4 ms·

Facebook's Recruiting and Retention Problem

27 points by daviday 17y ago

josefresco 17y ago
It's the circle of life (or poo depending oh who you ask) This same article has been written about Microsoft, Apple, Google and every other successful tech giant, I should start writing my 'Twitter Retention Crisis' article now, and just insert the names and which companies they left for later when it starts happening.
- vaksel 17y ago
  the difference is that at Google the programmers would be working on fun and exciting new things, so it takes a lot longer to get bored with the company...at facebook? What real innovation is there? I mean if you think about it, most of Facebook's features can be written by any programmer.
  - smokinn 17y ago
    The features Facebook has any programmer could add to their blog, sure. However if you were coding the same feature for twitter I'd be surprised if you kept even 5% of the original code. Coding at the scale facebook is at is a completely different ball game. Anyone can add those features to their blog but not everyone can add them to Facebook.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - hboon 17y ago
    That's like saying work at Twitter is easy because it's just a simple messaging system. Scaling a system to the level of Google, Facebook and Twitter is the hard part.
    - evgen 17y ago
      Actually, I have to disagree. There was a time when this was the hard part, but at this point the "scale it up" search space has been explored quite effectively by a lot of different groups to the point where the only reason anyone below the "system architect" level would need to know the ins and outs of this particular subject is because the company has a deep-seated NIH syndrome. Scaling a system to the Google, Facebook, or Twitter level is hard, but getting to half of their size using off the shelf components is not. Getting the rest of the way on this journey is not something that mid-level tool and front-end coders should ever have to deal with. If they do need to know this information then you are doing it wrong...
abstractbill 17y ago
Facebook's "close rate" on new employees it wants to hire hovers around 80% ... for a company with the potential to mint hundreds of millionaires in a rare Silicon Valley IPO, both numbers seem low. Right, but it's increasingly unlikely that any new employee will be among those millionaires.
- jonknee 17y ago
  And that there will be any significant number of millionaires. It has yet to be monetized.
  - teej 17y ago
    > It has yet to be monetized. Incorrect. It has yet to become profitable.
    - jonknee 17y ago
      Successfully monetized then. We can play semantics all day, but Facebook has lost a shit ton of money and has no plan to make a shit ton + X(billion) in the near future .
      - teej 17y ago
        There is a huge difference between a -$300M run rate and a shrinking -$150M run rate. Monetization isn't always about turning on one big switch, but about turning on lots of little switches. Remember, Facebook makes -tens of millions- of dollars on people sending a picture of flowers to their friends. There are plenty of other opportunities for Facebook to make money, they're just making sure to do it right. MySpace is profitable - then again, who is on MySpace anymore?
      - furburger 17y ago
        it doesn't matter. employees only become rich if the stock goes crazy. lots of profitable companies have craptastic stocks.
furburger 17y ago
facebook is indulging the exact same hubris we engaged at yahoo in the late 90s. after an initial cadre of so-so developers rode the wave up, we decided to believe the hype that we were uber-brilliant and suddenly no one was smart enough to pass our interviews. we made sure of it. in the end we hired mediocore talent because we had pissed off anyone with a brain with our retarded brain teasers and "did you memorize page 478 of stroustrup" type questions. my interview with them was pointlessly difficult, i pretty much hung up on them because it was obvious that the point of the interview was to provide amusement for the caller.
briansmith 17y ago
I could have written this article and I know nothing of the goings-on at Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. It is all speculation and rumor.
kalvin 17y ago
I went to a focus group in SF that turned out to be organized by Facebook (the last question was "what could Facebook tell you to convince you to work there?"-- it wasn't possible to tell up till then, surprisingly) and of the dozen CS students/alumni from Stanford/Berkeley there, none of them put Facebook as their first choice from a list of tech companies (all the large ones + Palantir, Twitter, FB). Surprisingly, even though everyone had completely different career goals and rankings of companies, everybody had the same answer to the last question: "Tell me where you're headed and how you're going to get there."
geuis 17y ago
I interviewed with Facebook in March for a front-end developer role. It was an insulting experience. The tech screen was with some low-level engineer. The first(and only question before I hung up on him) was to write a function in javascript to return the square root of a number. My answer in 15 seconds: var sqr = function(e){ return Math.sqrt(e); } Easy enough. But no, he wanted a function that demonstrated an algorithm to find the square root. Ok... I said. I spent a minute trying to salvage some odd details from high-school algebra and basically came up blank. I was thinking, well this isn't going to look good on me. I readily admit to him that my knowledge of figuring out square roots by hand is a rusty, having been out of high school for 12 years(even though in retrospect, this was something we were never really even taught anyway). But surely this guy, who is screening me for my ability to do front-end coding, will move on and start asking me some hard problems about javascript, css, cross browser problems, etc. No. We spend the next 6-8 minutes with him circling back on his square root problem. I tried a couple more times to answer this question that is completely unrelated to the job I'm interviewing for. Finally, I get so fed up with this moron that my internal ticker clicks over and I realize, "Even if I get this job, I'm going to be dealing with these kinds of nazel-gazing engineers every single day. Not an environment I want to be in." I thanked him for his time, and he acts surprised and says "Are you sure? After everything it took to get to talk to me?". Yes, I say. I'm quite sure. >Click.< I realized a long time ago what kind of people these are. When I was growing up, the garbage truck would come by on Tuesdays and Thursdays. When we first moved to the neighborhood, we would put our garbage out by the mailbox and some days it would be picked up and sometimes not. We would complain and nothing would change. After a few weeks, I was standing out front when they came by. I noticed that everyone had their trash bags on the right side of their mailboxes. That morning, I had done that as well. But some new neighbors down the street had put theirs out on the left side of their mailbox. The truck comes by, grubby guys grabbing/throwing, grabbing throwing. All the garbage gone, except for the neighbors. The next time, I purposely left ours on the left side. Didn't get picked up that day. So that was the day that I realized these guys had their Line In The Sand. It was Their Way or the Highway. They had a really crappy job. Probably crappy lives at home because they're garbage men. This was Florida, not NYC. There's no glamor or high-pay there. This was the one place where they were the kings, the arbiters of Pickup Or Not. This was the one point of control over their lives they could influence, and they grabbed onto with both hands and some toes. So this little middling engineer at Facebook had his Line too, in the form of a square root function that Had To Be ANSWERED! "You shall not cross!" He exclaims internally. I'm positive he was quite satisfied with himself after I hung up. Some self congratulation at keeping another peasant out of the castle halls. Kind of like the junk yard dog on a chain behind the fence. Smug in barking and keeping away the kids, but still chained to his dog house.
banned_man 17y ago
Mark Zuckerberg is great for media PR, because he reminds the old guard of the '90s, when a talented but generally unimpressive 2x-year-old could sell a money-losing company for billions. He's a massive liability for recruiting PR, though, because only a masochist would want him as a boss.

27 points by daviday 17y ago

It's the circle of life (or poo depending oh who you ask) This same article has been written about Microsoft, Apple, Google and every other successful tech giant, I should start writing my 'Twitter Retention Crisis' article now, and just insert the names and which companies they left for later when it starts happening.

vaksel 17y ago
the difference is that at Google the programmers would be working on fun and exciting new things, so it takes a lot longer to get bored with the company...at facebook? What real innovation is there? I mean if you think about it, most of Facebook's features can be written by any programmer.
- smokinn 17y ago
  The features Facebook has any programmer could add to their blog, sure. However if you were coding the same feature for twitter I'd be surprised if you kept even 5% of the original code. Coding at the scale facebook is at is a completely different ball game. Anyone can add those features to their blog but not everyone can add them to Facebook.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- hboon 17y ago
  That's like saying work at Twitter is easy because it's just a simple messaging system. Scaling a system to the level of Google, Facebook and Twitter is the hard part.
  - evgen 17y ago
    Actually, I have to disagree. There was a time when this was the hard part, but at this point the "scale it up" search space has been explored quite effectively by a lot of different groups to the point where the only reason anyone below the "system architect" level would need to know the ins and outs of this particular subject is because the company has a deep-seated NIH syndrome. Scaling a system to the Google, Facebook, or Twitter level is hard, but getting to half of their size using off the shelf components is not. Getting the rest of the way on this journey is not something that mid-level tool and front-end coders should ever have to deal with. If they do need to know this information then you are doing it wrong...

abstractbill 17y ago

Facebook's "close rate" on new employees it wants to hire hovers around 80% ... for a company with the potential to mint hundreds of millionaires in a rare Silicon Valley IPO, both numbers seem low. Right, but it's increasingly unlikely that any new employee will be among those millionaires.

jonknee 17y ago
And that there will be any significant number of millionaires. It has yet to be monetized.
- teej 17y ago
  > It has yet to be monetized. Incorrect. It has yet to become profitable.
  - jonknee 17y ago
    Successfully monetized then. We can play semantics all day, but Facebook has lost a shit ton of money and has no plan to make a shit ton + X(billion) in the near future .
    - teej 17y ago
      There is a huge difference between a -$300M run rate and a shrinking -$150M run rate. Monetization isn't always about turning on one big switch, but about turning on lots of little switches. Remember, Facebook makes -tens of millions- of dollars on people sending a picture of flowers to their friends. There are plenty of other opportunities for Facebook to make money, they're just making sure to do it right. MySpace is profitable - then again, who is on MySpace anymore?
    - furburger 17y ago
      it doesn't matter. employees only become rich if the stock goes crazy. lots of profitable companies have craptastic stocks.

furburger 17y ago

facebook is indulging the exact same hubris we engaged at yahoo in the late 90s. after an initial cadre of so-so developers rode the wave up, we decided to believe the hype that we were uber-brilliant and suddenly no one was smart enough to pass our interviews. we made sure of it. in the end we hired mediocore talent because we had pissed off anyone with a brain with our retarded brain teasers and "did you memorize page 478 of stroustrup" type questions. my interview with them was pointlessly difficult, i pretty much hung up on them because it was obvious that the point of the interview was to provide amusement for the caller.

briansmith 17y ago

I could have written this article and I know nothing of the goings-on at Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. It is all speculation and rumor.

kalvin 17y ago

I went to a focus group in SF that turned out to be organized by Facebook (the last question was "what could Facebook tell you to convince you to work there?"-- it wasn't possible to tell up till then, surprisingly) and of the dozen CS students/alumni from Stanford/Berkeley there, none of them put Facebook as their first choice from a list of tech companies (all the large ones + Palantir, Twitter, FB). Surprisingly, even though everyone had completely different career goals and rankings of companies, everybody had the same answer to the last question: "Tell me where you're headed and how you're going to get there."

geuis 17y ago

I interviewed with Facebook in March for a front-end developer role. It was an insulting experience. The tech screen was with some low-level engineer. The first(and only question before I hung up on him) was to write a function in javascript to return the square root of a number. My answer in 15 seconds: var sqr = function(e){ return Math.sqrt(e); } Easy enough. But no, he wanted a function that demonstrated an algorithm to find the square root. Ok... I said. I spent a minute trying to salvage some odd details from high-school algebra and basically came up blank. I was thinking, well this isn't going to look good on me. I readily admit to him that my knowledge of figuring out square roots by hand is a rusty, having been out of high school for 12 years(even though in retrospect, this was something we were never really even taught anyway). But surely this guy, who is screening me for my ability to do front-end coding, will move on and start asking me some hard problems about javascript, css, cross browser problems, etc. No. We spend the next 6-8 minutes with him circling back on his square root problem. I tried a couple more times to answer this question that is completely unrelated to the job I'm interviewing for. Finally, I get so fed up with this moron that my internal ticker clicks over and I realize, "Even if I get this job, I'm going to be dealing with these kinds of nazel-gazing engineers every single day. Not an environment I want to be in." I thanked him for his time, and he acts surprised and says "Are you sure? After everything it took to get to talk to me?". Yes, I say. I'm quite sure. >Click.< I realized a long time ago what kind of people these are. When I was growing up, the garbage truck would come by on Tuesdays and Thursdays. When we first moved to the neighborhood, we would put our garbage out by the mailbox and some days it would be picked up and sometimes not. We would complain and nothing would change. After a few weeks, I was standing out front when they came by. I noticed that everyone had their trash bags on the right side of their mailboxes. That morning, I had done that as well. But some new neighbors down the street had put theirs out on the left side of their mailbox. The truck comes by, grubby guys grabbing/throwing, grabbing throwing. All the garbage gone, except for the neighbors. The next time, I purposely left ours on the left side. Didn't get picked up that day. So that was the day that I realized these guys had their Line In The Sand. It was Their Way or the Highway. They had a really crappy job. Probably crappy lives at home because they're garbage men. This was Florida, not NYC. There's no glamor or high-pay there. This was the one place where they were the kings, the arbiters of Pickup Or Not. This was the one point of control over their lives they could influence, and they grabbed onto with both hands and some toes. So this little middling engineer at Facebook had his Line too, in the form of a square root function that Had To Be ANSWERED! "You shall not cross!" He exclaims internally. I'm positive he was quite satisfied with himself after I hung up. Some self congratulation at keeping another peasant out of the castle halls. Kind of like the junk yard dog on a chain behind the fence. Smug in barking and keeping away the kids, but still chained to his dog house.

banned_man 17y ago

Mark Zuckerberg is great for media PR, because he reminds the old guard of the '90s, when a talented but generally unimpressive 2x-year-old could sell a money-losing company for billions. He's a massive liability for recruiting PR, though, because only a masochist would want him as a boss.