Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline

I interviewed at FB recently (didn't pass the in-person) and the one question I asked each interviewer was "tell me about the parts of FB I don't see" - because they have an odd hiring process where you don't figure out what team you'd be working with until after you are hired...and I had no interest in pushing Ads, but understood that wouldn't be a great pitch from my side.

Turns out there is a LOT about ads at FB. Not everything, but a lot. Particularly in the Seattle office.

I was surprised I hadn't passed the interview (thought I did well), but in retrospect I'm glad. Whether that's sour grapes on my part, the fact the news has been full of reasons to be glad not to work at FB, or that I was very concerned that anything I did would end up pushing ads is something I can't be 100% certain of.

If you don’t want to participate in the central economic function of a company you would not have been a good hire regardless of technical skill. You don’t want employees who are willing to work at a company they think is a blight on humanity.

> you don't figure out what team you'd be working with until after you are hired

That sounds like hell. I need to meet the team I'll be working with before accepting an offer. It's the only way to know if they're competent, can communicate, and are not assholes.

> I need to meet the team I'll be working with before accepting an offer. It's the only way to know if they're competent, can communicate, and are not assholes.

This is exactly how Facebook's onboarding process works (at least in engineering). You spend 3-4 weeks in "bootcamp" classes (React 101, IOS 101, etc.). After that, you spend another 3-4 weeks auditioning teams -- you sit with teams that have open headcount for a week, attend their meetings, and work with a mentor on a coding project. Once you decide which team is the best fit, you "graduate" bootcamp and join them.

It's not perfect -- if there's no open headcount on your dream team, you'll have to pick another, but it's the best onboarding process I've seen from an employee standpoint.

Is this process for new college grads or senior engineers? I can't imagine principals go through this process, do they?

> Is this process for new college grads or senior engineers? I can't imagine principals go through this process, do they?

Good question. It's definitely not just for new grads (I went through team selection as an IC5/senior engineer). There is a process where you can be hired directly onto a specific team, but I got the impression that it's the exception rather than the rule.

I would guess that someone joining at a super-high level like a principal engineer would be doing so to work on a specific team or technology.

I've seen a lot of senior folks go through the same process.

All engineering hires go through bootcamp, period. The only engineering hires that don't go through team selection are domain experts hired for a specific team/role ahead of time.

These big companies optimize to reduce false positives during hiring, and I can say with 99% confidence across engineering that they are, they can, and they are not. I've yet to meet a jerk here after almost 2 years.

I'm sure they do. This is pretty standard at lots of big tech companies (Airbnb, most likely Uber, etc).

> The only engineering hires that don't go through team selection are domain experts hired for a specific team/role ahead of time.

Is this a significant fraction of hires? Because I find it really odd to waste the time of a say an embedded software engineer trying to teach them React when they're pretty set on working on something else anyways…

I work on machine learning and natural language processing projects. We use some tools from Facebook Research. These tools are great and open source.

Every time I want to contribute to them, I feel guilty because Facebook is behind them. I also have very mixed feelings for the devs working full time on these tools at Facebook, they're smart and doing interesting stuff, but they chose to work for Facebook... Earn big money? Destroy the world? Work on fun stuff with amazing work conditions and ignore what their company is doing? What are their motives?

I feel totally the same way. Their open source projects, especially pytorch, are masterpieces. Also, there are many renounced researchers of ML(LeCun, He, Goodfellow, etc) in FB. If I had a chance, I’d like to ask them the reson why they work for FB. It might not be just for salary, but where are the motivation to work for FB?

> You don’t want employees who are willing to work at a company they think is a blight on humanity.

If that was true nobody would have any henchmen

Someone joining to work on embedded systems would probably be "pre-allocated" during the hiring/offer process ... so they go through bootcamp, but skip team selection and go straight to their team. There's also a separate hiring pipeline for AI/ML roles since those require specialized domain knowledge vs. a "generalist" software engineer.

Most henchmen don’t think their bosses are bad people, because they aspire to be their bosses, and people don’t think they’re bad themselves, even when they are.

Generally speaking, the bootcamp process has a wide variety of different "classes" to take, covering a broad range of the Facebook stack, and no one engineer is ever expected to learn everything. So in this case, an embedded engineer would likely attend primarily backend focused classes, and would then choose from backend or embedded systems teams to work with, while someone interested in mobile or web frontend technologies would each have completely different experiences from everyone else. And ultimately, your experience coming into Facebook has far less to do with which classes or technologies you learn in bootcamp than what you're personally interested in. If you're interested in mobile, but only have experience in backend applications, that's fine – that's exactly what bootcamp is there for! We want to help you learn the technology or context that you're interested in so that you can find a role or team that you'll be happy to work on.