The new way to land a job at Facebook

Reading between the lines of your posts, I think you might have a pretty inaccurate view of facebook, as it currently is. Facebook has fewer engineers than you think, and it's -really- easy to have massive impact on features, or even the org as a whole, from day 1. Most of the teams responsible for major features/products are quite small. Some are frighteningly small. In many places, there are huge, ambitious, crazy ideas currently on the shelf waiting for 2-3 new people to join the team to take on.

My info is anecdotal from my wife, who has spent a significant portion of her life working with bears. But from the zoo keepers I've met, that mammal breakdown is true for most of the felines and primates as well.

You seriously don't have the correct mindset about this. You are thinking in a way that a lot of other people share, but it's not practical. In the real world you have to learn new technologies and languages consistently. Every day something new comes out or gets improved that makes doing a difficult task easier, and people/companies that can adapt and not be left behind do well.

If I were in your position (which I guess I kind of am, I'm also college-age but I've spent just under half my life doing some level of professional programming) I would be learning EVERYTHING I can or at least everything mainstream I can so that if I come by a cool piece of code online or at work I can tell exactly what it does.

It's true that PHP isn't as a strictly written language as some of the other languages (by this I don't mean syntax, I mean that doing two analogous operations have completely different names/attribute orders in the standard library) but it's still used by tons and tons of people. PHP isn't dying. I hate the term "dying language" because there's always something else out there that's good for that each specific language.

I'm assuming that Flash is also "dying" in your POV but just today I had to whip up a quick SWF to allow copying something to a user's clipboard because it was the simplest and quickest way to allow one-click clipboard access that I could think of and I have spent time learning Flash/AS in the past so I had that knowledge.

Now, when you say:

  it seems like it might be a waste to spend time at Facebook using PHP if the rest of the tech and start-up world has moved on

There is absolutely nothing that Facebook can not do with PHP that they could do with Python or Ruby. Any business logic can be written in a myriad of ways. And I believe to be a strong candidate for a "wow" employee after you graduate you should be able to drop head first into any codebase and at the very least quickly get a simple grasp of what's going on.

If Facebook gave you an internship today would you reject it because you've heard bad things about PHP?

Sorry about the rant, but I've spent a lot of time working to hire other developers and it really irks me when I hear something like "oh so and so's a dying language, it's useless to learn it" because it shows that you don't have the drive and love of technology that my ideal person would.

Most back-end services (ie, the systems that build your feed, or detect spam) are in C++. Java is used in some back-end services (including, for example, in Hadoop, Hive, HBase, and the messaging product) and for the Android app. Objective C is used for the Facebook app, Messenger, Camera, and so forth on iOS. Python is used primarily in the automation and operations space. You will also find a bunch of Ruby, Haskell, Scala, and so forth around.

I am not generally a fan of PHP and much of the ecosystem around it, but using it at Facebook is very different. I also would not say that time spent learning and using PHP is time wasted - the important things to learn typically transcend language, and learning anti-patterns / deficiencies is useful too. That is also why Facebook does not expect any particular language knowledge before you start/when you interview.

Rails is a permanent train wreck. The other hundred of Ruby-based Web frameworks are adequate for small, CRUD-style applications. (BTW, I like Ruby. It's a neat little language.)

In the end, it's either PHP or J2EE in 90% of the cases for high-uptime, high-traffic Web destinations.

You should read what Andrei Alexandrescu has to say about the language here: http://www.serversidemagazine.com/news/10-questions-with-fac...

Underlying your question is the idea that the specific language you work with is an investment that's critical to future success. Whether this is true depends a lot on what kind of career path you want.

I've found that lower quality jobs are the most specific about languages - "Must have 5 years of Java 1.5 or above experience" should be a huge red flag, because that place is hiring based on years-of-ass-in-chair rather than skills.

Some companies seem to be looking for specific language skills - "We're looking for great python hackers" it might say. But this is often just marketing and doesn't mean they won't take a someone who can show excellence in other ways.

There are exceptions of course - if you are doing low-level systems work, it would be expected that you know the ins and outs of C, and I'm sure there's other examples in other specialties.

One last thing: it's always useful to get experience with a range of languages, and that will pay off down the road when you have to learn language N+1. At Facebook I've written (in descending order of volume): PHP, Javascript, Python, C++ and Haskell.

There are a few things PHP gets accidentally right, though, and one of them is the execution model. Each request starts with a brand new empty PHP environment; runs in a single thread to completion; and must keep persistent state off to the side in a database or memcache or what have you rather than in language-level objects. This turns out to have been a really good set of decisions. It lends itself to a nice tight development loop: instead of save/recompile/restart the server/test, you basically save/load the page. It's easier to remember what the heck you were doing when you get feedback on the code you wrote in 500 milliseconds.

They also generally don't have the same attitude towards hiring and are definitely not hiring for top talent. People are hired because they fit in the company culture first, and because they have potential second. Young engineers are paid cheaply and are not expected to be skilled; they are trained on the job.

Somewhat related: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3845850

It's definitely possible to get hired as a foreigner in a Japanese company, but it's not easy and the conditions are not great, compared to Facebook et al.