Hey folks, I'm the student writing the emails in the post here. Thanks to everyone for their criticisms. While I was initially kind of shocked by the recruiter's response, I've had a lot of time to think about it today and have realized that I was being pretty damn condescending and spoke out of line without regards to the context. It's been a hard lesson learned. I honestly regret the whole exchange, and posting it online was inappropriate as well. I briefly debated deleting the image, but decided to leave it up for sake of posterity and accountability.<p>Also, just to be clear, I do not (and never did) hold any hard feelings towards the recruiter; in fact, it was very kind of them to point out why I was not qualified in the first place. This has been probably the most reflective of how I let my ego get the best of me at times, and I hope it might serve as a warning to those who might be tempted to do the same "devsplaining" in similar situations.<p>Please let me know if you have any other criticisms beyond the ones already voiced in this thread. I'm reading through the comments here as I can, and it's been a lot of good advice. Thanks again.
Recruiter: We're looking for someone to fix the pipes.<p>You: Yes, I'm a qualified plumber and can do the job.<p>Recruiter: Sure, but can you fix our pipes?<p>You: Off course, that is is what I was trained to do.<p>Recruiter: You keep saying you're a plumber but we need
someone to fix our pipes<p>You: I can do it.<p>Recruiter: we need someone who have worked with pipes.<p>You: I have worked with those.<p>Recruiter: Sure, but we need someone to fix our pipes.<p>etc
Its weird to see people encourage the guy for this. If you can't bite your tongue in order deal with someone who is clearly not getting it, what else are you going to slam the brakes on progress for? It was in your best interest to just let it go, then clarify in the follow up interview or when it came to a technically adept person.<p>I get the arguments that the HR recruiter was a bit off a buffoon, but at the abstract level, you lacked the pragmatism and interpersonal skills to brush through something that clearly isn't important seeing as you have the relevant skills.<p>I see a few people like this in every company and they most definitely hold up progress. Most of them get fired, technical understanding isn't the only facet of being a software developer. Working in a team is a mix of being assertive when its important and placating others when it doesn't matter, much like life. A failure to distinguish between the two types of situations is a pretty big flaw for anyone who will be working as part of a team.
This is not the right attitude to bring in to the workplace. You'll have a range of people from executives, to clients to co-workers in other departments who don't know what UNIX, APIs and POSIX are. If you can't communicate technical matters nicely then you have not yet developed the right attitude for a professional working environment. It's the same thing with doctors when they create metaphors to explain complicated problems. You need to speak in the layperson's terminology, and if all they know is UNIX then call it UNIX and leave it at that.
In situations like these you really aught to ask yourself what your end-goal with being elitist like that is really trying to serve. In engineering situations usually the purpose is some form of disguised signaling. This is the purpose of most sentences that start with "technically". But when you're talking to a recruiter that kind of move is unlikely to be effective. It's unlikely to affect your application positively, and the only effect you can expect is what happened in this interaction, namely rejection.
Be honest about why you act the way you do, and be rational about your decisions.
Reminds me of this: <i>If Carpenters Were Hired Like Programmers</i> <a href="http://www.jasonbock.net/jb/News/Item/7c334037d1a9437d9fa6506e2f35eaac" rel="nofollow">http://www.jasonbock.net/jb/News/Item/7c334037d1a9437d9fa650...</a><p>--<p><i>Interviewer: First of all, we're working in a subdivision building a lot of brown houses. Have you built a lot of brown houses before?</i><p><i>Carpenter: Well, I'm a carpenter, so I build houses, and people pretty much paint them the way they want.</i><p><i>Interviewer: Yes, I understand that, but can you give me an idea of how much experience you have with brown? Roughly.</i><p><i>Carpenter: Gosh, I really don't know. Once they're built I don't care what color they get painted. Maybe six months?</i>
While both parties here could learn how to communicate better, there's an important distinction:<p>The student is representing only himself. The recruiter is representing the company.<p>When a recruiter mishandles a situation so massively as was the case here, it puts Facebook in a poor light. Obviously, Facebook's engineering teams are well aware of what all of this technology is, but it is distasteful to see this complete lack of understanding and know that I might have to deal with it if I were to work with one of their recruiters.<p>I'm not saying the industry in general is better than this, but it would have taken the recruiter all of 30 seconds to draft an email to the hiring manager and ask for clarification - "This guy is really insistent on how he has POSIX and Linux experience and that this will be okay. What do?"<p>Also, putting Unix on the required skills for an intern position? What did they think was going to happen?
Take this as a lesson in people handling. As a rule when dealing with business situations:<p>- Keep messages simple. Less information to process is better.<p>- If the response seems strange, start by assuming miscommunication and misunderstanding. Do not respond with more complicated information.<p>- When in doubt, say what they are expecting to hear and sort it out later when you talk voice or in person.<p>A more fruitful exchange would be:<p>Recruiter: We require having UNIX experience. If you have it could you update your resume and resend?<p>Candidate: Resending with UNIX experience written in.<p>Recruiter: Thanks! We'll be contacting you shortly.
This is the official CMU facebook recruiter. They have done this to multiple people I know, each time they tried to explain and yet this keeps happening.
I had a similar experience with a recruiter at Google ... only worse. Recruiters are the gatekeepers. In my case I was waiting for an answer on my interview at Google for 6 months ... just radio silence with no reply.<p>If you are lucky, maybe you have some friends at Facebook that can intervene on your behalf. If not, there's other companies.<p>I had friends at Google to help me get an answer. But I decided I never wanted to work for Google based on how callously they treated me during the interview process. It became clear to me that I was not a high priority person to them ... just a fungible commodity. This is true, but nobody likes to be shown the truth of their value like that.<p>I knew other people with other talents that were treated really well by Google. My skillset was not in that high demand ... or there were plenty of other candidates. But I felt like Google did not need to treat me like garbage.<p>After that I went and joined a startup. Quite happy now. We stole a few engineers from Google even :)<p>I always make sure we get back to our interview candidates as quickly as possible. I won't let us turn into a callous Google.
Sort of off topic but I am just kind of wondering if there is a safety net if I ever burn out, and how much money I am potentially not earning :o)...<p>Any chance someone on here that was deeply technical transitioned into recruiting? Will you spill the beans like compensation ranges, per head bonus/commission, and satisfaction?<p>As an engineering manager I've done all my own recruiting and have been recognized by my management chain for doing a stand up job at it.<p>I know several socialites from High School that are not or barely technical that outwardly seem to be earning a lot of money doing recruiting or contract agency talent management. It seems like way less hours and stress than I've put in to become a systems expert. Maybe that wont last forever with economic waves, but then again neither do a lot of tech jobs.
In my home country we say sometimes it's better being smart than right. The recruiter is doing their job and antagonizing them, no matter how right you are, is not the smart move.
Just because you're right, doesn't mean you've won. The recruiter is a gatekeeper, just say the thing you need to say to get past them... move on to the next level. The recruiter asks for Unix/Linux and yours says Unix-Like, get over yourself and change your resume. They are literally telling you the password.
True story, I once got an email from a recruiter asking for someone with experience in C, C+ and C++.<p>No idea if it was a typo for C# or the recruiter thought, we have C and C++, why not add C+ in there to increase our hits.<p>I found it amusing, but didn't start an argument..
Other comments say this guy should learn how to communicate better. I agree with that.<p>Knowing the person you're talking to helps greatly.<p>The average recruiter has a high school certificate and that's it. They're hired to do largely manual work comparing skills on resumes to skills on job positions.<p>Now that you know how they work you should ask yourself what's your goal? Is it to get that internship at Facebook? If so then how can I write my resume and cover letter to help me get the recruiters attention? Put the skills from the job listing on your damn resume.<p>Personally I'd dislike working with this guy. I can tell he's a smart guy but he's misdirecting his intelligence.
This is a tricky exchange. Both sides could've done better. To be honest though, a company like Facebook gets so many resumes that these mistakes are inevitable. Not saying it's acceptable, but it's just the nature of recruiting.
This happens all the time. Recruiters are Sales people. They don't want to learn technical things. It's not in their interest to know what Unix is. They just want to validate whether you are good and if so, sale you the position.<p>The proper response here is:
"I have experience in Linux and Unix. Updated resume is attached." Done.<p>You need to treat them like he's your old uncle. Use minimal technical words, repeat what they ask/say and most importantly respect them.
This sounds so much like those ads that look for "8 years of Swift development experience" despite the fact that Swift only came out 3 or 4 years ago. The fact that a recruiter can 'recruit' for a company like Facebook without having enough knowledge in the area that they're recruiting for is not only embarassing for FB but for the recruiting profession in general.
> Beyond software developers who have programmed in the 1970s, most people do not have experience with a true UNIX OS, and I would find it hard to believe that such outdated technologies are underpinning Facebook's advanced innovations<p>Every OS X from 10.5 on except 10.7 has been certified under Version 3 of the Single UNIX Specification, and thus is officially considered to be UNIX.
I don't work at facebook I work at a healthcare company and I would accept this rejection as a solid weed out.<p>If you cannot understand that the HR person responsible for hiring you maybe is not a top-tier engineer and you cannot accommodate that person's gap in technical knowledge you probably cannot function in a healthy way with other members of the team such as junior developers, business people, or end users.
Throwing my two cents here - as an employer who also happens to be technical I don’t like working with recruiters for the simple reason that most of them aren’t qualified to asses the kind of talent I’m looking for most times. They are good at parsing through resumes.<p>However, keep in mind this guy is recruiting for internships, so I assume he’s not the most experienced recruiter on the team.<p>P.S. - I personally believe in reading the audience, which in this case meant not digging deeper into technical terms but just adding “experience with Linux and Unix systems” to the resume as the recruiter suggested. But... only if you really _can_ answer questions about either/both during an interview.
At least this recruiter wont be as dumb moving forward. It's important as a recruiter to understand what the hell it is you are looking for in a candidate. I personally thought the applicant handled this perfectly.
It would be good to know if this was an internal or external recruiter. If the organization has contracted this out to another organization, then it should minimally reflect on Facebook and have maximum, laughable effect, on the contracted organization.<p>From what I've experienced with Facebook recruitment, they dragnet linkedin pretty hard and have at-least a 5-step process for interviewing that is designed to be implemented at high speed by internal people, but at-least lets you talk with internal people.<p>I stopped responding to their requests on Linkedin because you start over each time. Although the inquiries are interesting, it's not really fun to have a bunch of "first dates" constantly.
I had totally different experience with Facebook recruiter, honestly they are great and really want you to succeed. You could have just updated resume as UNIX/LINUX ...rest of the technical jargon should be explained to technical person in the interview. Why argue with recruiters? Get in the door as soon as possible and deal with someone who can understand the terms.
The kid isn't doing himself any favors but this is totally on the recruiter. Good lesson to learn early, you will have to deal with many ignorant people in your career and you need to adapt on the fly.
I interned at Facebook a while back (pre-IPO). On the first day of onboarding my neighbor was struggling to follow the instructions - it turned out he'd never used bash or any Unix-like system before.<p>Anyway, I guess he figured it out since he did well enough to get a return offer.<p>Apparently things have changed a bit.
TL;DR: A recruiting conversation insisting that each party 'get bent' with utmost professionalism.<p><i>Edit: apparently the student did follow up here about the same time I posted this; props for doing so. This entire discussion serves as a reminder that getting a resume past HR (and most recruiters) is 100% about ticking exactly the right boxes, and only serves as the most rudimentary of filters.</i>
Put yourself in the recruiter's shoes for a second.<p>Facebook has a vast array of technologies in use, from the top to the bottom of the stack and across a wide breadth of problem domains. A lot of the time there are competing technologies.<p>No one engineer at Facebook is familiar with the sum of technologies worked on by engineers at Facebook.<p>It stands to reason that recruiters are in the same boat.<p>So if someone comes to you and says "I've used Oberon, which is like Modula", do you know if they're correct? You don't, really. They very well may be. But the recruiter may also be dealing with one of the three dozen hopefuls every day who are desperate to pitch that X is similar enough to Y that they should be given a chance.<p>The recruiter was in the wrong. But at that size, there will always be recruiters who are in the wrong. It's luck of the draw. I've dealt with two Facebook recruiters in the past 4 years: one who misunderstood my résumé, another who understands it quite well. These days I don't take it personally.
I don't understand why you felt necessary to leave out the recruiter name. I personally would really like to know this person and try to avoid her/him by all means possible, saving me (and all the others, who will know him) a ton of time and consequently punishing this recruiter for his incompetence and inability to learn the actual thing he is recruiting for.<p>We (developers) want the recruiting, interviewing and hiring processes to be improved and optimized to not let this sort of things happen again, yet when it comes to actual actions to take, we just decide to post it as a "look, another funny incompetent recruiter!" post. As time shows, this post will not change anything and these people will continue harassing and denying interviews for good developers. Today it was a fresh graduate; tomorrow it can be me or you.<p>So please, do share the name of this recruiter.
The cynic in me makes me think this was actually intentional by the recruiter to gauge personality characteristics of the candidate. It's not entirely implausable to think that corporations could use techniques like this to try to measure social capabilities of technical people.
so you didn't get the internship. did you get one with a different place, after all of that? if not, do you think your response and this subsequent post increase your marketability?
The recruiter is an idiot who doesn't really know the hiring requirement of his/her employer, which is exactly the job he/she is supposed to do. Simple as that. I marvel at people who can spin it as the student's bad communication. Maybe you communicated your way to your current position? The recruiter is tasked with a job to find appropriate candidates, and is apparently failing. If it were to happen in my company I'll just fire the recruiter on the spot.<p>The lesson that should be learned: HR should have some technical background to do technical hiring.
Oh this is hilarious. I was left wondering whether the recruiter was a real person at all, or one of those Bots that FaceBook had to unplug.<p>Seriously though, this conversation is not completely untypical of some I've had in the past. The technical knowledge of _some_ recruiters is, well, non-existent. As has been pointed out they tend to keyword search, and well, if you don't have exactly the right keyword you're toast.
A lot of people in this thread seem to believe people should remain ignorant of technology. How many people understand how a car or airplane works - at least in theory? A technology recruiter should be able to know this (or at least pick it up on the job when polite explanations are given to them). And it would be beneficial to broader society if people had at least a surface level understanding of computers (like how airplanes generate lift, how combustion engines work, and how source code is used; so that when someone says Linux is a common variant of UNIX, they understand what that means from a source code perspective).<p>Perhaps it's in our best interest to keep these people ignorant; we do get paid a lot of money. Perhaps society has decided it's not important for most people to know, and that it's alright to be ignorant (though this leads to common problems we complain about every day). But whatever the reason, this person was doing the right thing by trying to educate the person in a pretty polite way. Sure he could play the game and get the job. But it's still frustrating.
FWIW I think OP handled the situation well. A lot of commenters say, "just role with it", but he did. He updated the resume to match what the recruiter wanted, then the recruiter said, well... What about this?
He gave an explanation as to why his resume was still valid, and added that.
I also think he explained the issue very well, and communicated well.
A no-win situation in my eyes.
You are technically right but also very wrong.<p>Empathy is a critical skill in engineering. In this exchange you have shown to be unable to understand what the recruiter's point of view.<p>You will encounter many similar situations in your career, especially when working with people in areas of expertise different than yours.<p>Luckily, it is a skill, not a gift. So it is just up to you to get better at it.
Working at a large corporation is knowing when to pick your battles. IMHO the candidate failed before he even got started. Picking your battles means figuring out if putting up a fight or being pedantic about something is worth it. What are you getting out of it except for some sort of sense of "winning" in the short term. Corporate survival is about thinking long term, and often doing or saying something to keep moving forward. Not suggesting one iota to compromise the quality of your work or your moral perspectives. Just saying there's a delicate balance to surviving in any corporate setting.
This bit in particular I think did you in:<p><i>Beyond software developers who have programmed in the 1970s, most people do not have experience with a true UNIX OS, and I would find it hard to believe that such outdated technologies are underpinning Facebook's advanced innovations.</i><p>These two sentences could easily be read as<p>"Hey idiot, no one since 70's era programmers have that experience, also I think you're wrong about this requirement because I know better.<p>Dripping with condescension, but you're young and smart so understandable that ego can swell. You've down tremendous self-awareness in your post here though, clearly have a bright future!
This exchange reminds me of this old Dilbert strip, one of my all time favorites: <a href="http://dilbert.com/strip/1993-11-09" rel="nofollow">http://dilbert.com/strip/1993-11-09</a>
The right answer is to say<p>"Oh, you're exactly right. I've updated my resume accordingly.<p>...//Unix //Linux"<p>and have that be the end of it. What is the point of arguing here but to prove some kind of imagined superiority?
Some recruiters can truly get on your nerves. I once applied to Expedia; the recruiter once called and asked me what's an 'Epic' (from Agile Methodology). That was my first call after email communication. I expected the HR guy to ask questions about my experience and setup an interview time with an engineer. I just didn't get why asking for a definition of keywords from the Agile Method was the first step in their interviewing process at all!
I'm so tired of this Linux/Unix/Posix religious BS. Earning money with software development for 7+ years now and mostly using macOS, Suse and Ubuntu (to precisely name it), I'm wondering if this Posix debate is applicable anywhere outside school and Wikipedia.<p>Of course, the recruiter is just a recruiter but with this "I know it all & better"-attitude, when the intention was absolutely clear, having no deal was the right choice for fb.
Somebody once referred me to a role at Facebook. I never got a response from the recruitment team. After emailing them, one of the recruiters told that their referral platform has some issues. After that I never got a response from any recruiter, I tried reaching out to different recruiters on LinkedIn but none responded. I suppose they have a shitty recruiting team.
Reading through the comments about the "recruit by grep" methods made me wonder: what are the chances this was a Facebook chatbot instead of a human recruiter? Anybody in the know able to say whether it would have that level of conversational fluidity (e.g. "Thanks for the tutorial but..." sounds a bit too human to me)?
You should have just appended UNIX to the CV and been done with it. You just have to play the game and keep a long 'experience tuple' of keywords.<p>The recruiter was basically trying to help you, most would have just filtered you out and not even replied.<p>Recruiters don't have technical experience, so don't expect them to understand the nuances of OSes etc.
Good summary of difference between Linux and Unix:<p><a href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/linux-vs-unix-crucial-differences-matter-linux-professionals/" rel="nofollow">http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/linux-vs-unix-crucial-differenc...</a><p>"Mac OS X is also a certified Unix operating system".
Hey recruiters,<p>At the point that it became clear that there was a technical misunderstand, would you find it condescending to say something like, "I think there's a misunderstanding over this qualification for `foo` position. Could we clear it up with a `foo` engineer who is working on this stack?
Just send the recruiter to the Linux Wikipedia article and have them read the first line:
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux</a>
Most recruiter are relatively idiots, and obviously do not know how to talk to super-smart people. Lesson to learn here is to stop apologizing, and start learning how to exploit their idiocy instead.
The HR person should at least understand the very basic technical terms, a.k.a, what it is and how are they related.<p>I know HR/headhunters who think Hadoop/AWS are programming languages.
> We're looking for experience in Linux and Unix, not just Unix-like OS.<p>...<p>> We're looking for students with experience working on Linux and Unix.<p>What the recruiter said - twice - was pretty clear and matter-of-fact. Why does everyone assume it's not true? They could indeed be filtering out candidates whose "Unix" experience is limited to Linux.
Ad: we're looking for guitarists
Candidate: I have experience with guitar like instruments
Recruiter: can you play guitar?
Candidate: as I explained, I have experience with guitar like instruments. I have played a couple of fretted string instruments.
Recruiter: do you play guitar?
....
..
Here are the facts about Unix.<p>* The name "UNIX" or "Unix" is trademarked.<p>* AIX, Solaris and HP-UX are certified Unix systems. These are bonafide Unix systems and there indeed are software developers today who work with these Unix systems.[2]<p>* The set of Unix-like systems is a superset of the set of Unix systems. The set of Unix-like systems include systems like Linux, FreeBSD, etc. which the set of certified Unix systems do not.<p>[1]: <a href="https://archive.org/details/bstj57-6-1905" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/bstj57-6-1905</a><p>[2]: <a href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/linux-vs-unix-crucial-differences-matter-linux-professionals/" rel="nofollow">http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/linux-vs-unix-crucial-differenc...</a>
I never went to a elite enough school to be <i>reached out to</i> by Facebook recruiters so maybe there's something I'm missing but I genuinely wonder why someone would be this condescending towards the people helping you get a job.
Facepalm. Somebody show this to Zuck. Change needs to begin at the top.<p>EDIT: Is it possible that they actually want people with actual UNIX experience? They are recruiting students. Maybe they want someone who has used an actual UNIX system on some kind of emulator for some sort of secret retro initiative.<p>EDIT2: <a href="http://www.jbox.dk/sanos/pdp11.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.jbox.dk/sanos/pdp11.htm</a>