Facebook recruiting and Unix systems • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook recruiting and Unix systems

#481

Post by exikyut » Fri, Sep 08, 2017, 3:35 AM UTC

pwdisswordfish wrote: post #294

L_Rahman wrote: post #214

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.

To whoever has changed this account's password, can you be nice and change it back? I wanted to play in this experiment too. :(

Re: Facebook recruiting and Unix systems

#482

Post by dymk » Fri, Sep 08, 2017, 3:40 AM UTC

spacelizard wrote: post #467

dymk wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On the contrary, this was an obvious power play by the recruiter This may seem obvious to you, but it's not to me. Why are you assuming malice on the part of the recruiter?

There is no malice, this is just what happens at big companies. When you have 10 layers of management, everyone is expected to fall in line because this is the only way it can work.

I work at one of those "big companies", what you're saying just isn't true. You'll find pockets of bad management, but that's far from "everybody is expected to fall in line".

Re: Facebook recruiting and Unix systems

#483

Post by fulldecent » Fri, Sep 08, 2017, 4:24 AM UTC

pwdisswordfish wrote: post #294

L_Rahman wrote: post #214

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.

FYI, here is more analysis on the reality of "recruiting by grep". https://fulldecent.blogspot.com/2010/10/classic-and-modern-j...

Under the section Keyword Stuffing.

Re: Facebook recruiting and Unix systems

#484

Post by bshanks » Fri, Sep 08, 2017, 4:53 AM UTC

oblio wrote: post #311

bshanks wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

thank you

Re: Facebook recruiting and Unix systems

#485

Post by bshanks » Fri, Sep 08, 2017, 4:54 AM UTC

foolfoolz wrote: post #277

bshanks wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Stanley did email 1: I want to apply email 2: I fixed my resume email 3: my fix didn't work? you must be wrong email 4: you are still wrong but at email 3 you clearly aren't getting it and should ASK them what they want

thank you

Re: Facebook recruiting and Unix systems

#486

Post by kichik » Fri, Sep 08, 2017, 5:35 AM UTC

pweissbrod wrote: post #442

kichik wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your experience, does it make sense for Facebook to also hire low-level recruiters to go over a mass of students? Would those recruiters be expected to do the same?

I'm not a recruiting manager. You cant really turn this situation around on me. I dont make the rules. If your job is procuring or selling a resource and you have little/no appreciation of said resource then you're effectively a spam bot. Imagine a car salesman said to you "Im a low level guy. I dont really know cars. But I bet you'd look great in this blue one". Does that sound acceptable to you?

I misread your original comment as "I'm a recruiter but..."

Re: Facebook recruiting and Unix systems

#487

Post by pwdisswordfish » Fri, Sep 08, 2017, 7:53 AM UTC

pwdisswordfish2 wrote: post #446

avip wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I see someone already changed your pwd, which is another expected result of the experiment :)

Not a very interesting one though.

We meet again.

Re: Facebook recruiting and Unix systems

#488

Post by dzamo_norton » Fri, Sep 08, 2017, 10:46 AM UTC

droithomme wrote: post #445

ricardobeat wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the most cringy part - in the second iteration you'll note he did list UNIX as a skill, but then the recruiter went on about the lack of Linux experience (which he had just replaced)! Like playing whack-a-mole.

Yeah, that's the part that gave the game away when the recruiter did the whack-a-mole move. The recruiter did in fact know exactly what the difference was and he was obstructing the candidate. Who knows why, maybe he feels there are too many asians working at Facebook so he takes it upon himself to play games with applicants who have asian names so they are more likely to give up, but he can still have plausible deni…

> The recruiter did in fact know exactly what the difference was and he was obstructing the candidate.

For a little while I was basically convinced of deliberate obstruction - no sane person would use the arguments employed by the recruiter. But, on reading through from the top once more, the recruiter was actually initially helpful and I have settled on "incompetence, not malice". Almost settled, at least.

Re: Facebook recruiting and Unix systems

#489

Post by _anonymous » Sat, Sep 09, 2017, 11:51 PM UTC

Most recruiter are relatively idiots, and obviously do not know how to talk to super-smart people. Lesson to learn here is to stop apologizing, and start learning how to exploit their idiocy instead.

Re: Facebook recruiting and Unix systems

#490

Post by _anonymous » Sat, Sep 09, 2017, 11:55 PM UTC

aspyrx wrote: 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…

Not your fault. Most recruiter are relatively idiots, and obviously do not know how to talk to super-smart people. Lesson to learn here is to stop apologizing, and start learning how to exploit their idiocy instead.