Fri, 12 Feb 2010
Not working for Facebook
In november last year, I was contacted by Facebook HR.
They found my background interesting and thought I might be a good
fit for an "application operations engineer" position in Palo Alto, California. (it is
basically the link between their infrastructure engineering and operations/support
teams).
::Read from here
I did a few technical interviews over phone with other app ops and engineers
from CA (about the Linux kernel, lowlevel userspace, mysql, memcached, networking, programming,
scalability, etc) and solved one of their optimisation puzzles.
( I picked usr bin crash. Actually I wanted to do something with thrift but I
couldn't get it to compile).
The technical interviews went well but then I had
another interview which was about handling support. As I have no experience
in setting up support frameworks and procedures to hand off to separate
support teams, I was/am not good enough for this position.
Then they suggested a role as site reliability engineer for the office in Dublin, which is more about
troubleshooting, monitoring and systems management/automation.
So I did some more interviews with SRE's and engineers from the London office and
from Palo Alto. Similar subjects as before, but with more of an operations/support touch to it.
These also went well, except the last one, which was more about things less related to
high-performance/scalability such as nfs, pam and ldap.
I think I missed too many questions on the last interview. I could come up
with some excuses such as me being tired (it was the evening before our Kangaroot showcase event, and
the call being late - Facebook HR messed up a timezone conversion) but fact
of the matter is: I have little experience with such "office ;-)" stuff.
So after 8 interviews over phone (each one about 40-60 minutes), spanning
about 2 months, they let me know they would not go forward with me.
That was late december, I asked for some feedback but haven't heard from
them since.
Bottomline: it sounded quite nice but I'm pretty happy with my current life in Belgium.
posted on Friday, 12 Feb 2010 22:58 - link - tags: real life - path: / - 5 comments
Comments
Posted by Anonymous on Wed Feb 24 16:57:19 2010
What do you mean? Why would that be sad? They do some cool stuff.
Posted by Dieter_be on Thu Feb 25 19:33:13 2010
Hmm just got contacted last week by some Facebook recruiter (Stephen) in Dublin, for a SRO Engineer position.
I rejected the offer and didn't even go to the first phone interview.
Seeing this post, I'm glad I did.
I've been involved in interviews with Google for 2 positions (SRE in Zurich, Senior DC Tech in Mons/Bergen) and it went pretty much the same way (spanning around 2 months each time).
Their hiring processes are just ridiculously long, and they keep going with you even if they know they are aiming too high (SRE) or too low (DC tech).
And finally, after countless hours of interviews they still don't know if you are a good fit or not.
Some companies decide if you're a good fit or not after 1 or 2 interviews, and I'm sure they make as good choices as Google/FB, if not even better.
Posted by Sébastien Wains on Tue Oct 12 21:07:54 2010
Funny, I got contacted a few days ago by the same guy, same position.
A lot has been written about the interviewing process of G/FB/.., and yes, what you say sounds familiar.
On the other hand they want to be really, really sure they only hire the best. So many people are being contacted by/doing interviews with Google as well lately. It's amazing. Only try to imagine how many man-hours those companies are investing to talk to so many people all over the world.
Posted by Dieter_be on Wed Oct 13 22:29:09 2010
I am wondering if you are the creator of vox-fora.com
if this is true I have an interesting offer for you that you might be interested in. If not, I am still wanting to make an offer to you as a personal site developer and IT member for my website.
Posted by jranderson on Fri Oct 15 11:30:05 2010
sad is, you wanted to accept the job for them.