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A comment on The new way to land a job at Facebook. Parent comment

Re:The new way to land a job at Facebook by i_like_my_name on Tuesday June 05, 2012 @07:06PM (#4071465)
Andrei Alexandrescu said: "One really cool thing about doing machine learning at Facebook is the sheer size of data involved; most researchers are happy to put together a graph with some hundreds of thousands of nodes. At Facebook samples of interest are in the hundreds of millions and more. It took a few of us quite a while to figure out how to distribute graph processing on many machines, but we finally did it. We should be able to publish the method soon."

http://www.serversidemagazine.com/news/10-questions-with-fac...

Edit: On the other hand, I doubt he had to jump through any hoops to land a job at facebook.

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Re:The new way to land a job at Facebook by tluyben2 on Tuesday June 05, 2012 @07:26PM (#4071537)
Good edit :)

But yes that makes sense; my, maybe cynical, outlook is that most people will not actually do that work there. Most will do their stinking best to end up working on some (seemingly) insignificant stuff. I read some newsgroup post from a Windows (person on the actual MS Windows team, not someone who devs Windows apps) developer once who said something like 'I WISH I had programmed the clock in Windows, at least then I could show my parents I do something remotely interesting'. For Andrei and many others it is obvious, but for a lot more people it is completely weird why they do the things they do. And I love to read their stories.

I can rant on forever about a guy I met on a summer job at a supermarket distribution hub (yeah; in the 80s as a 15 year old programmer you couldn't get on freelancer and do something cool); he worked there for 20 years and he was very happy. Because of him, people could get their food every day and he felt valuable and lucky to have landed that job. It was a great example and I like hearing stories WHY people like their job, but not only from people we all know (and love or hate).

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Re:The new way to land a job at Facebook by andralex on Wednesday June 06, 2012 @12:12PM (#4074605)
This is Andrei. You'd be surprised; the interview was very difficult and I might have failed it just as easily. I got no C++ question (we seldom ask language-specific questions). Instead, my interviewers asked me questions related to my research and had me implement a classic algorithm on a very large data set and a simple ML algorithm. I recall at a point I got the curve ball of an NP-complete algorithm that had a polynomial approximation.

Bottom line, the Facebook interview is not easy, and we're determined to not make it easier even though we're hiring intensively. The upside is that you get to work almost exclusively with very bright people, which makes for a very palpable difference from the typical corporate experience.

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Re:The new way to land a job at Facebook by wglb on Tuesday June 05, 2012 @07:22PM (#4071526)
Um, as one of the three people in the world who understand all of C++, i also doubt if he had to do any jumping.
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Re:The new way to land a job at Facebook by rherb on Wednesday June 06, 2012 @02:20PM (#4075273)
My name is Ralf Herbrich and I am an Engineer at Facebook. I work on large-scale probabilistic models for ranking - the "stuff" that is used to determine how likely a user is going to engage with a story or ad.

I have worked for over 10 years at Microsoft Research before on large-scale problems, for example, the TrueSkill ranking and matchmaking system used in Xbox Live and the Halo series as well as ranking systems in Bing. I can honestly say that the current projects I am working on are professionally the hardest I worked on so far and it is amazing how much gets done by a very small team of some of the brightest and most talented people in the industry.

I echo Andrei's comments that the interviews were very difficult. I got no specific C++ or PHP question but more general questions to translate algorithms into working code (being able to pick any language). This IS very important when you work here and everyone at Facebook carries a lot of responsibility so having a high bar is the right decision.

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Re:The new way to land a job at Facebook by waterlesscloud on Tuesday June 05, 2012 @10:57PM (#4072172)
Out of idle curiosity, who are some other big name programmers working at Facebook?
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