Facebook Has Struggled To Hire Talent Since the Cambridge Analytica Scandal (cnbc.com) 140
An anonymous reader shared a report: Facebook is still reeling from the fallout of its Cambridge Analytica scandal more than a year ago, as multiple former recruiters say candidates are turning down job offers from what was once considered the best place to work in the United States. More than half a dozen recruiters who left Facebook in recent months told CNBC that the tech company experienced a significant decrease in job offer acceptance rates after the March 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal.
This impact to Facebook's recruiting efforts is important as the company adds thousands of employees each year. [...] Most notably, Facebook saw a sharp increase in students at top universities who are declining the company's job offers. Among top schools, such as Stanford, Carnegie Mellon and Ivy League universities, Facebook's acceptance rate for full-time positions offered to new graduates has fallen from an average of 85% for the 2017-2018 school year to between 35% and 55% as of December, according to former Facebook recruiters. The biggest decline came from Carnegie Mellon University, where the acceptance rate for new recruits dropped to 35%.
This impact to Facebook's recruiting efforts is important as the company adds thousands of employees each year. [...] Most notably, Facebook saw a sharp increase in students at top universities who are declining the company's job offers. Among top schools, such as Stanford, Carnegie Mellon and Ivy League universities, Facebook's acceptance rate for full-time positions offered to new graduates has fallen from an average of 85% for the 2017-2018 school year to between 35% and 55% as of December, according to former Facebook recruiters. The biggest decline came from Carnegie Mellon University, where the acceptance rate for new recruits dropped to 35%.
First be Evil (Score:2, Funny)
Hmm, have they tried recruiting from Nazi schools?
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It is more about being able to say they have the top talent. Without that, people might start actually scrutinizing the behavior of their software...
Re:First be Evil (Score:4, Interesting)
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Former Googler here. I really disliked my time at Google. I was young, got suck into all the marketing of the 'best place to work' and had really high expectations, then as I wanted to grow my career I pretty much ran into a similar experience as this:
https://mtlynch.io/why-i-quit-... [mtlynch.io]
A lot of Googlers joined Facebook, and re-created a similar work culture which lead to an other 'best place to work'. At least as long as you drink the cool-aid and go along with the program.
If you need a boost on your resume,
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Former Googler here. I really disliked my time at Google. I was young, got suck into all the marketing of the 'best place to work' and had really high expectations, then as I wanted to grow my career I pretty much ran into a similar experience as this: https://mtlynch.io/why-i-quit-... [mtlynch.io]
That story does highlight a real problem in Google, the tendency to optimize for promotion, but I think it dramatically overstates it. The engineer in question claims to have made significant positive impact, and perhaps he did... he just failed to prove it. I would tend to blame his manager, more than him, but assuming his work really was impactful they should have made some small changes to allow him to do precisely the work he did and use it to get promoted.
The first thing he should have done differe
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I am sure Mr Putin would be interested in sending many Russian programmers to FB
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Yea probably, but it's just gonna make the security problems worse, you know.
Trying to skip out on the Barr tab? (Score:1)
Trying to skip out on the Barr tab?
Talent != Top Schools. (Score:4, Informative)
Google actually studied this, and having a degree from a shiny institution only mattered for a short period of time. IIRC on the order of months. After that it made no difference.
But I have a suspicion that it doesn't really matter, and everyone is largely the same, shiny degree or non-shiny degree. It's hard to tell your friends that you got accepted at FB and not have them think you sold out.
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Hiring can be as easy or as hard as you want it to be. Complicated interviewing schemes are about company and employees' egos as much as anything else. Agile (as in non-methodology) companies interview the first crop of applicants who have the qualifications and hire the ones who seem competent rather than trying to find the mythical "perfect candidate". The reality is that the quality of a worker is really only known after a few months on the job, so it's pointless to spend a lot of time to try to know the
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your management is incompetent. Or both. All failures are management failures really.
Agreed. I've been lucky enough to work for myself most of my professional life however my wife of many years has worked at a few Fortune 100/500 co's over the years. I am appalled at the stories I hear. Neopotism is rampant, even in companies with anti-nepotism policies. Favoritism also is a very big thing, with people being promoted over better candidates because of their personal relationship with the one doing the promoter - be it friendship, the same sexual preference, the like of the same sport, bei
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Choose at random. The last thing you want in the workplace is unlucky people.
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People who took the time to study and learn math make that interview process less difficult for the people having to do the interview process.
One good math question.
The smart people can do the math quickly and are correct. No help needed. No calculator. No smart phone. Their brains can do the work.
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>No calculator. No smart phone.
I was with you up to that point - then I realized you were probably talking about arithmetic rather than math. Math mostly doesn't involve numbers, so (most) calculators are no help.
There are jobs where being able to do arithmetic quickly (and accurately) in your head is useful, but it doesn't seem to correlate all that well with being good at math, nor the more general purpose problem-solving skills or formal logic that serve programmers, engineers, and other such profess
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Yes, there are people who make their living on stage, doing math in their head to the amazement of their audience. Unfortunately not a particularly useful skill for a developer.
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Also Pro Tip: Making the interview process easier for interviewers is not a valid goal of the process. Perhaps those who find the process too hard, should defer to those who willing to put in the work.
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Their metrics are flawed and their results are invalid. Most "research" coming out if Google is pretty bad.
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Anybody who accepts a job sells out.
Isn't that the point?
Or is it because (Score:2, Insightful)
Or is it because facebook pays like shit?
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Maybe what they offered you was in line with your effort?
Re: Or is it because (Score:2)
Pays like shit, don't let members post cool stuff like politically incorrect opinions, interesting guns or even a nip slip. So now it's like eating bread without butter or cheese. Even driving a Renault 4 is more interesting.
Get boring and only boring people will work there and use the service.
Things have gotten so bad (Score:4, Funny)
That they might have to resort to recruiting Asians and white men again.
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You can be a minority if you're underage.
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I believe the stereotype is that Asians make enough money that they vote Republicans. Only people who vote Democrat are allowed to be minorities.
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No, it's too late. All the Asians and White Men have already been hired. Well, the ones under 40 anyway.
Oh noez! (Score:2, Informative)
Now they'll have to make-do with graduates from state universities.
State university! The idea!
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Twitter? It's like the exact same business plan with a slightly different content format. I'm really trying to figure out how they've dodged the hate train here.
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They ban the right people, and are better at not getting caught.
Oh noes, React! (Score:1)
Oh, noes! All the developers (developers, developers!) went out and spent a couple of years wrapping their heads around React! Because they have to groom themselves to be hired by either Facebook or Google!
Bzzzzzztttt! Losers! They should have spent a couple of years wrapping their heads around Google own overly-complex time-waster, Angular.
Or just have stayed off the pony ride.
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Both complex monsters, that will have to be put down after countless wasted years of work. Hallmarks if inexperienced and not too smart designers.
(I don't mean low intelligence designers, but some that vastly overestimated their own capabilities. Happens even more to people with high intelligence, and the results are never good.)
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went out and spent a couple of years wrapping their heads around React!
Uh, it shouldn't take you 'years' or even 'year' to learn React. If you already know Javascript, it should be "months" or "weeks" or even "days." React isn't that tough.
Ah, now I know... (Score:2)
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Nah.
You're thinking about Twitter.
They discriminate by allowing a fat ass orange pussy grabbing white nationalist to be exempt from ToS.
Silly Valley doesn't pay enough. (Score:2, Interesting)
Back when I was starting out, my mentor told me how to adjust for living expenses. He used haircuts. Call a couple of barbers and mall haircut places and ask for a price. That was a metric he used.
I base it on my lifestyle. So, relocating to another place, how much does it cost to keep the same commute, housing standard, memberships to pools (I swim and no Silly Valley "Campus" has a 25yrd or 50 meter lap pool), and so on.
I've come up with a differential of five for Silly Valley. Take whatever you're ma
Re:Silly Valley doesn't pay enough. (Score:4, Funny)
Re: Silly Valley doesn't pay enough. (Score:2)
Surveillance Valley
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Excellent advice.
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So, for someone say making $100K/yr in metro Atlanta, you NEED $500K/yr to keep your current lifestyle
What dollar figure do you attach to soft geographic attributes, Anonymous Coward?
e.g. the climate in San Francisco is much nicer than Atlanta. In San Francisco you are on the ocean. In Atlanta you have to drive five hours to reach the seaside. Atlanta's six hours from a ski hill - San Francisco's half that.
etc. etc.
And if you're a woman, don't get me started on the women's rights issues boiling o
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Re: Silly Valley doesn't pay enough. (Score:1)
Facebooook is doooomed! (Score:1)
Doooomed, I tell ya. And all that was a black op by Goooogle: revenge for Google+ failure.
Who wants Facebook on resume? (Score:1)
Zuckerberg is whore for personal data he lives to harvest it, Facebook was created for just that reason. At least its good many people still have a moral compass and refuse to work for such a morally depleted company like Facebook.
Who knew?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Who knew that playing a pivotal role in the undermining of democracy could be so bad for business? ;)
How would you feel working for Facebook? (Score:2)
Great. (Score:3)
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Oh the shame.
A whore's perspective (Score:2, Interesting)
I have a bias, but I find well educated graduates to be entitled. I'll take a programmer with military experience, a solid resume, and a state school education over a degree from MIT any day. You onl
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Just please don't say you'd work for Halliburton.
Give me an extra hour with my kids and I'll go! (Score:2)
All that matters to me is my family. I am an amoral whore. There are few boundaries I wouldn't cross if it truly made their lives better. I love writing code and I love what I do for a living, but I love my kids more.
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I am sick of the myth of the superstar full stack programmer that facebook prefers
I don't think Facebook uses many full-stack developers, but regardless:
If you are a backend programmer, and are afraid of learning to do frontend, something is wrong with you. Likewise,
If you are a frontend programmer, and are afraid of learning to do a backend, something is wrong with you.
The basic concepts of programming are the same either place, but if you want to know backend, you need to know SQL, and if you want to know frontend, you need to learn CSS (and if HTML scares you, then you should jus
Fullstack == low quality (Score:3)
If you are a backend programmer, and are afraid of learning to do frontend, something is wrong with you. Likewise, If you are a frontend programmer, and are afraid of learning to do a backend, something is wrong with you. The basic concepts of programming are the same either place, but if you want to know backend, you need to know SQL, and if you want to know frontend, you need to learn CSS (and if HTML scares you, then you should just quit because even non-programmers can do that).
Gotta disagree with you on that one. I am sure a good full stack developer exists, by probability, but every one I've seen is really good in 1 or 2 layers, and, at best, barely competent in the rest. Sure, they solve the problem, but they violate every best practice in the process. I have inherited too much code from
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Why the hell do we want one guy doing CSS, HTML, JavaScript, Java, and Oracle programming?
Why? It prevents integration bugs before they happen.
I am a backend programmer. I write UIs and can do CSS, JavaScript, Angular, etc....but much more poorly than someone whose career is front-end development. They will do it much faster with fewer lines of code.
Oh please, if you spent six months doing front end, you'd be as proficient in it as anyone else. Why? Because you read documentation.
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Re: A whore's perspective (Score:1)
Isn't FB, like, for old people? (Score:1)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
bogus normalization group (Score:2)
If a CMU student applies for five different positions in parallel, and accepts any one of them, this clearly counts as a acceptance.
But if he rejects all five, does it count as five rejections?
This is not the most trivial statistic to fully normalize.
Trust me, the people who gather these statistics are sufficiently unemployable in these elite jobs to have actually committed such a glaring blun
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We really need a smart ... (Score:2)
... young insider looking to make a name for themselves by single-highhandedly taking the cloak off Facebook.
Why go to offer stage knowing you'll decline? (Score:3)
Why would one go through the interview process all the way to an offer, if you are going to decline it because of the company itself. I suspect there are other factors in play, like the offers not being competitive or the jobs not being very interesting.
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Why would one go through the interview process all the way to an offer, if you are going to decline it because of the company itself. I suspect there are other factors in play, like the offers not being competitive or the jobs not being very interesting.
Lots of reasons.
1. Maybe you don't know what other offers you get and are willing to work for FB if nothing else good shows up, even though you're a little uncomfortable with it.
2. Maybe you don't plan to take the job -- or didn't believe you were good enough to get an offer, but think it would be fun to go see the FB campus and spend a day solving puzzles -- no stress because you don't plan to take the job anyway.
3. Maybe you just want to get an offer from FB to use as leverage in negotiation with anot
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Re: Pay them more (Score:2)
All the VC-backed companies in Silicon Valley have colluded for years to suppress programmer wages. Maintaining that collusion is far more important than hiring "top talent".