I’m buying facebook at $50b
TweetI’ve been silent for a few weeks (months, gah) now, but with good reason. I’ve spent the better part of the last few weeks interviewing all over SF and silicon valley. I’ll just skip to the end: I’ve accepted a job at Facebook and my wife and I will be relocating to silicon valley in the next few weeks.
So up first, my current job. As you may or may not know, I work at a startup face recognition company in Pittsburgh. Our decision to relocate was largely for personal reasons, and choosing to leave my job wasn’t easy. It’s an awesome place to work. If you are interested, we are still hiring.
Interviewing
The job market in California seems quite good for software engineers right now. If you are thinking about heading west, I would wager a guess that now is a great time to do it. The whole process was extremely quick (once I was in contact with a recruiter). I ended up with a handful of offers from several really awesome places (names ranging from the biggest, to awesome little places you’ve only maybe heard of). Having spent quite a bit of time the last 5 years being the interviewer, it was quite enlightening to be on the other side of it, for once. To be sure, there’s another blog post hiding behind that last sentence.
Though the vast majority of my interviews ended up with offers, it wasn’t all good news. I actually got phone-screened by one startup company. I have tons of opinions about the quality of my interviewers throughout this process (and it’s not all good, by any means), but I can’t blame that phone screener. I bumblefucked my way through a fairly easy question (I was unprepared, more on that in a bit) and knew I was blowing it. My wife tried to make me feel better after the call but I told her, having done a ton phone screens myself, that was a definite ‘no’. In fact, if he wanted to interview me after that phone screen, I’d have questioned his whole interview philosophy to begin with! There’s probably another blog post hiding there, too.
In the end, the blown phone screen was a nice wake-up call that I needed to do some more review. I did, and the rest of my interviews went extremely well. Had that phone screen been later in the process, I’m certain it would have turned out much better for me, but c’est la vie.
In the end, the decision to choose Facebook was fairly difficult (and somewhat personal) because I had such a fantastic group of offers. All of them had huge upsides, and the thought of saying “no” to any one elicited this “are you crazy?” feeling in me. The reasons Facebook stood out, for me, was because 1) they have tons of the types of problems I want to learn about, and solve, 2) they are one of the few places in the world where you can learn about things at that scale, and 3) over the next few years, Facebook is almost certainly going to be a fascinating place to be.
This post was mainly an update to anyone who frequently reads. In the next few posts, I’ll go back to the more general style, probably talking a bit more about the interview and the interviewing process. I feel like I could write a book, at this point.
Tweet
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January 30th, 2011 at 9:51 pm
Congrats on the new job.
January 31st, 2011 at 3:49 am
Would you still be doing face recognition stuff?
I have your blog aliased as “face recog” in my google reader.
Now that you’ve got a new job I’m wondering if I’ll have to find a new alias to identify you in my google reader
January 31st, 2011 at 5:33 pm
sorry nazri, though I’m not 100% sure yet, it would appear I won’t be working on much face recognition
and thanks tom.
January 31st, 2011 at 5:51 pm
Congrats louis
Facebook is a geeky place, and some real hackers work on very interesting and extremely challenging problems. I’m sure you will face with a lot of fun problems there
Good luck,
February 18th, 2011 at 12:15 pm
Brian, congratulations on the new gig! I am a frequent and avid reader and wish you and your wife the best of luck on the new endeavor.
- BJ
February 18th, 2011 at 12:16 pm
Louis, sorry I typed your name in wrong!
February 21st, 2011 at 11:26 pm
Congrats on the job, and welcome to the Bay. I also followed a new job out to Silicon Valley; I accepted a position last year with NASA Ames, whose campus is a stone’s throw from Facebook’s Palo Alto office. I now work for a startup in Cupertino. Though I’m still a newbie here myself, maybe I could give you some tips on living/working in the Bay. So once you’re settled in, drop me a line; we could grab lunch or something. I’ve been reading your blog ever since your JPEG vs. PNG cartoon…
March 1st, 2011 at 12:45 am
Trevor… I have no contact info for you! Send me an email.
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