I’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.
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.