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Comment by tw1010 | Hacker News Reader

In situations like these you really aught to ask yourself what your end-goal with being elitist like that is really trying to serve. In engineering situations usually the purpose is some form of disguised signaling. This is the purpose of most sentences that start with "technically". But when you're talking to a recruiter that kind of move is unlikely to be effective. It's unlikely to affect your application positively, and the only effect you can expect is what happened in this interaction, namely rejection. Be honest about why you act the way you do, and be rational about your decisions.

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I disagree. It looks like the recruiter is clueless or maybe even trolling, and applicant was going out of their way to be helpful. They could have just updated their resume, and allowed the recruiter to remain ignorant, but imo that would have been very rude.

totally agree with dec0dedab0de. and recruiters should pay attention - think of how many smart candidates see this nonsense, consider it a reflection of the organization, and opt-out of the recruiting process.

If you're looking for someone who has actual high level expertise working on AIX or FreeBSD, having some dude tell you that Linux is the same as Unix or asserting that knowing what POSIX means is equivalent to having production knowledge of AIX/FreeBSD for a production engineering role is not very productive.

The recruiter handled himself professionally and should be commended for not being bullied. Mr. Zhang sounds like a punk, and would probably be better served by pulling the image.

I'm going to leave the image up. It's regrettable, but for accountability's sake I don't want to run away from my mistakes. And yeah - I think it boils down to their having strict requirements and large applicant volume, so my response definitely wasn't appropriate there.

They didn't have strict requirements, unless you mean strict requirements on what keywords appear in the CVs that are submitted.

If the recruiter is looking for FreeBSD experience and not just *nix experience he needs to be a hell of a lot more explicit. As is it just sounds like the recruiter doesn't know what he's talking about and is trying to just go based on keywords.

Especially since this is a UX research internship, and the candidate made perfectly clear that that is how the recruiter was coming across, so the recruiter had every opportunity to clarify.

The candidate didn't handle it perfectly, the recruiter however handled it far worse.

Read more carefully. It was a production engineer internship, not UX research.

Early phases of job applications are about following directions and saying what you need to truthfully say. I'm actually surprised that my original comment was voted into oblivion -- its a pretty obvious reality. The recruiter did his best to say "Just write Unix" without crossing a line.

If they need experience with a specific Unix they should ask for it by name. Having worked with a number 'real' Unix's (mainly Solaris, Irix and Digital Unix/Tru64) I can tell you that it's no easier (or harder) to transfer knowledge between, say, Irix and Solaris than between Linux and Solaris.

He already did his job of intellectually engaging the recruiter. If the other party is not interested, it will not be rude if he update his resume and move on.

On the contrary, he seems to be trying to help the applicant, most would just not reply to a candidate filtered out because their 'experience tuple' didn't contain a certain keyword (UNIX & LINUX in this case)

> ask yourself what your end-goal with being elitist like that is really trying to serve. In engineering situations usually the purpose is some form of disguised signaling.

Facebook markets itself as hiring the best people. Therefore, when applying to Facebook, you want to market yourself as being among the best. When a recruiter first tells you that Linux isn't Unix, you assume that the elite recruiter looking for elite people is looking for an elite response which explains the difference.

OP's point is that image of Facebook elitism is just smoke and mirrors.

What precisely do you think the word elitist means? I'm not sure which dictionary you're using but I'm confident that the definition isn't close to "politely explaining the confusion, and then changing the language in your email and resume to match the inaccurate expectations of the idiot on the other end of the conversation"

As a tutorial for those of us like me who sometimes stumble in situations like this, could someone who found the OP's responses to the recruiter unprofessional please post example phrasing of what the OP should have said? Let's assume the constraint that the OP will refuse to lie (so they won't just change their resume to 'Unix' instead of 'Unix-like').

This is a genuine question; I often can't think of how to phrase things and I think an example would be educational.

Stanley did

email 1: I want to apply

email 2: I fixed my resume

email 3: my fix didn't work? you must be wrong

email 4: you are still wrong

but at email 3 you clearly aren't getting it and should ASK them what they want

thank you

> Let's assume the constraint that the OP will refuse to lie.

This constraint is invalid. People need to use contextual awareness. The recruiter is most likely not a technical person, so splitting hairs won't help. And based on a bit of knowledge about Facebook, it's highly unlikely that a company that prides itself on building its own data centers from scratch will actually use a creaky AIX 7.1 for their backend, so you just "lie". Heck, it's not even a lie, it's a white lie which you'll tell the engineer interviewer down the line, while explaining that you have POSIX/whatever experience.

In my opinion this whole exchange shows a need for improvement regarding people skills for OP, at least in writing. Considering it's an internship, this was probably a good moment for a wake-up call.

thank you

He's not interested and wants some lulz.

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