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Counterpoint appreciated. Any chance someone could expand on this? Not sure how serious the commenter was.

by pkdpic 5y ago

duxup 5y ago
Generally you wouldn’t want to speak poorly about a candidate’s choices to their face.
munchbunny 5y ago
Some hiring managers will care about your moral compass and your motivations more than others. (This isn’t a moral judgement on my part, just stating the phenotypes of hiring managers that I’ve seen.) They might not ask you to your face to explain things like joining a company right after it got #metoo-ed, but if they care they’ll absolutely be thinking the question.
comp_throw7 5y ago
I can't imagine a single person where I work factoring this in when scoring a candidate. I guess someone could lie and say a candidate performed worse than they did, but unless the candidate actually performed poorly on other rounds, that isn't an automatic rejection (sometimes we'll ask for a follow-up round). Candidate performance tends to be pretty strongly correlated across rounds (unsurprisingly), so sharp outliers are pretty rare.
- zionic 5y ago
  > I can't imagine a single person where I work factoring this in Then it’s entirely possible you work for an immoral mega corp and your judgment has been compromised by your paycheck. Let me put it in a more blunt way you are more likely to understand. Your team is interviewing someone who was a process engineer on the deep water horizon oil spill. You’d probably feel gross hiring someone whose incompetence poisoned the Gulf of Mexico. They did a fraction of the damage that FAANG engineers do to our society on a daily basis.
  - mizzao 5y ago
    Whoa, it seems like you might want to be careful with politics creeping into your decision making. I'm seeing several of your posts here and it seems like you are making the inference "worked at FAANG" -> "horrible person", and while I have never worked at FAANG I have many friends I respect who have, and eventually left though it took some time. It feels like you might be making an ad hominem attack here.
    - zionic 5y ago
      It’s an entirely rational decision. The kinds of people who take a fat salary from FAANG are the exact kinds of people I want to keep out of my companies at all costs. They are negative value add employees and I’ve yet to find a better way to filter them.
    - throwaway2333 5y ago
      If you can make it into a FAANG/MAMAA/whatever flavor of the year acronym, you can make it into most tech companies (and still make a salary that's more than enough to live a dignified life and support yourself, and family if you have any). Working at Facebook as a software engineer is a choice; just like working at a bulge bracket investment bank is a choice. The type of people that choose to work at either of these two are (more likely than not) people who do not have morals or a sense of character and values. In my experience, being a good person only works when you're interacting with good people. If you're a good person interacting with a "bad" person, you tend to get a worse deal -- and if not alert, will unconsciously "sink" to their level, and start mirroring their behaviors in order to not get a bad deal. Sooner or later, you're surrounded by "bad" people and have become a "bad" person yourself, simply by moral "osmosis," all because a few "bad" eggs spoiled the quiche. I have been the type of person that naturally gravitated towards the "money money money" professions, because I did not have any strong role models to build a value system. Now that I'm out of that moral rut, I do not wish to go back. Just like an ex-addict who decides not to associate with other ex-addicts, because the chance of relapsing increases exponentially: I do not want people without any moral compass dragging me back down to their level. I like the way things are. Things are good. Associating with Facebookers will make things bad. I don't want things to be bad. I've tried very hard to express this viewpoint, without making value judgements, but it's moot: I have standards for what it means to be a good person, and Facebookers do not meet my standards -- so I won't associate with them. I won't hire them. And I will avoid collaborating with them.
mercutio2 5y ago
I waited a while to reply to you, because the thread got overwhelmed with some pretty over the top opinions. When I am considering whose resume is worth a call back for, there are a variety of signals: - Is your resume even vaguely coherent - Do you have things on your resume that suggest curiosity and the ability to get things done - Are you likely to stick around long enough to be worth investing in you? So if you changed jobs every 1-2 years, you're going to lose a lot of points - If you worked at a company which I don't think aligns with good treatment of the general public, how long did you work there? Was it early in your career, or late? I don't think anyone is being discarded just for working at Facebook, but if you're borderline in any of these other categories, working for a long time at Facebook is certainly a negative factor for getting a call back.

Counterpoint appreciated. Any chance someone could expand on this? Not sure how serious the commenter was.

by pkdpic 5y ago

Counterpoint appreciated. Any chance someone could expand on this? Not sure how serious the commenter was.

duxup 5y ago

Generally you wouldn’t want to speak poorly about a candidate’s choices to their face.

munchbunny 5y ago

Some hiring managers will care about your moral compass and your motivations more than others. (This isn’t a moral judgement on my part, just stating the phenotypes of hiring managers that I’ve seen.) They might not ask you to your face to explain things like joining a company right after it got #metoo-ed, but if they care they’ll absolutely be thinking the question.

comp_throw7 5y ago

I can't imagine a single person where I work factoring this in when scoring a candidate. I guess someone could lie and say a candidate performed worse than they did, but unless the candidate actually performed poorly on other rounds, that isn't an automatic rejection (sometimes we'll ask for a follow-up round). Candidate performance tends to be pretty strongly correlated across rounds (unsurprisingly), so sharp outliers are pretty rare.

zionic 5y ago
> I can't imagine a single person where I work factoring this in Then it’s entirely possible you work for an immoral mega corp and your judgment has been compromised by your paycheck. Let me put it in a more blunt way you are more likely to understand. Your team is interviewing someone who was a process engineer on the deep water horizon oil spill. You’d probably feel gross hiring someone whose incompetence poisoned the Gulf of Mexico. They did a fraction of the damage that FAANG engineers do to our society on a daily basis.
- mizzao 5y ago
  Whoa, it seems like you might want to be careful with politics creeping into your decision making. I'm seeing several of your posts here and it seems like you are making the inference "worked at FAANG" -> "horrible person", and while I have never worked at FAANG I have many friends I respect who have, and eventually left though it took some time. It feels like you might be making an ad hominem attack here.
  - zionic 5y ago
    It’s an entirely rational decision. The kinds of people who take a fat salary from FAANG are the exact kinds of people I want to keep out of my companies at all costs. They are negative value add employees and I’ve yet to find a better way to filter them.
  - throwaway2333 5y ago
    If you can make it into a FAANG/MAMAA/whatever flavor of the year acronym, you can make it into most tech companies (and still make a salary that's more than enough to live a dignified life and support yourself, and family if you have any). Working at Facebook as a software engineer is a choice; just like working at a bulge bracket investment bank is a choice. The type of people that choose to work at either of these two are (more likely than not) people who do not have morals or a sense of character and values. In my experience, being a good person only works when you're interacting with good people. If you're a good person interacting with a "bad" person, you tend to get a worse deal -- and if not alert, will unconsciously "sink" to their level, and start mirroring their behaviors in order to not get a bad deal. Sooner or later, you're surrounded by "bad" people and have become a "bad" person yourself, simply by moral "osmosis," all because a few "bad" eggs spoiled the quiche. I have been the type of person that naturally gravitated towards the "money money money" professions, because I did not have any strong role models to build a value system. Now that I'm out of that moral rut, I do not wish to go back. Just like an ex-addict who decides not to associate with other ex-addicts, because the chance of relapsing increases exponentially: I do not want people without any moral compass dragging me back down to their level. I like the way things are. Things are good. Associating with Facebookers will make things bad. I don't want things to be bad. I've tried very hard to express this viewpoint, without making value judgements, but it's moot: I have standards for what it means to be a good person, and Facebookers do not meet my standards -- so I won't associate with them. I won't hire them. And I will avoid collaborating with them.

mercutio2 5y ago

I waited a while to reply to you, because the thread got overwhelmed with some pretty over the top opinions. When I am considering whose resume is worth a call back for, there are a variety of signals: - Is your resume even vaguely coherent - Do you have things on your resume that suggest curiosity and the ability to get things done - Are you likely to stick around long enough to be worth investing in you? So if you changed jobs every 1-2 years, you're going to lose a lot of points - If you worked at a company which I don't think aligns with good treatment of the general public, how long did you work there? Was it early in your career, or late? I don't think anyone is being discarded just for working at Facebook, but if you're borderline in any of these other categories, working for a long time at Facebook is certainly a negative factor for getting a call back.