Former Facebook employees uncover "unspoken rules" for Silicon Valley companies

A lot of friends asked the Silicon Valley company recruit engineers basic process. As a candidate, I've tried Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Oracle, and I've had an offer. As an interviewer, interview more than 300 people, clear about the process, do this short, hope for the Silicon Valley to work friends, or are preparing for the interview of friends, or are designing hiring process start-up companies have some inspiration. Experience is limited, please correct me if there is an adjacent leak.

Interview Opportunities

In Silicon Valley, the easiest opportunity to recruit is an acquaintance recommendation. Is that the target company's so-and-so person is your friend, you ask her to make an internal recommendation for you. Facebook's probably 60-70% employees are hired in this way. One of Facebook's earliest major Chinese engineers was my in-house referral interview. Acquaintances recommend a low relative cost to a friend or company. For job seekers, you can know the real situation within the company through acquaintances; For a company, the recommendation of an acquaintance gives the quality of a job seeker an endorsement. This is also where I received more than 200 recommended requests, but I decided to do less than 100 of the recommendations, of which 12 friends succeeded, each successful referral company to 5000 knife bonuses. Do the internal recommendation of the staff should be a selection of their own recommendations, can not blindly to recommend a bonus to push one; Otherwise, your reputation will soon rot away.

Here is a story about myself. My first job was to get an interview through the 2005 KDD Conference in Chicago and a technical director of Yahoo's data mining department. In the spare time of the meeting, I wandered about in the showroom, chatting with booth people, talking a few words and then mentioning that I was looking for a job and asking if they had the right opportunity. After a chat with the technical director after we got to the Yahoo showroom, we went to the hotel lobby and found a clean floor to sit down and start the interview. The design of the algorithm is discussed in several big problems, which seems to be satisfactory to him. Then he let one of his engineers do a phone interview the next day and flew me over. What you want to say here is that if you're looking for a job, try your future colleagues ' future bosses ' activities, places, get to know them, make them interested in you, and then make internal recommendations through them.

Other ways are more conventional, such as a centralized campus interview, through the site to complete puzzle submit resume (success rate is very low), in various programming competitions outstanding was found.

There is the company to take the initiative to dig people, this belongs to high-end talent, I have dug some senior engineers; These people are often not easy to move, if you are such a person, congratulations, you do not need to read this article.

Process

The process of the large company is due to the above approach (internal recommendation, school interviews, Web applications, etc.) began to interest in a resume, and then let recruiter contact, do a mapping nature of the telephone interview, then 2-3 phone interviews, and finally the interview 4-6 people. Most companies are round.

Recruiter's phone interview.

This understanding is two-way. Talk about some of the candidates ' experiences and backgrounds, what they are interested in, why they change their jobs, what special requirements they have for the job, etc. Talk about some of the basics of the company, especially the company culture and so on, now vacant positions, as well as the basic requirements for the interviewer's wishes.

Telephone interview
It's usually 30-45 minutes. I usually spend 40 minutes getting each other to do two questions and then spend 5 minutes getting her to ask questions. Usually finish the first question, I will ask myself, want to do the second way; Anyway, I'll make sure I have 5 minutes to ask questions about Facebook. This is a minimum of respect for each other. Because it is 40 minutes two problems, not too complex, is generally programming focus but the design does not have too many challenges, such as flip-one-way linked list (reverse a singly linked list), you can change itereative or recursive request to write, the middle ask a lot of questions. Through websites like http://sync.in/, both of us can see it in the words we play.

After the first phone interview I need to write my feedback in an internal tool and suggest that a later phone interview can be more focused.

Scene

Generally see 4 people (I saw 10 people in Oracle in 2005 ...), 45 minutes per person. 2.5 of them will focus on the coding above for inspection, 0.5 people to study culturual fit, 1 people focus on design. The typical coding problem should be found on the Internet, not mentioned here. But be aware that everyone can adapt to the white board coding (write the program on the whiteboard), it is best to practice in advance. Cultural fit is to discover her style of doing things by asking each other about past experiences and solving problems. The last thing we want to know is whether she can get the shit done. Design is designed primarily for a large system, such as how you would implement the Facebook News Feed, what you would need to build, and how your data would be transmitted; What are the advantages and disadvantages of your design, and so on. Everyone has a different practice, this is OK, but the middle of the communication can reflect the thickness of some design ideas, this is the purpose of the interview. Design capacity of the weight of the study for different positions, such as backend to more, frontend less; Just from the school to be lighter, have done many years to heavier.

Each person who participates in the interview must evaluate the candidate: strong hire, hire, weak hire, weak no hire, no hire. Strong no hire. I generally ignore all the options with weak, my idea is not to need mediocre colleagues; Weak option I used it when I was wrongly placed in a interview loop where I wasn't supposed to be, so it's rarely used.
A particular aspect of attention

English
The biggest problem for people who recruit directly from the mainland is English. I interviewed the first few. The phone interview to half, I really do not understand what he said, finally had to let him start to speak Chinese, wow, shunliu a lot. It is recommended that friends who are interested in working in the United States practise their spoken English first.

Programming
For engineers, the most work is programming. So, practice good programming. Because the interview question has the time limit (20-25 minutes), the specific tool (sync.in or whiteboard), does not care about the subtle grammatical error, and the actual programming still some difference, therefore the practice is still very necessary.

Know the company well in advance
Learn about the basics and let you know why you are interested in the company. Have any suggestion to the company's existing products, and so on.

Prepare your own story.
A real story that allows the interviewer to quickly get to know your story. For example, you have done the most proud of the project, you in the specific contribution, you encounter the greatest resistance, how you are resolved, and so on. The problem here is a lot of lists on the web, but what I'm talking about is being able to get together with your own story, when it's appropriate to speak out, flesh and blood is persuasive.

Consideration of an Offer

At Facebook, all of the interview evaluations will be aggregated at the end of the month, with a review committee to discuss whether or not to make a hiring decision. In this review committee all the candidates will be discussed, obviously not the fastest, obviously the line is also faster, slow is the kind of everyone said that the line but no one was shocked, or someone said no one said very good situation. At this time if a person willing to stand up for her, she will not be cut off, may be, may be arranged for a follow-up interview, see 1-2 people. The whole idea is "please take the bright point to convince me".

The final offer usually has two parts, salary and stock. I can't talk about Facebook, but the Silicon Valley engineers are roughly the same as the new undergraduate's annual salary of 9.1 million knives, 10.12 million to the Master doctor; Years of work experience should be around 11.16 million. And the stock is eight Immortals crossing recount, there is no conclusion. Whether you read a book in the United States or a Chinese book, the standard should be the same.

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This article comes from Wanghuai Harry's blog.

Author: Wanghuai. University of Science and computer 2003 undergraduate graduates, April 2007 into the facebook,2011 year of September, resigned from the end, spent 4.5 hours on Facebook, now his identity is angel investors, and is planning to start a company of their own.

2007, Wanghuai at Stanford University, behind which is the famous Hu Pagoda.