The Trials and Tribulations of a Would-Be Facebook Employee

An anonymous reader writes "It may be hard for Facebook HR infrastructure to keep up with the rapid growth of the company, so scheduling and performing Skype screening interviews with the prospective new developers appears deteriorating into disorderly jumble. In a blog post, a recent candidate for a development job at Facebook has shared his excruciation at coordinating and then having this preliminary interview, pointing out the unhelpfulness of HR staff at Facebook during all stages of the process."

Comments

HR will be HR

[AntiBasic]

HR is always a bunch of ass-sucking sycophants. That is true in every industry. Never count on meeting an intelligent person is HR. And NEVER count on them as an ally -- they are there for the company, not you. They ONLY time they might take your side is (if they are capable of understanding you) when you explain to them their managers have fucked up so badly, they will likely lose a lawsuit.

Fuck HR. It is always a pink ghetto.

Re:HR will be HR

[Anonymous Coward]

I even take issue with the term Human Resources. Resources in an office context are computers, filing cabinets, copiers, etc. I'm a person, not a fucking resource! If management places people in the same category as furniture, then no wonder these companies are such god-awful places to work.

Yes, you are a resource -- a source of profit that is to be exploited as hard as possible for as long as possible, to extract as much value for the company as possible; then discarded and abandoned at the first instant you no longer provide profit.

You are not a human being to them, because they are not human beings. They are management drone units. You are work drone unit. Nothing more. It's just business.

Re:HR will be HR

[Sir_Sri]

No.

HR Is full of the prom queens and football captains who everyone loves but who have no idea what they're doing at actual work, so you put them in HR, so they have a career but never actually touch a customer project.

Re:HR will be HR

[AK Marc]

I had an HR drone haggle me so much in response to the money issue that when I was hired, my manager appologized that he wouldn't be able to pay the agreed rate. The HR person put down a number lower than the lowest range for the position. I was given a $2000 raise before I even started. There's no reason for the HR person to have haggled me down so low, when the range was was well above the ranges we were talking. I'd been offered a job before, only to have it disappear when I asked for too much (then found a similar job for more elsewhere, so no great loss), so I was concerned about that again, so I was realistic but not pushy. Then he talked me down $10,000, implying that my initial number was too high, when it was still at the low end of the range, and he talked me down to a number lower than they could pay.

The only good thing is that I'll get many years of raises before I'm close to the position ceiling. I spent 7 years at the pay ceiling in a previous job I held for 8 years. Not even inflation raises there.

Another place I worked, I met the HR recruiter my first day, the first contact I had with him. Turns out I was hired in the back door, the IT department doesn't use HR because HR is incapable of screening IT professionals reliably.

Re:HR will be HR

[jcr]

HR is always a bunch of ass-sucking sycophants.

I beg to differ. I've been hired at two different companies in my career where the HR staff did an amazing job of getting an offer to me in a hurry and arranging the meetings I had to have to get those offers. Now, that's two instances over a couple of decades, but it only takes one counter-example to disprove your claim.

-jcr

In summary

[LordLucless]

- Email problems with the HR drone
- Skype call interview organised for a time not convenient for him
- Network issues during the call

Um, cry me a river?

Re:In summary

[93 Escort Wagon]

Seriously. Why should we care about this guy's complaints in the least?

I've had job interviews in the past that left me with a bad opinion of a company... and know what I did? Hint: Whining about it online wasn't it. I chalked it up to experience and thanked my lucky stars I figured it out before working there. In the few cases I got an offer from them, I politely declined.

I'm tempted to complain about "kids today", but the grass is in pretty sorry shape right now so I don't care if they're standing on it.

Re:Ludicrous expectations

[discord5]

And this interviewee doesn't seem to understand how Internet routing works.

But it's a university with two class Bs... Don't you get it? They're fucking PRO there in Israel. (pardon my french). Don't bother with that BGP stuff, he obviously doesn't know what it is, nor why Facebook isn't going to bend over backwards to accomodate him.

Did the interviewee not have a speakerphone? He mentions being unable to both type and talk... I think they solved that problem in the 1980's.

The speakerphone would've picked up the "Whaa Whaa Whaa" from the whaaaaambulance on his blog.

Don't get me wrong, but the following passage was telling:

My interview was finally scheduled three weekdays in advance, leaving me in fact one day to prepare, because I've already had plans for the other weekday and the weekend.

Why didn't he prepare in advance? If he knew it was coming any time soon, why not brush up on it in advance? Why wait until the company says "Well, next week" and bitch about having to cancel his plans, which he eventually doesn't do.

So allow me to simply summarize the entire blog in an all too familiar onomatope: Waaaaaaah

Re:Facebook..shower of bastards

[houstonbofh]

This should come as no surprise though. In these modern times of recession and people being made unemployed due to robots it really is a buyer's market and employers can pull as much "shit" as they like and still have a queue of people outside the door looking for jobs.

A queue of desperate people. The good people will never put up with this shit and get jobs through their own personal network that bypasses HR. Ask any manager who needs to fill a slot about the quality of people they get from HR. And I have not gotten a job through traditional means for about 20 years.

I do not know why companies still put up with this...

gonna file this under "1st world problems"

[miniMUNCH]

Someone had to spend time emailing, calling, and skyping to interview for job? I think I might cry...