It would be good to know if this was an internal or external recruiter. If the organization has contracted this out to another organization, then it should minimally reflect on Facebook and have maximum, laughable effect, on the contracted organization.
From what I've experienced with Facebook recruitment, they dragnet linkedin pretty hard and have at-least a 5-step process for interviewing that is designed to be implemented at high speed by internal people, but at-least lets you talk with internal people.
I stopped responding to their requests on Linkedin because you start over each time. Although the inquiries are interesting, it's not really fun to have a bunch of "first dates" constantly.
Probably internal – when I interviewed with them in the past an internal recruiter (I was familiar with through friends / on-campus stuff) gave me some super dumb technical questions on the "initial screen". Very basic pseudo data structure stuff, but still. It was obvious she was trying to map the words I had said to some pre-provided solution.
If a business hires cutrate idiots to source candidates for the largest investment expense it has[1], I guarantee you that it will cut costs elsewhere as well.
[1] Yes, people are an investment. At a quarter of a million dollars a pop for proper coding talent, multiplied by however many coders the company has, people are the largest expense Facebook has.
> It would be good to know if this was an internal or external recruiter. If the organization has contracted this out to another organization, then it should minimally reflect on Facebook and have maximum, laughable effect, on the contracted organization.
This is a large part of why they contract it out and they shouldn't get a free pass on it. If $company contract out customer support (very common) we don't say "sure I was on hold for 7 hours, but the support was contracted out, so it doesn't reflect on $company".
Thinks to self: "I'm sure I must have I laid pipe in a park and in a bathroom at some point back in high-school. Regardsless, I'm an f-ing plumber, I can figure it out. If I couldn't figure out crap like that I wouldn't be a plumber in the first place. I'll just tell them what they want to hear."
Replies: "Yes, I have experience with pipe in that setting."
The thing is, in your context, materials do matter; there are enourmous differences between material x and y, eg. a metal pipe and a plastic pipe. Different structural capabilities, different resistance towards chemicals, etc., so if you do need clay pipes experience, because of the very special material that is about to flow in it, or due to structural/pressure/etc specialities, you may actually be in the need of someone who knows these.
There aren't that many differences in software and they are easier to learn (eg. be aware of `killall` linux vs bsd).
In this case though I doubt they were looking for a specialist; it would have been marked as, for example, AS/400 experience if this was the case.
I remember in about 1998 seeing a job ad for a dev with 7 years of Java. Yeah good luck with that one! I'm sure they found someone willing to put that on their CV.
To me, the problem (in part) seems to be that the recruiter is not qualified to understand, or at least cannot clearly communicate, whether they actually need someone who has worked specifically with copper or whether they want general experience with pipes such as copper and pex.
Of course, depending on your objective: if your objective is to have at least the option of interviewing further for this company, it helps to remember the concept of Pyrrhic victories: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrhic_victory, i.e.: don't win the battle and lose the war.
Alternatively, don't fucking apply to this kind of company. They have BILLIONS of dollars in the bank (let that sink in for a moment) and the technical recruiters are paid well anyway, there is absolutely no reason for them to not give at least a timid shit about the quality of the people who are the first line of interaction with potential employees.
I interviewed at Google 3 times and I'm currently going through the interviews for the 4th time (a combination of bad interviewers and me being a total idiot), and this time I've stumbled across the nicest technical recruiter I've ever seen in 7yrs in the industry. She actively fought for me after a poor performance, and went above and beyond to accommodate me. And all my previous 3 recruiters at Google were extremely "professional-nice" and rather intelligent. In contrast, every single interaction I had with Facebook left a bad taste in my mouth (mostly getting rejected 2 times with a 5 line email, after being referred by Fb employees).
> Why do I continually hear the term "unpaid intern".
Because those things still exist, just not doing employer-sponsored g work in for-profit firms.
> I believe there is more to the US than just California, right?
Yes, and unpaid interns doing work that directly benefits the employer is a violation of rules under the Fair Labor Standards Act in the whole US, not just California.
This is not the right attitude to bring in to the workplace. You'll have a range of people from executives, to clients to co-workers in other departments who don't know what UNIX, APIs and POSIX are. If you can't communicate technical matters nicely then you have not yet developed the right attitude for a professional working environment. It's the same thing with doctors when they create metaphors to explain complicated problems. You need to speak in the layperson's terminology, and if all they know is UNIX then call it UNIX and leave it at that.
Nah, they were pretty patient - updating their resumé so that they weren't lying, yet still giving the recruiter what they thought the recruiter wanted.
Presumably they were worried that the resumé wouldn't just be seen by a recruiter, and a more knowledgeable person might flag it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
I'm not sure how much more clear poor Stanley can get:
> Recruiter: We're looking for students with experience work on Linux and Unix
> Stanley: I have experience working on Linux and UNIX
> Recruiter: Your email and resume say Unix-like, which is not exactly UNIX.
The recruiter, by the end of this exchange has been given the explanation of why "UNIX-like" is the correct term, why it is being used, and why it is relevant. Stanley has also tried to take a more layman-like approach, and backed off the technical jargon to state "yes, I have that", using the exact terms that the recruiter used, despite them being incorrect.
The recruiter's last email contains things that are incorrect, and the response from the recruiter is irrational.
The recruiter's response isn't irrational. Very clear instructions are being given: put UNIX and Linux on your resume. Not tell me via e-mail. Then candidate goes ahead and 'educates' the recruiter, and puts something other than UNIX (UNIX-like) on the resume. i.e., does not follow instructions.
What? I don't care who gets hired. But when hiring at scale, if a candidate can't follow instructions, they don't get hired. It's a basic filter that is necessary when that many people are being considered.
How many tens of thousands of university kids go through the hiring pipeline at Facebook each semester?
When you are doing things at that scale, you need well-defined processes. The process here was we need you to put exactly what this position requires on your resume, probably because the resume needed to be OKd by some keyword-checking system.
The candidate either was incapable of or refused to follow the process. Therefore, no hire.
Hey, my grandparent comment clearly instructed you to email me responses, not post them here. Now you go ahead and "send" me this response, but you don't even email me a copy, i.e. do not follow instructions.
> Very clear instructions are being given: put UNIX and Linux on your resume. Not tell me via e-mail.
Even if that were the recruiter's intent, I don't think it's that clear. At no point in the conversation does the recruiter ever make an explicit request to have a resume with both of those on it. You might think there is an implied request from the recruiter for that, but I do not, and neither, it seems, did Stanley.
The only point in the exchange that I can see where the recruiter requests a change to the resume is here:
> […] we require having Unix experience. If you have it, could you update your resume and resend?
There are multiple screenshots of his resume. One of them says "UNIX", but does not include "Linux". The recruiter asked him to put both Unix and Linux on his resume. He then updated it to say "Linux and Unix-like". The recruiter again asked him to specifically put "Unix and Linux", but he still didn't.
The recruiter does appear to be a little clueless with the terminology, but there could be several reasons for this. Oftentimes resumes are input into an automated system that searches for very specific keywords, or the resume might be going to an executive who is very specific about what they are looking for.
At the end of the day, the recruiter gave very clear instructions on what to do. If Stanley had just followed those instructions and re-sent his resume, he'd probably be fine. Instead, he chose to be snarky and condescending in his response. The recruiter was very professional and STILL gave him a chance to fix his resume and re-send, but he still didn't.
It's tricky because from the layperson's perspective Microsoft Windows, VxWorks, and whatever runs on a TI-86 graphic calculator could be "UNIX-like" in that they are operating systems, yet none of these things are what they're actually looking for.
Still it's sort of amazing that the recruiter could be both so wrong and so confident.
Stanley said in an email he worked on Linux systems, but despite repeated prompts from the recruiter, refused to put exactly that on his resume.
He was technically correct, which some people believe is the best kind of correct, but the failure here was his. He was more interested in being right than getting the internship, and as a result he gets a lot of pats on the back from people who share his philosophy here... and no internship.
At first, his resume included "Linux". The recruiter asked him to update his resume to include Unix as well. Stanley changed it to read just "UNIX", but no Linux.
The recruiter asked him to fix this by specifying both Linux and UNIX in his resume. Stanley updated it to say Linux and UNIX-like.
The recruiter, very professionally instead of just dropping the conversation immediately, then asked again that Stanley rectify his resume to include the terms they are looking for: Linux and UNIX. Not "UNIX-like". But Stanley again did not do this.
The recruiter gave very clear instructions on what to do, but (from the recruiter's perspective) Stanley was more concerned with condescendingly educating the recruiter rather than following simple instructions.
I sometimes screen resumes from college students at my company, and if I ever received an email exchange like the one from Stanley here, I would have immediately put him in the "no" pile. I already have 400+ people to screen, why waste time with him when I can easily find someone with equivalent experience that also knows how to follow instructions and, most importantly, isn't so rude about it?
That's not incorrect, but at the same time it's not improbable that he was essentially trolling at this point and expecting to show this nonsense to his peers (which worked!).
Solid engineers, even ones still in school, know who they are and that their skills are valuable. To this candidate the value of any one recruiter is near-zero. He was chasing lols, basically.
The story here is that Facebook messed up by having this person front their recruiting efforts, not that Stanley Zhang was denied a job.
The kid was pretty green (when you apply for internships you usually are), he had no idea that first-line screeners at a big-5 company could be that awful. With age comes experience and low expectations but as an undergraduate you can be excused. You might even demand a minimum standard of discourse, interviews go both ways.
Storytime: back then us students were doing a factory tour, we went to Hoechst in Frankfurt (yes, it was that long ago). There was lunch with company research staff in the Jahrhunderthalle (they did have longer time horizons then). Strangely, the majority was from our university. That was puzzling, do they mostly recruit from our university?! They solved the mystery for us, this was a recruitment visit, they wanted us to consider them and wanted to put their best foot forward.
Something happened to the employer-employee relationship in the meantime.
It’s not always that bad. I have had pretty pleasant experiences with Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Apple (my current employer). I have also had negative experiences with Google and Amazon as well (the Amazon one puts them squarely in the I-don’t-want-to-ever-interview-with-them-again bucket).
On a more relevant comment, I think the student could have been a little smarter in realizing that the recruiter didn’t seem like he/she understood what was really being asked in the position he/she was recruiting for, but I think a lot of respondents on HN forget that people are sometimes held to account for items put in the resume. I remember when I interviewed at Apple in my last interview search, all 3 of the teams I had onsites with held me to account for items I had put on my resume.
> 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.
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.
Don't you think the risk you are talking about in believing a 20 year old is exaggerated? Is it that hard to go back to the manager and ask if "Unix-like" is acceptable although the job description says "Unix"? Or just do a little bit of Googling to figure out if what the candidate is saying could have merit?
From my perspective, it appears that the recruiter is the jerk and not the candidate. I have met many computer-illiterate recruiters but never one like this who would repeat the same response over and over again despite the candidate having clarified his position.
I Googled and I find that the candidate was wrong. The recruiter was right.
AIX, Solaris and HP-UX are bonafide Unix systems and there indeed are software developers today who work with them.
In any case, it is not very hard to write something like the following in the resume: POSIX, CentOS (Linux), Solaris (Unix), FreeBSD (Unix-like), etc. It is always good to be more specific about your skills in situations like this than being ambiguous.
The reason you're getting downvoted is because you're saying he's incorrect by making a distinction between UNIX (uppercase) and Unix when referring to commercial OSes. There is no such distinction. UNIX is a trademark for the Unix family of operating systems. All of the systems you referenced as a family of Unix systems are certified and therefore can be referred to in the trademarked way as UNIX.
The candidate is incorrect in his belief that nobody uses UNIX (or Unix) in 2017 and he could have been less flippant in his responses to the recruiter, but his technical accuracy is spot on.
Regarding the minimal distinction that exists, FreeBSD is Unix, but not UNIX, because it has never been certified as there is a cost associated but it is directly derived from AT&T Unix in its lineage. Mac OS X which is derived from FreeBSD in turn was certified and is therefore a UNIX, ironically enough.
IBM licensing can be absurd. Unless his university provided AIX systems to work with (and I can almost guarantee they didn't), its unreasonable to assume that an applicant would take the slowboat to licensing/software support contract hell and back just to get hands on with a niche, oddball UNIX system.
Solaris died roughly 3 times, depending on who you ask. 2002 was 15 years ago. Oracle officially killed it by laying off over 90% of people assigned to the project two days ago. Future Solaris development is deader than shit.
The only true UNIX that sees "widespread" use, and the only one that you will ever find a student with any experience with it is FreeBSD, and FreeBSD is popular because of its licensing, not its "true UNIX nature."
As somebody else said, it wouldn't have busted the recruiter's ass to forward the email to the manager and ask if "Unix-like" experience is relevant.
>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.
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.
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.
The recruiter needn't even be a person. A blind monkey can detect that "UNIX" doesn't match "Linux and UNIX-Like" and reject an application. Pure text matching. Recruiter literally doesn't even need to know how to read.
Most people can't communicate with blind monkeys though, so I wouldn't fault anyone for failing here either.
Well, then you'll end up being that one lack-of-social-skills dev in the basement at many places. Or in your Mom's basement because you can't hold a job. Social skills, interpersonal intelligence (EQ) and the ability to be patient and communicate are higher up the list than your portfolio of coding majesty or IQ.
I don't think "pick your battles" is quite fair. I didn't read this as him being stubborn for no reason, at least not in this initial message. He knows Facebook has a reputation as a strong technical team, and since he is applying for a technical job, he probably thought they'd appreciate the attention to detail of giving a thorough response.
But yes, it certainly is a lesson in dealing with nonsense.
What is up with this societal mentality that the employee is beneath the employer, and the employer has the license to be rude and it's the employee's job to accommodate their bullshit? Sending a resume for a job interview and dealing with an obnoxious recruiter is definitely not a battle I'd pick. If that's how they treat prospective job candidates, then that's probably not a company I want to work for.
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.
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.
"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.
It's unclear to me if the recruiter meant "experience" in the "professional experience" sense vs just "have used personally," I'd say there was a definite failure on both sides to figure out if that was the expectation. Both parties in this are basically just repeating the same stuff back and forth at each other "you need Unix experience" "I have Unix on the skills section" and repeat...
I'm not sure I agree. You bring up an important point -- that specialists will always encounter slight errors when interacting with laypeople. There's a tricky balance to be struck there -- how do you communicate with them without adopting the same errors yourself, but also without bruising their ego, while hopefully educating them at the same time? The best mix seems to be the "correct by agreeing" approach.
"Is the tumor beniggun?" "Yes, that's correct, the tumor is benign".
This is a broader concept that I've had to get used to recently: I don't think this is a specialist/layman thing as much as a smart/dumb thing. I know plenty of very smart people who are happy to show their ignorance about a topic that they don't know about when talking to someone with that knowledge (including examples like the benign/bennigun thing).
For the first time in my life, I'm working with people who aren't particularly intelligent[1]. The lack of intelligence doesn't bother me much per se, but I was absolutely not prepared for how incredibly childish their psyche is when it comes to making mistakes and learning from them, admitting they don't know things, asking questions, etc. It was absolutely shocking how routinely people would read all kinds of ulterior motives into every possible question: "the only reason you would ask X is because you're trying to put me down" and stuff like that. I've learned to heavily sugarcoat things, stroke egos with compliments before describing things that need improvement or fixing, etc etc. Goddam is it an exhausting waste of time.
My plan at this point is to steer my career as far away as possible from people who are this stupid and immature; I spent a long time at the start of my career surrounded by very smart people and I just got used to the idea that everyone is secure in their intelligence and everyone can focus on being productive together without needing to keep stopping and feeding the egos of infants.
[1] Just to forestall the complaints: this isn't a value judgment of who they are as people, it's just a single weakness. A comparable weakness of my own is that I have to exert quite a bit of effort to maintain a strong work ethic when being hardworking comes more easily to some.
There is an extremely fine line between speaking the layperson's terminology and lying.
Wrong: "Yep, I have UNIX experience!"
Right: "These days, the phrases 'UNIX' and 'UNIX-like systems' are used interchangeably. Please double check this with your hiring manager to confirm that we're on the same page."
Agreed there's a fine line. I somehow find myself a little further along the spectrum - Perhaps I'm jaded from dealing with too many recruiters who are trying to check boxes.
If I really thought this job was worth my time, I would've updated my resume to say UNIX and Linux, and then clarified during the first interview with a technical person.
Right: "Yep, I have Unix experience! I have worked on Solaris which is a bonafide Unix system. I also have experience with Unix-like systems like FreeBSD and Debian GNU/Linux."
Solaris and AIX /are/ UNIX. Solaris is derived from SunOS, which is derived from 4.2BSD, which was directly licensed by Sun from AT&T via a UNIX source license. Solaris and SunOS were both certified as UNIX.
Similarly IBM licensed AT&T UNIX and derived AIX. It is still certified as UNIX.
The Open Group holds the UNIX trademark and copyrights and conducts the certification and licensing process these days.
You've posted functionally the same comment multiple times in this thread. No matter how many times you say it, you are technically incorrect. UNIX is a valid piece of terminology when referring to commercial Unix OSes.
Did you read my comments carefully? I am saying the same thing as you are. I am saying that Solaris and AIX /are/ bonafide Unix systems in all my comments.
> You'll have a range of people from executives, to clients to co-workers in other departments who don't know what UNIX, APIs and POSIX are.
Yes, but if a recruiter is attempting to convince the smartest people at top universities to come be an intern at their company, they should know the difference (or practical lack thereof) between linux and unix. Or at least they should be smart enough to not triple-down on that difference when they clearly don't know wtf they're talking about.
Bottom line is OP is a candidate that should have gotten through to the next stage and should not have been disqualified because the front-line recruiter was being an idiot. It's a missed opportunity and there are probably many more like it.
> they should know the difference (or practical lack thereof) between linux and unix.
I hate this attitude. How can a recruiter know all the intricacies for the roles he is hiring, he would need to be an expert. He has to know everything he they have to learn a whole pile of new terms.
That’s why you pay a technical recruiter. It’s their job to know all the terms and their relationships. They don’t need to know how to program them, just what fits what. Think the difference between a athlete and a sports reporter. The best sports reporters know the intricacies but no one expects them to play the sports they cover. Generic recruiters are not very useful.
It is stupid to expect a technical recruiter to know everything, especially in this ever changing world of languages and frameworks.
I like how easy it is for people to blame someone else here, rather than try to understand it from the recruiters position. I understand, we all hate recruiters.
I don't hate recruiters. I know quite a few that keep up with the industry. I literally only ask the competence of a sports reporter. What baffles me is the acceptance of little to no knowledge in recruiters.
Yea man, I hate it when people are expected to know enough to do their jobs effectively too. Thank god there are heroes like the recruiter in this post who have the courage to stick to their ignorance even when the situation is politely explained to them.
He may have assumed that at some point someone in the hiring pipeline would _not_ be an idiot (or in your words, "would be autistic") and may notice his false claim. Especially for a college student applying for an internship, it's a little much to expect him to know exactly where lying on your resume is appropriate. (At some point he said "I have experience in Linux and UNIX" and the moron on the other end still referred to his resume saying Unix-like).
I think you may be extrapolating your own experience of "not being autistic" (by your definition) a little too widely.
I think it's silly and demeaning to think of college students as being that naive. I was one very recently and believe it or not we aren't that way. Especially ones who study engineering at top schools like CMU.
Everyday I talk to someone who isn't informed about one subject or another. It should be a common skill for people to put their selves in the other person's shoes and explain it at their level. When a non-cs person asks me about what exactly my job is I don't start going into details about Hadoop and Spark etc, I talk at a level they could understand about data.
As far as the autism comment, it was a little offensive but I meant it in terms of ability to read the social situation, not cs knowledge.
I may be a little harsh here, because everyone makes mistakes, especially in college. And there is nothing wrong with that. I've done embarrassing things with recruiters too, believe me. I just want to make sure people realize it's a mistake and learn from it.
Recruiter: "We're looking for students with experience working on Linux and Unix. If you do not meet the above ..."
Stanley: "As per my previous email, I have experience working on Linux and Unix ..."
Recruiter: "Your email and resume say Unix-like systems, which is not exactly Unix."
What is the point of the recruiter's last email, claiming that the email doesn't say Unix, when it clearly does? It looks to me as though Stanley was crystal clear at this point, and the recruiter still wouldn't have any of it.
(this comment is a dup of one that i submitted elsewhere in this thread)
As a tutorial for those of us like me who sometimes stumble in situations like this, could someone who found the OP's responses to the recruiter unprofessional please post example phrasing of what the OP should have said? Let's assume the constraint that the OP will refuse to lie (so they won't just change their resume to 'Unix' instead of 'Unix-like').
This is a genuine question; I often can't think of how to phrase things and I think an example would be educational.
A technical recruiter should definitely know, especially after you've explained it in exceedingly obvious language. It's not like just updating your resume to say different words is necessarily going to work. He more or less did that at the end by being specific about Linux, and yet the recruiter was like "oh it still doesn't say Unix". My grandmother, who didn't even graduate from high school, is less clueless than this guy.
Put yourself in the recruiter's shoes for a second.
Facebook has a vast array of technologies in use, from the top to the bottom of the stack and across a wide breadth of problem domains. A lot of the time there are competing technologies.
No one engineer at Facebook is familiar with the sum of technologies worked on by engineers at Facebook.
It stands to reason that recruiters are in the same boat.
So if someone comes to you and says "I've used Oberon, which is like Modula", do you know if they're correct? You don't, really. They very well may be. But the recruiter may also be dealing with one of the three dozen hopefuls every day who are desperate to pitch that X is similar enough to Y that they should be given a chance.
The recruiter was in the wrong. But at that size, there will always be recruiters who are in the wrong. It's luck of the draw. I've dealt with two Facebook recruiters in the past 4 years: one who misunderstood my résumé, another who understands it quite well. These days I don't take it personally.
If I'm a recruiter and an intelligent-sounding person comes to me and says theyve used Oberon which is like Modula I would do 30 seconds research and understand if that is true, maybe reach out to my peers for more info.
If I didnt bother accepting anything beyond an exact keyword match of something I didnt understand then I was probably a lousy recruiter and likely not worth my paycheck.
In your experience, does it make sense for Facebook to also hire low-level recruiters to go over a mass of students? Would those recruiters be expected to do the same?
I'm not a recruiting manager. You cant really turn this situation around on me.
I dont make the rules. If your job is procuring or selling a resource and you have little/no appreciation of said resource then you're effectively a spam bot.
Imagine a car salesman said to you "Im a low level guy. I dont really know cars. But I bet you'd look great in this blue one". Does that sound acceptable to you?
I'm not a recruiter, but I'd hope that's how it goes normally.
If you can't find someone to answer your question, or don't even know how to start to find someone inside the org, what do you do?
I guess my position is that I dislike beating up on people simply for not knowing something that's not common knowledge in their own area of expertise.
> If you can't find someone to answer your question, or don't even know how to start to find someone inside the org, what do you do?
As my brother used to say when he was in the Marines in a non-combat position: "They literally pay me to move sheets of paper from the left side of the desk to the right."
This seems to be downvoted; Could one of the downvoters explain their point of view? I was pretty annoyed at the recruiter too but this explanation seemed to make sense for me.
Absolutely, though it's a dying breed, and with the news of Solaris's EOL, accelerating all the time. BSD is the FOSS actual UNIX. On the commercial side there's AIX from IBM, HP-UX from HP, and probably a few other really niche-y ones I forget.
Illumos had a hard fork from Solaris in 2010 and many of the Solaris team are apparently involved in that project, Joyent uses their own UNIX for their hypervisor, too, if I recall correctly.
You can basically buy the right to call yourself UNIX today from The Open Group. The most extreme example of this is z/OS, but Mac OS is also UNIX.
As for a singular product it was always kind of muddy. There was early UNIX, Research UNIX, BSD and then System III and System V as products from AT&T. The last product that was "pure" UNIX was System V Release 4. You could buy it into the 90s for 3B2s and PCs. It had lots of derivatives that used it as the port base like Solaris, Interactive UNIX, UnixWare etc and the code was also widely incorporated into other port bases (AIX, IRIX, etc) that predate or incorporated lots of different code like OSF/1. IIRC Novell came to own this "pure" UNIX and then sold it to SCO.
I would say any of the BSDs are UNIX today, but that caused a pretty big legal gaffe between AT&T and BSDi in the early '90s and limited adoption at a critical point. OpenBSD to me seems like the spiritual Research UNIX continuation.
A very good question, but I'm not sure if it would be useful.
I don't know if this is true or not ("I think I'm right but don't quote me"), but I think that UNIX certification applies to the effective equivalent of "that bunch of files over there". Change the checksum and the certification doesn't apply anymore. Yay.
But it's not the end of the world. The people that want to buy UNIX licenses - Solaris, HP/UX, AIX, z/OS guys, etc - are those steeped in vendor lockin from legacy systems. The number of people still part of that tradition is decreasing; most new tech stacks are built on Linux, and its new mindset.
So, a UNIX cert for Linux would ultimately be 95% geek cred, 4.9% "oh hey, let's go this way" for those from the aforementioned groups who want familiarity, and 0.1% practical in terms of ROI.
Once the personal status quo of each individual in those groups shifts so that UNIX won't pay their bills anymore, those who wants to keep their jobs will switch.
NB. I know this comment is mildly flat in terms of only looking at this from one angle. I don't have any experience or knowledge to comment on the many other interpretations of the issues I've mentioned, replies are welcome to do so.
It would be pretty comical to do so, just to muddy the already muddy term. But it has very little practical utility. I don't think any regulatory body requires a "real" UNIX these days -- sure, some products require a particular OS like AIX but I haven't heard of a spec/customer/vendor demanding "UNIX". Most clueful people would talk in terms of POSIX and {POSIX, UNIX, Linux}-like to describe the desire for portable software APIs or whatever.
Upon more thought, maybe all caps UNIX should refer to the legacy AT&T system. In the modern lexicon, Unix is mainly two things: a command environment (i.e. a shell with UNIX-like built ins and pipes) and a philosophy (shell, simple short commands, pipes, hierarchical file system, less is more etc). This use still has great meaning to me and I wish more people would spend the time to learn the culture, reading books like those by author Peter H. Salus. Using those definitions, it should still be common to talk about "Unix shell scripting" or thinking about software design in a "Unix environment", even if that were to execute entirely on Linux in practice.
I was a sysadmin in the internal managed services division of a healthcare company and we had AIX, Solaris, HP-UX, Linux (CentOS, Debian, RHEL), BSD, Open-VMS, and FreeBSD.
We had about 150 Sysadmins to manage it all, a lot of the guys had been doing their respective OS's exclusively for 20+ years.
Facepalm. Somebody show this to Zuck. Change needs to begin at the top.
EDIT: Is it possible that they actually want people with actual UNIX experience? They are recruiting students. Maybe they want someone who has used an actual UNIX system on some kind of emulator for some sort of secret retro initiative.
Some schools do still maintain a lab of Sun hardware. Extremely weak speculation: Perhaps they are targeting those schools and/or professors, without being explicit about targeting them?
Did you read the email exchange carefully? The Facebook recruiter did not ask for experience with the AT&T Unix systsem of 1970s. The candidate perhaps assumed that incorrectly.
Facebook asked for actual Linux and Unix experience which indeed many people who have worked on GNU/Linux systems like CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu, etc. and Unix systems like AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, etc. have.
Truth be told, I didn't remember there is a distinction between Unix and UNIX. I also didn't know/remember that Solaris and AIX are proper Unixes. These are probably things that a systems developer should know. Given this distinction, I am starting to empathize with the recruiter – when an unqualified candidate is trying to sell me / pedant me on something they're actually unqualified to talk about.
Years ago I had a recruiter pull a list of questions from their technical guy to ask. The first question was something about constructors in C. I carefully explained that the question made no sense for C but would for C++. They insisted the question was correct, so I told them what the answer would be in C++.
They also asked me about if I had experience with the EMACS editor, but spelled out the letter E-M-A-C-S. Why that was an important skill I have no idea. Especially since this was for a contact that several companies were competing for and I was hired by the winning company to work on it. No special knowledge of EMACS was required. Any text editor would work.
Regarding the Emacs question - could be a weedout/profiling question. I've asked recruiters in the past to screen candidates for familiarity with certain tools as a shortcut for identifying candidates with higher aptitude for what I'm hiring for.
For instance, when I'm hiring a vSphere admin, and I ask my recruiters to put anybody that wasn't immediately familiar with RVTools (among other things) at the bottom of the resume pile. It's a dead simple and ubiquitous utility for vSphere admins, and is a pretty good shortcut for eliminating people with too little experience or too hands-off experience from contention. Sure, it might end up accidentally selecting against what would otherwise be good candidates, but in general I've found it helps accelerate forced ranking of candidates.
That's probably a bit more directly applicable to the role than your Emacs question, but they might be trying to feel out what 'kind' of a developer you could be. Those that favor Emacs, Vim etc tend to be rather different than those that use Visual Studio, etc.
But a text editor? Sorry, but that's just ridiculous. There are plenty of good developers who have never heard of Emacs, and plenty of shit developers who have. Is this really what passes for interviewing in the software world? Useless trivia questions about text editors because you think that weeds people out? Have you been sued yet? Because you should probably get sued.
You sound like my racist grandfather: "Those that favor Emacs, Vim etc tend to be rather different than those that use Visual Studio, etc." Yeah? How are they different? O Great Arbiter of Skills, how did you come to this conclusion?
Honestly, while I would not stake a hiring decision on the distinction, I see quite a difference in the two. Comparing a coders chosen habits to racism is a huge stretch.
Awareness of them alone indicates a greater interest in the field imo. It obviously wouldn't be a critical factor, but it's easy to tell how enthusiastic someone is about computers in general based on whether their familiarity with them ends at the outlines of their personal experience or domain.
There's tons of ways to assess this -- interest in upcoming technologies, familiarity with linux/unix history, awareness of other tools, regardless of whether they use them, etc
To me this seems like the OPPOSITE of trivia/whiteboard interviewing. The goal is to probe someone, not mark them down for every random thing they don't know about. Software absolutely seems like one such field where it's both easy and important to find people whose enthusiasm goes home with them.
I still think you'll end up selecting against a lot of great hires. Plenty of great programmers simply don't use vim/emacs, even if aware of them. The question didn't seem to be about awareness but rather about experience. I am aware of both and actively choose not to use either - I use nano if it's ever easiest to edit a file on the terminal, and otherwise, stick to IDE's and things like Sublime/Atom.
It's really popular in the startup world to care deeply about enthusiasm about the subject at home, but a lot of these litmus tests won't consistently hit that.
Even though you may generally get better programmers on average through these types of screens and companies are free to hire as they please when it comes to this, it seems rather unfair to a good programmer who simply likes to do other things in their spare time. Requiring programmers that live and breathe CS makes it feel much more exploitative.
It's possible they have a bunch of tools written as emacs scripts to the point where it's become a key part of the role. There is enough of a learning curve (the editor itself, short cuts, elisp, plugins) and a significant chance that someone could quit in frustration that favoring people with experience makes sense.
I like to use vim whenever possible, but my job requires Visual Studio for many day to day tasks and would not hire someone unfamiliar with Visual Studio.
I once interviewed a guy who listed both EMACS and Vim in his "Skills" section. When I asked him how to quit Vim, he got visibly confused and said "you just close the window".
In my home country we say sometimes it's better being smart than right. The recruiter is doing their job and antagonizing them, no matter how right you are, is not the smart move.
I'm not disagreeing with your main point -- no one gets into the club by arguing with the bouncer.
My point is that the recruiter is a collossal screw-up, and its imprecise to describe what they did as 'doing their job'. Unless their job is to alienate qualified applicants.
There's no argument there. I would actually like to learn more about Facebook's recruiter situation to understand how this can happen. That's definitely something you want to avoid in your own company.
Facebook hires (or at minimum, interviews) hundreds of PE's a year, there's no way this sort of miscommunication isn't sorted out in the average case.
I might be wrong, but as far as I know PE's are recruited to have SysAdmin expertise as well. It's clear that the resume didn't reflect that as well as it should if this was even being asked.
You're right about the full-time PE role but this is an intern role - how much production fire-extinguishing/sysadmin experience could they expect a student to have?
It's definitely plausible! I met a guy who had gotten a PE intern offer from FB. He said he had an systems internship at a trading company where he did automation and and infrastructure.
I wouldn't know for certain but I'd think they'd be looking for experience with scripting languages and deployment systems as well.
so you didn't get the internship. did you get one with a different place, after all of that? if not, do you think your response and this subsequent post increase your marketability?
This is a tricky exchange. Both sides could've done better. To be honest though, a company like Facebook gets so many resumes that these mistakes are inevitable. Not saying it's acceptable, but it's just the nature of recruiting.
In all fairness, at scale. it takes one incompetent recruiter out of literally hundreds, or one badly managed case from an otherwise very competent recruiter, out of thousands a day, to get something like this to happen. Any large enough system will have component-level faults.
Sure, it is Facebook, they know how to build systems that are tolerant to faulty components. If they cared about preventing this, they could send resumes to multiple recruiters and proceed based on some sort of consensus. But that's the kicker, turns out their recruitment organization is already a fault tolerant system. The particular fault tolerance mode here is that they don't care about a certain rate of false negatives, no matter how egregious in hindsight, as long as they have few false positives. Sucks at a human level, but in some ways it probably is the optimal system based on what the objective function is for a large company.
Sort of off topic but I am just kind of wondering if there is a safety net if I ever burn out, and how much money I am potentially not earning :o)...
Any chance someone on here that was deeply technical transitioned into recruiting? Will you spill the beans like compensation ranges, per head bonus/commission, and satisfaction?
As an engineering manager I've done all my own recruiting and have been recognized by my management chain for doing a stand up job at it.
I know several socialites from High School that are not or barely technical that outwardly seem to be earning a lot of money doing recruiting or contract agency talent management. It seems like way less hours and stress than I've put in to become a systems expert. Maybe that wont last forever with economic waves, but then again neither do a lot of tech jobs.
It's not a bad gig, but it's sales. You need to fill and maintain your funnel of both candidates and customers.
Typically you get a cut of the action (10-20% of first year salary or annual rate) or spiffs. If you have a good network of contacts, you may be able to specialize in some niche that pays more.
The most appealing thing to me about that is performance based pay. It's not hard to imagine closing dozens of hires a year in a moderately interesting company. It probably feels great too, as you're greatly helping individuals and managers and the company by landing talent.
In an engineering org, I typically see low salary multiples for the lowest and highest performers. The lowest may be barely responsive while the highest is trading away health and life to make something happen. There is a real ceiling for pay vs effort and talent in technical roles. Tech management roles can allow for less effort and incentive programs are easier to come by, but it is still very seldom performance based where again the difference between the worst and the best is marginal. Cynically, it seems the most effective game theory to maximize ROI in a technical org is to be a shitbag and perform minimally. I can't bring myself to slump like that.
I am really thinking I need to transition into something like this or sales to build wealth in a few years. I would trade 10 years of grueling effort for financial freedom. I traded 15 years of basically unpaid grueling learning to become a systems expert. Very silly from an ROI perspective. I can always get intellectual stimulation from open source I guess, but I'd caution anyone from taking the path I did.
Your thoughts don't seem wrong, but I'm reminded of the phrase 'Grass is greener on the other side'.
In a recruiter role, networking might be everything. You can be great and know the domain specific knowledge, but missing out on one contact might cost you your salary.
To me it seems to be a very risky job. Isn't this similar to being a real estate agent in a way? Sure, we see the successful ones, but obviously there are people who go months without a sale.
Yeah most things follow a Pareto principle, and I'm sure this is no different.
Whatever I do career wise, I aim to be one of the best at it, at least the best that I can personally be. I suspect it would take a while to learn all the soft skills and what candidates and managers are looking for, but I don't think I'd have any trouble rising up. Likewise for sales, that is likely a very grueling job, but I think it comes with commensurate pay for high performance.
The real gap here from my perspective being in a deeply technical role, you really don't have high upside, even at lauded companies, vs these other roles at those /same/ companies.
Maybe I am just looking for excuses and entrepreneurism is the answer, but on glance it seems like the path to becoming a {talent,sales} rainmaker is far less risky for a good piece of the pie?
I had totally different experience with Facebook recruiter, honestly they are great and really want you to succeed. You could have just updated resume as UNIX/LINUX ...rest of the technical jargon should be explained to technical person in the interview. Why argue with recruiters? Get in the door as soon as possible and deal with someone who can understand the terms.
Just because you're right, doesn't mean you've won. The recruiter is a gatekeeper, just say the thing you need to say to get past them... move on to the next level. The recruiter asks for Unix/Linux and yours says Unix-Like, get over yourself and change your resume. They are literally telling you the password.
In situations like these you really aught to ask yourself what your end-goal with being elitist like that is really trying to serve. In engineering situations usually the purpose is some form of disguised signaling. This is the purpose of most sentences that start with "technically". But when you're talking to a recruiter that kind of move is unlikely to be effective. It's unlikely to affect your application positively, and the only effect you can expect is what happened in this interaction, namely rejection.
Be honest about why you act the way you do, and be rational about your decisions.
I disagree. It looks like the recruiter is clueless or maybe even trolling, and applicant was going out of their way to be helpful. They could have just updated their resume, and allowed the recruiter to remain ignorant, but imo that would have been very rude.
totally agree with dec0dedab0de. and recruiters should pay attention - think of how many smart candidates see this nonsense, consider it a reflection of the organization, and opt-out of the recruiting process.
If you're looking for someone who has actual high level expertise working on AIX or FreeBSD, having some dude tell you that Linux is the same as Unix or asserting that knowing what POSIX means is equivalent to having production knowledge of AIX/FreeBSD for a production engineering role is not very productive.
The recruiter handled himself professionally and should be commended for not being bullied. Mr. Zhang sounds like a punk, and would probably be better served by pulling the image.
I'm going to leave the image up. It's regrettable, but for accountability's sake I don't want to run away from my mistakes. And yeah - I think it boils down to their having strict requirements and large applicant volume, so my response definitely wasn't appropriate there.
If the recruiter is looking for FreeBSD experience and not just *nix experience he needs to be a hell of a lot more explicit. As is it just sounds like the recruiter doesn't know what he's talking about and is trying to just go based on keywords.
Especially since this is a UX research internship, and the candidate made perfectly clear that that is how the recruiter was coming across, so the recruiter had every opportunity to clarify.
The candidate didn't handle it perfectly, the recruiter however handled it far worse.
Read more carefully. It was a production engineer internship, not UX research.
Early phases of job applications are about following directions and saying what you need to truthfully say. I'm actually surprised that my original comment was voted into oblivion -- its a pretty obvious reality. The recruiter did his best to say "Just write Unix" without crossing a line.
If they need experience with a specific Unix they should ask for it by name. Having worked with a number 'real' Unix's (mainly Solaris, Irix and Digital Unix/Tru64) I can tell you that it's no easier (or harder) to transfer knowledge between, say, Irix and Solaris than between Linux and Solaris.
He already did his job of intellectually engaging the recruiter. If the other party is not interested, it will not be rude if he update his resume and move on.
On the contrary, he seems to be trying to help the applicant, most would just not reply to a candidate filtered out because their 'experience tuple' didn't contain a certain keyword (UNIX & LINUX in this case)
As a tutorial for those of us like me who sometimes stumble in situations like this, could someone who found the OP's responses to the recruiter unprofessional please post example phrasing of what the OP should have said? Let's assume the constraint that the OP will refuse to lie (so they won't just change their resume to 'Unix' instead of 'Unix-like').
This is a genuine question; I often can't think of how to phrase things and I think an example would be educational.
> Let's assume the constraint that the OP will refuse to lie.
This constraint is invalid. People need to use contextual awareness. The recruiter is most likely not a technical person, so splitting hairs won't help. And based on a bit of knowledge about Facebook, it's highly unlikely that a company that prides itself on building its own data centers from scratch will actually use a creaky AIX 7.1 for their backend, so you just "lie". Heck, it's not even a lie, it's a white lie which you'll tell the engineer interviewer down the line, while explaining that you have POSIX/whatever experience.
In my opinion this whole exchange shows a need for improvement regarding people skills for OP, at least in writing. Considering it's an internship, this was probably a good moment for a wake-up call.
> ask yourself what your end-goal with being elitist like that is really trying to serve. In engineering situations usually the purpose is some form of disguised signaling.
Facebook markets itself as hiring the best people. Therefore, when applying to Facebook, you want to market yourself as being among the best. When a recruiter first tells you that Linux isn't Unix, you assume that the elite recruiter looking for elite people is looking for an elite response which explains the difference.
OP's point is that image of Facebook elitism is just smoke and mirrors.
What precisely do you think the word elitist means? I'm not sure which dictionary you're using but I'm confident that the definition isn't close to "politely explaining the confusion, and then changing the language in your email and resume to match the inaccurate expectations of the idiot on the other end of the conversation"
This is the official CMU facebook recruiter. They have done this to multiple people I know, each time they tried to explain and yet this keeps happening.
Besides, there are other upsides: you get to work at a company that values developers, you'll have lots of competent colleagues and you'll learn a lot, and you'll work at a product that hundreds of millions of people love.
The kid isn't doing himself any favors but this is totally on the recruiter. Good lesson to learn early, you will have to deal with many ignorant people in your career and you need to adapt on the fly.
Other comments say this guy should learn how to communicate better. I agree with that.
Knowing the person you're talking to helps greatly.
The average recruiter has a high school certificate and that's it. They're hired to do largely manual work comparing skills on resumes to skills on job positions.
Now that you know how they work you should ask yourself what's your goal? Is it to get that internship at Facebook? If so then how can I write my resume and cover letter to help me get the recruiters attention? Put the skills from the job listing on your damn resume.
Personally I'd dislike working with this guy. I can tell he's a smart guy but he's misdirecting his intelligence.
> Put the skills from the job listing on your damn resume.
He did. Everyone seems to be scrolling by that screenshot. He's trying to be honest -- the poor bastard.
A few more interactions like this though and he's bound to start telling white lies on his resume. Eventually he'll start to think "sure, I've got like '4 years'ish of experience in that... fuck it..." And so it goes.
Pretty soon he's just like everyone else who doesn't bat an eye at "10 years of Swift experience" and all that garbage.
Frankly, if Facebook is hiring recruiters fresh out of HS with no tech background and treating fresh, naive, honest soon-to-be devs like this, then they've failed their own interview. This is nothing short of ridiculous.
> 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
Every OS X from 10.5 on except 10.7 has been certified under Version 3 of the Single UNIX Specification, and thus is officially considered to be UNIX.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 173 ms ] threadI'm hoping this is a yes. That was... incredibly difficult to read.
From what I've experienced with Facebook recruitment, they dragnet linkedin pretty hard and have at-least a 5-step process for interviewing that is designed to be implemented at high speed by internal people, but at-least lets you talk with internal people.
I stopped responding to their requests on Linkedin because you start over each time. Although the inquiries are interesting, it's not really fun to have a bunch of "first dates" constantly.
They should probably stop doing that.
If a business hires cutrate idiots to source candidates for the largest investment expense it has[1], I guarantee you that it will cut costs elsewhere as well.
[1] Yes, people are an investment. At a quarter of a million dollars a pop for proper coding talent, multiplied by however many coders the company has, people are the largest expense Facebook has.
This is a large part of why they contract it out and they shouldn't get a free pass on it. If $company contract out customer support (very common) we don't say "sure I was on hold for 7 hours, but the support was contracted out, so it doesn't reflect on $company".
You: Yes, I'm a qualified plumber and can do the job.
Recruiter: Sure, but can you fix our pipes?
You: Off course, that is is what I was trained to do.
Recruiter: You keep saying you're a plumber but we need someone to fix our pipes
You: I can do it.
Recruiter: we need someone who have worked with pipes.
You: I have worked with those.
Recruiter: Sure, but we need someone to fix our pipes.
etc
But this position is primarily for pipes in park bathrooms. Do you have any experience with that type of pipe?
Two parallel lines though....
Replies: "Yes, I have experience with pipe in that setting."
I would add that in this case they wanted someone with 'clay' pipes experience. He only had 'regular' pipes knowledge.
There aren't that many differences in software and they are easier to learn (eg. be aware of `killall` linux vs bsd).
In this case though I doubt they were looking for a specialist; it would have been marked as, for example, AS/400 experience if this was the case.
This guy has a better analogy (and funnier) then mine:
http://www.jasonbock.net/jb/News/Item/7c334037d1a9437d9fa650...
Recuiter: we need someone who can work with copper and pex pipes. Your resume says that you work with PEX
You: I can do plumbing. I have connected PEX to copper before.
Recruiter: Do you have experience installing copper?
You: Building codes allow you to substitute PEX for copper pipe. I have used PEX with copper.
Recruiter: we need someone to work with copper. Thank you.
Recruiter: We're looking for someone to fix the pipes.
(re-word their statement/question in your answer so there can be NO ambiguity)
You: I have lots of experience fixing many kinds of pipes, (including the EXACT SPECIFIC kind you asked for - WORD FOR WORD.)
(Notes on your replies, they didn't ask if you are a qualified plumber, they didn't ask what you were trained to do)
Of course, depending on your objective: if your objective is to have at least the option of interviewing further for this company, it helps to remember the concept of Pyrrhic victories: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrhic_victory, i.e.: don't win the battle and lose the war.
I interviewed at Google 3 times and I'm currently going through the interviews for the 4th time (a combination of bad interviewers and me being a total idiot), and this time I've stumbled across the nicest technical recruiter I've ever seen in 7yrs in the industry. She actively fought for me after a poor performance, and went above and beyond to accommodate me. And all my previous 3 recruiters at Google were extremely "professional-nice" and rather intelligent. In contrast, every single interaction I had with Facebook left a bad taste in my mouth (mostly getting rejected 2 times with a 5 line email, after being referred by Fb employees).
TL;DR stop enabling companies to be shitty
Companies have billions in the bank, make tens of billions profit each year, and have "staff" working who they don't pay a cent to.
The fact there are no laws against that is evil.
It is, in fact, illegal to not pay an intern in the state of California if the intern performs beneficial work.
Your entire rant is predicated on untrue assumptions.
I believe there is more to the US than just California, right?
Because those things still exist, just not doing employer-sponsored g work in for-profit firms.
> I believe there is more to the US than just California, right?
Yes, and unpaid interns doing work that directly benefits the employer is a violation of rules under the Fair Labor Standards Act in the whole US, not just California.
It's illegal in the whole US: https://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs71.htm
Except that is not a fact, at least in the US.
Presumably they were worried that the resumé wouldn't just be seen by a recruiter, and a more knowledgeable person might flag it.
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.
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.
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.
...but, yet, probably should be.
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...
How can you not learn that - how else can you talk to IT/Conputer teachers?
It wasn't not caring; at that point the recruiter didn't believe him about the Unix experience.
> Recruiter: We're looking for students with experience work on Linux and Unix
> Stanley: I have experience working on Linux and UNIX
> Recruiter: Your email and resume say Unix-like, which is not exactly UNIX.
The recruiter, by the end of this exchange has been given the explanation of why "UNIX-like" is the correct term, why it is being used, and why it is relevant. Stanley has also tried to take a more layman-like approach, and backed off the technical jargon to state "yes, I have that", using the exact terms that the recruiter used, despite them being incorrect.
The recruiter's last email contains things that are incorrect, and the response from the recruiter is irrational.
Clear no hire.
You'd rather higher a liar and someone that will follow instructions to the letter, even when they're incorrect?
It sounds like you'd hire this useless recruiter.
How many tens of thousands of university kids go through the hiring pipeline at Facebook each semester?
When you are doing things at that scale, you need well-defined processes. The process here was we need you to put exactly what this position requires on your resume, probably because the resume needed to be OKd by some keyword-checking system.
The candidate either was incapable of or refused to follow the process. Therefore, no hire.
Clear no hire.
Even if that were the recruiter's intent, I don't think it's that clear. At no point in the conversation does the recruiter ever make an explicit request to have a resume with both of those on it. You might think there is an implied request from the recruiter for that, but I do not, and neither, it seems, did Stanley.
The only point in the exchange that I can see where the recruiter requests a change to the resume is here:
> […] we require having Unix experience. If you have it, could you update your resume and resend?
Which he does.
The recruiter does appear to be a little clueless with the terminology, but there could be several reasons for this. Oftentimes resumes are input into an automated system that searches for very specific keywords, or the resume might be going to an executive who is very specific about what they are looking for.
At the end of the day, the recruiter gave very clear instructions on what to do. If Stanley had just followed those instructions and re-sent his resume, he'd probably be fine. Instead, he chose to be snarky and condescending in his response. The recruiter was very professional and STILL gave him a chance to fix his resume and re-send, but he still didn't.
Still it's sort of amazing that the recruiter could be both so wrong and so confident.
He was technically correct, which some people believe is the best kind of correct, but the failure here was his. He was more interested in being right than getting the internship, and as a result he gets a lot of pats on the back from people who share his philosophy here... and no internship.
But he did!! And the recruiter still gave him flak!
Stanley said, "POSIX is more-or-less a standardization effort for UNIX/Linux systems, so I've updated my resume to reflect this."
And then he shows a screenshot that just lists "UNIX", not "UNIX-like".
Then the recruiter bats at him again!
I think he was more interested in being as honest as possible, not being right.
At first, his resume included "Linux". The recruiter asked him to update his resume to include Unix as well. Stanley changed it to read just "UNIX", but no Linux.
The recruiter asked him to fix this by specifying both Linux and UNIX in his resume. Stanley updated it to say Linux and UNIX-like.
The recruiter, very professionally instead of just dropping the conversation immediately, then asked again that Stanley rectify his resume to include the terms they are looking for: Linux and UNIX. Not "UNIX-like". But Stanley again did not do this.
The recruiter gave very clear instructions on what to do, but (from the recruiter's perspective) Stanley was more concerned with condescendingly educating the recruiter rather than following simple instructions.
I sometimes screen resumes from college students at my company, and if I ever received an email exchange like the one from Stanley here, I would have immediately put him in the "no" pile. I already have 400+ people to screen, why waste time with him when I can easily find someone with equivalent experience that also knows how to follow instructions and, most importantly, isn't so rude about it?
Solid engineers, even ones still in school, know who they are and that their skills are valuable. To this candidate the value of any one recruiter is near-zero. He was chasing lols, basically.
The story here is that Facebook messed up by having this person front their recruiting efforts, not that Stanley Zhang was denied a job.
Storytime: back then us students were doing a factory tour, we went to Hoechst in Frankfurt (yes, it was that long ago). There was lunch with company research staff in the Jahrhunderthalle (they did have longer time horizons then). Strangely, the majority was from our university. That was puzzling, do they mostly recruit from our university?! They solved the mystery for us, this was a recruitment visit, they wanted us to consider them and wanted to put their best foot forward.
Something happened to the employer-employee relationship in the meantime.
On a more relevant comment, I think the student could have been a little smarter in realizing that the recruiter didn’t seem like he/she understood what was really being asked in the position he/she was recruiting for, but I think a lot of respondents on HN forget that people are sometimes held to account for items put in the resume. I remember when I interviewed at Apple in my last interview search, all 3 of the teams I had onsites with held me to account for items I had put on my resume.
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.
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.
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.
From my perspective, it appears that the recruiter is the jerk and not the candidate. I have met many computer-illiterate recruiters but never one like this who would repeat the same response over and over again despite the candidate having clarified his position.
AIX, Solaris and HP-UX are bonafide Unix systems and there indeed are software developers today who work with them.
In any case, it is not very hard to write something like the following in the resume: POSIX, CentOS (Linux), Solaris (Unix), FreeBSD (Unix-like), etc. It is always good to be more specific about your skills in situations like this than being ambiguous.
[1]: https://archive.org/details/bstj57-6-1905
Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
The candidate is incorrect in his belief that nobody uses UNIX (or Unix) in 2017 and he could have been less flippant in his responses to the recruiter, but his technical accuracy is spot on.
Regarding the minimal distinction that exists, FreeBSD is Unix, but not UNIX, because it has never been certified as there is a cost associated but it is directly derived from AT&T Unix in its lineage. Mac OS X which is derived from FreeBSD in turn was certified and is therefore a UNIX, ironically enough.
Solaris died roughly 3 times, depending on who you ask. 2002 was 15 years ago. Oracle officially killed it by laying off over 90% of people assigned to the project two days ago. Future Solaris development is deader than shit.
The only true UNIX that sees "widespread" use, and the only one that you will ever find a student with any experience with it is FreeBSD, and FreeBSD is popular because of its licensing, not its "true UNIX nature."
As somebody else said, it wouldn't have busted the recruiter's ass to forward the email to the manager and ask if "Unix-like" experience is relevant.
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.
I don't play well with idiots, or nonsensical bullshit.
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.
Most people can't communicate with blind monkeys though, so I wouldn't fault anyone for failing here either.
But yes, it certainly is a lesson in dealing with nonsense.
Want a job there? Play by their rules. Don’t want a job there? Have an email exchange like this one.
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.
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.
IMO the recruiter should have basic understanding of the technologies they are recruiting for. But it's the norm for them to have no idea.
"Is the tumor beniggun?" "Yes, that's correct, the tumor is benign".
For the first time in my life, I'm working with people who aren't particularly intelligent[1]. The lack of intelligence doesn't bother me much per se, but I was absolutely not prepared for how incredibly childish their psyche is when it comes to making mistakes and learning from them, admitting they don't know things, asking questions, etc. It was absolutely shocking how routinely people would read all kinds of ulterior motives into every possible question: "the only reason you would ask X is because you're trying to put me down" and stuff like that. I've learned to heavily sugarcoat things, stroke egos with compliments before describing things that need improvement or fixing, etc etc. Goddam is it an exhausting waste of time.
My plan at this point is to steer my career as far away as possible from people who are this stupid and immature; I spent a long time at the start of my career surrounded by very smart people and I just got used to the idea that everyone is secure in their intelligence and everyone can focus on being productive together without needing to keep stopping and feeding the egos of infants.
[1] Just to forestall the complaints: this isn't a value judgment of who they are as people, it's just a single weakness. A comparable weakness of my own is that I have to exert quite a bit of effort to maintain a strong work ethic when being hardworking comes more easily to some.
Wrong: "Yep, I have UNIX experience!"
Right: "These days, the phrases 'UNIX' and 'UNIX-like systems' are used interchangeably. Please double check this with your hiring manager to confirm that we're on the same page."
If I really thought this job was worth my time, I would've updated my resume to say UNIX and Linux, and then clarified during the first interview with a technical person.
Right: "Yep, I have Unix experience! I have worked on Solaris which is a bonafide Unix system. I also have experience with Unix-like systems like FreeBSD and Debian GNU/Linux."
Similarly IBM licensed AT&T UNIX and derived AIX. It is still certified as UNIX.
The Open Group holds the UNIX trademark and copyrights and conducts the certification and licensing process these days.
See here: https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/
You've posted functionally the same comment multiple times in this thread. No matter how many times you say it, you are technically incorrect. UNIX is a valid piece of terminology when referring to commercial Unix OSes.
Did you read my comments carefully? I am saying the same thing as you are. I am saying that Solaris and AIX /are/ bonafide Unix systems in all my comments.
Yes, but if a recruiter is attempting to convince the smartest people at top universities to come be an intern at their company, they should know the difference (or practical lack thereof) between linux and unix. Or at least they should be smart enough to not triple-down on that difference when they clearly don't know wtf they're talking about.
Bottom line is OP is a candidate that should have gotten through to the next stage and should not have been disqualified because the front-line recruiter was being an idiot. It's a missed opportunity and there are probably many more like it.
I hate this attitude. How can a recruiter know all the intricacies for the roles he is hiring, he would need to be an expert. He has to know everything he they have to learn a whole pile of new terms.
I like how easy it is for people to blame someone else here, rather than try to understand it from the recruiters position. I understand, we all hate recruiters.
If he doesn't know what the terms he's screening for mean, then he probably isn't a very effective recruiter.
aaand now I understand why he is how he is.
I don't think the onus is on developers here to explain why Unix and Posix are interchangable.
It's like the carpenter telling the recruiter that yes, his skills in building a chair transfer to building a table.
I think you may be extrapolating your own experience of "not being autistic" (by your definition) a little too widely.
Everyday I talk to someone who isn't informed about one subject or another. It should be a common skill for people to put their selves in the other person's shoes and explain it at their level. When a non-cs person asks me about what exactly my job is I don't start going into details about Hadoop and Spark etc, I talk at a level they could understand about data.
As far as the autism comment, it was a little offensive but I meant it in terms of ability to read the social situation, not cs knowledge.
I may be a little harsh here, because everyone makes mistakes, especially in college. And there is nothing wrong with that. I've done embarrassing things with recruiters too, believe me. I just want to make sure people realize it's a mistake and learn from it.
Stanley: "As per my previous email, I have experience working on Linux and Unix ..."
Recruiter: "Your email and resume say Unix-like systems, which is not exactly Unix."
What is the point of the recruiter's last email, claiming that the email doesn't say Unix, when it clearly does? It looks to me as though Stanley was crystal clear at this point, and the recruiter still wouldn't have any of it.
As a tutorial for those of us like me who sometimes stumble in situations like this, could someone who found the OP's responses to the recruiter unprofessional please post example phrasing of what the OP should have said? Let's assume the constraint that the OP will refuse to lie (so they won't just change their resume to 'Unix' instead of 'Unix-like').
This is a genuine question; I often can't think of how to phrase things and I think an example would be educational.
Is just communicating a fact politely, "not nice"?
Facebook has a vast array of technologies in use, from the top to the bottom of the stack and across a wide breadth of problem domains. A lot of the time there are competing technologies.
No one engineer at Facebook is familiar with the sum of technologies worked on by engineers at Facebook.
It stands to reason that recruiters are in the same boat.
So if someone comes to you and says "I've used Oberon, which is like Modula", do you know if they're correct? You don't, really. They very well may be. But the recruiter may also be dealing with one of the three dozen hopefuls every day who are desperate to pitch that X is similar enough to Y that they should be given a chance.
The recruiter was in the wrong. But at that size, there will always be recruiters who are in the wrong. It's luck of the draw. I've dealt with two Facebook recruiters in the past 4 years: one who misunderstood my résumé, another who understands it quite well. These days I don't take it personally.
If I didnt bother accepting anything beyond an exact keyword match of something I didnt understand then I was probably a lousy recruiter and likely not worth my paycheck.
I dont make the rules. If your job is procuring or selling a resource and you have little/no appreciation of said resource then you're effectively a spam bot.
Imagine a car salesman said to you "Im a low level guy. I dont really know cars. But I bet you'd look great in this blue one". Does that sound acceptable to you?
If you can't find someone to answer your question, or don't even know how to start to find someone inside the org, what do you do?
I guess my position is that I dislike beating up on people simply for not knowing something that's not common knowledge in their own area of expertise.
As my brother used to say when he was in the Marines in a non-combat position: "They literally pay me to move sheets of paper from the left side of the desk to the right."
As for a singular product it was always kind of muddy. There was early UNIX, Research UNIX, BSD and then System III and System V as products from AT&T. The last product that was "pure" UNIX was System V Release 4. You could buy it into the 90s for 3B2s and PCs. It had lots of derivatives that used it as the port base like Solaris, Interactive UNIX, UnixWare etc and the code was also widely incorporated into other port bases (AIX, IRIX, etc) that predate or incorporated lots of different code like OSF/1. IIRC Novell came to own this "pure" UNIX and then sold it to SCO.
I would say any of the BSDs are UNIX today, but that caused a pretty big legal gaffe between AT&T and BSDi in the early '90s and limited adoption at a critical point. OpenBSD to me seems like the spiritual Research UNIX continuation.
I don't know if this is true or not ("I think I'm right but don't quote me"), but I think that UNIX certification applies to the effective equivalent of "that bunch of files over there". Change the checksum and the certification doesn't apply anymore. Yay.
But it's not the end of the world. The people that want to buy UNIX licenses - Solaris, HP/UX, AIX, z/OS guys, etc - are those steeped in vendor lockin from legacy systems. The number of people still part of that tradition is decreasing; most new tech stacks are built on Linux, and its new mindset.
So, a UNIX cert for Linux would ultimately be 95% geek cred, 4.9% "oh hey, let's go this way" for those from the aforementioned groups who want familiarity, and 0.1% practical in terms of ROI.
Once the personal status quo of each individual in those groups shifts so that UNIX won't pay their bills anymore, those who wants to keep their jobs will switch.
NB. I know this comment is mildly flat in terms of only looking at this from one angle. I don't have any experience or knowledge to comment on the many other interpretations of the issues I've mentioned, replies are welcome to do so.
Upon more thought, maybe all caps UNIX should refer to the legacy AT&T system. In the modern lexicon, Unix is mainly two things: a command environment (i.e. a shell with UNIX-like built ins and pipes) and a philosophy (shell, simple short commands, pipes, hierarchical file system, less is more etc). This use still has great meaning to me and I wish more people would spend the time to learn the culture, reading books like those by author Peter H. Salus. Using those definitions, it should still be common to talk about "Unix shell scripting" or thinking about software design in a "Unix environment", even if that were to execute entirely on Linux in practice.
I was a sysadmin in the internal managed services division of a healthcare company and we had AIX, Solaris, HP-UX, Linux (CentOS, Debian, RHEL), BSD, Open-VMS, and FreeBSD.
We had about 150 Sysadmins to manage it all, a lot of the guys had been doing their respective OS's exclusively for 20+ years.
EDIT: Is it possible that they actually want people with actual UNIX experience? They are recruiting students. Maybe they want someone who has used an actual UNIX system on some kind of emulator for some sort of secret retro initiative.
EDIT2: http://www.jbox.dk/sanos/pdp11.htm
Facebook asked for actual Linux and Unix experience which indeed many people who have worked on GNU/Linux systems like CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu, etc. and Unix systems like AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, etc. have.
No idea if it was a typo for C# or the recruiter thought, we have C and C++, why not add C+ in there to increase our hits.
I found it amusing, but didn't start an argument..
They also asked me about if I had experience with the EMACS editor, but spelled out the letter E-M-A-C-S. Why that was an important skill I have no idea. Especially since this was for a contact that several companies were competing for and I was hired by the winning company to work on it. No special knowledge of EMACS was required. Any text editor would work.
For instance, when I'm hiring a vSphere admin, and I ask my recruiters to put anybody that wasn't immediately familiar with RVTools (among other things) at the bottom of the resume pile. It's a dead simple and ubiquitous utility for vSphere admins, and is a pretty good shortcut for eliminating people with too little experience or too hands-off experience from contention. Sure, it might end up accidentally selecting against what would otherwise be good candidates, but in general I've found it helps accelerate forced ranking of candidates.
That's probably a bit more directly applicable to the role than your Emacs question, but they might be trying to feel out what 'kind' of a developer you could be. Those that favor Emacs, Vim etc tend to be rather different than those that use Visual Studio, etc.
There's tons of ways to assess this -- interest in upcoming technologies, familiarity with linux/unix history, awareness of other tools, regardless of whether they use them, etc
To me this seems like the OPPOSITE of trivia/whiteboard interviewing. The goal is to probe someone, not mark them down for every random thing they don't know about. Software absolutely seems like one such field where it's both easy and important to find people whose enthusiasm goes home with them.
It's really popular in the startup world to care deeply about enthusiasm about the subject at home, but a lot of these litmus tests won't consistently hit that.
Even though you may generally get better programmers on average through these types of screens and companies are free to hire as they please when it comes to this, it seems rather unfair to a good programmer who simply likes to do other things in their spare time. Requiring programmers that live and breathe CS makes it feel much more exploitative.
I like to use vim whenever possible, but my job requires Visual Studio for many day to day tasks and would not hire someone unfamiliar with Visual Studio.
My point is that the recruiter is a collossal screw-up, and its imprecise to describe what they did as 'doing their job'. Unless their job is to alienate qualified applicants.
I might be wrong, but as far as I know PE's are recruited to have SysAdmin expertise as well. It's clear that the resume didn't reflect that as well as it should if this was even being asked.
I wouldn't know for certain but I'd think they'd be looking for experience with scripting languages and deployment systems as well.
It did in my eyes.
Sure, it is Facebook, they know how to build systems that are tolerant to faulty components. If they cared about preventing this, they could send resumes to multiple recruiters and proceed based on some sort of consensus. But that's the kicker, turns out their recruitment organization is already a fault tolerant system. The particular fault tolerance mode here is that they don't care about a certain rate of false negatives, no matter how egregious in hindsight, as long as they have few false positives. Sucks at a human level, but in some ways it probably is the optimal system based on what the objective function is for a large company.
Any chance someone on here that was deeply technical transitioned into recruiting? Will you spill the beans like compensation ranges, per head bonus/commission, and satisfaction?
As an engineering manager I've done all my own recruiting and have been recognized by my management chain for doing a stand up job at it.
I know several socialites from High School that are not or barely technical that outwardly seem to be earning a lot of money doing recruiting or contract agency talent management. It seems like way less hours and stress than I've put in to become a systems expert. Maybe that wont last forever with economic waves, but then again neither do a lot of tech jobs.
Typically you get a cut of the action (10-20% of first year salary or annual rate) or spiffs. If you have a good network of contacts, you may be able to specialize in some niche that pays more.
In an engineering org, I typically see low salary multiples for the lowest and highest performers. The lowest may be barely responsive while the highest is trading away health and life to make something happen. There is a real ceiling for pay vs effort and talent in technical roles. Tech management roles can allow for less effort and incentive programs are easier to come by, but it is still very seldom performance based where again the difference between the worst and the best is marginal. Cynically, it seems the most effective game theory to maximize ROI in a technical org is to be a shitbag and perform minimally. I can't bring myself to slump like that.
I am really thinking I need to transition into something like this or sales to build wealth in a few years. I would trade 10 years of grueling effort for financial freedom. I traded 15 years of basically unpaid grueling learning to become a systems expert. Very silly from an ROI perspective. I can always get intellectual stimulation from open source I guess, but I'd caution anyone from taking the path I did.
In a recruiter role, networking might be everything. You can be great and know the domain specific knowledge, but missing out on one contact might cost you your salary.
To me it seems to be a very risky job. Isn't this similar to being a real estate agent in a way? Sure, we see the successful ones, but obviously there are people who go months without a sale.
Whatever I do career wise, I aim to be one of the best at it, at least the best that I can personally be. I suspect it would take a while to learn all the soft skills and what candidates and managers are looking for, but I don't think I'd have any trouble rising up. Likewise for sales, that is likely a very grueling job, but I think it comes with commensurate pay for high performance.
The real gap here from my perspective being in a deeply technical role, you really don't have high upside, even at lauded companies, vs these other roles at those /same/ companies.
Maybe I am just looking for excuses and entrepreneurism is the answer, but on glance it seems like the path to becoming a {talent,sales} rainmaker is far less risky for a good piece of the pie?
--
Interviewer: First of all, we're working in a subdivision building a lot of brown houses. Have you built a lot of brown houses before?
Carpenter: Well, I'm a carpenter, so I build houses, and people pretty much paint them the way they want.
Interviewer: Yes, I understand that, but can you give me an idea of how much experience you have with brown? Roughly.
Carpenter: Gosh, I really don't know. Once they're built I don't care what color they get painted. Maybe six months?
The recruiter handled himself professionally and should be commended for not being bullied. Mr. Zhang sounds like a punk, and would probably be better served by pulling the image.
Especially since this is a UX research internship, and the candidate made perfectly clear that that is how the recruiter was coming across, so the recruiter had every opportunity to clarify.
The candidate didn't handle it perfectly, the recruiter however handled it far worse.
Early phases of job applications are about following directions and saying what you need to truthfully say. I'm actually surprised that my original comment was voted into oblivion -- its a pretty obvious reality. The recruiter did his best to say "Just write Unix" without crossing a line.
This is a genuine question; I often can't think of how to phrase things and I think an example would be educational.
email 1: I want to apply
email 2: I fixed my resume
email 3: my fix didn't work? you must be wrong
email 4: you are still wrong
but at email 3 you clearly aren't getting it and should ASK them what they want
This constraint is invalid. People need to use contextual awareness. The recruiter is most likely not a technical person, so splitting hairs won't help. And based on a bit of knowledge about Facebook, it's highly unlikely that a company that prides itself on building its own data centers from scratch will actually use a creaky AIX 7.1 for their backend, so you just "lie". Heck, it's not even a lie, it's a white lie which you'll tell the engineer interviewer down the line, while explaining that you have POSIX/whatever experience.
In my opinion this whole exchange shows a need for improvement regarding people skills for OP, at least in writing. Considering it's an internship, this was probably a good moment for a wake-up call.
Facebook markets itself as hiring the best people. Therefore, when applying to Facebook, you want to market yourself as being among the best. When a recruiter first tells you that Linux isn't Unix, you assume that the elite recruiter looking for elite people is looking for an elite response which explains the difference.
OP's point is that image of Facebook elitism is just smoke and mirrors.
Besides, there are other upsides: you get to work at a company that values developers, you'll have lots of competent colleagues and you'll learn a lot, and you'll work at a product that hundreds of millions of people love.
Knowing the person you're talking to helps greatly.
The average recruiter has a high school certificate and that's it. They're hired to do largely manual work comparing skills on resumes to skills on job positions.
Now that you know how they work you should ask yourself what's your goal? Is it to get that internship at Facebook? If so then how can I write my resume and cover letter to help me get the recruiters attention? Put the skills from the job listing on your damn resume.
Personally I'd dislike working with this guy. I can tell he's a smart guy but he's misdirecting his intelligence.
He did. Everyone seems to be scrolling by that screenshot. He's trying to be honest -- the poor bastard.
A few more interactions like this though and he's bound to start telling white lies on his resume. Eventually he'll start to think "sure, I've got like '4 years'ish of experience in that... fuck it..." And so it goes.
Pretty soon he's just like everyone else who doesn't bat an eye at "10 years of Swift experience" and all that garbage.
Frankly, if Facebook is hiring recruiters fresh out of HS with no tech background and treating fresh, naive, honest soon-to-be devs like this, then they've failed their own interview. This is nothing short of ridiculous.
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/linux-vs-unix-crucial-differenc...
"Mac OS X is also a certified Unix operating system".
Every OS X from 10.5 on except 10.7 has been certified under Version 3 of the Single UNIX Specification, and thus is officially considered to be UNIX.