Thanks for the quick response and clarifications. Experience with Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems is largely transferrable thanks to the standardization that resulted from the POSIX specification. As a result, the terms "POSIX" and "UNIX-like" by-and-large refer to the same thing.
My experiences are in particular with developing software for Linux platforms, which are the most popular of the UNIX-like operating systems. I also have experience using POSIX-specified APIs to ensure consistency and portability. Beyond software developers who have programmed in the 1970s, most people do not have experience with a true UNIX OS, and I would find it hard to believe that such outdated technologies are underpinning Facebook's advanced innovations.
I've updated my resume to indicate my familiarity with Linux, POSIX, and UNIX-like systems. Please let me know if there is anything else you need.
Thanks for your time and consideration, Stanley Zhang.
Response:
Hi Stanley,
Thank you for the tutorial. We're looking for experience working on Linux and Unix.
If you do not meet the above, please let me know if there are other roles you'd like to rank.
Best, ________
I'd love to see you defend why the guy who wrote the first half is bad at technical communication and needs to develop a professional attitude, and the recruiter -- who copies and pastes the same incorrect response over and over, showing no indication that they read a single word -- is a professional communicator with a good attitude.
He'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.
But yes, it certainly is a lesson in dealing with nonsense.
I don't play well with idiots, or nonsensical bullshit.
Moreover, if I'm a recruiter, unless I'm a domain expert, looking to hire someone into the field and they say they already have it on their resume, I'm going to go and double check their resume and double check my own understanding before I go any further to avoid issues like this.
The only person who looks bad here is the recruiter, and it's entirely their own fault.
Most people can't communicate with blind monkeys though, so I wouldn't fault anyone for failing here either.
Want a job there? Play by their rules. Don’t want a job there? Have an email exchange like this one.
> 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.
Still it's sort of amazing that the recruiter could be both so wrong and so confident.
He was technically correct, which some people believe is the best kind of correct, but the failure here was his. He was more interested in being right than getting the internship, and as a result he gets a lot of pats on the back from people who share his philosophy here... and no internship.
But he did!! And the recruiter still gave him flak!
Stanley said, "POSIX is more-or-less a standardization effort for UNIX/Linux systems, so I've updated my resume to reflect this."
And then he shows a screenshot that just lists "UNIX", not "UNIX-like".
Then the recruiter bats at him again!
I think he was more interested in being as honest as possible, not being right.
At first, his resume included "Linux". The recruiter asked him to update his resume to include Unix as well. Stanley changed it to read just "UNIX", but no Linux.
The recruiter asked him to fix this by specifying both Linux and UNIX in his resume. Stanley updated it to say Linux and UNIX-like.
The recruiter, very professionally instead of just dropping the conversation immediately, then asked again that Stanley rectify his resume to include the terms they are looking for: Linux and UNIX. Not "UNIX-like". But Stanley again did not do this.
The recruiter gave very clear instructions on what to do, but (from the recruiter's perspective) Stanley was more concerned with condescendingly educating the recruiter rather than following simple instructions.
I sometimes screen resumes from college students at my company, and if I ever received an email exchange like the one from Stanley here, I would have immediately put him in the "no" pile. I already have 400+ people to screen, why waste time with him when I can easily find someone with equivalent experience that also knows how to follow instructions and, most importantly, isn't so rude about it?
Clear no hire.
Even if that were the recruiter's intent, I don't think it's that clear. At no point in the conversation does the recruiter ever make an explicit request to have a resume with both of those on it. You might think there is an implied request from the recruiter for that, but I do not, and neither, it seems, did Stanley.
The only point in the exchange that I can see where the recruiter requests a change to the resume is here:
> […] we require having Unix experience. If you have it, could you update your resume and resend?
Which he does.
You'd rather higher a liar and someone that will follow instructions to the letter, even when they're incorrect?
It sounds like you'd hire this useless recruiter.
How many tens of thousands of university kids go through the hiring pipeline at Facebook each semester?
When you are doing things at that scale, you need well-defined processes. The process here was we need you to put exactly what this position requires on your resume, probably because the resume needed to be OKd by some keyword-checking system.
The candidate either was incapable of or refused to follow the process. Therefore, no hire.
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.
Clear no hire.
Storytime: back then us students were doing a factory tour, we went to Hoechst in Frankfurt (yes, it was that long ago). There was lunch with company research staff in the Jahrhunderthalle (they did have longer time horizons then). Strangely, the majority was from our university. That was puzzling, do they mostly recruit from our university?! They solved the mystery for us, this was a recruitment visit, they wanted us to consider them and wanted to put their best foot forward.
Something happened to the employer-employee relationship in the meantime.
On a more relevant comment, I think the student could have been a little smarter in realizing that the recruiter didn’t seem like he/she understood what was really being asked in the position he/she was recruiting for, but I think a lot of respondents on HN forget that people are sometimes held to account for items put in the resume. I remember when I interviewed at Apple in my last interview search, all 3 of the teams I had onsites with held me to account for items I had put on my resume.
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.
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...
...but, yet, probably should be.
How can you not learn that - how else can you talk to IT/Conputer teachers?
It wasn't not caring; at that point the recruiter didn't believe him about the Unix experience.
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.
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.
From my perspective, it appears that the recruiter is the jerk and not the candidate. I have met many computer-illiterate recruiters but never one like this who would repeat the same response over and over again despite the candidate having clarified his position.
AIX, Solaris and HP-UX are bonafide Unix systems and there indeed are software developers today who work with them.
In any case, it is not very hard to write something like the following in the resume: POSIX, CentOS (Linux), Solaris (Unix), FreeBSD (Unix-like), etc. It is always good to be more specific about your skills in situations like this than being ambiguous.
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.
Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
Your school was trail blazing! At my uni, UVic, it was still all Sun and IBM Unix labs (with plaques) when I graduated in 2000.
There was even a room with NT4 - I went there once.
When I started work as a trainee at a major UK broadcaster in 2003 the news production system ran in Solaris, radio was on some vax thing, the image store ran on irix, the logging system was on aix, and there were half a dozen distros across about 20 servers with no real standards. The majority of staff were either windows IT staff (who got outsourced), help desk staff, or broadcast engineers with limited computer knowledge.
Over the next few years I changed the news system, others followed suit, and there's now 1200 ubuntu boxes/vms over 6 continents. Hooray for monoculture. Looking back it's amazing how quickly things change.
Solaris died roughly 3 times, depending on who you ask. 2002 was 15 years ago. Oracle officially killed it by laying off over 90% of people assigned to the project two days ago. Future Solaris development is deader than shit.
The only true UNIX that sees "widespread" use, and the only one that you will ever find a student with any experience with it is FreeBSD, and FreeBSD is popular because of its licensing, not its "true UNIX nature."
As somebody else said, it wouldn't have busted the recruiter's ass to forward the email to the manager and ask if "Unix-like" experience is relevant.
He was a hardcore Linux guy before taking this position 5 or so years ago. He'll tell you himself, there's little transfer between deep Linux knowledge and deep Unix knowledge. They're two different beasts.
Trust me, Unix is not limited to programmers from the 1970s, it's very much alive, and it's not outdated. There's a hell of a lot of interesting stuff going on outside of Silicon Valley. I wish I could talk about it.
Too many details the target person is not just not interested about, but also have low chance to fully understand - judging from targets initial confusion about Unix and Linux.
Totally cool at that age, but not perfect communication either. All that is orthogonal to quality of communication from recruiter.
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.
aaand now I understand why he is how he is.
I hate this attitude. How can a recruiter know all the intricacies for the roles he is hiring, he would need to be an expert. He has to know everything he they have to learn a whole pile of new terms.
I like how easy it is for people to blame someone else here, rather than try to understand it from the recruiters position. I understand, we all hate recruiters.
If he doesn't know what the terms he's screening for mean, then he probably isn't a very effective recruiter.
Presumably they were worried that the resumé wouldn't just be seen by a recruiter, and a more knowledgeable person might flag it.
Wrong: "Yep, I have UNIX experience!"
Right: "These days, the phrases 'UNIX' and 'UNIX-like systems' are used interchangeably. Please double check this with your hiring manager to confirm that we're on the same page."
If I really thought this job was worth my time, I would've updated my resume to say UNIX and Linux, and then clarified during the first interview with a technical person.
Right: "Yep, I have Unix experience! I have worked on Solaris which is a bonafide Unix system. I also have experience with Unix-like systems like FreeBSD and Debian GNU/Linux."
Similarly IBM licensed AT&T UNIX and derived AIX. It is still certified as UNIX.
The Open Group holds the UNIX trademark and copyrights and conducts the certification and licensing process these days.
See here: https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/
You've posted functionally the same comment multiple times in this thread. No matter how many times you say it, you are technically incorrect. UNIX is a valid piece of terminology when referring to commercial Unix OSes.
Did you read my comments carefully? I am saying the same thing as you are. I am saying that Solaris and AIX /are/ bonafide Unix systems in all my comments.
I don't think the onus is on developers here to explain why Unix and Posix are interchangable.
It's like the carpenter telling the recruiter that yes, his skills in building a chair transfer to building a table.
I think you may be extrapolating your own experience of "not being autistic" (by your definition) a little too widely.
Everyday I talk to someone who isn't informed about one subject or another. It should be a common skill for people to put their selves in the other person's shoes and explain it at their level. When a non-cs person asks me about what exactly my job is I don't start going into details about Hadoop and Spark etc, I talk at a level they could understand about data.
As far as the autism comment, it was a little offensive but I meant it in terms of ability to read the social situation, not cs knowledge.
I may be a little harsh here, because everyone makes mistakes, especially in college. And there is nothing wrong with that. I've done embarrassing things with recruiters too, believe me. I just want to make sure people realize it's a mistake and learn from it.
IMO the recruiter should have basic understanding of the technologies they are recruiting for. But it's the norm for them to have no idea.
"Is the tumor beniggun?" "Yes, that's correct, the tumor is benign".
For the first time in my life, I'm working with people who aren't particularly intelligent[1]. The lack of intelligence doesn't bother me much per se, but I was absolutely not prepared for how incredibly childish their psyche is when it comes to making mistakes and learning from them, admitting they don't know things, asking questions, etc. It was absolutely shocking how routinely people would read all kinds of ulterior motives into every possible question: "the only reason you would ask X is because you're trying to put me down" and stuff like that. I've learned to heavily sugarcoat things, stroke egos with compliments before describing things that need improvement or fixing, etc etc. Goddam is it an exhausting waste of time.
My plan at this point is to steer my career as far away as possible from people who are this stupid and immature; I spent a long time at the start of my career surrounded by very smart people and I just got used to the idea that everyone is secure in their intelligence and everyone can focus on being productive together without needing to keep stopping and feeding the egos of infants.
[1] Just to forestall the complaints: this isn't a value judgment of who they are as people, it's just a single weakness. A comparable weakness of my own is that I have to exert quite a bit of effort to maintain a strong work ethic when being hardworking comes more easily to some.
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.
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.
Is just communicating a fact politely, "not nice"?