Facebook Recruiter Correspondence
george.mand.is
george.mand.is
At some point, the root issue with Facebook (as identified best by Jaron Lanier) has been lost in the political noise: their business model is one that incentivizes and enables the creation of a global scale surveillance and behavior modification empire. Getting angry that they are not removing content you feel is “dangerous” is the opposite of fixing this: it’s smuggling in the idea they ought to be presumed an arbiter of speech - that arbitration being the key lever of their toxic business model.
If we agree Facebook should be in a position to decide who gets to talk to whom in the modern public square, we are forced to agree they get to monetize that capability, which is their current business model.
In other words, they are a syndicator.
In the physical world, syndicators remain accountable for what they publish through through their channels. They are not responsible for the material (given they didn't create or commission it), but they sure as hell carry the responsibility for letting the material propagate.
Incidentally, several years back I was talking to FB after they reached out. Visited their office for an informal chat and got to talk to couple of their senior(ish) engineering managers. I asked if they were doing, or planning to do anything like actually educating the users on their platform once they've identified someone having been subjected to propaganda or misinformation campaign. I said that I could imagine working on that type of project.
It's not often that you see a person physically recoil from an idea. "We don't do that!"
As far as I'm concerned, until FB actively fights not only the propaganda being funnelled through their machine, but also its effects on groups and individuals to undo the damage, the company is beyond redemption.
Just like tv channels optimize their content for TRP ratings and for ad sales, FB does the same – except its engagement optimization cycle is super-micro and super-fast and super-scalable and its ads are super-cheap and super-granular and super-micro.
Its the same business model followed by newspapers/magazines, other forms of content based attention grabbing and holding mechanism which make money through ads. The older business models are more coarse-grain in everything (cost, price, target size, targeting precision, time-cycles etc) and newer tech-enabled business-models are fine-grain everything.
Obviously, the same old social/behavioral/moral rules that worked (or didn't work, but didn't matter) at coarse-grain/slow-cycle/less-massive/more-local won't work (or needs to work better because it matters at scale!) at fine-grain/fast-cycle/huge/global levels. And the answer isn't obvious.
It is obvious same notions/rules/mechanisms won't scale (like content editorialship/moderation etc).
Facebook penetration in my country is so complete, I would wager there is absolutely no way to, say, successfully run for public office without at least maintaining an active Facebook page. This is why I say that Facebook must be destroyed. It is not acceptable that some company half the world away, based on American morals and American interests, gets to decide who can and cannot realistically get elected here.
In my experience when this argument is made, I typically follow it up by "well if it's so unimportant, why don't you delete your account?". 99/100 times I've asked this in real life the person responds by saying, "well I don't have anywhere else to say things" (this is during covid).
For the past two years, social media is the only public square allowed by government fiat. Thus it must be regulated as such.
Without the promises made on behalf of FB's tracking tech and the behavioural feedback loops they farm, the social features are basically worthless.
FB's problem isn't a 1st Amendment issue. It's the fact that it lies about the effectiveness of its ad tech to its advertisers, while also attempting to hide the toxicity of its behaviour mod techniques.
And there are too many parts of the world where it has monopoly status on both.
And that's completely irrelevant to my argument which is that, since Facebook is the only public square by government fiat, it ought to be treated as such regardless of how it got there.
When government exercises eminent domain for the public interest, it does not worry about why it is the house it is seizing was placed there. It just notes that the house is there and then takes proper action to secure it's future aims for public benefit.
What?
No, FB users talk to each other not to FB (the editor).
Quantity has a quality of its own - when size is huge it should be reclassified as public interest, not private. There should be mechanisms for people to ensure their voices matter similar to elections and parliament.
Note to readers: the author of the blog post is not espousing this, at least not overtly.
I think we're thinking about this the wrong way - we should break up Facebook the same way we broke up Bell into baby Bells. Make "Facebook" a utility. Split Facebook into five different companies, maybe some not even in the US. Each "Facebook" company would have to provide Facebook service to a subset of current users. Allow new people to run Facebook providers.
Unhappy with the customer service from your current Facebook provider, or with the quantity of ads? Don't like the algorithm that's running your timeline? Switch to one of the other providers who may do things differently. Create competition in this market where there simply isn't any.
Some people will point out this forces all these providers to interoperate somehow, so users on one Facebook provider can talk to users on another. This is a really great part of this plan! Our social networks become based on open standards and interoperability instead of being walled gardens.
[edit] Further, im not sure how you’d slice it up horizontally instead of vertically - that is to say Facebook is Facebook for “millennials,” Instagram is Facebook for gen z“. It feels like each of these vertical slices retain the same incentive structure they have today but targeting different demographics.
What could slicing it horizontally look like? An independent infra AWS? A social graph? Curious your thoughts.
I think the problem is the incentive structure - a company goaled on engagement will focus on the most engaging content. That’s hate, division, fear and anger. Without a fundamental reimagination of incentives I think the same beast will emerge. The new T-1000 of corporations - as Colbert referred to at&t at the time.
FB is not a medium. It may be a de facto platform for social organisations and advertising, but it's still just an app.
Whilst FB made more money than MySpace and lasted for a longer time, its demise is inevitable for the same reason, and we're seeing the slide occur now.
FB, like AOL and MySpace before it, was fashionable when its feature provided new reach for participants. Sooner or later, these apps reach maximum cachet and after that, they are for "old people".
FB is for old people. And that's not even the worst of its problems.
I'd break out FAANG's advertising operations. Prohibit conflicts of interest, fraud.
I sorta expected the online advertising bubble to pop, mooting the need for remedy. But somehow it keeps not popping.
Set some threshold. Reach a certain size and your ops get divided up. Spitballing: $10m annual revenue, 100k monthly visitors, whatever. So indies like daringfireball can continue to do their own thing.
Lets be serious, the youth market is strongly moving towards TikTok, and its feed algorithm already has created a notion of 'the different sides of TikTok', for conservative vs liberal content.
While I'm not sure parent's suggestion is feasible or would solve anything, it is more like the AT&T breakup in that the system is still cohesive, even if operated by separate entities.
Federated social media for me has been much less toxic in terms of discussion quality and is much less addictive, I love checking it but I don’t doom-scroll to oblivion…
But server doesn’t get payed to make me doom scroll to oblivion so incentives are much more aligned.
Its one thing if the content being served is what some nefarious actor wants a group to consume, for influence sake. Its another when its the content produces and consumes themselves. The current misinformation discourse on FB is the current culture, especially the culture of a large group of people. It originates both on and off FB. 'Q' didn't originate on FB, it originated on 8chan, let that sink in.
huh, that's the first time i have read this one. the one i read about recently has to do with connecting the world.
now this is making me realize that maybe, just maybe, nobody knows what their true business model is?
I’m joking of course. None of those make as much money as Facebook, and I think we can all agree it’s the fact that they are so rich that bothers us most. Far more than any public square argument. Where’s my yacht?!
I care that they have a monopoly and consolidate so much power that they can shift the balance for the interest of their stakeholders or lobbyists.
If everyone had sufficient bandwidth to host their own content from their home Internet, and ISPs were prohibited from also being media companies, free speech would be much stronger.
Can anyone seriously argue that disinformation on Facebook isn't dangerous? The only possible question should be what can we do about it to preserve debate, free speech, etc. while stoping the literally deadly parts.
- "I'll probably get put in facebook jail for this..."
- A misinformation label attached to the bottom of the post.
- The post completely blanked out, with a statement that this is misinformation.
This seems to indicate some moderation being done. What I don't see from the "facebook should stop' this group, is any attempt to get cable companies to do the same with "news" stations that broadcast misinformation. An attempt to have the FCC take AM radio station's licenses for broadcasting propaganda.
The underlying fact is, what we label misinformation is just what a large group of people wrongly believe, and they really like sharing it with each other.
All of this was evident many years ago, based on the ad delivery system Facebook built, and the kinds of information their early APIs were exposing to people. It didn’t take a genius to realize having people building more and more sophisticated systems to spy on people to get data to drive the development of products to persuade people was a dangerous flywheel, and one that was held up by good intentions (making services “free”), so it was likely to be sustainable via an “ends justify the means” rationalization.
Now we are seeing a large group of people freely sharing misinformation amongst themselves. The fueling of this, I would argue, is outside of facebook and is being brought there by the people themselves.
It was really easy to blame the lowering of the level of discourse to social media. However, the "our side at any cost" has its modern seeds in the advent of right wing radio with Rush Limbaugh, followed by the rise of fox news. With the internet, the public has learned that they too can be players in the political landscape by commenting on news articles. All of which predates the rise of social media to a large extent. In the early 2000s, Yahoo News political articles would have 10s of thousands of comments, even now, the 2020 election market on predictit had 300k comments on it, of people posting memes and s*t talking to each other.
This is the culture now. To change this, you can't go and regulate a social media company, you have to change the culture.
The core mechanism of political polarization is that the internet inexorably pulled society out of its temporary state of mass media consolidation. For a couple decades, we had an unusual situation where a few companies ran mass media, and those companies all sort of agreed to toe the centrist consensus line politically. Now, we've reverted to something like what we had before radio, which was that socialists read the socialist newspaper, right-wing folks read the right-wing newspaper, etc., if not even worse -- some folks just got their news from the loudest partisans at the bar.
We've gone from an era where news distribution was fragmented because it was very difficult, to an era where it was consolidated because it was easy for large corporations only, to an era where it's so dead simple that anyone can do it, so it's fragmented again.
Legacy media folks hate this. They blame the biggest players helping people share fragmented media sources with one another, rather than recognizing the inevitability of this fragmentation, no matter what products people use to share news over the internet. They demand a return to elite consensus blocking extreme viewpoints. It is simply not gonna happen. That barn was always temporary, and it has collapsed around the horse.
But when it became obvious that “ads” was the wrong mental model, and that the products being created were ultimately about the general problem of persuading people by using data collected by spying on them, it should have been realized this was an incentive structure that any sane code of engineering ethics should abandon. Facebook ended up being the best and most successful example of an organization taking this system to its most logical endpoint, but someone always would have unless a code of ethics managed to materialize upon seeing the damage it was causing before it got too far.
I don’t judge people who work at Facebook generally, but do think every one of them at this point should resign on ethical grounds. The situation could be fixed if the company (even just internally) owned up to the malincentives they have fallen into and committed to exiting it and leading on forming a code of ethics on when these kinds of system ought not be built.
I really don't understand why it's taken almost a decade for you idiots to figure out what that would result in.
"At this point"
What point? The point they started hiding your friends "boring" posts in order to serve up the most clickbait shit possible?
Or the point they allowed political parties to ram Obama and then trump down your throat.
Or the point they decided to become arbitors of truth?
Or the point they decided to censor you over your beliefs?
Nah, it was made very clear by very many back when, all of my friends understood my concerns clearly, I made sure they knew what was happening.
They chose not to care. I don't blame them, but I have no sympathy for them either.
I don't really have many regrets either, my life improved a lot since distancing myself from the online world.
Sure, media is more fragmented now. But that doesn't address any of the criticisms in question.
The surveilance is going to happen no matter what country. Thinking any other country would actually respect privacy is truly delusional.
Further bear in mind that “free speech” refers to the government not precluding your speech and Facebook ain’t government. Unless you’re proposing nationalizing it.
Basically the modern version of riling up a lynch mob … for profit.
To some extend, all social media use this feedback loop, even this site.
P.S. Yes, I realize the irony of this comment.
First amendment refers to the government not precluding your speech. "Free speech" is a much broader concept.
Given the constitutional safeguards you may be right on this one.
> Thinking any other country would actually respect privacy is truly delusional.
This, however, I had to read several times to be sure you were saying what I thought you were saying. At which point I just shook my head in amazement.
I laughed a bit at this. I guess a recruiting tactic is to now advertise the exciting possibilities of burnout? "Come join Facebook because you can totally change the ethical direction of this billion dollar surveillance behemoth from the inside, one commit at a time. ;)"
Recruiters at FB seem to earn ~50-60% of the total compensation of Engineers at equivalent levels, doing a bit better at the bottom of the ladder (I don't see a single IC3 recruiter earning under $100k in the US; they'd have to be earning ~60k to be earning "half of the base of an L3 with no RSUs").
...
>they'd have to be earning ~60k to be earning "half of the base of an L3 with no RSUs"
The people that email you are not L3s. They're actually often contractors. When they're not they're definitely L1s (or maybe L2s since I think L1s are actually service staff).
but it's the recruiter who decided to play along despite that. At that point OP has no choice but to elaborate and counter the 'criticizing from outside' thing
The author of this post, George Mandis, DOES NOT work at Google.
They are a “Google Developer Expert”, which is a person recognized by Google as having exemplary expertise in one or more of their Google Developers products. GDEs are awarded through the Google Developers Experts program established and administered by Google.
Anyone with a relevant background in web development can become a GDE.
Eligibility criteria → https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Developer_Expert#Eligib...
Wonder if they have similar conversations with recruiters from all other companies, would be great to see those published.
This, apparently, was a way to get myself permanently and unceremoniously removed from all Facebook recruiter outbound. Not only did I not get a reply, but where I used to get multiple emails a month from different teams, I haven't heard anything from a Facebook recruiter in more than two years.
So everything worked out in the end.
I see it through my family members who all have Facebook, how they connect with relatives across the globe and routinely stay in touch during birthdays and other events.
I also see it at most social functions around me that organize over Facebook, because I am left out of those since I don't have an account.
My best connection to social gatherings is a friend who also hates Facebook but is a lot more social than me, moves around a lot more, so he hears from all the people with Facebook what is going on through word of mouth.
So that's a pretty neat service they're offering to a substantial part of the population. But of course they're suffering from moderation issues, something we can see on all large platforms like Youtube and Twitter.
For sure, Facebook is great. It just provides services that shouldn't come from one single company in America.
They should be forced to interoperate. Provide a way to subscribe to Facebook content (pages, events) from outside of Facebook, and a way to pull outside content (RSS, ActivityPub, hell, throw in Twitter while we're at it) into your Facebook stream. A sort of standardized stream for updates and comments.
This would clear up all my criticisms of Facebook. At that point I would only wish them well. I'm sure they would provide the best interface to it, and most people would stay with them, and that would be fine.
I just don't see the US implementing such measures. But I do hope for a municipal social media platform in Europe some day.
Oh, the irony. Well it looks like the "healthy dissent" gets you out the door. Perhaps that is the right direction the recruiter was referring to?
http://web.archive.org/web/20050403215543/www.thecrimson.com...
This is very much like the promise that Page and Brin made in their early 1990's paper announcing Google. How easily the idealism gave way to greed. These kids were never suited for management, let alone leading a large organisation. There was no "business plan". Even today, they still fall back on advertising. Competition is far too challenging.
There is likely no person on the Facebook dole who wants to "fix" the problem of Facebook if it means losing their paycheck, bonus and stock options. On the contrary, it stands to reason these people will be compelled to act in the interests of self-preservation, which means the preservation of "the business" (high surveillance advertising). The reply from the recruiter is perhaps an example of such desperation.
Bill Gates was recently interviewed on PBS News Hour about his relationship with Jeffery Epstein. His answer seemed reminiscient of the younger Gates. Getsuring with his hands, we can see his wedding ring is gone. Perhaps he has come full circle, he is who he always was. He refused to disclose what he knew. He was apparently told to say he regretted having the meetings, which he repeats several times. Eventually after evading more questions, he is asked if he learned from the mistakes of the past, and his reply is "Well, he's dead..." and then he tries to play up his role in philanthropy. His kids are likely afraid to speak out.
https://archive.org/download/youtube-LNAwUxZ5nfw/LNAwUxZ5nfw...
https://www.thedailybeast.com/bill-gates-asked-what-he-knew-...
IIRC, back when he was active on HN, PG was a staid Zuckerberg fan. I also recall HN commenters claiming that Zuckerberg's "dumb fucks" comment referring to Facebook's early users, his fellow classmates, was no longer representative of the person who made it. I wonder if he can do better than Bill Gates in interviews.
That's it in a nutshell.
It will decidedly not solve all problems associated with online digital platforms. We know for a fact that even the earliest and most innocent online forums would degenerate into flame wars. We know that filtering and struggle for the political control of news dissemination is "tech-independent": print, radio, TV etc all "solve" this in their own arbitrary and varying ways.
What facebook managed to achieve is to combine all those, together with many others (personal data collection, algorithmic profiling of people, leaking of such profiles to third parties etc) and deploy it at an unthinkable scale.
(Shorting is not for me).
You should resign if you do.
TV works better.
> One day, through VR/AR/AI agents, they will even be able to turn your children against you
Again unless your kids hate you, I doubt that's going to be the case. AR is far more likely to give the user "Perfect Memory" which will have all sorts of interesting side effects to how we manage forgiveness and growing up.
AR has a whole bunch of vectors that will fuck with the fabric of society, but this isn't one.
> ethical framework is put in place to restrain their actions. (Regulation won’t work, it is the wrong solution to this problem imo.)
Ok this is an interesting one. Laws are ethical frameworks, its just their values tend to lag society's values.
Facebook's "ethics" are codified here https://transparency.fb.com/policies/community-standards/ they are, much as it pains me, quite good. If I was going to write a guideline to civic engagement, this would be a good thing to base it on.
Facebook's problems are threefold:
1) nobody likes them so _anything_ they do will be negative. They could pay off all medical debt for the US, and it'd still be a negative action.
2) They don't enforce the rules evenly, some of this is down to scale, others because they don't want to piss off noisy operators(ie trump, modi, etc).
3) people are fucking stupid in groups.
Don't get me wrong, facebook have trespassed on a number of occasions. In practice to the same level as google/apple/amazon etc etc.
>You should resign if you do.
so that facebook can stuff it's self full of people who lack ethics? thats going to end well isn't it.
TV only has high esteem because it is seem as a "verified" medium, ie its had some level of fact checking. (whether thats true or not is another matter.)
If you undermind an entire new medium by abusing people's avatars to sell shit, it will sink the entire medium, unless the platform offers something compelling enough to overcome the stink.
I believe you are actually describing government employees.
They flog you to the current Don, calculated to be replaced by a new Don every few years.
ß: Bribery notwithstanding.
You have the moral backbone of a jellyfish and you're doing it for the sweet smell of green. Just own it, like the arms dealers and hedge fund managers.
FB is one of the largest companies on the planet with worldwide effects. There isn't another 10x for it to grow. If it's not subject to scrutiny/control at this scale, then it will never be subject to it.
> would like to see more testimony from users who believe that they have been personally harmed
Victims of genocide are notoriously unable to testify.
> Victims of genocide are notoriously unable to testify Noted, but I also do not believe that Facebook's policies either equate to genocide or indirectly result in increased genocide as understood in the most obvious/severe definition of the word 'genocide'.
If this recruiter is to believed -- and I wouldn't believe a goddamn word of any of it -- there are all these poor, principled people who really truly want to "make Facebook better" but dangnabit they just don't have critical mass yet.
Bullshit. All of it.
This is a carefully calculated response, like all of Facebook's responses (PR or otherwise), to make you drop your guard and stop using your critical thinking faculties. It's a siren song, with promises of six figures and early retirement.
Listen... if you're at Facebook, you've personally made a decision that you'd rather collect your paycheque than stop contributing to the beast that surrounds you. You're fine with the pervasive corruption and rampant disinformation and hypocrisy because you're making bank. Don't be shy. Own it. Say it with a full chest. At least it would be genuine.
But don't lie to yourself, or your coworkers, or anyone outside the company, and say you're trying to "make Facebook better". It can't be made "better" in its current form. It will never be better. It needs to be dismantled. It needs to be put on trial. It needs to be bled dry.
if facebook had good PR, it would be google.
You are putting far too much faith in the power of zuckerberg.
> It can't be made "better" in its current form. It will never be better.
so you're arguing for the banning of all social media?
So true. I would never want to work for Facebook, but I’ve always wanted to reply back to their persistent recruiters with an obscene salary expectation just to see if they’ll consider it.
Companies for the most part aren't evil or good, they're a tool. And they behave like a gas that fills the container they are in.
If not facebook, some other company would make money in some way you would find similarly objectionable.
> a true net-negative to life on earth,
Facebook has really facilitated family, friend, community and volunteer groups I'm involved with to connect and communicate easily. Social media in general has been great at elevating the voice (at least the collective voice) of the common people to something vaguely competitive with the ruling class and their dinosaur media / propaganda corporations too. For a couple of examples.
There are also downsides of facebook and social media in general, but I don't know that it's so clearly been a net negative.
> a destroyer of personal privacy,
Law enforcement and intelligence agencies already destroyed personal privacy before facebook.
> responsible for facilitating genocides,
Language and writing is also responsible for facilitating every atrocity committed in history but they have been overwhelming net positives to humanity. The same is and will be true of computers and mobile phones from now on.
It's a great go-to for the emotional argument and outrage, but anything can be misused.
> constantly lying to its users,
Like virtually all politicians, and every corporation does (or would if they thought it might help them in any way).
I'm not giving facebook a pass on its behavior, I just don't think it's useful to be fixated on them as though they are the source of evil and problems with society, as opposed to an unsurprising product of the environment created by society.
Facebook's lies and actions did not result in the invasion of Iraq that destroyed a sovereign country, resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, and took trillions of dollars, for example. That was the doing of the corrupt corporate-political system in the country. The vaunted New York Times was one of the mouthpieces beating the drums for war, no less. Just as they did in the lead up to American involvement in Vietnam. Just as the media corporations did in the calls for the wars and interventions in Syria and Libya. And on and on. So much for disinformation, eh? Yes, internet and social media corporations have or will be pulled into that system (as traditional media companies were) and made to facilitate this kind of thing but again I see it as a symptom rather than a cause. And not really facebook specific.
> the most egregious example of how corruptive a monopolistic corporation can be on a society at a global level.
I don't really think it is at all. The entire military industry are basically arms dealers and war profiteers. Banking industry was complicit in housing collapse that destroyed many people's assets. Pharmaceutical companies literally create epidemics of drug addiction. Tobacco companies similarly. Fossil fuel companies tried to bury climate science and lobby against externalities created by their product, not to mention the way war follows them around like they're a horseman of the apocalypse. Clothing companies (and many others) infamously use child labor, slave labor. Mining and extraction companies have pretty commonly taken full advantage of high levels of corruption present in developing countries. The list just goes on and on. I'm willing to hear you out, but it's a pretty damn high bar that your evidence for facebook being the worst-of-the-worst is going to have to overcome here.
I'm not going to defend facebook the company or social media in general here, because I don't know enough in depth about either subject to really offer a worthwhile opinion on it (and I don't work for them, hold their shares, or have any association with them). I just want to give a bit of balance and perspective to the fashionable "facebook is the devil" opinion.
I think it's also on us to stop holding facebook at such a high level.
People are proud to have facebook on their resume, maybe they shouldn't be. Maybe facebook should be seen as an embarrassment. Maybe facebook should be something you want to hide from some employers because they're going to judge you for accepting a job from them. (Exceptions for h1b, first job, etc apply)
It's kinda how if you tell me you were a cop I'm going to immediately see you as a power hungry and abusive thorn in society. The burden of proof is on you to...show me that's not true. Some decisions have consequences I suppose.
> People are proud to have facebook on their resume, maybe they shouldn't be. Maybe facebook should be seen as an embarrassment. Maybe facebook should be something you want to hide from some employers because they're going to judge you for accepting a job from them. (Exceptions for h1b, first job, etc apply)
> It's kinda how if you tell me you were a cop I'm going to immediately see you as a power hungry and abusive thorn in society. The burden of proof is on you to...show me that's not true. Some decisions have consequences I suppose.
You appear to be in some sort of bubble, where people are ashamed for their engineering work. This is never going to be true; anyone who puts something on their CV that indicates a high level of technical competence is going to be in demand no matter how much you wish otherwise.
Same with cops - you appear to be believe that law enforcement is forced upon an unwilling population. This is also not true: people prefer to live in places with an active and working law enforcement. If there isn't one the populace, by clear and almost unanimous majority, creates one.
You are free to move to places that don't have law enforcement officers. However it seems that the rest of the world (outside of your bubble) doesn't care for your ideals. I can't blame them.
While we're on the subject of judging people, what do you think people think of you when you say you want to ostracise law enforcement officers?
Why do you assume that? How is this any different than assuming any generalization/stereotype about a group of people is true until proven otherwise?
Social media is great if it is limited to say 100 people. When you broadcast to millions, it is toxic.
I'm getting to the point where I'm just going to say if my work experience doesn't provide you with enough information about my technical ability then you can go hire someone fresh out of school who's done l33tcode 24/7 for the last few months.
- You only hire folks with prestige; pulling the ladder up for everyone else.
- You fire fast; potentially screwing up peoples lives.
- You carry dead weight that slows everyone else down.
Of course, some of the interviews go a bit far. I had one with at ~15 calls, at least 7 of them "interviews". Most of them went well enough, but the architectual was somewhat egregious where I was asked a bit of a trick question, asked some clarifiying questions and got conflicting statements. I asked for a redo, and got a nope, then ended up in the weirdest offer stage I've experienced.
I try to keep that in mind when people propose we add more hurdles to our process. :)
as long as your resume/linkedin shows that you have clearly passed once and have exceeded "leetcode level" for a number of years, you should already be getting emails for "Staff/Lead" positions that end with "got 15 minutes for a chat to see if we're right for you?"
helps to have a site/project/blog/portfolio along with a github to breeze past the phone/culture screens :)
Now if FB stops doing what it is doing, another company will take the lead, so I guess ultimately it's a problem that we can never get away from.
Having said that, FB is the current leader in facilitating evil, so I hate them for that and will never work for them. Ever.
Thanks for reading.
If you work for an immoral organization and are OK with that by virtue of continuing to draw a wage there, YOU ARE AS IMMORAL as the company because you aid and abet it.
I won't have anything to do with you based on that. I'll be polite and arm's length interacting with you but NOTHING beyond that will ever be possible; not personal, not business, not social!
What annoys me is not that they took the job for the paycheck (we all have to eat at the end of the say), but rather the fact that all it takes to appease their moral conscience is such a weak and flimsy bit of moral acrobatics. Have a spine and accept the real consequences of your actions at least.