Hey folks, I'm the student writing the emails in the post here. Thanks to everyone for their criticisms. While I was initially kind of shocked by the recruiter's response, I've had a lot of time to think about it today and have realized that I was being pretty damn condescending and spoke out of line without regards to the context. It's been a hard lesson learned. I honestly regret the whole exchange, and posting it online was inappropriate as well. I briefly debated deleting the image, but decided to leave it up for sake of posterity and accountability.
Also, just to be clear, I do not (and never did) hold any hard feelings towards the recruiter; in fact, it was very kind of them to point out why I was not qualified in the first place. This has been probably the most reflective of how I let my ego get the best of me at times, and I hope it might serve as a warning to those who might be tempted to do the same "devsplaining" in similar situations.
Please let me know if you have any other criticisms beyond the ones already voiced in this thread. I'm reading through the comments here as I can, and it's been a lot of good advice. Thanks again.
Hi, I think you could have massaged the snark in the sentence that says "Beyond software developers who have programmed in the 1970s, most people do not have experience with a true UNIX OS" but other than that I think you should walk away thinking that your communication was clear, straight-forward and respectful.
Here's what happened - the recruiter had a list of keywords, received a large volume of inbound resumes and filtered for == 'UNIX' and dumped everything else.
They (and the company they represent) could have done a better job if they'd taken the information given, created an actual human mental model and filtered accordingly but chose to behave like a computer program instead. Their loss - move on and don't feel bad about this.
But I want to point out that like the recruiter you too got stuck in the literal filter. You assumed, I'm guessing correctly, that the hiring team is probably looking for someone with experience working on UNIX-like operating systems.
A bit of advice: When you encounter imperfect systems like this in the future a good practice is to ask yourself if you know what the actual desired outcome is, and give the lossy filter the input it needs to get you to the next round.
Here it would have been simply updating your resume to list UNIX instead offering an explainer. This would get you through the recruiter filter, and during your actual phone screen with someone on the hiring team, you could discuss your UNIX-like experience if asked. If they did want literal UNIX experience, you could apologize for misinterpreting the requirement and move on. No harm done.
That's the most cringy part - in the second iteration you'll note he did list UNIX as a skill, but then the recruiter went on about the lack of Linux experience (which he had just replaced)! Like playing whack-a-mole.
Yeah, that's the part that gave the game away when the recruiter did the whack-a-mole move. The recruiter did in fact know exactly what the difference was and he was obstructing the candidate. Who knows why, maybe he feels there are too many asians working at Facebook so he takes it upon himself to play games with applicants who have asian names so they are more likely to give up, but he can still have plausible deniability in showing that he reached out to all ethnic groups if he's ever audited. This sort of stuff happens all the time in industry. If they are interested, management there can audit recruiter exchanges to identify different approaches a particular recruiter takes with different classes of applicants to find out exactly what classes or categories of persons they are obstructing.
> Who knows why, maybe he feels there are too many asians working at Facebook so he takes it upon himself to play games with applicants who have asian names
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence/stupidity"
> The recruiter did in fact know exactly what the difference was and he was obstructing the candidate.
For a little while I was basically convinced of deliberate obstruction - no sane person would use the arguments employed by the recruiter. But, on reading through from the top once more, the recruiter was actually initially helpful and I have settled on "incompetence, not malice". Almost settled, at least.
> When you encounter imperfect systems like this in the future a good practice is to ask yourself if you know what the actual desired outcome is, and give the lossy filter the input it needs to get you to the next round.
I feel like this is one of the most fundamental skills I learned in school. You don't answer the actual question, you provide the response that they are looking for, even if those are different. This is doubly true for machine graded multiple choice exams.
We had a biology teacher in high school who, in order to keep things fair, made the system very clear: when answering essay questions, he had a list of a dozen or so points he wanted you to mention, and you were graded by how many you hit. It didn't matter if you had a brilliant thesis or whatever, if you didn't recite the relevant parts of the book and lectures back, you lost credit.
The biology barely matters, but I couldn't have asked for better training in dealing with recruiter (and hard headed managers, beurocrats, etc).
And yet engineers are taught to be liberal in what they accept and strict in what they send. It would seem that most recruiters are taught the opposite.
This is good advice. If you want the internship/job at a company, you have to get your foot in the door. That means going through the recruitment team. Cutting off your nose to spite your face doesn't often result in job offers. Get through the recruitment and make it better from the inside.
SunOS, HP-UX, and BSDs up to a point all ran System V binaries until recently, or still do. If they really want that then it's a thing they can ask for.
Speaking as someone who used to work in dev at Facebook, in my time there I saw absolutely no Unix systems, just Linux on the production side. They did have some proprietary systems in corporate IT that could have been running on HP-UX or AIX for all I know, but a PE intern wouldn't ever have touched those.
> A bit of advice: When you encounter imperfect systems like this in the future a good practice is to ask yourself if you know what the actual desired outcome is, and give the lossy filter the input it needs to get you to the next round.
This is extremely condescending. The article displayed a supercilious tone towards the recruiter, clearly making it known that "I (the erudite developer) know more about how to filter candidates than you (the ignoramus recruiter). I am right, and I will only adjust my position under duress to the bare minimum which meets your requirements".
But, as a recruiter, I would be delighted to glean this insight into a candidate's mindset, and gladly put them into the "struggles with collaboration" reject pile.
Facebook employ canny recruiters. If this interaction seems odd to the "well actually" crowd, please be advised that it makes perfect sense to those involved in hiring decisions.
You think this exchange shows a recruiter conducting a psych experiment?
All I see is a human keyword grep that is clearly failing to do their job: find relevant candidates and forward them on. I say this having been in both ends of the recruiting process and have have struggled with recruiters who had no understanding of how to read a technical resume and rejected JavaScript experts on this basis that they didn't list html in their keywords.
Your statement is a mismatch between the comment about the lossy filter, and the actual email conversation, which clearly shows the lossy filter in all its glory.
My statement is about condescendingly calling humans doing their job 'lossy filters', and challenging the deeply-ugly assumption that they should have bowed to the candidate's correctness.
The recruiter wanted to advance the candidate through the pipeline; they told them exactly what they needed to do to proceed; the candidate didn't think it was necessary to modify their position to conform with the requirements, in the face of someone asking nicely.
Humans are always lossy filters, more lossy in some areas than others. There is also no 'bowing' required, and there is no correctness.
The recruiter wanted to put pegs in holes (which is essentially what selection is), but mistook the request for a red rond peg for 'only a specific type of red' peg. The peg in this situation might have been fire engine red, while the recruiter had poppy red in mind. In both cases, what they both should have in mind is not the color of the peg, but the shape. Swap peg with 'POSIX' and color with Unix, Linux, Unix-alike and you're back in context.
In this specific context, the one setting up the list of requirements should have specified "any posix, unix, linux or similar knowledge" as one single item, and then the recruiter should have matched any response that contains either posix, unix, linux or bsd, or a combination of those. This same problem could have happened if someone wanted a lathe operator that does threads, but the respondent lists NPT, TPI and M, but the recruiter doesn't know the area of expertise to filter for that and thus loses the input completely.
Aside from that, there is emotion and intonation and tone and appearances, but that doesn't have anything to do with the concept of 'lossy filters' and it totally irrelevant regarding that.
We are all lossy filters because the world makes infinite demands on our time and attention and we have finite amounts of it give.
I didn't write this as an indictment of the recruiter.
How could I when I have no knowledge of their constraints, their past experiences or the incentives that guide their behavior? In all likelihood, they're behaving in a way that's perfectly consistent with their environment.
What I can do is form a reasonable guess of what the desired outcome is - the recruiter wants to move a qualified candidate into the applicant pool, the applicant wants a shot at interviewing, and Facebook wants someone who has experience in working with UNIX or UNIX-like systems.
Structuring the response so that everyone gets the outcome they want, as an acknowledgment of the constraints, and not as a criticism of the recruiter makes everybody win.
> I didn't write this as an indictment of the recruiter.
Have you heard? Authorial intent is dead. If you write something crappy, it doesn't matter if you meant to or not.
Calling someone a 'lossy filter' dehumanise them; these are people doing an incredibly difficult job & whose work has a huge impact on the productivity and success of companies.
> Structuring the response so that everyone gets the outcome they want, as an acknowledgment of the constraints, and not as a criticism of the recruiter makes everybody win.
I find this a disingenuous excuse: the behaviour you think should change was the recruiter's insistence on specifically 'Linux'. It is a criticism, whether you intended it or not. Your recommendations are to recognise and work around this behaviour, not to understand and accept it.
As a thought exercise, have you considered how a candidate without Linux experience would have acted in this situation? What evidence would the recruiter use to determine if this was a genuine candidate, or a dead lead that wouldn't proceed + waste their time + cause them to miss their quota?
This is ridiculous. Nothing in your responses was rude. The CMU recruiter is dense and underqualified. Don't apologize for taking the time to remain honest in your communications and explain the circumstances.
Because of the monopolies that have been allowed to exist, getting black listed by FB is akin to chopping off a large portion of the quality tech jobs out there.
Its not that he was factually wrong (or even wrong in etiquette) , but as my mom said you can be right and dead right, which is why he recognizes he needed a better approach to leave the most opportunities for his career going forward
What has been done has been done and there is no place for regrets. Facebook might (along with its partner and associates) be a big workplace but it definitely isn't the only launchpad for a happy & successful career.
He came a little bit snarky, true, but I yet have to see devstar who isn't snarky at least to some degree.
I hardly think getting blacklisted by FB would lose you opportunities outside of FB. Sure, you probably can't get a job at Instagram because they probably share the recruiting database. Beyond that, there are a million startups, and tons of other medium and large engineering companies that need technical people. Seriously, Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc are all trying to steal each other's employees. They are competing so they definitely don't share such information.
If this person is good, they will definitely have opportunities elsewhere.
> Because of the monopolies that have been allowed to exist, getting black listed by FB is akin to chopping off a large portion of the quality tech jobs out there.
That does not describe reality as I've lived it. I tell headhunters from Google, Apple, Amazon, FB and other huge companies to leave me alone every few years - seems like they expire their 'go away' notes after a while.
I've had zero problems finding quality employment.
Facebook isn't going to blacklist someone over a bad interaction with a university recruiter, at least short of sending an email full of hate-speech.
It's an opportunity missed (it's a great place to have an internship or be a new grad, not so much for senior people who've worked elsewhere in industry) but the OP will certainly have no trouble applying again with some future recruiter.
> I was being pretty damn condescending and spoke out of line without regards to the context.
No, you didn't speak out of line. To be honest, the recruiter was lucky you were willing to continue the conversation at all; if that were my experience with Facebook recruiting, I'd simply would have stopped replying as soon as it was clear that the recruiter was nothing more than checking boxes. The recruiter needs to improve before they lose more than just intern prospects.
Eh, honestly I would've been similarly frustrated. The recruiter seems like they are being needlessly bureaucratic. Either they are familiar with Unix and thus should know that Unix-like is synonymous with Unix nowadays or they aren't and they should take your word.
Maybe you were a little condescending but it happens and rejecting someone on the basis of this exchange seems mad to me. If FB doesn't reverse their decision here I'd be surprised/disappointed.
I read the exchange as cutting the recruiter slack. He didn't say "you're wrong" or "you're an idiot." It seems to me he's saying "here's how I understand what you're saying, and here's why I think my skills meet your qualifications."
Do remember that we are talking about internships here.
If I have a task for an intern that requires some shell-scripting, and the intern already understands what it means to pipe commands, I put my hands together in silent thanks.
However, the HR person clearly filtered with "==UNIX". Hence, any explanation to him/her just wasted everybodies time. A different approach might have landed Stanley an interview with a Tech and the world might have looked different.
But then, he has plenty of new Tech contacts now. ;-)
> If I have a task for an intern that requires some shell-scripting, and the intern already understands what it means to pipe commands, I put my hands together in silent thanks.
I thought we were talking about university students studying CS or related discipline?
How on earth would a uni student in CS don't know about piping commands? Does this actually happen? I dropped out of uni after 1,5 years, and I studied bioinformatics, not CS, but even then I considered using pipes as basic and universal skill for any "advanced user", not even an engineer.
> How on earth would a uni student in CS don't know about piping commands?
Beyond the obvious ones, lots and lots of valid reasons this could happen:
1. Student is entirely new to programming as a concept and just started in university. Not every fresh CS student has been programming since birth.
2. Student uses the shell entirely for basic commands and honestly doesn't even realize it can be used for more advanced things
3. Student is really interested in the "Science" part of CS and isn't planning on being a developer. Plenty of brilliant CS minds are awful at the programming part but extremely adept at, say, consensus protocols.
Your basic first year CS curriculum might offer a crash course in things like basic shell scripting, but it's certainly not a given. Computer Science is a very broad field and it's arguably a huge waste of time for them to teach you how to pipe commands when they could be teaching you something you can't pick up in 10 minutes, like automata theory.
Many interns I've been in charge of were not comfortable in the command line and most had no experience outside of windows. Writing shell scripts? The everything-is-a-file concept in Unix? You're lucky if they know what you are talking about.
It highly depends on where and what exactly you study, but in many cases you've probably been explained shell basics once and can get by with knowledge how to to copy-paste commands to install packages and basic git usage.
Of course, many students are interested in more and learn it, but isn't a requirement, so students with other interests have no real need for it.
Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, and FreeBSD are all Unix systems. With the exception of FreeBSD they are all also UNIX, because other than FreeBSD the other three are commercial Unix OSes that have been certified and therefore hold a license to use the trademarked name UNIX.
Debian GNU/Linux is a Unix-like system because Linux is not Unix, but it is Unix-like and when combined with a GNU userland is POSIX compliant.
For which definition of UNIX? There are 'genetic unices' - systems that directly descent from AT&T UNIX. From your list Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, and FreeBSD are (genetic) UNIX, since they all descent from AT&T UNIX (FreeBSD via the Berkely distribution of UNIX).
Then there are 'trademark unices', which are systems that implement the Single UNIX Specification and are certified to be compliant. Such a system does not need to be a descendant of AT&T UNIX. From your list, Solaris, HP-UX, and AIX are (trademark) UNIX [1]. Note that there is also a RHEL-deriver Linux distribution, EulerOS, that is a certified UNIX.
In fact, the recruiter was the one that introduced "UNIX-like" term, in a reply to second resume change. Judging from that, I'd say this recruiter is intentionally malicious.
Agree. This is a recruiter-like person. I doubt he knows at all about "Unix-like" systems. He debated about words hiding his own shortcomings. I would have replied "you needed it" to the comment "thanks for the tutorial".
Here's the sad fact: If I were a hiring manager at Facebook and saw your post, I would slap my forehead in frustration in complete empathy with you. That recruiter is not only clueless, but shows a nearly bot-like level of comprehension of the subject they're supposedly recruiting for, which I personally find quite rude on their part.
Then, because I'm at Facebook, I would just move on, because honestly anything that filters out one more of the 10,000 qualified intern candidates I'm going to have to look at is good for me, even if it's completely random and stupid.
Don't take all the feedback in the thread to heart. The fact of the matter is that even if you were more condescending than you desired to be, the joke in this thread about plumbers and pipes is also true. The end of the chain really does enter an absurd territory that narrows things down such that the recruiter was either failing very badly at understanding your emails, lying about his reason for rejecting you, or not even reading the emails. There is a very gross lack of comprehension in his later responses. It eclipses your condescension, by far. If it didn't, your post wouldn't be at the top of Hacker News.
Reading, it was frustrating to see the recruiter looking for essentially an "exact string" match. They did not appear to be interested in leveling with you on UNIX vs Unix vs POSIX vs Linux or having any sort of interesting technical discussion.
Also their "thanks for the tutorial" phrasing is very unprofessional.
I do hope this thread helps FB in training + calibrating their external comms with candidates.
Nobody else has mentioned this so I will: leave an email address in your profile, or dump something sharable in a comment here. (Pretty much everyone here (relevant) can de-base64 (which can be convenient, a la data:text/plain;base64,...) or figure out "gmail@myaccountname".)
Best case scenario, someone from FB could say hi. Not officially (that would be a nice miracle), but rather some person working there. Then you could start chatting with them, they could figure out somewhere you could probably get in on the ground at, and give appropriate instructions. AFAIK internal recommendation is the best way to get through/inside The Great Wall of Google™, perhaps that's the case for FB as well. Note, I have no experience with either company, but in a thread like this not having contact info is wasting your 15 minutes.
If you are not an old fart like myself, you probably haven't used an actual Unix system but back in the days before the popularity of Linux, you'd see a lot of Solaris.
You stuck to your guns and didn't just lie about Unix experience, so I commend you.
But if you really want the job, next time just lie and set them straight once you've gotten an interview. It is splitting hairs to make a big deal out of actual Unix experience vs Linux experience.
It is splitting hairs to make a big deal out of actual Unix experience vs Linux experience.
This only holds true if one is a UNIX Graybeard, otherwise, GNU/Linux is rife with pitfalls and minefields for the unwary. Shell scripting and GNU-isms or bash-isms is an example of this, or using GNU specific functions or semantics when programming yet another. There are many such landmines lying in wait on GNU/Linux, waiting to blow one's legs off. The BSD guys have been trying to raise awareness of this for years.
Commenting just to let you know. You did nothing wrong.
Never forget who reached for who. It's FB in desperate need that they pick workers from students these days.
Also, trying to (yuck) trick you into providing names of others companies - hahaha - it's like you asking him: what's the maximum salary FB can offer or similar questions. Disgusting simply because any sane person (your friend e.g.) would suggest you never provide that to counter negotiating party. Asking for this info is not far (in effect) to asking about age/race etc. This data is intended to have more bargaining power on FB side. Unethical.
And NB: it's the recruiter who introduced 'UNIX-like' into conversation.
Take your time, they all (companies) will bend. It's an employee market.
As you've requested comments. I would say your replies were fine. You gave more detail than was necessary, and the recruiter was not able to understand. That's not really your fault though.
Your comment here however indicates to me you lack confidence. That's normal too. But lacking confidence can be career limiting.
You're trying to figure out "what did I do wrong" which is a useful exercise, but as Picard said "it is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose that is not a weakness, that is life".
You dodged a bullet. If a recruiter is that dense, that doesn't speak well for the company they represent (they are helping to recruit others, too!) You can do better. Nothing in your response was wrong or out of line.
Just because the people played the "inane recruiter junk" game doesn't mean they are good or bad.
Maybe the manager of the team does an excellent job of sorting out the noise after people have passed the recruiter game. Maybe they have great face-to-face interviews with the team and the team decides.
There are a hundred reasons why the recruiter junk is meaningless to the quality of the candidate, but it certainly lets you know everyone that gets through is willing to be adaptable, compromise, communicate clearly etc. etc.
I also think you're being too hard on yourself here. Sure, it will be helpful for you to learn to interact with difficult people, and to bite your tongue when frustrated. But frankly, most of us have limited success with that even by late in our careers. It appears to me that the recruiter could have been a lot more helpful, particularly at the end where you flat-out explain you have Unix and Linux experience and they still insist that your email never said so.
You're not condescending; you were trying to explain to a person who is not qualified to screen you. It's a billion-dollar business, and they're hiring engineers, so they're not picking up apples at the grocery store. Even if you would apply before they contacted you, there is no excuse that they don't know what they're talking. You don't have to be gentle to excuse someone else's illiteracy. He/she is not your friend or your family, this is a business.
You screened the recruiter well, and he/she failed to continue.
Best luck in his/her exactly-UNIX-and-not-UNIX-like engineer search!
Do not bend. Keep educating people. You done right.
If we all give in, the result is 2017: ignorant, arrogant recruiters, not willing to look into what they _should_ understand, since they are looking for speciality positions; and ignorant, arrogant people all around, not willing to learn anything.
This kind of advice is what will keep him from being an engineer that others want to work with, and from passing the trivial HR screens that big companies have immediately before talking with an engineer.
Soft skills and an ability to explain without condescension are much more important for educating others, rather than doubling down and being pedantic to someone who obviously isn't getting it.
You were not condescending, what you wrote about POSIX are facts (with a slight addendum that if you grew up on Solaris, HP-UX and IRIX like some of us, those are true UNIXes). You simply had the misfortune to run into an inexperienced recruiter. It happens often whereas it shouldn't happen at all: I've been preaching for years that IT professionals should be recruiting other professionals, instead of companies putting up someone who isn't formally trained in computer science to do something they don't really understand. After my own experience, I'm of deep and firm belief that recruiting good people is part of a social contract of every good IT professional. It is too critical to be left in the hands of the non-practitioners.
Also, good on you for being able to receive criticism, that's a big step in the right direction. In time, you'll likely come to the realization that good communication skills are an important part of almost any role.
RE: Linux distros, I am familiar with Ubuntu, Debian, and Arch Linux. To some extent RHEL as well.
RE: Unix (commercial brand names), none. It was my fault that I assumed the recruiter meant UNIX-like systems.
I can claim experience with developing userland applications portable across POSIX-compliant systems, as well as some understanding of lower-level operating system concepts. However, to be honest it seems I am unqualified for the role as specified, which makes the exchange all the more embarrassing. Oh well, what's done is done.
The recruiter did mean UNIX-like systems. There exists no useful set of experience which is common among pedantically defined "UNIX" and which excludes UNIX-like systems. The pedantic definition-lawyer type responses you've gotten are absurd.
A role might specifically require extensive AIX experience in particular -- and if it did you would say you needed "AIX experience" -- never some vague umbrella family of "UNIX experience."
It is entirely unbelievable that the requirements for this role would exclude your experience. Doubly so as they're recruiting from interns. Triply so if you know anything about Facebook engineering teams. "Production Engineer?" "Frontend Engineer?" At Facebook? Yeah, those teams run Linux.
ps: The folks telling you not to language lawyer are correct. But your initial assumption that the recruiter had made a dumb mistake was also correct.
The recruiter in this case is a pattern-matching engine with no internal semantics, as a result of Facebook hiring them and training them but not educating them.
Eventually they'll notice that they are only seeing car salesmen with extensive experience in selling brown cars with walnut dashboards, rather than carpenters. [ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15190438 ]
You honestly did nothing wrong. I don't think Facebook is looking for UNIX admins/developers, nor are they going to find any for an internship. CS students with experience in AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, or FreeBSD are exceedingly rare. Solaris and FreeBSD are the only two systems that Facebook would have a chance in hell at finding interns for, and even that's a stretch. AIX and HP-UX are expensive and the licensing is painful.
Getting a little frustrated with resume-screening-by-grep is not at all unreasonable. After the recruit had you play whack-a-mole for three resume revisions, a little bit of snark is to be expected. Don't let people walk over you.
A quick search around the web will tell you that FB probably primarily uses CentOS (with custom built components, I'm sure), so your experience was most likely almost directly what they were looking for.
It would have been pretty simple to tailor your resume in that regard. What I know of PE/SRE type positions at companies like FB and Google is that you are literally working with some Linux flavor nearly all the time unless you are applying for a very niche role.
It is not uncommon to come across open positions that actually do require Unix (not Linux) experience.
For example, American Express has a large deployment of AIX systems and they indeed look for candidates with experience in AIX systems, although I believe someone with experience in another Unix or Unix-like system should also be okay.
But I agree that such openings are usually quite specific about which Unix system they are working with.
This is true, but I would imagine that, if not in the job description, if a really specific kind of Unix experience is required, it would come out in the exchange - and be really OS specific and actually say - True64, AIX, Solaris, etc.
"Unix-like" today means bsd/linux. The recruiter did bad, but recruiters will always do bad.
If its a job you want, don't let a recruiter foible disqualify you, if you can help it.
Anyone who is old enough to remember MUDs feels your pain - it's a real shame that you had to test HR inputs this way though!
$ CROSS DRAWBRIDGE
CANNOT CROSS DRAWBRIDGE
$ TRAVERSE DRAWBRIDGE
CANNOT TRAVERSE DRAWBRIDGE
$ ABANDON DRAWBRIDGE
YOU REALIZE THAT YOUR EFFORTS ARE WASTED TRYING TO EXPLAIN YOUR QUEST TO A LOW LEVEL GUARD.
YOUR PRINCESS IS IN ANOTHER CASTLE.
GO NORTH, WEST, SOUTH OR EAST (?)
Your application for an internship was spot on - ignore any and all feedback you've received from the HR rep, as it's all gumph. You obviously know what you're doing, and Internships (while beneficial in the market at the moment) are useful, you will be more than capable finding real paid work in any other area with your skillset - and best of luck to you as well. Aiming high doesn't necessary mean applying to the Facebooks and Googles of the world.
--- Wonder if the HR filters take regex?
'It'"'"'s a $"[nN].[Xx]" system! I know this!'*
*Edit: This also qualifies you on Xanax, which may not be what you want.
You didn't do anything wrong. In fact, you should have asked the recruiter to speak to a supervisor with deep knowledge in Unix, where he could confirm your knowledge and get back to you and you would've gotten the job.
If you never work on Unix, then you should insist on saying so. Holding integrity is much more important than getting an internship from FB. And, as an engineer working in the infrastructure space, I do not believe FB is looking for someone has UNIX experience for the internship.
The recruiter is not knowledgeable. If he/she is hiring for production engineering, he/she needs to understand the basic of the keywords they search for. No reason for you to apologize.
Ah, don't worry - as others said, most of us did something similar at some point.
I'd even say that it's good to keep our profession strong by not playing the game of the business and HR people.
I always envy my friends in medicine. They have a strong union and stand together, pushing salaries for all of them and don't accept anyone above them who is not also from their profession (even if that's often hell of arrogant...).
I was being pretty damn condescending and spoke out of line without regards to the context. It's been a hard lesson learned. I honestly regret the whole exchange, and posting it online was inappropriate as well.
Nah. Relax. It was gauche, but not that bad. The responses you get are largely driven by the fact you got egg on the face of a tech Golden Boy. Also, social norms say you shouldn't air private conversations that expose the failings of a (potential, current, or former) employer.
Almost everyone will admit that tech hiring practices are an ongoing dumpster fire and comedy of errors, they just prefer a less dicey context and framing for that conversation.
You're new to the world of applying for jobs and how hiring works in professional contexts. I don't hold this against you. But this does lower my opinion of Facebook. Don't buy into the meme that programmers are dorks and therefore always carry 100% of fault for any social interaction that doesn't go magnificently.
See if your school has a career services office, they can give you a crash course in all the ceremony and fuss around building a resume and getting interviewed.
I'm more disappointed with this comment! But I guess it's to be expected. You've learned a life lesson - Don't get out of line, Don't mess with authority, Or you'll get shut down!
I dislike big companies for this reason. Expect worse when you work at one. The most successful learn the game (you've taken your first step) and rise the ranks.
You don’t deserve the criticism in my opinion. Recruiters serve a necessary function, and knowing a good recruiter can be a great help. That being said, engineers drive the bus. Recruiters aren’t subject matter experts and shouldn’t pretend to be. This is a simple question that could and should have been kicked up to an actual engineer.
I see recruitment like a see sales. When you're selling a technical product (e.g. a smartphone) to the general public, it's your job to communicate what makes it great, and it's not the public's fault if they don't understand the technical terms. That doesn't mean that a chunk of the population aren't being idiotic when they misunderstand some bit of your marketing spiel, but it's fundamentally your problem and not theirs.
Another point of view is that recruitment people are going to be less technically savvy than the actual engineers. That's a good thing - do you want to work as an engineer somewhere where they make the engineers do all the HR grunt work?
It's not a criticism, but I think you should have recognized immediately the mismatch between your competence and that of the recruiter.
When participants in conversation are different enough, true communication becomes impossible, and it's useful to recognize this as early as possible to either choose another tact or abort entirely. (I think this applies to any distributed system not just recruiter-candidate pair.)
Not your fault. Most recruiter are relatively idiots, and obviously do not know how to talk to super-smart people. Lesson to learn here is to stop apologizing, and start learning how to exploit their idiocy instead.
While reading the exchange, I totally thought that you were conversing with a bot. Just scanning the resume for missing items and pointing them out in slightly different ways each time. Kind of disturbing, actually.
Don't take the feedback personally, but hopefully you will apply the lessons. Even better, this serves as a practical example for others to learn from. None of us were born knowing this stuff.
Since you are soliciting feedback, I think you can do better than Facebook.
You have taken the time at university to learn about the origins of "UNIX" and about portability, but it seems clear to me you do not need to know about these things for this Facebook internship.
If you want this knowledge to be acknowledged and valued, if you want to put it into practice, then perhaps Facebook is not the proper place for this to happen.
There are open source UNIX-like projects that would be better suited and more appreciative.
If the position they were recruiting for was not "UNIX and Linux" then I would have a different opinion.
You did nothing wrong. Sure, you could have gotten past this recruiter by being more cooperative but if you are really passionate about UNIX then I think the internship would be a disappointment.
You come across as far more impressive than the Facebook organization and I hope that you will stick with UNIX-like OS going forward, whether as part of your day job or as an open source contributor.
Oh, come on. I work at Google. I am sure Facebook is a very fine place to work. They have plenty of very smart people working on very interesting projects. Don't be a snob.
Lol open source contributor. Yeah nice and all but where's the money in that? The guy just fouled up a potential career track to half a mil engineering salaries but hey I'm sure the satisfaction from some open source work will be just as good! ;-)
"ya was pretty much all true, but writing this to show i'm not an asshole to hopefully not fuck up any future job prospects with other recruiters who might read this"
I don't think you was horribly inappropriate, tho you really was condescending. You was mostly quite a lot unstrategic and you did not tailored your communication to audience.
The audience is not-too-technical requiter. You introduced term he did not knew (posix) and sent him wall of text explaining history of unix/linux. First, even tech people use terms Linux and Unix as a synonyms for Unix-like daily, so there is not need to go full nerd on someone who is not into it. Local experienced senior could easily have said "we need Unix and Linux experience" and requiter then simply attempts to fulfill that requirement. Local experienced seniors would rather change job then manage communication with dozens of potential interns, you cant expect first contact to be like them.
Second, history of tech wall of text will not work even if you are the most polite and humble person in the world. People don't read long detailed explanation even when they actually need them. They want to move to next mail as soon as possible. If the long text where you are lecturing someone contains just a hint of condescension, even if unintentional, people wont read it and will react negatively (which happened by the end of conversation). It is his bad not yours, but such reaction is still fairly predictable.
Just say that yes, you worked with Linux and Unix systems and leave out historical details. When you are looking for doctor, you don't expect lecture on correct latin names of body parts and their history. You expect them to translate from human speech to doctor speech. It is same thing.
This follow-up shows a lot of maturity. Both sides are obviously at fault here, although you instigated it.
I suspect you could still get the internship if you send an apology like "Sorry for my previous emails they were out of line. You're essentially correct and here's an updated resume to reflect that."
I don't see how the candidate instigated anything. The recruiter was either being deliberately obtuse or does not understand the role he/she is recruiting for. At almost any tech company, when a hiring manager asks for Unix/Linux experience for an internship role, there is a 99.9% chance that the hiring manager is looking for general experience on unix-like operating systems. I would bet my life on it. If Solaris/HP-UX/etc. experience was really specifically needed, it would have been spelled out as such.
I'm imagining a recruiter saying "We're looking for someone with graphics programming experience. Your resume says 'OpenGL and DirectX experience.' If you do not have graphics programming experience, I can try to find another role for you." As a candidate, I would think I was interacting with an idiot.
I don't think I'll be able to convince you otherwise, but this would read to most people as two assholes arguing with each other. Also OPs explanation of why UNIX == POSIX was pretty confusing, and I had to look up more information.
Plus, recruiters are incredibly busy this time of year. I don't blame him for choosing not to engage with candidates who reply with a wall of text when given a simple request.
Would be interesting to conduct a survey among your friends. Seems a lot of commenters here read it as the recruiter being overly strict, and Stanley trying to accommodate him/her while sticking to his integrity.
Thank you - I actually did send an apology email, but since I'm pretty sure I'm not quite qualified for the position, I didn't bother pursuing it any further than that.
Are you insisting that you're not qualified for the position on the basis of that Linux / Unix distinction alone ?
If so, that's really really sad. Even more so if you thought "Unix-like" genuinely disqualifies you because it's not strictly "Unix" !
You need to be more confident about your skills. Most interns don't know how POSIX relates to UNIX and Linux like you do, if they are even familiar with the word !
Look, I'm a former Facebook production engineer. I won't exactly reveal a secret by saying that FB is wholly Linux based. It's not a bank with legacy commercial Unix systems, and you were of course right about the 1970s engineers comment.
Positions requiring expertise with a specific brand of Unix are less and less common, and these would always mention the flavor they're after anyway (mostly Solaris, possibly some AIX/HP-UX).
One more general piece of advice : let others decide that you're not qualified for, don't self-censor before you even get a chance to fight.
Pure Unix is not even thought to CS students anymore. Looking for Unix experience for internships is utterly pointless. The Recruiter should have been happy that there was Linux experience, because even that is not a given.
You had nothing to apologize for. There are tons of recruiters in this industry who do not know what they are recruiting for and are dumbly trying to match text. I've had a recruiter tell me that they are looking for experience programming "graphics drivers", and would I kindly update my resume to say that instead of "display drivers". If a company uses recruiters this clueless, you dodged a bullet.
As general career advice going forward, I recommend letting the employers filter you out instead of disqualifying yourself based on technical skills. They're good enough at it themselves, and job listings are oftentimes half-truths at best.
If you know enough Linux to do anything useful with Arch, and you're as CS student at CMU, you're almost certainly qualified for a PE internship there.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Its weird to see people encourage the guy for this. If you can't bite your tongue in order deal with someone who is clearly not getting it, what else are you going to slam the brakes on progress for? It was in your best interest to just let it go, then clarify in the follow up interview or when it came to a technically adept person.
I get the arguments that the HR recruiter was a bit off a buffoon, but at the abstract level, you lacked the pragmatism and interpersonal skills to brush through something that clearly isn't important seeing as you have the relevant skills.
I see a few people like this in every company and they most definitely hold up progress. Most of them get fired, technical understanding isn't the only facet of being a software developer. Working in a team is a mix of being assertive when its important and placating others when it doesn't matter, much like life. A failure to distinguish between the two types of situations is a pretty big flaw for anyone who will be working as part of a team.
I agree in principle but it seems like his only way to go forward was to either lie about having direct experience with UNIX, or try to explain that POSIX is transferrable. I would have taken the latter route as well, reasoning that if it ended up costing me the job it would have been a big red flag anyway.
I used to interview at Google and I've dealt with entitled candidates, but this reads about as polite as I could expect without being a complete pushover.
I agree with your agreement in principle, but the real mistake was not simply adding Unix to the skills list to begin with, and keeping POSIX and Linux. It's not really a lie, and it's pretty obvious from the first email what's going on with this recruiter. Besides, if he's touched a Macbook, he's used UNIX in some form, because at least 7 versions of OSX have been certified as Unix [0].
I don't think I'd have thought of one ignorant recruiter out of a company of many thousands as a red flag. We have a great recruiter at my company, but I have no idea if he knows the difference between Unix, POSIX, and Linux, or if he knows OSX is a Unix (tm).
I don't see a recruiter not knowing the particulars of POSIX/UNIX differences as the red flag (heck, I'm not even sure I could answer that question). The red flag to me is that the Kafkaesque exchange that followed, I suspect, is the product of the overall recruiting culture rather than a lone recruiter.
Oh, right, the "deleted Linux -> we need people with Linux experience" bit is pretty stupid. Still, I'd probably chalk that up to one ignorant recruiter and just put all those words on the résumé to satisfy them.
When I read this, I just assumed he could see what was going on and just didn't feel like playing the game. But it could be that he was thick. At the very least, no more thick than the HR person on the other end of the conversation.
Por examplo: I get the arguments that Stanley was a bit of a buffoon, but at the abstract level, the HR person lacked the pragmatism and interpersonal skills to identify a possible problem with a job description, and at the very least run it by the hiring manager if they were not allowed and/or comfortable adjusting the must-fit qualifications themselves.
I see a few people like this in every company and they most definitely hold up progress. Most of them get fired, rigidly filtering resumes by well-defined criteria isn't the only facet of being a recruiter. Working to help build teams is a mix of being assertive when its important and bridging the gap between what was said and what is desired, much like life. A failure to distinguish between the two types of situations is a pretty big flaw for anyone who will be working as part of a team.
"... technical understanding isn't the only facet of being a software developer."
True, but consider that some commenters might be commenting as end users of open source UNIX-like OS, not as salaried software developers.
In that case, there is nothing in this email exchange to suggest he could not be a valuable contributor to a UNIX-like project, paid or unpaid.
As an end user, I could care less whether developers are adept at dealing with recruiters (though I might sympathize them for the BS they must endure).
What I care about as an end user is whether they can write portable code.
Given that these companies are dedicated to selling web ads, it really makes me wonder how "progress" would be defined in your chosen context.
I am not sure that UNIX or Linux would even exist were it not for the type of person you are describing.
There is nothing wrong with having technical understanding or working elsewhere besides companies selling web ads. That is where true "progress" has come from in the past and I think it is likely to come from in future.
On the contrary, this was an obvious power play by the recruiter to get the candidate to agree and submit to whatever arbitrary KPI has been passed down by the HR manager, regardless of whether or not it's meaningful. I would not take anything away from this other than that the candidate was probably not a good fit for the position anyway, as they don't seem to gel well with the BS corporate politics. Some do, some don't.
There is no malice, this is just what happens at big companies. When you have 10 layers of management, everyone is expected to fall in line because this is the only way it can work.
I work at one of those "big companies", what you're saying just isn't true. You'll find pockets of bad management, but that's far from "everybody is expected to fall in line".
FB haven't used external recruiters for some time now (they did in 2008). It's expected that internal recruiters be capable of understanding the skills they're looking for.
> I get the arguments that the HR recruiter was a bit off a buffoon, but at the abstract level, you lacked the pragmatism and interpersonal skills to brush through something that clearly isn't important seeing as you have the relevant skills.
It doesn't take a master of etiquette not to send a recruiter a 4-paragraph explanation of the finer points of POSIX v. UNIX. "I'm right and I'm going to explain to you exactly why whether it's relevant or not" is not generally a good attitude to have in the business world, even if you're working for Facebook.
That actually makes it more problematic. New grads trying to break into an industry should be especially respectful. If someone can't strategically avoid confrontation when the situation calls for it, that does not bode well for their ability to work in a team.
There are many new grads who are capable of appropriately dealing with social challenges. Those who can't have only themselves to blame.
True, but the recruiter on the other hand should show more experience and cognition. The emails might refer to systems the recruiter doesn't understand, but the actual words make complete sense.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
> 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"
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.
While both parties here could learn how to communicate better, there's an important distinction:
The student is representing only himself. The recruiter is representing the company.
When a recruiter mishandles a situation so massively as was the case here, it puts Facebook in a poor light. Obviously, Facebook's engineering teams are well aware of what all of this technology is, but it is distasteful to see this complete lack of understanding and know that I might have to deal with it if I were to work with one of their recruiters.
I'm not saying the industry in general is better than this, but it would have taken the recruiter all of 30 seconds to draft an email to the hiring manager and ask for clarification - "This guy is really insistent on how he has POSIX and Linux experience and that this will be okay. What do?"
Also, putting Unix on the required skills for an intern position? What did they think was going to happen?
That was my thought all along. My suspicion is one of the directives of the recruiter is to weed out people that are getting hung up on proving their point and/or stubbornly arguing about inconsequential things. The recruiter gave the candidate multiple chances to redeem himself, but no cigar.
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.
I had a similar experience with a recruiter at Google ... only worse. Recruiters are the gatekeepers. In my case I was waiting for an answer on my interview at Google for 6 months ... just radio silence with no reply.
If you are lucky, maybe you have some friends at Facebook that can intervene on your behalf. If not, there's other companies.
I had friends at Google to help me get an answer. But I decided I never wanted to work for Google based on how callously they treated me during the interview process. It became clear to me that I was not a high priority person to them ... just a fungible commodity. This is true, but nobody likes to be shown the truth of their value like that.
I knew other people with other talents that were treated really well by Google. My skillset was not in that high demand ... or there were plenty of other candidates. But I felt like Google did not need to treat me like garbage.
After that I went and joined a startup. Quite happy now. We stole a few engineers from Google even :)
I always make sure we get back to our interview candidates as quickly as possible. I won't let us turn into a callous Google.
On the point of needing friends, I don't think this is necessary given that this post hit 500 points on this site. This almost definitely will be posted to some internal group for recruiting feedback.
edit:
Looks like it's been posted already internally judging from one of the other posts
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
This happens all the time. Recruiters are Sales people. They don't want to learn technical things. It's not in their interest to know what Unix is. They just want to validate whether you are good and if so, sale you the position.
The proper response here is:
"I have experience in Linux and Unix. Updated resume is attached." Done.
You need to treat them like he's your old uncle. Use minimal technical words, repeat what they ask/say and most importantly respect them.
This sounds so much like those ads that look for "8 years of Swift development experience" despite the fact that Swift only came out 3 or 4 years ago. The fact that a recruiter can 'recruit' for a company like Facebook without having enough knowledge in the area that they're recruiting for is not only embarassing for FB but for the recruiting profession in general.
> is not only embarassing for FB but for the recruiting profession in general.
I don't think the profession has any room to be embarrassed:it seems like a check your dignity at the door type deal. I've dealt with plenty of recruiters as an applicant, an employee being hounded for referrals, and even in just social situations, and I can't think of a single positive thing to say about them.
I'm usually not comfortable with such blanket statements, but it's literally 100% of the ones I've interacted with. I've yet to meet one that knows anything about the jobs they're hiring for, or one that doesn't give you the dirty feeling of being used after a conversation in any capacity with them. The worst was meeting them in social situations when they'd hear I worked for Google: 90% of the time they'd immediately get a predatory gleam in their eye and the tenor of their interactions with me would immediately shift. It was sickeningly transparent.
> 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.
I don't work at facebook I work at a healthcare company and I would accept this rejection as a solid weed out.
If you cannot understand that the HR person responsible for hiring you maybe is not a top-tier engineer and you cannot accommodate that person's gap in technical knowledge you probably cannot function in a healthy way with other members of the team such as junior developers, business people, or end users.
It's not exactly easy. The student has to figure out if the position genuinely needs UNIX experience or not. The recruiter doesn't seem able to communicate this. If so, it would be dishonest to claim experience the student doesn't have.
Throwing my two cents here - as an employer who also happens to be technical I don’t like working with recruiters for the simple reason that most of them aren’t qualified to asses the kind of talent I’m looking for most times. They are good at parsing through resumes.
However, keep in mind this guy is recruiting for internships, so I assume he’s not the most experienced recruiter on the team.
P.S. - I personally believe in reading the audience, which in this case meant not digging deeper into technical terms but just adding “experience with Linux and Unix systems” to the resume as the recruiter suggested. But... only if you really _can_ answer questions about either/both during an interview.
At least this recruiter wont be as dumb moving forward. It's important as a recruiter to understand what the hell it is you are looking for in a candidate. I personally thought the applicant handled this perfectly.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
I interned at Facebook a while back (pre-IPO). On the first day of onboarding my neighbor was struggling to follow the instructions - it turned out he'd never used bash or any Unix-like system before.
Anyway, I guess he figured it out since he did well enough to get a return offer.
TL;DR: A recruiting conversation insisting that each party 'get bent' with utmost professionalism.
Edit: apparently the student did follow up here about the same time I posted this; props for doing so. This entire discussion serves as a reminder that getting a resume past HR (and most recruiters) is 100% about ticking exactly the right boxes, and only serves as the most rudimentary of filters.
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.
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."
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?
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.
I don't understand why you felt necessary to leave out the recruiter name. I personally would really like to know this person and try to avoid her/him by all means possible, saving me (and all the others, who will know him) a ton of time and consequently punishing this recruiter for his incompetence and inability to learn the actual thing he is recruiting for.
We (developers) want the recruiting, interviewing and hiring processes to be improved and optimized to not let this sort of things happen again, yet when it comes to actual actions to take, we just decide to post it as a "look, another funny incompetent recruiter!" post. As time shows, this post will not change anything and these people will continue harassing and denying interviews for good developers. Today it was a fresh graduate; tomorrow it can be me or you.
Doxxing/outing people here is probably against site rules, and if it's not, it's still unprofessional and likely to reflect just as badly on the him as on the recruiter. The recruiter can say to his boss, "shit, I didn't have enough coffee that day!" and be forgiven; Stan won't get the same forgiveness.
It does not matter what recruiter says to his boss; what matters is that we will know this person and avoid all contact with him; it is not his boss (as if the boss cares) he should seek forgiveness from. Stan does not need forgiveness for there is nothing to forgive him for; the only thing he will get is respect for standing up for the gross incompetence and bullying.
The cynic in me makes me think this was actually intentional by the recruiter to gauge personality characteristics of the candidate. It's not entirely implausable to think that corporations could use techniques like this to try to measure social capabilities of technical people.
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?
The recruiter is an idiot who doesn't really know the hiring requirement of his/her employer, which is exactly the job he/she is supposed to do. Simple as that. I marvel at people who can spin it as the student's bad communication. Maybe you communicated your way to your current position? The recruiter is tasked with a job to find appropriate candidates, and is apparently failing. If it were to happen in my company I'll just fire the recruiter on the spot.
The lesson that should be learned: HR should have some technical background to do technical hiring.
Oh this is hilarious. I was left wondering whether the recruiter was a real person at all, or one of those Bots that FaceBook had to unplug.
Seriously though, this conversation is not completely untypical of some I've had in the past. The technical knowledge of _some_ recruiters is, well, non-existent. As has been pointed out they tend to keyword search, and well, if you don't have exactly the right keyword you're toast.
A lot of people in this thread seem to believe people should remain ignorant of technology. How many people understand how a car or airplane works - at least in theory? A technology recruiter should be able to know this (or at least pick it up on the job when polite explanations are given to them). And it would be beneficial to broader society if people had at least a surface level understanding of computers (like how airplanes generate lift, how combustion engines work, and how source code is used; so that when someone says Linux is a common variant of UNIX, they understand what that means from a source code perspective).
Perhaps it's in our best interest to keep these people ignorant; we do get paid a lot of money. Perhaps society has decided it's not important for most people to know, and that it's alright to be ignorant (though this leads to common problems we complain about every day). But whatever the reason, this person was doing the right thing by trying to educate the person in a pretty polite way. Sure he could play the game and get the job. But it's still frustrating.
FWIW I think OP handled the situation well. A lot of commenters say, "just role with it", but he did. He updated the resume to match what the recruiter wanted, then the recruiter said, well... What about this?
He gave an explanation as to why his resume was still valid, and added that.
I also think he explained the issue very well, and communicated well.
A no-win situation in my eyes.
Working at a large corporation is knowing when to pick your battles. IMHO the candidate failed before he even got started. Picking your battles means figuring out if putting up a fight or being pedantic about something is worth it. What are you getting out of it except for some sort of sense of "winning" in the short term. Corporate survival is about thinking long term, and often doing or saying something to keep moving forward. Not suggesting one iota to compromise the quality of your work or your moral perspectives. Just saying there's a delicate balance to surviving in any corporate setting.
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.
These two sentences could easily be read as
"Hey idiot, no one since 70's era programmers have that experience, also I think you're wrong about this requirement because I know better.
Dripping with condescension, but you're young and smart so understandable that ego can swell. You've down tremendous self-awareness in your post here though, clearly have a bright future!
He is actually incorrect in this case as Mac OS is certified UNIX so is a UNIX and not just UNIX-like [*]. If the recruiter was being clever and wanted the applicant to understand the distinction or answer with the magic OS X words I'd be impressed.
Some recruiters can truly get on your nerves. I once applied to Expedia; the recruiter once called and asked me what's an 'Epic' (from Agile Methodology). That was my first call after email communication. I expected the HR guy to ask questions about my experience and setup an interview time with an engineer. I just didn't get why asking for a definition of keywords from the Agile Method was the first step in their interviewing process at all!
I'm so tired of this Linux/Unix/Posix religious BS. Earning money with software development for 7+ years now and mostly using macOS, Suse and Ubuntu (to precisely name it), I'm wondering if this Posix debate is applicable anywhere outside school and Wikipedia.
Of course, the recruiter is just a recruiter but with this "I know it all & better"-attitude, when the intention was absolutely clear, having no deal was the right choice for fb.
Somebody once referred me to a role at Facebook. I never got a response from the recruitment team. After emailing them, one of the recruiters told that their referral platform has some issues. After that I never got a response from any recruiter, I tried reaching out to different recruiters on LinkedIn but none responded. I suppose they have a shitty recruiting team.
Reading through the comments about the "recruit by grep" methods made me wonder: what are the chances this was a Facebook chatbot instead of a human recruiter? Anybody in the know able to say whether it would have that level of conversational fluidity (e.g. "Thanks for the tutorial but..." sounds a bit too human to me)?
At the point that it became clear that there was a technical misunderstand, would you find it condescending to say something like, "I think there's a misunderstanding over this qualification for `foo` position. Could we clear it up with a `foo` engineer who is working on this stack?
Most recruiter are relatively idiots, and obviously do not know how to talk to super-smart people. Lesson to learn here is to stop apologizing, and start learning how to exploit their idiocy instead.
> We're looking for experience in Linux and Unix, not just Unix-like OS.
...
> We're looking for students with experience working on Linux and Unix.
What the recruiter said - twice - was pretty clear and matter-of-fact. Why does everyone assume it's not true? They could indeed be filtering out candidates whose "Unix" experience is limited to Linux.
Ad: we're looking for guitarists
Candidate: I have experience with guitar like instruments
Recruiter: can you play guitar?
Candidate: as I explained, I have experience with guitar like instruments. I have played a couple of fretted string instruments.
Recruiter: do you play guitar?
....
..
* AIX, Solaris and HP-UX are certified Unix systems. These are bonafide Unix systems and there indeed are software developers today who work with these Unix systems.[2]
* The set of Unix-like systems is a superset of the set of Unix systems. The set of Unix-like systems include systems like Linux, FreeBSD, etc. which the set of certified Unix systems do not.
If I quizzed engineers, what percentage of them do you think would get that exactly right? Prior to your post, I had myself thought — as Stanley seems to — think that Unix referred to the operating system by that name. I did not know that,
> By decree of The Open Group, the term "UNIX" refers more to a class of operating systems than to a specific implementation of an operating system; those operating systems which meet The Open Group's Single UNIX Specification should be able to bear the UNIX 98 or UNIX 03 trademarks today, after the operating system's vendor pays a substantial certification fee and annual trademark royalties to The Open Group.
But if I were exchanging information with a candidate, what Stanley provides is more than I would expect from a candidate (even from industry; he seems to be a student); that he isn't exactly on the mark should have been fine. If we really wanted exacts, the recruiter had ample opportunity to explain his/her position, but instead, we get nothing. Stanley took the time to both give his view on things, and give a simple layman's answer that conforms to that view when the tech jargon didn't seem to go over well. That he might be technically wrong is incredibly nitpicky, and I am not persuaded that that was the issue the recruiter had.
It still seems like an extremely weird qualification to require, doubly so again for an intern level position: you would still be likely to pass over extremely qualified candidates who just never touched a "UNIX".
All I am saying is that when technology people like us are debating about terminology, we can cut the recruiter some slack, be nice to him or her and be more explicit in our communication to the recruiter.
For example, instead of responding to
"We are looking for experience in Linux and Unix"
with
"I have updated my resume with POSIX",
respond with the following instead assuming you indeed have real Unix experience with a system like Solaris,
"I have mentioned Linux and Unix more explicitly in my resume in the following manner: Debian (Linux), CentOS (Linux), Solaris (Unix) and FreeBSD (Unix-like).
That is something I would never do, because by doing so, I would by lying. Under the same beliefs as Stanley, I do not have experience with Unix.
He does also, at various iterations, include UNIX, Linux, and UNIX-like on his resume, not necessarily at the same time. If there's a particular order, or casing of the word Unix the recruiter is looking for, he or she should just name it.
> be more explicit in our communication to the recruiter.
The long, technical response is the explicit response.
In the original post. I don't have his entire resume; I am relying on the image on the linked-to Imgur URL. I am interpreting the sections of the image that start with "SKILLS" as a screencap of his resume, my interpretation is that they are interspersed with the email chain in order to give us context as to what is on his resume, since it is material to the discussion.
do you want a job at one of the most prestigious companies or do you value being right on a minute detail more? I would have just added the word "unix" to my resume and moved on with my life.
People keep mentioning Solaris as a solution but as one recent college grad (2014) I can say nobody was really using Solaris anymore. Maybe other schools still have Solaris labs but we did not. Same with AIX and HP-UX. I really only know about these because I'm interested in tech history.
Actually you're wrong about Linux not being included in the certified set. Inspur K-UX, a Linux distro based on RHEL, is a certified UNIX system. As is EulerOS.
Interestingly, MacOS is included in the certified UNIX list. Most of its userspace and a lot of its kernel interfaces come from FreeBSD. So in a way, some of FreeBSD is a certified Unix.
Curiously enough, Oracle just killed Solaris. AIX is old. Is it dead? Last release was in 2015. HP-UX was last released a year ago. My guess is that both of these systems are on their last legs.
I believe that specific distributions of Linux and versions of FreeBSD could both trivially be Unix certified, if someone wanted to waste the money paying SCO for the designation.
Either way, it's a stupid pedantic thing for a recruitor to gate on.
Solaris lives on in illumos and derivatives like Joyent's (now a subsidiary of Samsung) SmatOS. Sure these aren't "Solaris", but it would be a shame if the publicity around Oracle's decision were to kill these projects as well.
Interesting fact: Inspur K-UX 2.0 is one of five commercial operating systems that have versions certified to The Open Group UNIX 03 standard and is licensed to use the UNIX trademark.
It's Linux based (RedHat family tree).
I never went to a elite enough school to be reached out to by Facebook recruiters so maybe there's something I'm missing but I genuinely wonder why someone would be this condescending towards the people helping you get a job.
Facebook reaches out to me every few months and don't have a degree. I don't have the time or patience to study for their fresh-out-of-cs-grad style interview process though so only go with companies that test for what actually happens on the job vs in a text book, of which there are plenty.
Honestly, my best guess for why this kind of interview is used is that it's just an intelligence test. It's worked extremely well for me: I'm very upfront about the fact that I don't expect them to _know_ anything (it would probably be tough for me to do something as simple as Dijkstra's on a whiteboard under time pressure), but that I want to see how they think.
I recently had a guy with an incredibly impressive resume and a couple decades of experience, and I gave him the same interview. He clearly thought he did badly since he couldn't go through the white board coding as smoothly as a recent cs grad would, but in my book he got a 9/10, because he was obviously good at clearly thinking about creative problem solving.
Now I can't speak to whether large companies universally treat these interviews the way I do, but as a sample of one, when I conducted interviews for Google I certainly did.
You shouldn't let your assumptions about the interview process color your decisions so heavily.
Yeah and that's fine, you probably get enough candidates willing to grind through it anyway if you're at The Big 4. Interviewing is a two-way street though so obviously I am going to have it color my decision process. I want to know what challenges actually happen on the job and if I can solve those challenges, and if you ask me to code up a shortest path algorithm on a whiteboard but that never appears on the job, then it seems like a pointless test to me.
Compare this to other companies, both large and small who have asked more reasonable challenges such as; "set up MySQL master/slave replication," "write a script that parses a text file in Python," "build a 2-tier architecture through terraform," "troubleshoot these issues on a broken server." Obviously these aren't as fancy as "implement an algorithm on a whiteboard," but it shows me as a candidate/potential candidate what type of problems to expect on the job. As a DevOps person I don't believe in whiteboarding for interviews, nor do I believe it should be a thing for devs, but if a company prefers to interview with this method like Facebook and Google (have received study material for both), I'll continue to focus on the companies who are practical about interviewing instead as it's worked out fine so far for my career path.
> Compare this to other companies, both large and small who have asked more reasonable challenges such as; "set up MySQL master/slave replication," "write a script that parses a text file in Python," "build a 2-tier architecture through terraform," "troubleshoot these issues on a broken server."
See to me, these are _terrible_ interview questions because they reward memorization and rote knowledge and completely leave aside the kind of creative problem-solving skills that I've always needed from my employees and colleagues. I've had the misfortune to work with people hired by the process you describe, and they tend to suck pretty hard. If you want cogs that can't adapt beyond their very narrow comfort zone, you've just described exactly how to get them.
I agree with your description of the two-way street, but I generally take care of that by leaving time for the candidate to ask questions, generally guided a little by me to give them an idea of the stack we work on, what kind of problems generally need solving, etc. (In fact, I warned the 9/10 guy that I described above that he may not be challenged enough by the work that we'd likely have for him).
That can still be fixed by having them set up a service that they have never seen before. Like "oh, you have MySQL experience only? Let's see you set up Postgres," or whatever database service is different from their resume or something along those lines, which is also something that actually happens on the job. It just doesn't make sense to me that white boarding is seen as "creative problem-solving skills" when it is literally the exact opposite of how you would solve a problem in the real world 99 percent of the time.
Even if true you can still beat a hundred other things like not having to be on-call, base pay, location (remote vs Manlo Park/ManFrancisco or being senior enough for their alternate locations), and lack of Test Driven Development (feel free to prove me wrong here). It's far easier to get a fat base pay somewhere sensible that knows how to manage a remote team, where you can then live in a low COL area or with better housing and cultural options, than to deal with bureaucratic nonsense for the chance of cashing out a few extra dollars in a few years in a high COL area where you don't have a life outside of work for that time, IMHO.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Also, just to be clear, I do not (and never did) hold any hard feelings towards the recruiter; in fact, it was very kind of them to point out why I was not qualified in the first place. This has been probably the most reflective of how I let my ego get the best of me at times, and I hope it might serve as a warning to those who might be tempted to do the same "devsplaining" in similar situations.
Please let me know if you have any other criticisms beyond the ones already voiced in this thread. I'm reading through the comments here as I can, and it's been a lot of good advice. Thanks again.