I go so far as to immediately say no to any candidates who have Meta in their history. Every meta person I’ve interviewed has been an asshole in one way or another, and not a fit for my team.

Meta, like many big tech companies, has some fantastic engineers, some lousy ones, and some in between. At this point I don’t pay too much attention to where someone worked previously, and try to get to know candidates individually. They’re all just different people, like you and me!

There are definitely things you should adjust depending on where a candidate is from. People tend to inherit things from the overall culture, particularly if it's been a major part of their career. It's better not to ask an Apple employee what they worked on in any detail, or an Amazon employee why they're leaving, for example.

Helps avoid potentially uncomfortable situations on both sides and increase the signal/noise ratio.

So what else are you prejudiced about?

People who worked for cigarette companies.

Or DraftKings/gambling sites. Basically those that exploit addiction for profit.

Job hoppers.

Cisco management - truly horrible people.

We see a lot of applicants from Red Hat who “drank the kool aid” there for way too long.

Not in my experience.

I've helped hire/onboard a couple of really great former Meta engineers, and currently collaborate with a bunch of great engineers at Meta.

Generally a bad practice to automatically say no based on a single entry on a resume, no matter what that entry is. If Meta was their first and only job, maybe you could justify that view.

But for example, I've had a few exceptional coworkers from Netflix go to Meta. In part because they got to work on exactly what they wanted with nearly unlimited resources, and in part because they got paid fat bank to do it.

Doesn't make them bad people. Would gladly work with them again at any time.

Working for a company that knowingly harms children (especially young women and girls) to get paid “fat bank” is up there on my list of reasons to say they’re bad people.

https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/facebook-instagram-dangerou...

I'm going to assume that the people I'm talking to are the ones who are against that and trying to fix it.

At this point in my life, I've seen enough people desperate for work that I'm not going to fault someone for working for an "evil" company. Maybe they really needed that money. Maybe they really needed that insurance for a loved one. I really don't know their situation and I'm not going to judge them just for that.

If, after talking to them, they talk about how excited they were abound working on code that helped exploit addiction in young girls, then I'll reject them. But if they were just there because they really wanted to work on react.js, I'm going to fault them for that.

Just because someone needs a job doesn’t mean I need to blow up my well meshed team consisting of sane, non-assholes with some twat whose head is 100x the size it should be. They can work for oracle or something.

We tried meta folks before. Every other sentence was “at Meta…” what works at Meta does not work everywhere else.

Plenty of other places for them to work. I am not responsible for their well-being.

Yes I’m sure there were many plumbers that just wanted to do their jobs at concentration camps.

Maybe. Even as someone who lost most of their family in said concentration camps, I'll reserve judgement until I find out their motivation. If they were there because the SS held a gun to their head and said, "help us build camps or we will kill your family", then yes, I'm going to forgive them. If doing plumbing at the camps was the only job they could get to feed themselves, then yes, I will forgive them.

If they volunteered for the job because they wanted to kill Jews more efficiently, then I won't forgive them.

That's brutal. I had a recruiter get both dates wrong for both stages of an interview process at a company I really wanted to join.

Not that I don’t believe you, but how does that even happen?! And if it was truly recruiter error, wouldn’t any reasonable hiring manager get it sorted and reschedule?

Timezones. I was in one timezone, she was in another, company was in another. I got a "the company has moved on" message and ghosted by the recruiter.

Meta has always been hit or miss on recruitment. I don’t see much value in engaging with their recruiters at all given how flaky they are, it might be better to just go with an internal recommendation.

do internal recommendations not end up in the same pipeline (+/- one step)? Or is it that with internal recommendations you at least have someone on the inside following up?

Same pipeline, but if it's a friend who wants to work with you then you have someone who is not in recruiting who you can ping for updates if the process gets stuck.

Depending on the company, there may even be referral bonuses so there's a financial incentive for your "insider" to follow up.

For Meta in particular, I believe there are no referral bonuses anymore FWIW.

I just assume there was a ton of turmoil internally after layoffs and the outcome of that was me being ghosted.

I was ghosted even when they were aggressive in their hiring, so it’s not just that. They even come back and try to recruit you again while you are being ghosted, it’s insane.