<story><title>The Social Network Bust: What I learned from my job interview with Facebook  </title><url>http://www.thebitsource.com/infrastructure-operations/the-social-network-bust-what-i-learned-from-my-job-interview-with-facebook/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>neilk</author><text>It&apos;s good that the author prepared him or herself so thoroughly, but in my experience, someone like Tom Cook would not waste time asking a new candidate how to scale Facebook. That&apos;s like preparing for your interview with NASA by studying how they built the Space Shuttle. They &lt;i&gt;know&lt;/i&gt; you aren&apos;t going to have experience there.&lt;p&gt;What they want are people who understand the fundamentals of how the computer and the OS works, who can diagnose problems correctly, who know modern sysadmin tools. They can teach you the ins and outs of their macro-scale systems on the job.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Social Network Bust: What I learned from my job interview with Facebook  </title><url>http://www.thebitsource.com/infrastructure-operations/the-social-network-bust-what-i-learned-from-my-job-interview-with-facebook/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>lionhearted</author><text>&amp;#62;  What I slowly understood while I was talking with Tom Cook was that this was not a discussion on scalability on a macro scale, however it was it was discussion of scalability on a micro-scale.  I was not prepared for some of these questions, since some of these questions were Computer Science fundamental.  It took me a short while to re-calibrate myself, and try not to sound like I was bullshitting my way through an answer, and began some of my retorts with , “From my experience from C programming…”&lt;p&gt;I wonder if he could&apos;ve answered, &quot;Oh my, I spent two weeks preparing like crazy for this, but I was working and reading nonstop on scalability, and focusing more on showing you hands on what I can do on collabedit.&quot; Maybe he did, but it sounds like he just tried to play it off when the interview went in another direction - if you research/prepare like a madman, my god, you&apos;ve got to let the interviewer know how dedicated you are and how much you want it. If the interview goes in a different direction than you planned for, you could still possibly guide it back towards what you&apos;re strong in, or at least get a mention in of how dedicated and prepared you are for this, and how much you want it.</text></comment>