7 ms·
Turned me down in 07' after a handful of phone interviews, flying me across the country, and 8 hours of in person interviews with 3 separate departments... but
by chadillac 13y ago
Turned me down in 07' after a handful of phone interviews, flying me across the country, and 8 hours of in person interviews with 3 separate departments... but not before I got their CTO so shitfaced drunk he botched a 2AM code push to production and helped convince Zuckerbergs little sister into riding a mechanical bull.
I regret nothing.
edit: Worth noting I was a 22 year old self taught programmer that hadn't experienced addressing O(log n) in a CS course, working with massive amounts of data, or large scale Linux sysadmin stuff. I wasn't fit for the ranks when compared against ex Yahoo! and Google people running for the same positions. So at least I made the most of it.
edit2: I got the interview after finding a bug in their authentication system that would allow a password hash collision to spit out the e-mail of the user that the collision occurred with. Meaning I type in a bogus email, and a password, after the post the login form would come back with the email pre-populated of the user that the hash collision had happened on, I type in the password again, and I was logged in as said user. It was a small bug I found by accident and then afterwards asked if they were hiring...
edit3: http://i.imgur.com/sePVdgI.png http://i.imgur.com/sePVdgI.png
- jonalmeida 13y agoI don't remember seeing this in the movie.
- balls187 13y agoGet the extended edition on BluRay.
- gscott 13y agoThey won't hire you but are begging to get more H1b workers...
- adoggman 13y agoHe didn't fit their needs. If he doesn't and H-1B workers do, they should get the job.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- grej 13y agoYeah because with the engineer crunch and all, there clearly just aren't quality folks out there. :-\
- smsm42 13y agoUnfortunately, there aren't. Or, rather, there are, but not easy to find and not so many. Not enough for the amount of work that is out there.
- vonmoltke 13y agoBullshit. If you are turning down people for "culture fit" or perceived ramp-up time, there is no shortage.
- smsm42 13y agoYou are assuming "culture fit" is just an excuse to interview somebody, waste all that valuable time on evaluating them and then reject them under a transparent ruse. Why would a company do that, where's a upside in that? Culture fit is a real thing and if the person does not fit the team, it would be an expensive mistake to hire that person. Shortage of talent does not mean the company would hire anybody. It just means it is hard to find people that they want to hire. There could be plenty of people that they don't want to hire, still.
- xacaxulu 13y agoLet's drive down wages first with lots of visas and companies colluding to not recruit amongst themselves.
- cenhyperion 13y agoYou're aware Jan, the CEO and other founder, is a Ukrainian immigrant, right?
- gscott 13y agoMy point was more that he was here, is good enough to get past all of the phone screens, probably did pretty well in person, but was passed over. My thinking is more that large companies with many open positions might want to consider the person for another position at least.
- prostoalex 13y agoIn 2007 Facebook was not in the club of "large companies with many open positions", just another startup on University Avenue with some series B in the bag.
- pm90 13y ago...and therefore would have even more of an incentive to hire local.
- prostoalex 13y agoWhich they did http://www.entrepreneur.com/slideshow/231332 http://www.entrepreneur.com/slideshow/231332
- graviboots 13y agoI'll second this. I recently interviewed at a bunch of companies and couldn't get any offers. The interviews are getting ridiculous - we all know how pointless the coding questions are getting by now. Companies are too picky, in part because there's so much labor supply. I know there are loads of H1Bs around here, SV is like a third-world country.
- prostoalex 13y agoStartups are picky, large employers are less so. Try Cisco or Intel.
- _pmf_ 13y ago> Startups are picky, large employers are less so. Try Cisco or Intel. I hope this is sarcasm.
- karl_nerd 13y agoif your comment is intented to mean 'foreigners are coming over stealing our jobs', feel free to leave it as it is. Otherwise, you might wanna rephrase what you wrote..
- alexeisadeski3 13y ago>SV is like a third-world country ???
- jonny_eh 13y ago
- JamesArgo 13y agoYeah, how awful it would be for America if the world's brightest become citizens.
- 001sky 13y agoIndentured Servantry sounds like a plan B. NBD is H1-B fails.
- michaelt 13y agoI'm all for the best and brightest becoming citizens, but we should offer visas for the most in-demand, high salary professions first. We can tell from salaries that the shortage of CEOs, lawyers and hedge fund managers is much more acute than the shortage of programmers and engineers.
- kyllo 13y agoSince when do CEOs, lawyers, and hedge fund managers ever have visa problems? Certain categories of US visas can basically be bought, but it is not cheap.
- TallGuyShort 13y agoI think michaelt was being ironic.
- talmand 13y agoI would think you are responding to a sarcastic comment.
- chongli 13y agoI don't know about lawyers and hedge fund managers but CEOs are able to manipulate their own pay and avoid accountability due to their position of power within a company. The labour market has no bearing on someone who effectively writes their own paycheck.
- crassus 13y agoAlong with 10 million physical laborers, just to kick in the teeth of the middle class a bit more. The middle-class doesn't benefit Silicon Valley. Cheap nannies on the other hand...
- shutupalready 13y ago> Turned me down in 07 Telling the story now is an interesting historical anecdote, but you probably didn't blog or tweet about it in 2007, right? I can't quite understand why Brian Acton was so public about the companies that turned him down. Isn't this bad for him if he's in a job search? Doesn't this send out a negative message (assuming any employer bothered to look)?
- a_bonobo 13y agoYou could see it as a badge of honor that Google or another large company, which purportedly hires only the best of the best, deemed you worthy of an interview. The mere fact that you have been considered for a position might raise your standing with potential employers [citation needed].
- kkwok 13y agoDoubt that was the reason for him. He was already very established engineering leader at yahoo.
- incision 13y ago>"The mere fact that you have been considered for a position might raise your standing with potential employers [citation needed]." Personally, the weeks following my interviews with one of those big players saw me approached by a couple of established start-ups and a major financial company - far more attention than I'd ever received previously.
- eru 13y ago
- foobarqux 13y agoWhere did you end up?
- chadillac 13y agoJumped around a bit, handful of companies you've probably never heard of but paid better than FB due to geography and talent shortage. Worked on a lot of fun projects for smaller and more adventurous groups that I wouldn't have ever gotten a chance to touch at a big corp like FB. Everything from sneaking around pop-up blockers (sorry everyone) to video chat applications to real time messaging platforms to media conversion clusters to penetration testing (I use that term very lightly, but correctly... I wasn't cracking WPA or trashing stacks to pop boxes, just abusing poorly designed systems with permission and stuff with a touch of forensics and systems hardening). I think back at the opportunity and I was devastated that I didn't make the cut, but honestly, I'm pretty happy I was left to find my own way... it's lead to a lot of great experiences over the past 7 years and I wasn't able to just slide by on resume fodder and has left me the freedom to live in MIA, NYC, and LA... cross the country via road trip multiple times (once on motorcycle!), and met a lot of very talented peers along the way. Not all of the best and brightest are in the Valley... just the chest thumpingist.
- learningram 13y agoCannot see any picture there
- herokusaki 13y ago> he botched a 2AM code push to production I have come to think that pushing code to production when your person is noticeably compromised in some way should be prevented thorough technical means. Perhaps a CAPTCHA is an acceptable solution (which probably should also get more difficult the later the hour).
- chadillac 13y agoTailing syslog while under the influence and patching an error should be a senior developer right of passage. ;) http://www.wired.com/business/2008/10/googles-mail-go/ http://www.wired.com/business/2008/10/googles-mail-go/ edit: As an aside, it was entertaining watching a drunk man use Emacs under the gun.
- blueskin_ 13y agoI thought you had to be drunk to even consider Emacs.
- aestra 13y agoIf you're so drunk you can't solve a CAPTCHA then you also probably can't sit at a chair and type on a keyboard.
- blueskin_ 13y agoExactly this. I've done/said inadvisable things while drunk enough to do so, and not even made typos. I guess the function of using a computer is just natural due to practice.
- blueskin_ 13y agoUSB breathalyser?