<story><title>The new way to land a job at Facebook</title><url>https://www.kaggle.com/c/FacebookRecruiting</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tluyben2</author><text>I&apos;m not trolling here, but I have to ask i&apos;m seriously wondering what is &apos;so great&apos; about landing a job at Facebook? They have a nice tech stack, but it&apos;s a social networking site. How is it interesting to be a cog in the machine that is Facebook? Again; serious question; I&apos;m curious. I&apos;m a bit older :) and I would not want to work for any company other than a startup; I learned in life it is not the right dope for me. And so I am interested what makes it so interesting to work for this (Edit: scrapped [kind of]) company.&lt;p&gt;Edit: I mean; so interesting that you want to jump through hoops to get in.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kmavm</author><text>Hey, my name is Keith Adams, and I&apos;m an engineer at Facebook.&lt;p&gt;I work on the HipHop virtual machine, a dynamic compiler and runtime for the PHP language. It is the hardest challenge I&apos;ve tackled professionally, and the people I&apos;m working with are brilliant and work like animals.*&lt;p&gt;I think the larger significance of our work on HipHop is in the context of software as a whole. PHP is one of those &quot;developer productivity languages,&quot; like Python, JavaScript, LUA, etc. And, though I was skeptical before I came here, developers really are more productive in these languages. It would blow your mind what world-class people working in this medium can accomplish in compressed timeframes. This means that increasing these languages&apos; performance is incredibly leveraged; to the extent we&apos;re successful at making PHP faster, we change the set of problems that PHP can address. Moving a problem from the &quot;must be solved in C++&quot; category to the &quot;can be solved in PHP&quot; category frees up our fellow developers to get more done with their finite professional lives.&lt;p&gt;*Edit: By &quot;like animals&quot;, I mean, &quot;with a survival-level sense of urgency.&quot; It doesn&apos;t necessarily mean long hours.</text></comment>
<story><title>The new way to land a job at Facebook</title><url>https://www.kaggle.com/c/FacebookRecruiting</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tluyben2</author><text>I&apos;m not trolling here, but I have to ask i&apos;m seriously wondering what is &apos;so great&apos; about landing a job at Facebook? They have a nice tech stack, but it&apos;s a social networking site. How is it interesting to be a cog in the machine that is Facebook? Again; serious question; I&apos;m curious. I&apos;m a bit older :) and I would not want to work for any company other than a startup; I learned in life it is not the right dope for me. And so I am interested what makes it so interesting to work for this (Edit: scrapped [kind of]) company.&lt;p&gt;Edit: I mean; so interesting that you want to jump through hoops to get in.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>i_like_my_name</author><text>Andrei Alexandrescu said: &quot;One really cool thing about doing machine learning at Facebook is the sheer size of data involved; most researchers are happy to put together a graph with some hundreds of thousands of nodes. At Facebook samples of interest are in the hundreds of millions and more. It took a few of us quite a while to figure out how to distribute graph processing on many machines, but we finally did it. We should be able to publish the method soon.&quot;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.serversidemagazine.com/news/10-questions-with-facebook-research-engineer-andrei-alexandrescu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.serversidemagazine.com/news/10-questions-with-fac...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Edit: On the other hand, I doubt he had to jump through any hoops to land a job at facebook.</text></comment>