8 ms·

I remember talking to a senior person at FB (wears a suit on friday). I asked "how is hiring?". Their response: terrible. People like this OP game systems, k

I remember talking to a senior person at FB (wears a suit on friday). I asked "how is hiring?". Their response: terrible. People like this OP game systems, know how to test, understands what the boss wants, know ahead of time the questions they will be asked, etc. They have gamed the entire system. So! They tend to get through the interview with ease. The problem is... now what. What is the next thing they need to game? Turns out, they are in it for the 'game' itself. Eventually they wake up, realize their life now is to ensure people click on FB ads. Basically, they finished the last level on Mario Bros. and now begin a bizarre existential crisis.

austhrow743 6y ago
I don't understand what you mean by "people like this OP". They don't say that they struggled with the hiring process or feel like a fraud. Rather they seem to be easily capable of the work. Actually I'm not sure what any of your post is about. Your friend doesn't like their job because they're hiring people to make facebook ads more effective?
- jasonmp85 6y ago
  Hiring doesn’t show whether you’re capable of the work, it just answers whether you might be hired. The reply here is entirely in line with the poster; they didn’t say anything about feeling like a fraud, they said candidates in tech minmax career choices with no thought as to their actual purpose. And yeah anyone remotely self-aware would feel disgusting working on adtech. It’s just that most tech workers do not think about such things.
  - ghettoCoder 6y ago
    Some of us end up working at jobs infinitely worse than adtech, the public service.
    - feteru 6y ago
      What? What do you mean by worse...
      - ghettoCoder 6y ago
        Worse as in you try to get things done in a cost effective way in order to deliver value to taxpayers but have to deal with lifers, deadwood, and clueless managers who are completely risk-averse. I know. I work in the public service.
        jiscariot 6y ago
        Right there with you. Not saying I'm a bright shining star, but it is amazing the level of incompetence you sometimes run across. It is legitimately the first place where I've found people who actually cost time/resources for anything they touch or interact with. The other thing is the supreme deference to rank at the cost of initiative. It was mind blowing coming from a more competitive corporate world.
- watwut 6y ago
  And in addition slacks as much as he can get away with. There is that option where even if it looks like you can get away with working only on Mondays spreading results, you would work on Tuesday, Wendsday etc too.
  - VRay 6y ago
    I was in the same boat as OP a few years back at an old grimy tech megacorp. I worked my ass off, and couldn't make any progress because of terrible tools, terrible teammates, terrible process. It was a fucking nightmare.* If that'd been my first tech job, I might have just ragequit the whole industry. Fortunately, I'd already been around the block a couple of times, so I knew that I just had a particularly bad team at a mediocre company. I hopped ship, and everything was great at the next company. *A bad job: My teammates were annoyed any time I asked them any questions. "Just read the code! It's in the code!" Yeah, OK, I'll spend 8 hours digging through this fucking code when you could have spent 10 minutes explaining it. I think this is probably the worst thing for productivity I've come across in my career. Any time someone asks you for help at work, DROP EVERYTHING AND FUCKING HELP THEM. Teach them how to fish, too, don't just walk them through things. Show them where you're finding documentation, show them the local equivalent of a man page, introduce them to the people with the tribal knowledge. If they spent an honest 10 minutes trying to figure something out on their own, it's part of your job to go help them out. I'd fix a bug, then have to go to meeting after meeting after meeting to try and get permission to check in my fix. It'd often be either rejected, or I'd have to redo the same handful of lines of code a dozen times before I could get it in. I'd have to set up some internally-developed test infrastructure, but it was a 40 step procedure to get the tool running and if any one of those steps went wrong, you'd have to go back to the start and start over. Nobody who was familiar with it was willing to walk me through it, so it took an incredible amount of willpower to force myself to get that shit set up. There was another team working on the exact same thing as my team in another org, but we weren't "tented" (AKA: "disclosed") on each other's super secret projects, so we weren't allowed to work together at all or share any information. My team hated the other team, and they in turn hated our team. (I knew this because I had a close personal friend on the other team) The development environment was almost completely paralyzed by company-wide bugs. The company was sharing a single insanely gigantic codebase across thousand and thousands of engineers, and there'd be month+ long stretches where the build and tools were broken. Since things were broken so long, people would check in new build breaks without realizing it, and it ended up in a vicious circle of badness. And of course, the product we were building was a useless piece of crap that everybody hated.
pyb 6y ago
What you are trying to say sounds interesting, but not entirely clear. Was the FB exec complaining that when they hire, they are getting what they asked for ? Ie people who are very good at tests.
- bob33212 6y ago
  They hire people who can pass algorithm tests, those same people once employeed game the performance review process. You can't fire them because they "meet expectations" but they also have no interest in maximizing their impact towards helping the company succeed. For example, if the company gives you a goal of contributing to OSS you could add some feature that no one asked for and contribute 200 lines of code quickly. Or you could debug and fix a bug that many people complained about and that may take much longer and may be just a one line change. But your manager doesn't have the time to drill down into the details of that on your performance review. So the bug fixers looks worse than the feature adder during performance review. You could say the problem is management for having a bad review system but as soon as they update the review system it will be gamed by the people who don't care about the company.
- mywittyname 6y ago
  This is a side-effect of hiring smart people to do simple work. These companies optimize for hiring people who've spent their live trying to beat the next "level" of their lives with a bigger score than all of their peers. And once you have them, you make them QA the game of life on easy mode. Some people will invent some meager challenges to stay sane, and others will just be bored and miserable without a challenge and the prestige that comes from overcoming them.
giantg2 6y ago
I'm struggling with the purpose of my job too.
- _spoonman 6y ago
  I’ve been struggling with just purpose in general for years. I’m a husband and father - those are supposed to be my purpose. But sometimes I don’t feel very good at them. Hang in there. We’ll figure this all out.
  - giantg2 6y ago
    Me too. I've stuck with my miserable job for the last 4 years so I can support them. I feel like if I quit I'd be failing them.
    - JosephJoestar 6y ago
      I'm probably not one to be giving advice but I feel like your family might gain more from having a happy fulfilled parent with less wealth possibly? How that might affect you/the way you act/the things you do day to day could be more valuable long term. Obviously thats ignoring a lot e.g. finances, practicality.
      - giantg2 6y ago
        That would be nice, but I'm responsible for all our bills and I can't get a job that pays the same or better due to my experience in obscure tech, like Neoxam. I'll just continue to grind in this job until I get fired, die, or hopefully can retire someday (maybe coastFI).
        JosephJoestar 6y ago
        Yeah, it's never simple unfortunately. Good luck all the same.
        6y ago
nathanvanfleet 6y ago
The only thing I disagree with is that it's "bizarre." I think on average people have 6 careers in their lives. And people change jobs every few years as well. It's just a part of life to improve or change what you work on and there is no shame in that. I've worked in the bay area for almost 4 years at the same company and I think about changing things all the time.
- ghaff 6y ago
  >And people change jobs every few years as well. That's a fairly tech (and probably Bay Area) view of the world. I've been ~10 years or longer at three separate companies and I know tons of people in the same boat.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Traster 6y ago
If you're hiring smart people and they get into your company and find no way of succeeding, that's because your company sucks, not your hiring. This person isn't complaining that the job is to make people click on facebook ads, they're complaining because the company is so badly organised that 90% of the time is wasted not even on doing the job.
- TigeriusKirk 6y ago
  He didn't say they were hiring smart people, he said they were hiring people who could pass the interviews.
  - Traster 6y ago
    But there's literally nothing to indicate this person isn't smart. There's evidence that they are smart- they passed the interview, which let's face it, might not be perfect but certainly requires some level of intelligence. There's nothing int he Op post that indicates they're not capable of doing good work, only that they're in a situation where they and their colleagues aren't.
    - eternalban 6y ago
      Smart enough to know yourself > smart enough to pass interview.
      - dasil003 6y ago
        Knowing oneself has little correlation to intelligence as far as I can tell.
        Apocryphon 6y ago
        It's a wisdom skill.
        eternalban 6y ago
        Any effective 'theory of mind' requires intelligence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind
dilandau 6y ago
But they can always point to their resume, which lists a prestigious faang company. I worked for a well-known tech company for a couple years, with a grueling interview process. I regularly get cold called by recruiters asking me about "my time at X". So it's a good thing, from a career perspective. Whether it's a worthwhile thing of itself is a personal choice.
- mywittyname 6y ago
  Does this ever get old? From what I've seen, former FAANG hires get paraded around like some exotic pet at some smaller companies. It's kind of cringy as an onlooker. I once worked at a place with executives who had "hire 3 people from google" as a KPI.
  - dilandau 6y ago
    It's cringey as hell, but from a "making my career" perspective, it's clearly valuable to many in charge of hiring.
awinder 6y ago
Hysterically this usually "turns" for a company right around the point where someone successfully pitches they really need someone coming to the office in a suit on a Friday to signal seriousness.
- Lammy 6y ago
  Formal Friday was a very loose excuse for a happy hour, I assure you :)
the_wired 6y ago
This is on the companies themselves. You show young talent some kind of game then that's the game they'll play. https://youtu.be/FNEDJPeoHZo https://youtu.be/FNEDJPeoHZo
- jiscariot 6y ago
  Reminds me of Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
x87678r 6y ago
If you look at leetcode style interviews this is pretty much exactly how I'd expect it to end up. FB probably is worst as most people would only go there for the money.
ahmedbaracat 6y ago
Reminds me of Paul Graham’s essay: http://paulgraham.com/lesson.html http://paulgraham.com/lesson.html “I had avoided working for big companies. But if you'd asked why, I'd have said it was because they were bogus, or bureaucratic. Or just yuck. I never understood how much of my dislike of big companies was due to the fact that you win by hacking bad tests."
tmaly 6y ago
Maybe the focus on leetcode is not the best way to hire. Every company wants to automate or streamline the hiring process to get warm bodies in chairs in front of computers. What about culture and vision? What type of people do you really want working for you? A cog?
cblconfederate 6y ago
considering that the entire point of programming is to automate your job, i'd say it's just about right.
krthkv 6y ago
I have a different take: Nothing really wrong with gaming the system. If someone has successfully "gamed" the interview but not effective at their role, then the interview isn't testing the candidate for the role and sounds like a broken interview loop.

austhrow743 6y ago

I don't understand what you mean by "people like this OP". They don't say that they struggled with the hiring process or feel like a fraud. Rather they seem to be easily capable of the work. Actually I'm not sure what any of your post is about. Your friend doesn't like their job because they're hiring people to make facebook ads more effective?

jasonmp85 6y ago
Hiring doesn’t show whether you’re capable of the work, it just answers whether you might be hired. The reply here is entirely in line with the poster; they didn’t say anything about feeling like a fraud, they said candidates in tech minmax career choices with no thought as to their actual purpose. And yeah anyone remotely self-aware would feel disgusting working on adtech. It’s just that most tech workers do not think about such things.
- ghettoCoder 6y ago
  Some of us end up working at jobs infinitely worse than adtech, the public service.
  - feteru 6y ago
    What? What do you mean by worse...
    - ghettoCoder 6y ago
      Worse as in you try to get things done in a cost effective way in order to deliver value to taxpayers but have to deal with lifers, deadwood, and clueless managers who are completely risk-averse. I know. I work in the public service.
      - jiscariot 6y ago
        Right there with you. Not saying I'm a bright shining star, but it is amazing the level of incompetence you sometimes run across. It is legitimately the first place where I've found people who actually cost time/resources for anything they touch or interact with. The other thing is the supreme deference to rank at the cost of initiative. It was mind blowing coming from a more competitive corporate world.
watwut 6y ago
And in addition slacks as much as he can get away with. There is that option where even if it looks like you can get away with working only on Mondays spreading results, you would work on Tuesday, Wendsday etc too.
- VRay 6y ago
  I was in the same boat as OP a few years back at an old grimy tech megacorp. I worked my ass off, and couldn't make any progress because of terrible tools, terrible teammates, terrible process. It was a fucking nightmare.* If that'd been my first tech job, I might have just ragequit the whole industry. Fortunately, I'd already been around the block a couple of times, so I knew that I just had a particularly bad team at a mediocre company. I hopped ship, and everything was great at the next company. *A bad job: My teammates were annoyed any time I asked them any questions. "Just read the code! It's in the code!" Yeah, OK, I'll spend 8 hours digging through this fucking code when you could have spent 10 minutes explaining it. I think this is probably the worst thing for productivity I've come across in my career. Any time someone asks you for help at work, DROP EVERYTHING AND FUCKING HELP THEM. Teach them how to fish, too, don't just walk them through things. Show them where you're finding documentation, show them the local equivalent of a man page, introduce them to the people with the tribal knowledge. If they spent an honest 10 minutes trying to figure something out on their own, it's part of your job to go help them out. I'd fix a bug, then have to go to meeting after meeting after meeting to try and get permission to check in my fix. It'd often be either rejected, or I'd have to redo the same handful of lines of code a dozen times before I could get it in. I'd have to set up some internally-developed test infrastructure, but it was a 40 step procedure to get the tool running and if any one of those steps went wrong, you'd have to go back to the start and start over. Nobody who was familiar with it was willing to walk me through it, so it took an incredible amount of willpower to force myself to get that shit set up. There was another team working on the exact same thing as my team in another org, but we weren't "tented" (AKA: "disclosed") on each other's super secret projects, so we weren't allowed to work together at all or share any information. My team hated the other team, and they in turn hated our team. (I knew this because I had a close personal friend on the other team) The development environment was almost completely paralyzed by company-wide bugs. The company was sharing a single insanely gigantic codebase across thousand and thousands of engineers, and there'd be month+ long stretches where the build and tools were broken. Since things were broken so long, people would check in new build breaks without realizing it, and it ended up in a vicious circle of badness. And of course, the product we were building was a useless piece of crap that everybody hated.

pyb 6y ago

What you are trying to say sounds interesting, but not entirely clear. Was the FB exec complaining that when they hire, they are getting what they asked for ? Ie people who are very good at tests.

bob33212 6y ago
They hire people who can pass algorithm tests, those same people once employeed game the performance review process. You can't fire them because they "meet expectations" but they also have no interest in maximizing their impact towards helping the company succeed. For example, if the company gives you a goal of contributing to OSS you could add some feature that no one asked for and contribute 200 lines of code quickly. Or you could debug and fix a bug that many people complained about and that may take much longer and may be just a one line change. But your manager doesn't have the time to drill down into the details of that on your performance review. So the bug fixers looks worse than the feature adder during performance review. You could say the problem is management for having a bad review system but as soon as they update the review system it will be gamed by the people who don't care about the company.
mywittyname 6y ago
This is a side-effect of hiring smart people to do simple work. These companies optimize for hiring people who've spent their live trying to beat the next "level" of their lives with a bigger score than all of their peers. And once you have them, you make them QA the game of life on easy mode. Some people will invent some meager challenges to stay sane, and others will just be bored and miserable without a challenge and the prestige that comes from overcoming them.

giantg2 6y ago

I'm struggling with the purpose of my job too.

_spoonman 6y ago
I’ve been struggling with just purpose in general for years. I’m a husband and father - those are supposed to be my purpose. But sometimes I don’t feel very good at them. Hang in there. We’ll figure this all out.
- giantg2 6y ago
  Me too. I've stuck with my miserable job for the last 4 years so I can support them. I feel like if I quit I'd be failing them.
  - JosephJoestar 6y ago
    I'm probably not one to be giving advice but I feel like your family might gain more from having a happy fulfilled parent with less wealth possibly? How that might affect you/the way you act/the things you do day to day could be more valuable long term. Obviously thats ignoring a lot e.g. finances, practicality.
    - giantg2 6y ago
      That would be nice, but I'm responsible for all our bills and I can't get a job that pays the same or better due to my experience in obscure tech, like Neoxam. I'll just continue to grind in this job until I get fired, die, or hopefully can retire someday (maybe coastFI).
      - JosephJoestar 6y ago
        Yeah, it's never simple unfortunately. Good luck all the same.
        6y ago

nathanvanfleet 6y ago

The only thing I disagree with is that it's "bizarre." I think on average people have 6 careers in their lives. And people change jobs every few years as well. It's just a part of life to improve or change what you work on and there is no shame in that. I've worked in the bay area for almost 4 years at the same company and I think about changing things all the time.

ghaff 6y ago
>And people change jobs every few years as well. That's a fairly tech (and probably Bay Area) view of the world. I've been ~10 years or longer at three separate companies and I know tons of people in the same boat.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Traster 6y ago

If you're hiring smart people and they get into your company and find no way of succeeding, that's because your company sucks, not your hiring. This person isn't complaining that the job is to make people click on facebook ads, they're complaining because the company is so badly organised that 90% of the time is wasted not even on doing the job.

TigeriusKirk 6y ago
He didn't say they were hiring smart people, he said they were hiring people who could pass the interviews.
- Traster 6y ago
  But there's literally nothing to indicate this person isn't smart. There's evidence that they are smart- they passed the interview, which let's face it, might not be perfect but certainly requires some level of intelligence. There's nothing int he Op post that indicates they're not capable of doing good work, only that they're in a situation where they and their colleagues aren't.
  - eternalban 6y ago
    Smart enough to know yourself > smart enough to pass interview.
    - dasil003 6y ago
      Knowing oneself has little correlation to intelligence as far as I can tell.
      - Apocryphon 6y ago
        It's a wisdom skill.
      - eternalban 6y ago
        Any effective 'theory of mind' requires intelligence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind

dilandau 6y ago

But they can always point to their resume, which lists a prestigious faang company. I worked for a well-known tech company for a couple years, with a grueling interview process. I regularly get cold called by recruiters asking me about "my time at X". So it's a good thing, from a career perspective. Whether it's a worthwhile thing of itself is a personal choice.

mywittyname 6y ago
Does this ever get old? From what I've seen, former FAANG hires get paraded around like some exotic pet at some smaller companies. It's kind of cringy as an onlooker. I once worked at a place with executives who had "hire 3 people from google" as a KPI.
- dilandau 6y ago
  It's cringey as hell, but from a "making my career" perspective, it's clearly valuable to many in charge of hiring.

awinder 6y ago

Hysterically this usually "turns" for a company right around the point where someone successfully pitches they really need someone coming to the office in a suit on a Friday to signal seriousness.

Lammy 6y ago
Formal Friday was a very loose excuse for a happy hour, I assure you :)

the_wired 6y ago

This is on the companies themselves. You show young talent some kind of game then that's the game they'll play. https://youtu.be/FNEDJPeoHZo https://youtu.be/FNEDJPeoHZo

jiscariot 6y ago
Reminds me of Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

x87678r 6y ago

If you look at leetcode style interviews this is pretty much exactly how I'd expect it to end up. FB probably is worst as most people would only go there for the money.

ahmedbaracat 6y ago

Reminds me of Paul Graham’s essay: http://paulgraham.com/lesson.html http://paulgraham.com/lesson.html “I had avoided working for big companies. But if you'd asked why, I'd have said it was because they were bogus, or bureaucratic. Or just yuck. I never understood how much of my dislike of big companies was due to the fact that you win by hacking bad tests."

tmaly 6y ago

Maybe the focus on leetcode is not the best way to hire. Every company wants to automate or streamline the hiring process to get warm bodies in chairs in front of computers. What about culture and vision? What type of people do you really want working for you? A cog?

cblconfederate 6y ago

considering that the entire point of programming is to automate your job, i'd say it's just about right.

krthkv 6y ago

I have a different take: Nothing really wrong with gaming the system. If someone has successfully "gamed" the interview but not effective at their role, then the interview isn't testing the candidate for the role and sounds like a broken interview loop.