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Facebook recruiting and Unix systems

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Re: Facebook recruiting and Unix systems

#491

Post by mverwijs »

falsedan wrote: post #431
oneplane wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, since you asked... Your statement is a mismatch between the comment about the lossy filter, and the actual email conversation, which clearly shows the lossy filter in all its glory.

My statement is about condescendingly calling humans doing their job 'lossy filters', and challenging the deeply-ugly assumption that they should have bowed to the candidate's correctness. The recruiter wanted to advance the candidate through the pipeline; they told them exactly what they needed to do to proceed; the candidate didn't think it was necessary to modify their position to conform with the requirements, in…

So... Facebook wants employees that do as they are told and not to correct obvious mistakes?

I find that hard to believe.

Re: Facebook recruiting and Unix systems

#492

Post by stefek99 »

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…

Don't you know that recruiting at this stage (gatekeepers) is a box-ticking exercise?

Re: Facebook recruiting and Unix systems

#494

Post by wutbrodo »

autotune wrote: post #424
wutbrodo wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, my best guess for why this kind of interview is used is that it's just an intelligence test. It's worked extremely well for me: I'm very upfront about the fact that I don't expect them to _know_ anything (it would probably be tough for me to do something as simple as Dijkstra's on a whiteboard under time pressure), but that I want to see how they think. I recently had a guy with an incredibly impressive res…

Yeah and that's fine, you probably get enough candidates willing to grind through it anyway if you're at The Big 4. Interviewing is a two-way street though so obviously I am going to have it color my decision process. I want to know what challenges actually happen on the job and if I can solve those challenges, and if you ask me to code up a shortest path algorithm on a whiteboard but that never appears on the job, t…

> Compare this to other companies, both large and small who have asked more reasonable challenges such as; "set up MySQL master/slave replication," "write a script that parses a text file in Python," "build a 2-tier architecture through terraform," "troubleshoot these issues on a broken server."

See to me, these are _terrible_ interview questions because they reward memorization and rote knowledge and completely leave aside the kind of creative problem-solving skills that I've always needed from my employees and colleagues. I've had the misfortune to work with people hired by the process you describe, and they tend to suck pretty hard. If you want cogs that can't adapt beyond their very narrow comfort zone, you've just described exactly how to get them.

I agree with your description of the two-way street, but I generally take care of that by leaving time for the candidate to ask questions, generally guided a little by me to give them an idea of the stack we work on, what kind of problems generally need solving, etc. (In fact, I warned the 9/10 guy that I described above that he may not be challenged enough by the work that we'd likely have for him).

Re: Facebook recruiting and Unix systems

#495

Post by SZJX »

kazagistar wrote: post #443
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…

> When you encounter imperfect systems like this in the future a good practice is to ask yourself if you know what the actual desired outcome is, and give the lossy filter the input it needs to get you to the next round. I feel like this is one of the most fundamental skills I learned in school. You don't answer the actual question, you provide the response that they are looking for, even if those are different. This…

Well yeah but isn't that exactly where the tragedy lies then.

Re: Facebook recruiting and Unix systems

#496

Post by autotune »

wutbrodo wrote: post #494
autotune wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah and that's fine, you probably get enough candidates willing to grind through it anyway if you're at The Big 4. Interviewing is a two-way street though so obviously I am going to have it color my decision process. I want to know what challenges actually happen on the job and if I can solve those challenges, and if you ask me to code up a shortest path algorithm on a whiteboard but that never appears on the job, t…

> Compare this to other companies, both large and small who have asked more reasonable challenges such as; "set up MySQL master/slave replication," "write a script that parses a text file in Python," "build a 2-tier architecture through terraform," "troubleshoot these issues on a broken server." See to me, these are _terrible_ interview questions because they reward memorization and rote knowledge and completely leav…

That can still be fixed by having them set up a service that they have never seen before. Like "oh, you have MySQL experience only? Let's see you set up Postgres," or whatever database service is different from their resume or something along those lines, which is also something that actually happens on the job. It just doesn't make sense to me that white boarding is seen as "creative problem-solving skills" when it is literally the exact opposite of how you would solve a problem in the real world 99 percent of the time.

Re: Facebook recruiting and Unix systems

#497

Post by dkudriavtsev »

L_Rahman wrote: post #214
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…

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…

macOS/OS X is actually a certified UNIX OS.
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