My Three And A Half Month Facebook Job Interview

But there is a lesson to be learned here -- don't start scaling back your personal work/projects just because a potential job would be a conflict of interest.

That's the opposite of what you'd expect, actually. Countries where it's very hard or very socially taboo to fire people without very good reason (Europe, Japan) you would expect to have very difficult hiring procedures, but in at-will countries and states, you can afford more risk taking and hiring shouldn't be quite as arduous.

My rule in the '80s and '90s was that any company that couldn't make up its mind within one month was dropped from consideration; the only time I perhaps regretted this was with Thinking Machines, which started the offer process many weeks after I'd timed out on them and had found another job.

But I later gathered they had the worst Boston area hiring practices pretty much for all time, e.g. it took them three tries to fill the position I applied for and in one notorious case, they contacted an applicant's current employer without clearing it with him....

For what it's worth, when I interviewed with Facebook in 2008 I was told that it wouldn't be a problem to keep maintaining and working on my Facebook apps outside of work. I guess writing about Facebook might be a bit more difficult.

Also, I got an answer only a day or two after the on-site interviews. I wouldn't say the whole process moved quickly, but definitely not unreasonably slow.