice to him or her and be more explicit in our communication to the recruiter. For example, instead of responding to "We are looking for experience in Linux and Unix" with "I have updated my resume with POSIX", respond with the following instead assuming you indeed have real Unix experience w…

That is something I would never do, because by doing so, I would by lying. Under the same beliefs as Stanley, I do not have experience with Unix. He does also, at various iterations, include UNIX, Linux, and UNIX-like on his resume, not necessarily at the same time. If there's a particular order, or casing of the word Unix the recruiter is looking for, he or she should just name it. > be more explicit in our communic…

do you want a job at one of the most prestigious companies or do you value being right on a minute detail more? I would have just added the word "unix" to my resume and moved on with my life.

Re: Facebook recruiting and Unix systems

#314
I don't understand why you felt necessary to leave out the recruiter name. I personally would really like to know this person and try to avoid her/him by all means possible, saving me (and all the others, who will know him) a ton of time and consequently punishing this recruiter for his incompetence and inability to learn the actual thing he is recruiting for.

We (developers) want the recruiting, interviewing and hiring processes to be improved and optimized to not let this sort of things happen again, yet when it comes to actual actions to take, we just decide to post it as a "look, another funny incompetent recruiter!" post. As time shows, this post will not change anything and these people will continue harassing and denying interviews for good developers. Today it was a fresh graduate; tomorrow it can be me or you.

So please, do share the name of this recruiter.

Re: Facebook recruiting and Unix systems

#315
post #128

Hey folks, I'm the student writing the emails in the post here. Thanks to everyone for their criticisms. While I was initially kind of shocked by the recruiter's response, I've had a lot of time to think about it today and have realized that I was being pretty damn condescending and spoke out of line without regards to the context. It's been a hard lesson learned. I honestly regret the whole exchange, and posting it…

Since you are soliciting feedback, I think you can do better than Facebook. You have taken the time at university to learn about the origins of "UNIX" and about portability, but it seems clear to me you do not need to know about these things for this Facebook internship. If you want this knowledge to be acknowledged and valued, if you want to put it into practice, then perhaps Facebook is not the proper place for thi…

"feelin_googley" wouldn't have any motive for encouraging people to work somewhere else, could they? :P (I jest)

Re: Facebook recruiting and Unix systems

#317

This is not the right attitude to bring in to the workplace. You'll have a range of people from executives, to clients to co-workers in other departments who don't know what UNIX, APIs and POSIX are. If you can't communicate technical matters nicely then you have not yet developed the right attitude for a professional working environment. It's the same thing with doctors when they create metaphors to explain complica…

I'm not sure I agree. You bring up an important point -- that specialists will always encounter slight errors when interacting with laypeople. There's a tricky balance to be struck there -- how do you communicate with them without adopting the same errors yourself, but also without bruising their ego, while hopefully educating them at the same time? The best mix seems to be the "correct by agreeing" approach. "Is the…

This is a broader concept that I've had to get used to recently: I don't think this is a specialist/layman thing as much as a smart/dumb thing. I know plenty of very smart people who are happy to show their ignorance about a topic that they don't know about when talking to someone with that knowledge (including examples like the benign/bennigun thing).

For the first time in my life, I'm working with people who aren't particularly intelligent[1]. The lack of intelligence doesn't bother me much per se, but I was absolutely not prepared for how incredibly childish their psyche is when it comes to making mistakes and learning from them, admitting they don't know things, asking questions, etc. It was absolutely shocking how routinely people would read all kinds of ulterior motives into every possible question: "the only reason you would ask X is because you're trying to put me down" and stuff like that. I've learned to heavily sugarcoat things, stroke egos with compliments before describing things that need improvement or fixing, etc etc. Goddam is it an exhausting waste of time.

My plan at this point is to steer my career as far away as possible from people who are this stupid and immature; I spent a long time at the start of my career surrounded by very smart people and I just got used to the idea that everyone is secure in their intelligence and everyone can focus on being productive together without needing to keep stopping and feeding the egos of infants.

[1] Just to forestall the complaints: this isn't a value judgment of who they are as people, it's just a single weakness. A comparable weakness of my own is that I have to exert quite a bit of effort to maintain a strong work ethic when being hardworking comes more easily to some.

Re: Facebook recruiting and Unix systems

#318
post #91

In situations like these you really aught to ask yourself what your end-goal with being elitist like that is really trying to serve. In engineering situations usually the purpose is some form of disguised signaling. This is the purpose of most sentences that start with "technically". But when you're talking to a recruiter that kind of move is unlikely to be effective. It's unlikely to affect your application positive…

What precisely do you think the word elitist means? I'm not sure which dictionary you're using but I'm confident that the definition isn't close to "politely explaining the confusion, and then changing the language in your email and resume to match the inaccurate expectations of the idiot on the other end of the conversation"

Re: Facebook recruiting and Unix systems

#319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, I think you could have massaged the snark in the sentence that says "Beyond software developers who have programmed in the 1970s, most people do not have experience with a true UNIX OS" but other than that I think you should walk away thinking that your communication was clear, straight-forward and respectful. Here's what happened - the recruiter had a list of keywords, received a large volume of inbound resumes…

> the recruiter had a list of keywords, received a large volume of inbound resumes and filtered for == 'UNIX' and dumped everything else To be fair, I wouldn't expect this kind of 'recruiting by grep' to happen at Facebook of all places either.

OT, did you actually embed your password in the username to enable random users share it?

Re: Facebook recruiting and Unix systems

#320
Somebody once referred me to a role at Facebook. I never got a response from the recruitment team. After emailing them, one of the recruiters told that their referral platform has some issues. After that I never got a response from any recruiter, I tried reaching out to different recruiters on LinkedIn but none responded. I suppose they have a shitty recruiting team.
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