
Are you a Facebook employee? - antichaos
https://www.facebook.com/ajax/flash/user_info.php
======
slug
{"is_fb_employee":"maybe soon?
[https://www.facebook.com/careers/department.php?dept=enginee...](https://www.facebook.com/careers/department.php?dept=engineering)}

~~~
hjalle
Thats funny actually =)

~~~
idrinkmusic
How do they know that I actually fit in that department and not in Marketing?
Like... I never put who my employee was or my profession..

EDIT: Oh, I did put my profession. Stupid me.

~~~
jturn
I thought it was implying that if you are the type of person to find that link
you could be in the engineering department (ie it isn't dynamic)

~~~
peterhunt
we read hacker news :)

------
helloburin
I think it checks the referral page you came from when clicking it and shows
the {"is_fb_employee":"maybe soon?
[https://www.facebook.com/careers/department.php?dept=enginee...](https://www.facebook.com/careers/department.php?dept=engineering)}
when coming from HN.

If I open a new window and copy/pasta the URL, it'll say false :)

------
gojomo
Now, if you were to browse Facebook through a proxy that always tampered with
this result in transit to say you were an employee... might some stray client-
side code do anything interesting because it trusted that response?

~~~
evan_
try it and find out. I doubt anything ever even hits that programmatically.

------
goldmab
That's cute but it's not accurate. I interviewed there _over two years ago_
and I appear to be blacklisted, since whenever I look at any of their job
descriptions I get this:

"Hey, we have reviewed your application and unfortunately don't have an
opening for you."

I can't really square that with "Maybe soon?"

~~~
nbm
That sounds like a bug - from what I'm told by a recruiter, you should be able
to apply again by now. You can also start the process by emailing the address
in the text at the bottom of job once you click on "Apply for this position".

~~~
weel
If ever the online recruiting system gives you trouble but you think you ought
to be able to apply, send your application to HR by email. (careers@fb.com
should do it, I believe) And tell them about the bug too, so they can get it
fixed.

Also, if you know somebody who works at Facebook, try to get them to refer you
instead of applying directly. (Just email them your resume and ask if they can
forward it.) This applies not just to Facebook but to most other big
companies, especially popular employers that get a lot of resumes every week.
Our recruiters try hard to evaluate all the resumes they receive, but if you
guessed that they probably look more closely at ones that reach them by way of
an internal referral, I think you guessed correctly.

------
Jarred
I think this is_fb_employee variable is to check if they should be running the
internal testing version of Facebook. Facebook has a subdomain which, in their
offices everyone is redirected to. It's something like 'preview.facebook.com'.
It houses the latest testing build of Facebook. This way all the employees are
testing Facebook just by being on it, and they have other people testing their
new builds for short periods of time (~2 weeks). Chances are, the server
checks if the user is at an IP of a Facebook office, and that's the only
condition where this is true. This would make sense because if they just
redirect users to Facebook.com in their offices to preview.facebook.com, then
nearly anyone could do it. This would also help prevent leaking of new
features as well, because employees wouldn't be able to access them outside of
Facebook.

They mention this in the Facebook Effect ([http://www.amazon.com/Facebook-
Effect-Inside-Company-Connect...](http://www.amazon.com/Facebook-Effect-
Inside-Company-Connecting/dp/1439102112)). Or, at least the part about an
subdomain for testing their website in-house. Everything else was me analyzing
that.

~~~
mitchty
Why not just setup a proxy.pac file and proxy all internal ip's to the test
domain?

~~~
spiantino
not sure what a .pac file is, but yes, this is how it works.

~~~
mitchty
Just a javascript script file that tests for where ip-wise the user originates
from and determines if you use a proxy for the site or connect directly.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_auto-config>

------
ry0ohki
I'm not? What the hell was that walk in the woods for then??!!

------
yid
For what it's worth, I am, and I still get a 0.

~~~
hugh3
"I looked into it more deeply and I found that apparently what happened is
that yid was laid off five years ago and no one ever told him about it; but
through some kind of glitch in the payroll department, he still gets a
paycheck. So we just went ahead and fixed the glitch."

~~~
stiller
So, uh, yid has been let go?

------
base2john
{"user":842915,"is_fb_employee":"Dish Washer"} ? WTF?

~~~
hugh3
Hey, as long as the dish washers get stock options it's still a pretty good
job.

------
csomar
According to Facebook, I might be soon an employee.

    
    
      {"is_fb_employee":"maybe soon? https://www.facebook.com/careers/department.php?dept=engineering"}

~~~
ry0ohki
They changed it since this hit the top of Hacker News, I'm REALLY impressed
with the speed of rolling something like that out on the fly.

~~~
cbr
That's good; I was sad they were preemptively rejecting me when I saw "false".

------
taylorbuley
Well played, Facebook:

{"is_fb_employee":"maybe soon?
[https://www.facebook.com/careers/department.php?dept=enginee...](https://www.facebook.com/careers/department.php?dept=engineering)}

------
clarkevans
It appears that this web service has a rather obvious defect, the Content-Type
is set to "text/html; charset=utf-8" yet, the response body seems to be JSON
rather than HTML. The proper Content-Type should be "application/json" with
Content-Disposition to "inline". Perhaps they didn't do this since some
browsers ignore the Content-Disposition with this Content-Type, and prompt to
download the content regardless.

Even so, "text/html" is still wrong. Since the content actually isn't intended
for a JSON parser, but, a human, "text/plain" would be the most conservative
(and not wrong).

------
swapsmagic
Ok looks like if the url is referred from Hacker News, then they are
displaying, {"is_fb_employee":"maybe soon?
<https://www.facebook.com/careers/department.php?dept=enginee...>}

Even if you are logged out.

I am not an facebook employee so if i just paste the url in address bar and
enter it, it shows: is_fb_employee: false with my UID.

If i logged out, it shows UID: 0 with is_fb_employee: false.

It's a nice idea to attract ppl from different site and based on the site
domain, give them relevant career page url. (May be an intern project)

So for HN, it's engineering career page, if the referral site is relevant to
some other domain (i.e. sales/marketing) then they will give
<http://www.facebook.com/careers/department.php?dept=sales>.

Not sure how much data facebook have of other websites for categorizing
majority of the websites in to different domain, but i feel Google can do much
better with the same concept.

------
pettazz
I'm going to start using this as an endpoint for stats checks on my own stuff
to see if Facebook employees are visiting my site.

~~~
jannes
The same origin policy in browsers will stop you from doing that.

~~~
romey
Can't you use a JSONP request?

~~~
MiguelHudnandez
JSONP is a way to consume a feed from a willing website on a different domain
name. I say "willing" because the feed must be presented in JSONP -- there is
no way for you to alter a JSON feed into a JSONP feed without using some sort
of proxy.

Because you'd need to use a proxy on your domain to convert the feed to JSONP,
you would then lose access to the client's cookies for the target domain. That
basically means that no, you can't use a JSONP request to defeat the same-
origin policy.

------
richchan
I hope there isn't a flash app on Facebook that is using just that to decide
whether to show an employee/admin interface.. Will be quite easy to spoof the
result of that page if it is client-side.

------
dreamdu5t
Who cares? Getting excited over some random graph value used internally...
okay?

I mean, I already assumed FB had a staging server. Why does this interest
people so much?

------
Shenglong
Can someone please edit a question mark into this title? It's frustrating me.

~~~
hugh3
Are you a facebook employee question mark

 _"Hey Mark, am I a facebook employee?"

"Not any more!"_

~~~
Shenglong
I think this is the most amusing HN thread I've ever seen. :)

------
mahmud

      ln -s user_info.php user_info

------
the_cat_kittles
wow, I am the 49,200,124th user? we should see who can get the lowest score...

~~~
martingordon
600,343 (343rd user at Penn)

Assuming similar adoption rates at the 4 other "second wave" schools, I'm
probably one of the first 5-10k users of Facebook.

~~~
WALoeIII
504731 - 4731st at Dartmouth. They opened it during exam week when everyone
was in the library and nearly the entire school registered on one day.

~~~
VladRussian
lemmings.

------
h00k
So, what's the point?

~~~
flyt
is_fb_employee() is an internal FB function that can be used to gate features
to employees only on facebook.com.

------
leon_
let's build a better and stronger platform for ... clicking virtual cows!

------
Kirchart123
{"is_fb_employee":"maybe soon?
[https://www.facebook.com/careers/department.php?dept=enginee...](https://www.facebook.com/careers/department.php?dept=engineering)}

Maybe soon ... Engineering department .. I HOPE SO!

..im actually an engineer

