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

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550 points polskibus | 4 comments | 08 Feb 19 16:04 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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ergothus ◴[08 Feb 19 17:08 UTC] No.19116287[source]▶
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.

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driverdan ◴[08 Feb 19 17:36 UTC] No.19116628[source]▶
> 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.

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packetslave ◴[08 Feb 19 17:48 UTC] No.19116759[source]▶
> 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.

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nickv ◴[08 Feb 19 17:54 UTC] No.19116835[source]▶
Is this process for new college grads or senior engineers? I can't imagine principals go through this process, do they?
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1. nuclear_eclipse ◴[08 Feb 19 19:07 UTC] No.19117604[source]▶
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.
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2. saagarjha ◴[09 Feb 19 00:48 UTC] No.19119962[source]▶
> 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…

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3. packetslave ◴[10 Feb 19 00:33 UTC] No.19125663[source]▶
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.
4. nuclear_eclipse ◴[11 Feb 19 01:24 UTC] No.19131387[source]▶
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.