
Facebook's Recruiting and Retention Problem - daviday
http://www.businessinsider.com/facebooks-recruiting-and-retention-problem-2009-4
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kalvin
I went to a focus group in SF that turned out to be organized by Facebook (the
last question was "what could Facebook tell you to convince you to work
there?"-- it wasn't possible to tell up till then, surprisingly) and of the
dozen CS students/alumni from Stanford/Berkeley there, none of them put
Facebook as their first choice from a list of tech companies (all the large
ones + Palantir, Twitter, FB).

Surprisingly, even though everyone had completely different career goals and
rankings of companies, everybody had the same answer to the last question:
"Tell me where you're headed and how you're going to get there."

------
geuis
I interviewed with Facebook in March for a front-end developer role. It was an
insulting experience. The tech screen was with some low-level engineer. The
first(and only question before I hung up on him) was to write a function in
javascript to return the square root of a number.

My answer in 15 seconds: var sqr = function(e){ return Math.sqrt(e); }

Easy enough. But no, he wanted a function that demonstrated an algorithm to
find the square root. Ok... I said. I spent a minute trying to salvage some
odd details from high-school algebra and basically came up blank. I was
thinking, well this isn't going to look good on me. I readily admit to him
that my knowledge of figuring out square roots by hand is a rusty, having been
out of high school for 12 years(even though in retrospect, this was something
we were never really even taught anyway). But surely this guy, who is
screening me for my ability to do front-end coding, will move on and start
asking me some hard problems about javascript, css, cross browser problems,
etc. No.

We spend the next 6-8 minutes with him circling back on his square root
problem. I tried a couple more times to answer this question that is
_completely_ unrelated to the job I'm interviewing for. Finally, I get so fed
up with this moron that my internal ticker clicks over and I realize, "Even if
I get this job, I'm going to be dealing with these kinds of nazel-gazing
engineers every single day. Not an environment I want to be in." I thanked him
for his time, and he acts surprised and says "Are you sure? After everything
it took to get to talk to me?". Yes, I say. I'm quite sure. >Click.<

I realized a long time ago what kind of people these are. When I was growing
up, the garbage truck would come by on Tuesdays and Thursdays. When we first
moved to the neighborhood, we would put our garbage out by the mailbox and
some days it would be picked up and sometimes not. We would complain and
nothing would change.

After a few weeks, I was standing out front when they came by. I noticed that
everyone had their trash bags on the right side of their mailboxes. That
morning, I had done that as well. But some new neighbors down the street had
put theirs out on the left side of their mailbox. The truck comes by, grubby
guys grabbing/throwing, grabbing throwing. All the garbage gone, except for
the neighbors. The next time, I purposely left ours on the left side. Didn't
get picked up that day.

So that was the day that I realized these guys had their Line In The Sand. It
was Their Way or the Highway. They had a really crappy job. Probably crappy
lives at home because they're garbage men. This was Florida, not NYC. There's
no glamor or high-pay there. This was the one place where they were the kings,
the arbiters of Pickup Or Not. This was the one point of control over their
lives they could influence, and they grabbed onto with both hands and some
toes.

So this little middling engineer at Facebook had his Line too, in the form of
a square root function that Had To Be ANSWERED! "You shall not cross!" He
exclaims internally. I'm positive he was quite satisfied with himself after I
hung up. Some self congratulation at keeping another peasant out of the castle
halls. Kind of like the junk yard dog on a chain behind the fence. Smug in
barking and keeping away the kids, but still chained to his dog house.

~~~
DaniFong
Root-finding algorithms, or more generally iterative optimization and
numerical solution of equations, isn't something to be sneered at. Sure, it's
a front end position, but the ability to do this is something I'd want to know
if I were interviewing you, too.

~~~
abossy
Many square root methods have been devised, notable among them the Newton
method, devised by the _guy that invented calculus._.

How does front-end design work significantly overlap with this? I would wager
that one could quiz the best CSS/Javascript gurus in the world and not a
single one would know, nor care.

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abstractbill
_Facebook's "close rate" on new employees it wants to hire hovers around 80%
... for a company with the potential to mint hundreds of millionaires in a
rare Silicon Valley IPO, both numbers seem low._

Right, but it's increasingly unlikely that any new employee will be among
those millionaires.

~~~
jonknee
And that there will be any significant number of millionaires. It has yet to
be monetized.

~~~
teej
> It has yet to be monetized.

Incorrect. It has yet to become profitable.

~~~
jonknee
Successfully monetized then. We can play semantics all day, but Facebook has
lost a shit ton of money and has no plan to make a shit ton + X(billion) in
the near future .

~~~
furburger
it doesn't matter. employees only become rich if the _stock_ goes crazy. lots
of profitable companies have craptastic stocks.

~~~
jonknee
It matters completely, if Facebook can't get a plan together to make tons of
money there won't be an IPO to bring in the fuck-you money. Right now they are
unprofitable and have no great outlook that would lead to an IPO.

------
josefresco
It's the circle of life (or poo depending oh who you ask)

This same article has been written about Microsoft, Apple, Google and every
other successful tech giant,

I should start writing my 'Twitter Retention Crisis' article now, and just
insert the names and which companies they left for later when it starts
happening.

~~~
vaksel
the difference is that at Google the programmers would be working on fun and
exciting new things, so it takes a lot longer to get bored with the
company...at facebook? What real innovation is there? I mean if you think
about it, most of Facebook's features can be written by any programmer.

~~~
hboon
That's like saying work at Twitter is easy because it's just a simple
messaging system.

Scaling a system to the level of Google, Facebook and Twitter is the hard
part.

~~~
evgen
Actually, I have to disagree.

There was a time when this was the hard part, but at this point the "scale it
up" search space has been explored quite effectively by a lot of different
groups to the point where the only reason anyone below the "system architect"
level would need to know the ins and outs of this particular subject is
because the company has a deep-seated NIH syndrome.

Scaling a system to the Google, Facebook, or Twitter level is hard, but
getting to half of their size using off the shelf components is not. Getting
the rest of the way on this journey is not something that mid-level tool and
front-end coders should ever have to deal with. If they do need to know this
information then you are doing it wrong...

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

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

my interview with them was pointlessly difficult, i pretty much hung up on
them because it was obvious that the point of the interview was to provide
amusement for the caller.

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

