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>I'd love to see you defend why the guy is a professional communicator with a good attitude.

He's not, but that doesn't matter. You're going to be hard pressed to only ever communicate with professional communicators with good attitudes your whole career. So if you ever want to be taken seriously and have a successful career, you're going to need to learn what battles are worth fighting. Hell, maybe it was even a test to see if the guy worked well on a high-stress team. If he can't handle one person not understanding the difference between Unix and Unix-like, how's he going to handle someone who puts a tab as an indent instead of two spaces?

The recruiter was wrong. But it doesn't matter. Stanley (hopefully) learned a valuable lesson here, and that lesson is "pick your battles". Life, especially corporate life, is full of nonsensical requirements and TPS reports and if you fight every single one of them your performance review will read "not a team player" every single year.

> What are your weaknesses?

I don't play well with idiots, or nonsensical bullshit.

Recruiter is not a technical person. If you want technical people recruiting you work somewhere smaller. The real weakness is inability to communicate with non-technical members of staff.

I would expect a recruiter for one of the biggest tech companies in the world to have at least some basic understanding/idea of even what linux is - that's not a big ask at all.

Moreover, if I'm a recruiter, unless I'm a domain expert, looking to hire someone into the field and they say they already have it on their resume, I'm going to go and double check their resume and double check my own understanding before I go any further to avoid issues like this.

The only person who looks bad here is the recruiter, and it's entirely their own fault.

The recruiter needn't even be a person. A blind monkey can detect that "UNIX" doesn't match "Linux and UNIX-Like" and reject an application. Pure text matching. Recruiter literally doesn't even need to know how to read.

Most people can't communicate with blind monkeys though, so I wouldn't fault anyone for failing here either.

I would assume at this point that this is some advanced AI experiment Facebook was running to interact with future employees.

Given the exchange is now on imgur, I don’t think the lesson was learned.

I don't think "pick your battles" is quite fair. I didn't read this as him being stubborn for no reason, at least not in this initial message. He knows Facebook has a reputation as a strong technical team, and since he is applying for a technical job, he probably thought they'd appreciate the attention to detail of giving a thorough response.

But yes, it certainly is a lesson in dealing with nonsense.

What is up with this societal mentality that the employee is beneath the employer, and the employer has the license to be rude and it's the employee's job to accommodate their bullshit? Sending a resume for a job interview and dealing with an obnoxious recruiter is definitely not a battle I'd pick. If that's how they treat prospective job candidates, then that's probably not a company I want to work for.

The employee is not below the employer, but the employer is the one who decides if the employee gets hired.

Want a job there? Play by their rules. Don’t want a job there? Have an email exchange like this one.

A professional communicator tailors their communication to their audience. Stanley's initial explanation was pretty good, but since the recruiter didn't seem to understand it, Stanley should have adjusted his approach instead of doubling down.

I'm sure he could have done a better job communicating to the recruiter. You could tell he was slightly irritated, and maybe somehow he could have figured out a different framing that the recruiter would understand. (But note that at the end, he changed his strategy and said simply that he had experience with Linux and UNIX, and the recruiter still didn't care. It really isn't clear whether there was any approach that would have worked.)

He did like a 75% good job. But the recruiter did a 0% good job. It's not easy to personally take it upon yourself to make every interaction work perfectly when the other party is trying their hardest to make it fail.

> He did like a 75% good job.

I'd say a 75% good job for a fresh grad is a really good score. Explaining technical jargon to the computer illiterate is not really something you can learn at school.

>Explaining technical jargon to the computer illiterate is not really something you can learn at school

...but, yet, probably should be.

Not to mention he shouldn't have to in this instance. He's talking to someone who's recruiting for technical positions.

At a big-name company like this, is it really too much to ask that someone understand the basics of the technology and they're recruiting for?

I mean, I explain technical jargon all day long, sure, but I work at a trucking company. Still, my interview process certainly didn't run in to any problem like this, and had it, I can assure you I would've been met with no resistance with the given explanation...

> Explaining technical jargon to the computer illiterate is not really something you can learn at school.

How can you not learn that - how else can you talk to IT/Conputer teachers?

> and the recruiter still didn't care

It wasn't not caring; at that point the recruiter didn't believe him about the Unix experience.

I'm not sure how much more clear poor Stanley can get:

> Recruiter: We're looking for students with experience work on Linux and Unix

> Stanley: I have experience working on Linux and UNIX

> Recruiter: Your email and resume say Unix-like, which is not exactly UNIX.

The recruiter, by the end of this exchange has been given the explanation of why "UNIX-like" is the correct term, why it is being used, and why it is relevant. Stanley has also tried to take a more layman-like approach, and backed off the technical jargon to state "yes, I have that", using the exact terms that the recruiter used, despite them being incorrect.

The recruiter's last email contains things that are incorrect, and the response from the recruiter is irrational.

The recruiter's response isn't irrational. Very clear instructions are being given: put UNIX and Linux on your resume. Not tell me via e-mail. Then candidate goes ahead and 'educates' the recruiter, and puts something other than UNIX (UNIX-like) on the resume. i.e., does not follow instructions.

Clear no hire.

> Clear no hire.

You'd rather higher a liar and someone that will follow instructions to the letter, even when they're incorrect?

It sounds like you'd hire this useless recruiter.

What? I don't care who gets hired. But when hiring at scale, if a candidate can't follow instructions, they don't get hired. It's a basic filter that is necessary when that many people are being considered.

How many tens of thousands of university kids go through the hiring pipeline at Facebook each semester?

When you are doing things at that scale, you need well-defined processes. The process here was we need you to put exactly what this position requires on your resume, probably because the resume needed to be OKd by some keyword-checking system.

The candidate either was incapable of or refused to follow the process. Therefore, no hire.

Hey, my grandparent comment clearly instructed you to email me responses, not post them here. Now you go ahead and "send" me this response, but you don't even email me a copy, i.e. do not follow instructions.

Clear no hire.

> Very clear instructions are being given: put UNIX and Linux on your resume. Not tell me via e-mail.

Even if that were the recruiter's intent, I don't think it's that clear. At no point in the conversation does the recruiter ever make an explicit request to have a resume with both of those on it. You might think there is an implied request from the recruiter for that, but I do not, and neither, it seems, did Stanley.

The only point in the exchange that I can see where the recruiter requests a change to the resume is here:

> […] we require having Unix experience. If you have it, could you update your resume and resend?

Which he does.

But he put UNIX on his resume, and not UNIX-like. There's a screenshot that shows this.

There are multiple screenshots of his resume. One of them says "UNIX", but does not include "Linux". The recruiter asked him to put both Unix and Linux on his resume. He then updated it to say "Linux and Unix-like". The recruiter again asked him to specifically put "Unix and Linux", but he still didn't.

The recruiter does appear to be a little clueless with the terminology, but there could be several reasons for this. Oftentimes resumes are input into an automated system that searches for very specific keywords, or the resume might be going to an executive who is very specific about what they are looking for.

At the end of the day, the recruiter gave very clear instructions on what to do. If Stanley had just followed those instructions and re-sent his resume, he'd probably be fine. Instead, he chose to be snarky and condescending in his response. The recruiter was very professional and STILL gave him a chance to fix his resume and re-send, but he still didn't.

It's tricky because from the layperson's perspective Microsoft Windows, VxWorks, and whatever runs on a TI-86 graphic calculator could be "UNIX-like" in that they are operating systems, yet none of these things are what they're actually looking for.

Still it's sort of amazing that the recruiter could be both so wrong and so confident.

Stanley said in an email he worked on Linux systems, but despite repeated prompts from the recruiter, refused to put exactly that on his resume.

He was technically correct, which some people believe is the best kind of correct, but the failure here was his. He was more interested in being right than getting the internship, and as a result he gets a lot of pats on the back from people who share his philosophy here... and no internship.

No internship at FaceBook.

> refused to put exactly that on his resume.

But he did!! And the recruiter still gave him flak!

Stanley said, "POSIX is more-or-less a standardization effort for UNIX/Linux systems, so I've updated my resume to reflect this."

And then he shows a screenshot that just lists "UNIX", not "UNIX-like".

Then the recruiter bats at him again!

I think he was more interested in being as honest as possible, not being right.

He didn't, though.

At first, his resume included "Linux". The recruiter asked him to update his resume to include Unix as well. Stanley changed it to read just "UNIX", but no Linux.

The recruiter asked him to fix this by specifying both Linux and UNIX in his resume. Stanley updated it to say Linux and UNIX-like.

The recruiter, very professionally instead of just dropping the conversation immediately, then asked again that Stanley rectify his resume to include the terms they are looking for: Linux and UNIX. Not "UNIX-like". But Stanley again did not do this.

The recruiter gave very clear instructions on what to do, but (from the recruiter's perspective) Stanley was more concerned with condescendingly educating the recruiter rather than following simple instructions.

I sometimes screen resumes from college students at my company, and if I ever received an email exchange like the one from Stanley here, I would have immediately put him in the "no" pile. I already have 400+ people to screen, why waste time with him when I can easily find someone with equivalent experience that also knows how to follow instructions and, most importantly, isn't so rude about it?

Good luck on your candidate search. Despite a bit of stubbornness, it's clear that he had good intentions, which can't be said of the recruiter.

Yeah why waste time on someone that's correcting you, because you know what's best. Good luck to you and your company finding talented people.

That's not incorrect, but at the same time it's not improbable that he was essentially trolling at this point and expecting to show this nonsense to his peers (which worked!).

Solid engineers, even ones still in school, know who they are and that their skills are valuable. To this candidate the value of any one recruiter is near-zero. He was chasing lols, basically.

The story here is that Facebook messed up by having this person front their recruiting efforts, not that Stanley Zhang was denied a job.

The kid was pretty green (when you apply for internships you usually are), he had no idea that first-line screeners at a big-5 company could be that awful. With age comes experience and low expectations but as an undergraduate you can be excused. You might even demand a minimum standard of discourse, interviews go both ways.

Storytime: back then us students were doing a factory tour, we went to Hoechst in Frankfurt (yes, it was that long ago). There was lunch with company research staff in the Jahrhunderthalle (they did have longer time horizons then). Strangely, the majority was from our university. That was puzzling, do they mostly recruit from our university?! They solved the mystery for us, this was a recruitment visit, they wanted us to consider them and wanted to put their best foot forward.

Something happened to the employer-employee relationship in the meantime.

It’s not always that bad. I have had pretty pleasant experiences with Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Apple (my current employer). I have also had negative experiences with Google and Amazon as well (the Amazon one puts them squarely in the I-don’t-want-to-ever-interview-with-them-again bucket).

On a more relevant comment, I think the student could have been a little smarter in realizing that the recruiter didn’t seem like he/she understood what was really being asked in the position he/she was recruiting for, but I think a lot of respondents on HN forget that people are sometimes held to account for items put in the resume. I remember when I interviewed at Apple in my last interview search, all 3 of the teams I had onsites with held me to account for items I had put on my resume.

> Beyond software developers who have programmed in the 1970s, most people do not have experience with a true UNIX OS

This line is where he started to come across as a jerk.

I think if he had skipped this paragraph and just replied with the "I've updated my resume..." bit, he would have been fine.

> Beyond software developers who have programmed in the 1970s, ..

Stanley should update his industry knowledge. My school used AIX/Solaris in the late 90s, switching over to Linux (mostly because it was free/cheap) only in 99/2000. I have friends who interned at Sun Microsystems in 2001/2 and they were still using Solaris on all their computers including what the receptionists were using.

There's an old saying about no one getting fired for buying Microsoft (or was it IBM). Similarly, the (entry-level) recruiter/sourcer would rather not get fired or get a bad rap from the hiring manager for confusing Linux and Unix than risk it believing some 20 year old jerk.

> switching over to Linux (mostly because it was free/cheap) only in 99/2000

Your school was trail blazing! At my uni, UVic, it was still all Sun and IBM Unix labs (with plaques) when I graduated in 2000.

When I started uni in 2000 (exeter) we had some Solaris workstations (with CDM), and some redhat ones. The printing system was all redhat based, but the server with the fast 10mbit internet connection I ran BitchX on to DCC voyager episodes on was irix. The student radio station was some form of Linux on the tx side (in addition to the AM transmitter)

There was even a room with NT4 - I went there once.

When I started work as a trainee at a major UK broadcaster in 2003 the news production system ran in Solaris, radio was on some vax thing, the image store ran on irix, the logging system was on aix, and there were half a dozen distros across about 20 servers with no real standards. The majority of staff were either windows IT staff (who got outsourced), help desk staff, or broadcast engineers with limited computer knowledge.

Over the next few years I changed the news system, others followed suit, and there's now 1200 ubuntu boxes/vms over 6 continents. Hooray for monoculture. Looking back it's amazing how quickly things change.

Don't you think the risk you are talking about in believing a 20 year old is exaggerated? Is it that hard to go back to the manager and ask if "Unix-like" is acceptable although the job description says "Unix"? Or just do a little bit of Googling to figure out if what the candidate is saying could have merit?

From my perspective, it appears that the recruiter is the jerk and not the candidate. I have met many computer-illiterate recruiters but never one like this who would repeat the same response over and over again despite the candidate having clarified his position.

I Googled and I find that the candidate was wrong. The recruiter was right.

AIX, Solaris and HP-UX are bonafide Unix systems and there indeed are software developers today who work with them.

In any case, it is not very hard to write something like the following in the resume: POSIX, CentOS (Linux), Solaris (Unix), FreeBSD (Unix-like), etc. It is always good to be more specific about your skills in situations like this than being ambiguous.

[1]: https://archive.org/details/bstj57-6-1905

Can the downvoters care to explain what in my comment is incorrect?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

The reason you're getting downvoted is because you're saying he's incorrect by making a distinction between UNIX (uppercase) and Unix when referring to commercial OSes. There is no such distinction. UNIX is a trademark for the Unix family of operating systems. All of the systems you referenced as a family of Unix systems are certified and therefore can be referred to in the trademarked way as UNIX.

The candidate is incorrect in his belief that nobody uses UNIX (or Unix) in 2017 and he could have been less flippant in his responses to the recruiter, but his technical accuracy is spot on.

Regarding the minimal distinction that exists, FreeBSD is Unix, but not UNIX, because it has never been certified as there is a cost associated but it is directly derived from AT&T Unix in its lineage. Mac OS X which is derived from FreeBSD in turn was certified and is therefore a UNIX, ironically enough.

While that is true, I find it highly unlikely that they are expecting interns to have experience with Unix™.

Most public companies running Oracle Financials will do so in Unix to control license expenses.

IBM licensing can be absurd. Unless his university provided AIX systems to work with (and I can almost guarantee they didn't), its unreasonable to assume that an applicant would take the slowboat to licensing/software support contract hell and back just to get hands on with a niche, oddball UNIX system.

Solaris died roughly 3 times, depending on who you ask. 2002 was 15 years ago. Oracle officially killed it by laying off over 90% of people assigned to the project two days ago. Future Solaris development is deader than shit.

The only true UNIX that sees "widespread" use, and the only one that you will ever find a student with any experience with it is FreeBSD, and FreeBSD is popular because of its licensing, not its "true UNIX nature."

As somebody else said, it wouldn't have busted the recruiter's ass to forward the email to the manager and ask if "Unix-like" experience is relevant.

The guy writes well. The recruiter is the one with bad attitude. But I would say that a practical communicator knows his audience, and in this case might want to give up explaining POSIX, change his resume, and move on.

Stanley might change his tune if he broaden his experiences a bit. A close friend of mine is a 20-something, now, Chief Engineer at a defense contractor working with the big private names and USAF.

He was a hardcore Linux guy before taking this position 5 or so years ago. He'll tell you himself, there's little transfer between deep Linux knowledge and deep Unix knowledge. They're two different beasts.

Trust me, Unix is not limited to programmers from the 1970s, it's very much alive, and it's not outdated. There's a hell of a lot of interesting stuff going on outside of Silicon Valley. I wish I could talk about it.

Yep, still use AIX here.

Mac OS X is UNIX and people use it well after the 1970s, so he's just wrong.

"defend why the guy who wrote the first half is bad at technical communication"

Too many details the target person is not just not interested about, but also have low chance to fully understand - judging from targets initial confusion about Unix and Linux.

Totally cool at that age, but not perfect communication either. All that is orthogonal to quality of communication from recruiter.