Largest photo site in the world looking for HNers (Facebook job post) | Hacker News Reader

Largest photo site in the world looking for HNers (Facebook job post)

107 pointsSam_Odio22 comments

When looking for talented engineers I know of no other community with a higher signal/noise ratio than HN (well maybe Stackoverflow?).

I also know of no project to work on that is like Facebook Photos. The team is about the size of an angel funded startup, yet the scale of the fbPhotos is larger than any other app (Facebook or not) that I know of. By almost any metric it's an order of magnitude larger than any other photo sharing website.

=====Why?===== You'll work on hard problems at a huge scale. Expect to be responsible for mission critical features that will touch hundreds of millions of people. You'll be deploying code your first week here. I'm not kidding. This isn't HR-speak.

Client-side image editing algorithms, third-party API integration, data processing & warehousing, facial recognition, hi-res uploads, image matching[1], ... there are plenty of hard problems to solve.

I can promise you that it won't be easy, but it will be rewarding.

=====Interested?===== Don't email recruiting, I'll refer you internally [2]. Find my Facebook email in my profile. Use it to email me 3 sentences. One should be why you're excited about photos (or hard problems). Another should describe a cool project you've worked on. Links/examples of deployed code is best. The last sentence should be why you're going to pass Facebook's engineering interviews [3].

Hesitating? Go ahead and send that email. It might just be the best decision you make today.

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1. http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=robust+image+hashing - does that excite you?

2. Internal referrals are given priority. Also, there is a referral bonus. Once you complete Bootcamp and join the photos team I will give 50% to you and 50% to the photos team (for trips, cool toys, etc).

3. I don't have the authority to bypass the standard interview process. There will be lots of algorithm questions (sorting / tree traversals, etc.) http://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/Facebook-Engineering-Interview-Questions

Sam, I think you have done no wrong here. From my experience, if you appear 'too helpful' people become suspicious. Strange, but that is the reality. Human beings are not expected to be that nice, period. Cheers dude! I hope you get the best people.

Dude, this is one of the coolest job postings I've seen on HN for a while.

Not so much what the job involves (which is pretty cool in itself) but that you're reaching out to the HN community to hopefully bring some people like yourself onto your project. You were obviously passionate about Divvyshot, glad to see it's followed through with FB.

Just some advice for anyone going on to interview with Facebook.

1. Know _why_ you want to work there. Really think about that one.

2. Crack open an algorithms and data structures book. They ask some seriously off the wall questions.

3. Be prepared to fail gracefully.

4. Have an ivy league degree. Not saying that's a requirement, but it certainly helps.

5. Do some of the puzzles for Facebook engineering. It makes the interview process go quicker, and you'll be a little more prepared for the technical interview.

That said, I failed my interview earlier this year. Your mileage may vary, but good luck!

Last link is broken. Probably meant to be this: http://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/Facebook-Engineering-Inte... Also see: http://reza.lotun.name/entries/12052007a.html

There is something fishy about this, or just not cool about it.

He's going to give 50% of the referral fee back to the candidate? Links to the answers of FB's engineering questions over on a 3rd party site (presumably to help you pass the interview process)?

I'm sure its a legitimate call for applicants by a member of staff - it just seems fishy, or at the very least not the right way to go about things.

I understard that it's unusual for a large corp to make a personal appeal on hn. However fb is more like a startup than a big corp.

It's pretty standard practice for fb employees to give part of their referral bonuses back to their friends. Are you suggesting that I keep it for myself?

Um, yeah if you don't feel the need to take a referral bonus for yourself then why take it in the first place?

I've been a hiring manager in the past. A company uses referral bonuses to incentivize staff to bring in the top talent into the company.

If you are really not motivated by the referral bonus (eg your startup was aquired and you're not short of cash these days) then you shouldn't take it - the start up could use the valuable cash elsewhere. I guess burn isn't a big problem for Facebook, but then to your point in your comment, Facebook is still a big startup isn't it? (is it?)

I also think its poor to offer image on the interview questions/answers (yes, even if they are on a public site somewhere). If I was the hiring manager I would be upset by that as it skews my ability to interview all candidates equally (ie the ones who did see the interview questions and the ones that did not).

I don't think you are coming from a bad place or doing anything under-hand but I think it isn't the right and professional way of obtaining talent.

No offense but I'll let the hiring manager at facebook (not some guy on the 'net) decide whether I should get a referral bonus.

All I'm saying here is that anything I get will go back to the team/applicant.

I'm not sure how that's shady.

I'd take down the glass door link if I could to appease you. Personally, I think it's better that all photo team applicants see it rather than the few that find it through some cursory pre-interview research.

The interview questions link is the reason I upvoted this announcement; they interest me. And for what it's worth, I also find your reasoning for linking to them sensible.

No offense, but if you are going to mention splitting referral bonuses and the like on a public forum, people might make a comment about it - it's the nature of these public forum thingies.

Ditto seeing as we're here to discuss the practices of running startups, among other things

Anyway, I'm sure the realities of working for a BigCo will continue to sink in as time goes on (if you think Facebook is still a startup, keep drinking the koolaid). Congrats on the sale to Facebook, I hope the next few years on the earn out are good for you.

EDIT: I notice you added the comment about the glassdoor link... it's not about appeasing me, it's your team and your employer, do what you like. But I would comment that while the interview Q's are out there, if someone was going to walk into my interview office with them already in their head, I'd like to think it is because they were savvy enough to go find them on their own and not because my staff member pointed the candidate directly to them. Just saying.

dotBen,

Don't you think that people at Facebook are smart enough to figure out if the applicant really knows what he/she is talking about?

An applicant can read the questions from that link but if he/she doesn't understand these algorithms, etc., the interviewers can easily tell the BS.

As with drinking the Kool-Aid, what makes you a better judge than Sam? You seem jaded by your past experiences but that doesn't mean it happens to everybody.

dannyr,

So yes, I'm very sure my friends at Facebook can weed out those who know what they are talking about and those who don't. And yes, if you don't know how to do map the shortest distance on a cube or create a bubble sort method, etc then you are going to come up short regardless of what you have read on a cheat sheet online.

But then, the same logic reasons that it is therefore pointless to direct people to the interview questions before hand, doesn't it?

"As with drinking the Kool-Aid, what makes you a better judge than Sam?"

My koolaid reference was to Sam's perspective that Facebook is still a startup. I don't think it's a case of being 'a better judge' on that one - facebook has over 1000 employees, has professional management, makes acquisitions (like his company) and has a $1bn+ valuation. It's not a startup. (I think they do a great job of encouraging the staff to think it is still a startup)

I'm not jaded by any past, I'm not sure where that conclusion comes from. I do perhaps have, however, some more experience in hiring people (both for startups and for large companies) than Sam does... and maybe you are confusing 'thinking practically' for 'sounded jaded'.

I guess I might sound jaded from my overall snarky tone, but that's just how I am at 1:40am on a Thursday morning. :P

Ah, the eternal question of philosophy, rephrased.

If everyone at a large company think and act as if they are a startup, are they a startup?

I highly doubt that represents all the interview questions likely to be asked. Indeed it seems Facebook know they are out there.

Is splitting the referral bonus dodgy? Well if he hadn't mentioned it sods law says someone would come along and say "what about th referral bonus - you're just pitching to get some extra cash..." or something :) I just read it as him laying a potential issue to rest.

I think we're getting too bogged down in the details here. If a facebook hiring manager has a problem they can email me and I'll fix it.

Is it ok to go past 3 sentences?

Admittedly I went way over, but I thought it may be helpful to the other applicants to know.

The topic is very exciting and I needed to write more :(

Yes, but 3 is preferred.

I also think its poor to offer image on the interview questions/answers (yes, even if they are on a public site somewhere).

Google recruiters send people to Steve Yegg's stuff, which includes links to interview questions (including ones they actually use)

They also tell you to do TopCoder questions, which are also pretty close to the real thing.

Facebook also has their "Puzzles" page, which contains similar information: http://www.facebook.com/careers/#!/careers/puzzles.php

The truth is that with hard-core technical interview questions you can either do them or you can't. They aren't trick questions, just tests of what you can do.

No one knows image manipulation more than this guy: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=DarkShikari

At least no one that I know.

He's already worked for Facebook :)

Hi-res uploads? Has any site successfully sustained a "free" model while serving hi-res photos? Or do you just mean just during the upload process -- photos scaled down permanently and the originals discarded?

Is this in San Francisco?

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