The Social Network Bust: What I learned from my job interview with Facebook

http://www.thebitsource.com/infrastructure-operations/the-social-network-bust-what-i-learned-from-my-job-interview-with-facebook/

by msacks • 16 years ago

199 86 16 years ago

thebitsource.com

spicyj• 16 years ago

I hope people don't start referring to Facebook as "The Social Network". It's the name of a movie and there's really no reason to use it instead of just saying "Facebook".

izaidi• 16 years ago

Or if they insist on calling it that, at least shorten it to "Social Network." It's cleaner.

high5ths• 16 years ago

Yup, there's a reason it used to be "The Facebook" and is now just "Facebook."

InfinityX02• 16 years ago

How does this get downvoted? I know we're all about good conversation but in bursts, stuff like this completes this forum. This comment was clever and I laughed out loud. If a lighthearted comment is good enough to do that, it's worthy - at very least - of not getting downvoted.

FYI this is a reference to the movie - if you haven't seen it, it won't be funny and is probably worthy in your mind of being downvoted. If you have seen it, you're hitting thumbs up.

mycroftiv• 16 years ago

From reading this post, it sounds like Facebook missed out on a hire it probably should have made. Commitment, motivation, intelligence, and learning skills are usually more important predictors of how someone will perform in a job than their pre-existing knowledge base. Of course, those things are very hard to measure through a standard application and interview process. At the same time, I am a bit surprised that questions about threads and interprocess communication were challenging for a senior systems engineer with ten years experience. Still, I think if I was in Facebook HR, after reading this blog post, I might decide to give the guy a call back and give him another chance, assuming it really was just his lack of knowledge about some technical issues that resulted in his rejection.

emehrkay• 16 years ago

I was thinking the same thing, but at a 20k a month clip, the interviewer expects a lot of the people he takes time to talk to. I do web development and I feel that I can know if the interview is over after a few simple questions.

jsean• 16 years ago

>>.. it sounds like Facebook missed out on a hire it probably should have made. Commitment, motivation, intelligence, and learning skills..

When you say Facebook missed out on a hire it implies he has what they seek and by not hiring him they are now not getting what they first sought, right? I wonder if that's the case though. There probably exists people who are committed, motivated, intelligent and has good learning skills but yet also would manage to perform "flawlessly" (during the interview) or even as sought.

Now I'm not saying anything about whether they should have hired him or not, just merely stating that above conditions (commitment etc) are not always enough when comparing candidates. Ones current knowledge base is a factor since if persona A has x amount of knowledge and person B has y where y>x it would take A time to go from x to y while in the same time B goes from y to z where z>y.

>>just his lack of knowledge about some technical issues

"just". That's the thing. Why not hire the committed, motivated, intelligent, good learning-skilled person without that lack of knowledge about that technical issue? As he states in his post -- it's not like [big tech-company] has a shortage of bright people to pick and choose from.

ekidd2• 16 years ago

Yeah, I also got the impression that the author's technical background was slightly weak. Trying to cram on scalability questions using YouTube isn't going to give them the same background they'd get from hacking on real projects.

But having interviewed programmers, I'm deeply impressed by the author's work ethic. Probably less than 5% of people I've interviewed have spent even 30 minutes preparing. I'd love to have employees who approached problem solving with that kind of gonzo determination and resourcefulness.

jlees2• 16 years ago

If you're hacking on a real project where do you get solid scalability experience? Unless you hit gold and, say, create a social network that explodes like wildfire...

I got the impression the author had a strong practical sysadmin background, was interviewing for a sysadmin position (this wasn't totally clear), and had some technical chops. Interviewing him on CS101 seemed weak.

Goladus2• 16 years ago

The article isn't even telling half of the story, though. We only know his perspective on the actual interview, which includes his brain's attempt to explain what he perceives as failure, and we have no idea about the nature of the hiring process or what the other candidates looked like.

At some companies, you can apply for a position, go through the entire interview process, and then a company-wide hiring freeze can kill it dead. Sometimes you might be up against an internal applicants with huge advantages. The interviewer might have had a hangover. There are so many things you just can't know.

At the same time, I am a bit surprised that questions about threads and interprocess communication were challenging for a senior systems engineer with ten years experience.

The guy had taken some time off and was probably rusty.

nessence2• 16 years ago

That sounds like a more expensive long-term process than finding an applicant who is better qualified.

Maybe the OP is better finding a startup or open source project where he can learn at a faster pace. I suspect facebook maybe a tad too busy to help him along.

frou_dh• 16 years ago

Nice piece. I don't think the writer can be faulted; (s)he prepared quite valiantly for the interviews.

Goladus2• 16 years ago

I've been in a similar position as this guy, and really-- you never know what goes on behind the scenes when you don't get hired. His feelings about what he may have missed might or might not be accurate. We have no idea what the other candidates looked like. That 20k number doesn't really mean much once you've made contact.

Swizec5• 16 years ago

Don't you just love it how often all of us practical programming types who are too cool for school, realise that getting a CS degree/education is pretty damn useful as soon as a real problem comes your way.

dasil0032• 16 years ago

Well I have a CS degree, and I value it quite a bit, but honestly it's a second order concern in industry. The first thing is, can you write and debug code in a production environment? This is something that university just doesn't teach you; as long as you have the intelligence to understand the theory, the professors will prod you in the right direction on the assignments.

Now, once you can code your way out of a paper bag, then the question is do you have the CSCI fundamentals to apply the best known solutions to difficult problems. Facebook has their pick of the litter, so it makes sense that they might spend more time validating CSCI knowledge, but for most companies that are hiring this would be a very poor metric to go by.

Swizec5• 16 years ago

While this is true, I have never needed to explain CS stuff in an interview, it is also true that very often when faced with a tough algorithmic problem even the little CS foundation my few years of formal education in the field have granted me helps quite a bit. If nothing more than the fact I know what to google for.

It's surprisingly easy to google for solutions once you know what you're looking for instead of searching descriptively :)

illumin82• 16 years ago

Throughout my career, I've met many developers who couldn't code their way out of a paper bag, network engineers who couldn't network their way out of a paper bag, sysadmins who couldn't sysadmin their way out of a paper bag, etc.

I propose a new interview question: How would you code your way out of a paper bag? You will be given several constants, such as the strength of the paper bag, difficulty of tearing, etc, and will be expected to write your own Tear() function and call it properly.

The best part is that when the recruiters/headhunters ask why you rejected a candidate, you can honestly say "he couldn't code his way out of a wet paper bag."

physcab• 16 years ago

At the risk fanning a flame war between the value of having a degree vs. not, I think one of the big advantages of having a technical degree in the field of something you're applying for is having a lower value on the crackpot index[1] from the get-go.

Whether you're an expert or not is irrelevant. Its that statistically you're probably more likely to be humble about what you don't know, so that way you can go and hunt down the solution if you need to when those problem situations occur.

[1] http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html

gaius2• 16 years ago

It's not about the piece of paper, but about the theoretical background. You can't even have a conversation with someone about algorithms, performance tuning, optimization etc if they don't know Big-O for example.

Incidentally that's why CS undergrads "waste" their time learning all the sorts, not 'cos you'll ever need to write one from scratch ever, it's just a good way to introduce ideas about time and space complexity.

barrkel2• 16 years ago

Your smugness disagrees with me. In my personal experience, I covered the basics - analysis of algorithms, graph theory, the usual data structures, operating system architecture, parsing & state automata (DFA, NFA, PDA etc.) - long before I went to college. You risk tarring all autodidacts with the same brush.

And let's not forget, there are plenty of CS graduates who conversely aren't very good at programming.

ubernostrum2• 16 years ago

I have a degree... in philosophy.

Everything I know about theoretical computer science I picked up from books, at a price far below the tuition of a typical university.

hvs• 16 years ago

Which you picked up from books after getting a degree at a university that most likely taught you (or at least improved) your ability to think and learn. I think it is a bit disingenuous to say that you learned CS for far less than the tuition at a typical university after you got a degree at a typical university.

c00ki3s• 16 years ago

I've considered this. (Getting a Phil deg. altough I'm a geek and want to work in a technical field). Any pointers maybe? Is this a viable route?

ericabiz• 16 years ago

On the flip side of that, I once interviewed a candidate for a summer internship at my tech company in San Jose. Our first question was "What is your favorite operating system?"

The candidate looked confused and replied, "What's an operating system?"

The candidate was a 2nd-year CS major at a college in Silicon Valley.

Needless to say, we hired another candidate--the 16-year-old kid who built Linux boxes at home for fun. :)

Tichy• 16 years ago

I have a degree, but it is 10 years old by now. I can't even remember much from it. I don't think you learn that much useful stuff - real learning is learning by doing.

lallouz• 16 years ago

Nice piece. Of all of the take away's from this article, I think the author's outlook at the end is what is most important. Being able to learn and grow from an experience is so important, particularly in the tech field. Regardless of the outcome, no time was lost if it's spent increasing your knowledge base. Kudos.

lionhearted• 16 years ago

> What I slowly understood while I was talking with Tom Cook was that this was not a discussion on scalability on a macro scale, however it was it was discussion of scalability on a micro-scale. I was not prepared for some of these questions, since some of these questions were Computer Science fundamental. It took me a short while to re-calibrate myself, and try not to sound like I was bullshitting my way through an answer, and began some of my retorts with , “From my experience from C programming…”

I wonder if he could've answered, "Oh my, I spent two weeks preparing like crazy for this, but I was working and reading nonstop on scalability, and focusing more on showing you hands on what I can do on collabedit." Maybe he did, but it sounds like he just tried to play it off when the interview went in another direction - if you research/prepare like a madman, my god, you've got to let the interviewer know how dedicated you are and how much you want it. If the interview goes in a different direction than you planned for, you could still possibly guide it back towards what you're strong in, or at least get a mention in of how dedicated and prepared you are for this, and how much you want it.

anonymous245• 16 years ago

Unlikely to work. Companies will just invoke the "false negative better than false positive" heuristic.

nostrademons• 16 years ago

Companies - even ones that use the "false negative is better than false positive" heuristic - would also rather that you ask enough questions and adapt them to the candidates background so that you can rule out "false" anything.

This can work if you really are an expert at something but just got a bad interviewer or bad interview question. The tricky part is that you have to be an expert at something. I wasn't really seeing this from the author's blog post - experts typically wouldn't go for a bunch of blog articles and YouTube videos to learn more than a cursory overview, they'd look for the source of existing open-source libraries and implement a couple projects on their own.

neilk2• 16 years ago

It's good that the author prepared him or herself so thoroughly, but in my experience, someone like Tom Cook would not waste time asking a new candidate how to scale Facebook. That's like preparing for your interview with NASA by studying how they built the Space Shuttle. They know you aren't going to have experience there.

What they want are people who understand the fundamentals of how the computer and the OS works, who can diagnose problems correctly, who know modern sysadmin tools. They can teach you the ins and outs of their macro-scale systems on the job.

gridspy• 16 years ago

To expand on your point, They aren't looking for people who know the current bleeding edge (in scaling, say). Instead they need people who can continue to define the future bleeding edge.

varjag2• 16 years ago

Who are usually the same people.

neilk2• 16 years ago

This doesn't make any sense to me. You can't take a shortcut around understanding the systems as they are now.

Also, it's not clear to me that in this case they were even trying to find someone to be so bleeding-edge. They also need sysadmins to do other kinds of work -- fight fires, deal with adding servers, handle local IT, administer testing environments, and so on. If they are looking at people with the OP's background I'd hazard it was more about the latter.

DEinspanjer• 16 years ago

I'd say that someone with the experience and interest that the author had would be exactly the type of person I'd like to interview for the Hadoop opening at Mozilla. Finding someone who is always looking for new things to learn and ways to do so is unfortunately rare.

spudlyo2• 16 years ago

What is load exactly? What does it mean? Discussions on threads and processes. How can two processes communicate with one another? [...] I was not prepared for some of these questions, since some of these questions were Computer Science fundamental.

I enjoyed this article, and I rooted for the author to get the job, but I was somewhat confused by this part of the article. Perhaps the questions he mentioned weren't what he considered to be "Computer Science fundamental", but were there just for flavor. The questions mentioned seem more like Unix fundamental -- the load one in particular I ask almost every time I interview a sysadmin.

awakeasleep2• 16 years ago

Is that just about the load averages you'll see in top?

spudlyo2• 16 years ago

That's what I assume he was talking about -- the average number of processes/threads in the run queue or waiting on disk I/O for the sample period.

lazyant• 16 years ago

beyond something related to number of processes nobody knows what ´load´ really means http://www.teamquest.com/resources/gunther/display/5/index.h...

donaldc• 16 years ago

The author/candidate may have ten years' experience, but he still sounds a little naive:

(1) He seems to have (twice) gone into intensive studying mode without first doing research on what questions facebook was likely to ask him at that stage. He seems to have instead guessed at what they were going to want to talk about.

(2) For a computer geek, the Facebook site/system resembled the UNIX system. And I just love NIX. Wall == wall command on unix. Message == mail. Photo and video viewing permissions was dependent upon groups or individual USER_ID rights. The thousands of external sites using an API to connect to the Facebook internals, reminded me of service ports on a given system.

^ These analogies are not useful from the perspective of actually understanding how facebook works.

Admirably, he has learned from his experience, and is taking steps to correct what he was probably lacking with respect to the position he wanted.

gaius2• 16 years ago

Martial arts analogies too. Someone who uses "kung fu" metaphors has seen The Matrix one too many times; I never hear it from people who actually do do a martial art.

reneherse• 16 years ago

"Kung fu", translated literally from the Chinese means "hard work". So you may be misinterpreting the writer's intent. He didn't strike me as some pseudo-martial arts meathead.

Perhaps you've never heard someone use the word kung fu to describe their martial art, because their art wasn't of that particular Chinese tradition?

Personally I thought the writer's usage was apt, given that he had newly dedicated himself to a difficult path of work.

jmspring• 16 years ago

A nice piece, indeed. From experience both as an interviewer and an interviewee, my favorite set of questions to be hit with (or bring up) are:

1) What have you done and what did you like/dislike about it? 2) What sort of an environment do you thrive in? 3) What is an area that has most challenged you and how did you deal with it?

Specific technical chops are one thing, but anyone who is smart enough will be able to/driven to pick up the areas where they may be lacking. For me, the real test is in what adversities/challenges have they run into/how they articulate it/and how did they get themselves out of it.

Someone who can't tell a story and can't convey how they dug themselves out of a whole will not meet my initial threshold. Specific solutions to specific problems (or brain teasers) that are likely to come up in an interviews provide a very minor insight into who the person is and what they can/can't do. For me, how they convey their experiences will tell much more.

epoxyhockey• 16 years ago

I find it odd that Facebook solicited an application from the OP and then proceeded to run him through the usual interview process. Maybe that was a result of some FB script seeking more qualified applicants.

Either way, it seems that FB missed out on an opportunity. Scientists don't already know all of the answers to novel problems. And, someone can make a Phd look like an idiot if you quiz them on topics not related to their specific field of study.

Why are established computer scientists forced to take a week to study up for trivia-like interviews? I would expect trivia-like interviews for young professionals straight out of college. But, for more established professionals, it would seem that a "tell me about your achievements" discussion would be more applicable.

Hiring decisions are best weighted on the person as a whole, and less on the testing scores.

Edit: typo fix

prodigal_erik• 16 years ago

> Why are established computer scientists forced to take a week to study up for trivia-like interviews?

I don't ask anything in an interview that my colleagues didn't automatically learn long ago, just from being good at their jobs. Cram studying for an interview is a waste of time—unless you're trying to get a job you aren't qualified for.

> But, for more established professionals, it would seem that a "tell me about your achievements" discussion would be more applicable.

Once I had met an appalling number of candidates who are incapable of putting sensible pseudocode on a whiteboard, I stopped taking for granted that everyone actually can write what they claim to have written. I don't know where these people are coming from or why, but they're definitely out there, and over-represented in the candidate pool (because everyone is trying to avoid hiring them).

benjoffe• 16 years ago

Similarly to the blogger I was contacted by a Facebook employee asking if I'd like to apply for a job (they found work of mine online). I then had to complete a quiz (build a front-end app that conforms to a given criteria and screenshot) and take part in two 1 hour phone interviews using the collabedit website. I guess it seems to be quite standard for them to solicit applications and then scrutinise them heavily.

Luckily I hadn't read a blog post like this otherwise I would have been much more nervous for the interviews! (I thought it was just formality and expected them to only knock me back if I performed exceptionally bad).

nessence2• 16 years ago

I don't think interviewing for highly technical positions at Facebook could be "prepared" for, not especially, by reading so many books about high-level subjects (ex: Visual Basic).

A better approach would be books involving POSIX standards, implementations of all (current) OSI layers, compsci algorithms, how compilers work, and how various runtimes work for various interpreted languages and how to debug them (PHP, Ruby, Python, Obj-C, Java). None of these have anything to do with unix system administration, user permissions, shell scripting, or web servers.

"What I slowly understood while I was talking with Tom Cook was that this was not a discussion on scalability on a macro scale, however it was it was discussion of scalability on a micro-scale."

You maybe misunderstanding macro and micro; scale is a function of both, not one or the other.

rogercosseboom• 16 years ago

Having read many similar accounts of interviewing at Google I can't help but believe the two companies share the same hiring sentiment: they'd rather leave more qualified engineers on the table than risk hiring a bad one. If I were the OP I wouldn't (and it doesn't seem like he does) feel bad about it but instead use it as a determinant in viewing one's granularly-acquired skillset in contrast to the skillset involved in working at one of these gigantic companies. Its a good perspective to have regardless of if you end up working for them or not.

bhickey• 16 years ago

I interviewed at Facebook in the August of 2009. I believe that I'm precluded from discussing the technical details of the interview and any secret sauce I may have seen (N.B. Mark Zuckerberg's office is a fishbowl in the middle of the office.) In the end, they decided not to offer me a position and I believe I'm better off for it. Without any reservations I can say that Facebook employs a lot of extremely bright people -- it sometimes feels like a terrible waste of intellect.

A friend at FB suggested that I apply for a Software Engineer position. I sent in my CV and was granted an initial phone interview with a recruiter. Unlike the anonymous article writer, I went into my interviews cold. After as bit of a funny phone interview -- at one point I answered a question by saying "I have no idea how <thing> works. I'd read the manual" -- I was granted an on-site interview. (It probably didn't hurt that I was in Palo Alto in preparation for some climbing at Tuolumne Meadows).

My first technical interviewer was whip-sharp, having worked with a well known programming language designer. The questions he asked were designed to assess my basic knowledge and problem solving abilities. About an hour after this interview concluded, I was phoned by the HR person to schedule a more in depth battery of interviews the following day.

The next day I met with four interviewers, each from a different group. Two of them were fabulous; enthusiastic and engaged. One stuck me as bored by the whole interview process. I overheard the fourth interviewer outside the room complaining to a co-worker about how his time was being wasted interviewing me. (Gee, thanks.)

Parts one and two went swimmingly. With one of the awesome interviewers, I flubbed an easy algorithmic design question. I set out on the wrong angle of attack, and he did a great job of nudging me back. I made my best of my talk with the grumbly interviewer and worked through an open ended problem that required some domain specific knowledge. Some interview practice wouldn't have hurt, but I don't think that there would have been a benefit from technical preparation.

After a few days out in Yosemite Valley I chatted with my initial HR contact who informed me that FB would not be making an offer. So it goes.

Sorry to keep things vague, I did agree not to give out their interview questions or engage in industrial espionage. If anyone has specific questions, I'd be happy to try to answer them.

The Social Network Bust: What I learned from my job interview with Facebook

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