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Verbatim exchange: Thanks for the quick response and clarifications. Experience with Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems is largely transferrable thank

Verbatim exchange: Thanks for the quick response and clarifications. Experience with Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems is largely transferrable thanks to the standardization that resulted from the POSIX specification. As a result, the terms "POSIX" and "UNIX-like" by-and-large refer to the same thing. My experiences are in particular with developing software for Linux platforms, which are the most popular of the UNIX-like operating systems. I also have experience using POSIX-specified APIs to ensure consistency and portability. Beyond software developers who have programmed in the 1970s, most people do not have experience with a true UNIX OS, and I would find it hard to believe that such outdated technologies are underpinning Facebook's advanced innovations. I've updated my resume to indicate my familiarity with Linux, POSIX, and UNIX-like systems. Please let me know if there is anything else you need. Thanks for your time and consideration, Stanley Zhang. Response: Hi Stanley, Thank you for the tutorial. We're looking for experience working on Linux and Unix. If you do not meet the above, please let me know if there are other roles you'd like to rank. Best, ________ I'd love to see you defend why the guy who wrote the first half is bad at technical communication and needs to develop a professional attitude, and the recruiter -- who copies and pastes the same incorrect response over and over, showing no indication that they read a single word -- is a professional communicator with a good attitude.

zhanwei 9y ago
The guy writes well. The recruiter is the one with bad attitude. But I would say that a practical communicator knows his audience, and in this case might want to give up explaining POSIX, change his resume, and move on.
Denzel 9y ago
Stanley might change his tune if he broaden his experiences a bit. A close friend of mine is a 20-something, now, Chief Engineer at a defense contractor working with the big private names and USAF. He was a hardcore Linux guy before taking this position 5 or so years ago. He'll tell you himself, there's little transfer between deep Linux knowledge and deep Unix knowledge. They're two different beasts. Trust me, Unix is not limited to programmers from the 1970s, it's very much alive, and it's not outdated. There's a hell of a lot of interesting stuff going on outside of Silicon Valley. I wish I could talk about it.
- erikbye 9y ago
  Yep, still use AIX here.
eridius 9y ago
A professional communicator tailors their communication to their audience. Stanley's initial explanation was pretty good, but since the recruiter didn't seem to understand it, Stanley should have adjusted his approach instead of doubling down.
- mquander 9y ago
  I'm sure he could have done a better job communicating to the recruiter. You could tell he was slightly irritated, and maybe somehow he could have figured out a different framing that the recruiter would understand. (But note that at the end, he changed his strategy and said simply that he had experience with Linux and UNIX, and the recruiter still didn't care. It really isn't clear whether there was any approach that would have worked.) He did like a 75% good job. But the recruiter did a 0% good job. It's not easy to personally take it upon yourself to make every interaction work perfectly when the other party is trying their hardest to make it fail.
  - flukus 9y ago
    > He did like a 75% good job. I'd say a 75% good job for a fresh grad is a really good score. Explaining technical jargon to the computer illiterate is not really something you can learn at school.
    - cushychicken 9y ago
      >Explaining technical jargon to the computer illiterate is not really something you can learn at school ...but, yet, probably should be.
    - nulagrithom 9y ago
      Not to mention he shouldn't have to in this instance. He's talking to someone who's recruiting for technical positions. At a big-name company like this, is it really too much to ask that someone understand the basics of the technology and they're recruiting for? I mean, I explain technical jargon all day long, sure, but I work at a trucking company. Still, my interview process certainly didn't run in to any problem like this, and had it, I can assure you I would've been met with no resistance with the given explanation...
umeshunni 9y ago
> Beyond software developers who have programmed in the 1970s, most people do not have experience with a true UNIX OS This line is where he started to come across as a jerk. I think if he had skipped this paragraph and just replied with the "I've updated my resume..." bit, he would have been fine. > Beyond software developers who have programmed in the 1970s, .. Stanley should update his industry knowledge. My school used AIX/Solaris in the late 90s, switching over to Linux (mostly because it was free/cheap) only in 99/2000. I have friends who interned at Sun Microsystems in 2001/2 and they were still using Solaris on all their computers including what the receptionists were using. There's an old saying about no one getting fired for buying Microsoft (or was it IBM). Similarly, the (entry-level) recruiter/sourcer would rather not get fired or get a bad rap from the hiring manager for confusing Linux and Unix than risk it believing some 20 year old jerk.
- Spooky23 9y ago
  Most public companies running Oracle Financials will do so in Unix to control license expenses.
- lloydde 9y ago
  > switching over to Linux (mostly because it was free/cheap) only in 99/2000 Your school was trail blazing! At my uni, UVic, it was still all Sun and IBM Unix labs (with plaques) when I graduated in 2000.
  - isostatic 9y ago
    When I started uni in 2000 (exeter) we had some Solaris workstations (with CDM), and some redhat ones. The printing system was all redhat based, but the server with the fast 10mbit internet connection I ran BitchX on to DCC voyager episodes on was irix. The student radio station was some form of Linux on the tx side (in addition to the AM transmitter) There was even a room with NT4 - I went there once. When I started work as a trainee at a major UK broadcaster in 2003 the news production system ran in Solaris, radio was on some vax thing, the image store ran on irix, the logging system was on aix, and there were half a dozen distros across about 20 servers with no real standards. The majority of staff were either windows IT staff (who got outsourced), help desk staff, or broadcast engineers with limited computer knowledge. Over the next few years I changed the news system, others followed suit, and there's now 1200 ubuntu boxes/vms over 6 continents. Hooray for monoculture. Looking back it's amazing how quickly things change.
freehunter 9y ago
>I'd love to see you defend why the guy is a professional communicator with a good attitude. He's not, but that doesn't matter. You're going to be hard pressed to only ever communicate with professional communicators with good attitudes your whole career. So if you ever want to be taken seriously and have a successful career, you're going to need to learn what battles are worth fighting. Hell, maybe it was even a test to see if the guy worked well on a high-stress team. If he can't handle one person not understanding the difference between Unix and Unix-like, how's he going to handle someone who puts a tab as an indent instead of two spaces? The recruiter was wrong. But it doesn't matter. Stanley (hopefully) learned a valuable lesson here, and that lesson is "pick your battles". Life, especially corporate life, is full of nonsensical requirements and TPS reports and if you fight every single one of them your performance review will read "not a team player" every single year.
- Aeolun 9y ago
  > What are your weaknesses? I don't play well with idiots, or nonsensical bullshit.
  - bitexploder 9y ago
    Recruiter is not a technical person. If you want technical people recruiting you work somewhere smaller. The real weakness is inability to communicate with non-technical members of staff.
    - FridgeSeal 9y ago
      I would expect a recruiter for one of the biggest tech companies in the world to have at least some basic understanding/idea of even what linux is - that's not a big ask at all. Moreover, if I'm a recruiter, unless I'm a domain expert, looking to hire someone into the field and they say they already have it on their resume, I'm going to go and double check their resume and double check my own understanding before I go any further to avoid issues like this. The only person who looks bad here is the recruiter, and it's entirely their own fault.
    - 9y ago
MichaelGG 9y ago
Mac OS X is UNIX and people use it well after the 1970s, so he's just wrong.
watwut 9y ago
"defend why the guy who wrote the first half is bad at technical communication" Too many details the target person is not just not interested about, but also have low chance to fully understand - judging from targets initial confusion about Unix and Linux. Totally cool at that age, but not perfect communication either. All that is orthogonal to quality of communication from recruiter.

zhanwei 9y ago

The guy writes well. The recruiter is the one with bad attitude. But I would say that a practical communicator knows his audience, and in this case might want to give up explaining POSIX, change his resume, and move on.

Denzel 9y ago

Stanley might change his tune if he broaden his experiences a bit. A close friend of mine is a 20-something, now, Chief Engineer at a defense contractor working with the big private names and USAF. He was a hardcore Linux guy before taking this position 5 or so years ago. He'll tell you himself, there's little transfer between deep Linux knowledge and deep Unix knowledge. They're two different beasts. Trust me, Unix is not limited to programmers from the 1970s, it's very much alive, and it's not outdated. There's a hell of a lot of interesting stuff going on outside of Silicon Valley. I wish I could talk about it.

erikbye 9y ago
Yep, still use AIX here.

eridius 9y ago

A professional communicator tailors their communication to their audience. Stanley's initial explanation was pretty good, but since the recruiter didn't seem to understand it, Stanley should have adjusted his approach instead of doubling down.

mquander 9y ago
I'm sure he could have done a better job communicating to the recruiter. You could tell he was slightly irritated, and maybe somehow he could have figured out a different framing that the recruiter would understand. (But note that at the end, he changed his strategy and said simply that he had experience with Linux and UNIX, and the recruiter still didn't care. It really isn't clear whether there was any approach that would have worked.) He did like a 75% good job. But the recruiter did a 0% good job. It's not easy to personally take it upon yourself to make every interaction work perfectly when the other party is trying their hardest to make it fail.
- flukus 9y ago
  > He did like a 75% good job. I'd say a 75% good job for a fresh grad is a really good score. Explaining technical jargon to the computer illiterate is not really something you can learn at school.
  - cushychicken 9y ago
    >Explaining technical jargon to the computer illiterate is not really something you can learn at school ...but, yet, probably should be.
  - nulagrithom 9y ago
    Not to mention he shouldn't have to in this instance. He's talking to someone who's recruiting for technical positions. At a big-name company like this, is it really too much to ask that someone understand the basics of the technology and they're recruiting for? I mean, I explain technical jargon all day long, sure, but I work at a trucking company. Still, my interview process certainly didn't run in to any problem like this, and had it, I can assure you I would've been met with no resistance with the given explanation...

umeshunni 9y ago

> Beyond software developers who have programmed in the 1970s, most people do not have experience with a true UNIX OS This line is where he started to come across as a jerk. I think if he had skipped this paragraph and just replied with the "I've updated my resume..." bit, he would have been fine. > Beyond software developers who have programmed in the 1970s, .. Stanley should update his industry knowledge. My school used AIX/Solaris in the late 90s, switching over to Linux (mostly because it was free/cheap) only in 99/2000. I have friends who interned at Sun Microsystems in 2001/2 and they were still using Solaris on all their computers including what the receptionists were using. There's an old saying about no one getting fired for buying Microsoft (or was it IBM). Similarly, the (entry-level) recruiter/sourcer would rather not get fired or get a bad rap from the hiring manager for confusing Linux and Unix than risk it believing some 20 year old jerk.

Spooky23 9y ago
Most public companies running Oracle Financials will do so in Unix to control license expenses.
lloydde 9y ago
> switching over to Linux (mostly because it was free/cheap) only in 99/2000 Your school was trail blazing! At my uni, UVic, it was still all Sun and IBM Unix labs (with plaques) when I graduated in 2000.
- isostatic 9y ago
  When I started uni in 2000 (exeter) we had some Solaris workstations (with CDM), and some redhat ones. The printing system was all redhat based, but the server with the fast 10mbit internet connection I ran BitchX on to DCC voyager episodes on was irix. The student radio station was some form of Linux on the tx side (in addition to the AM transmitter) There was even a room with NT4 - I went there once. When I started work as a trainee at a major UK broadcaster in 2003 the news production system ran in Solaris, radio was on some vax thing, the image store ran on irix, the logging system was on aix, and there were half a dozen distros across about 20 servers with no real standards. The majority of staff were either windows IT staff (who got outsourced), help desk staff, or broadcast engineers with limited computer knowledge. Over the next few years I changed the news system, others followed suit, and there's now 1200 ubuntu boxes/vms over 6 continents. Hooray for monoculture. Looking back it's amazing how quickly things change.

freehunter 9y ago

>I'd love to see you defend why the guy is a professional communicator with a good attitude. He's not, but that doesn't matter. You're going to be hard pressed to only ever communicate with professional communicators with good attitudes your whole career. So if you ever want to be taken seriously and have a successful career, you're going to need to learn what battles are worth fighting. Hell, maybe it was even a test to see if the guy worked well on a high-stress team. If he can't handle one person not understanding the difference between Unix and Unix-like, how's he going to handle someone who puts a tab as an indent instead of two spaces? The recruiter was wrong. But it doesn't matter. Stanley (hopefully) learned a valuable lesson here, and that lesson is "pick your battles". Life, especially corporate life, is full of nonsensical requirements and TPS reports and if you fight every single one of them your performance review will read "not a team player" every single year.

Aeolun 9y ago
> What are your weaknesses? I don't play well with idiots, or nonsensical bullshit.
- bitexploder 9y ago
  Recruiter is not a technical person. If you want technical people recruiting you work somewhere smaller. The real weakness is inability to communicate with non-technical members of staff.
  - FridgeSeal 9y ago
    I would expect a recruiter for one of the biggest tech companies in the world to have at least some basic understanding/idea of even what linux is - that's not a big ask at all. Moreover, if I'm a recruiter, unless I'm a domain expert, looking to hire someone into the field and they say they already have it on their resume, I'm going to go and double check their resume and double check my own understanding before I go any further to avoid issues like this. The only person who looks bad here is the recruiter, and it's entirely their own fault.
  - 9y ago

MichaelGG 9y ago

Mac OS X is UNIX and people use it well after the 1970s, so he's just wrong.

watwut 9y ago

"defend why the guy who wrote the first half is bad at technical communication" Too many details the target person is not just not interested about, but also have low chance to fully understand - judging from targets initial confusion about Unix and Linux. Totally cool at that age, but not perfect communication either. All that is orthogonal to quality of communication from recruiter.