[L_Rahman]

Hi, I think you could have massaged the snark in the sentence that says "Beyond software developers who have programmed in the 1970s, most people do not have experience with a true UNIX OS" but other than that I think you should walk away thinking that your communication was clear, straight-forward and respectful.

Here's what happened - the recruiter had a list of keywords, received a large volume of inbound resumes and filtered for == 'UNIX' and dumped everything else.

They (and the company they represent) could have done a better job if they'd taken the information given, created an actual human mental model and filtered accordingly but chose to behave like a computer program instead. Their loss - move on and don't feel bad about this.

But I want to point out that like the recruiter you too got stuck in the literal filter. You assumed, I'm guessing correctly, that the hiring team is probably looking for someone with experience working on UNIX-like operating systems.

A bit of advice: When you encounter imperfect systems like this in the future a good practice is to ask yourself if you know what the actual desired outcome is, and give the lossy filter the input it needs to get you to the next round.

Here it would have been simply updating your resume to list UNIX instead offering an explainer. This would get you through the recruiter filter, and during your actual phone screen with someone on the hiring team, you could discuss your UNIX-like experience if asked. If they did want literal UNIX experience, you could apologize for misinterpreting the requirement and move on. No harm done.

[ricardobeat]

That's the most cringy part - in the second iteration you'll note he did list UNIX as a skill, but then the recruiter went on about the lack of Linux experience (which he had just replaced)! Like playing whack-a-mole.

[droithomme]

Yeah, that's the part that gave the game away when the recruiter did the whack-a-mole move. The recruiter did in fact know exactly what the difference was and he was obstructing the candidate. Who knows why, maybe he feels there are too many asians working at Facebook so he takes it upon himself to play games with applicants who have asian names so they are more likely to give up, but he can still have plausible deniability in showing that he reached out to all ethnic groups if he's ever audited. This sort of stuff happens all the time in industry. If they are interested, management there can audit recruiter exchanges to identify different approaches a particular recruiter takes with different classes of applicants to find out exactly what classes or categories of persons they are obstructing.

[jsjohnst]

> Who knows why, maybe he feels there are too many asians working at Facebook so he takes it upon himself to play games with applicants who have asian names

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence/stupidity"

Hanlon's Razor definitely applies to your theory!

[mister_handy]

"A sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."

[dzamo_norton]

> The recruiter did in fact know exactly what the difference was and he was obstructing the candidate.

For a little while I was basically convinced of deliberate obstruction - no sane person would use the arguments employed by the recruiter. But, on reading through from the top once more, the recruiter was actually initially helpful and I have settled on "incompetence, not malice". Almost settled, at least.

[pwdisswordfish]

> the recruiter had a list of keywords, received a large volume of inbound resumes and filtered for == 'UNIX' and dumped everything else

To be fair, I wouldn't expect this kind of 'recruiting by grep' to happen at Facebook of all places either.

[pwdisswordfish]

OT, did you actually embed your password in the username to enable random users share it?

[mungoid]

Initially I actually thought his working directory was swordfish.. I'd make a terrible hacker.

[pwdisswordfish]

Apparently they did...

[provost]

Interesting... Is it a social experiment?

[pwdisswordfish]

RMS did something similar way back in his days http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch07.html

[weinzierl]

Deniability? Make your password public, stop being responsible for your postings.

[pwdisswordfish]

I, pwdisswordfish, accept all responsibility for all of my posts, past, present, and future.

[pwdisswordfish]

Yep

[fulldecent]

FYI, here is more analysis on the reality of "recruiting by grep". https://fulldecent.blogspot.com/2010/10/classic-and-modern-j...

Under the section Keyword Stuffing.

[avip]

Can I use your user to upvote all my comments?

[pwdisswordfish]

That would be an interesting result to the experiment.

[avip]

Well I see someone already changed your pwd, which is another expected result of the experiment :)

[pwdisswordfish2]

Not a very interesting one though.

[pwdisswordfish]

We meet again.

[exikyut]

To whoever has changed this account's password, can you be nice and change it back? I wanted to play in this experiment too. :(

[subcosmos]

They are using greedy matching ;)

[kazagistar]

> When you encounter imperfect systems like this in the future a good practice is to ask yourself if you know what the actual desired outcome is, and give the lossy filter the input it needs to get you to the next round.

I feel like this is one of the most fundamental skills I learned in school. You don't answer the actual question, you provide the response that they are looking for, even if those are different. This is doubly true for machine graded multiple choice exams.

We had a biology teacher in high school who, in order to keep things fair, made the system very clear: when answering essay questions, he had a list of a dozen or so points he wanted you to mention, and you were graded by how many you hit. It didn't matter if you had a brilliant thesis or whatever, if you didn't recite the relevant parts of the book and lectures back, you lost credit.

The biology barely matters, but I couldn't have asked for better training in dealing with recruiter (and hard headed managers, beurocrats, etc).

[SZJX]

Well yeah but isn't that exactly where the tragedy lies then.

[tankenmate]

And yet engineers are taught to be liberal in what they accept and strict in what they send. It would seem that most recruiters are taught the opposite.

[FLUX-YOU]

>And yet engineers are taught to be liberal in what they accept and strict in what they send

From the desk of recruiters, most likely.

[groundCode]

This is good advice. If you want the internship/job at a company, you have to get your foot in the door. That means going through the recruitment team. Cutting off your nose to spite your face doesn't often result in job offers. Get through the recruitment and make it better from the inside.

[mozumder]

If you use Macs, you have bona-fide True Unix Experience. Mac OS is more Unix than Linux.

[microcolonel]

SunOS, HP-UX, and BSDs up to a point all ran System V binaries until recently, or still do. If they really want that then it's a thing they can ask for.

[mister_handy]

Speaking as someone who used to work in dev at Facebook, in my time there I saw absolutely no Unix systems, just Linux on the production side. They did have some proprietary systems in corporate IT that could have been running on HP-UX or AIX for all I know, but a PE intern wouldn't ever have touched those.

[dkudriavtsev]

macOS/OS X is actually a certified UNIX OS.

[falsedan]

> A bit of advice: When you encounter imperfect systems like this in the future a good practice is to ask yourself if you know what the actual desired outcome is, and give the lossy filter the input it needs to get you to the next round.

This is extremely condescending. The article displayed a supercilious tone towards the recruiter, clearly making it known that "I (the erudite developer) know more about how to filter candidates than you (the ignoramus recruiter). I am right, and I will only adjust my position under duress to the bare minimum which meets your requirements".

But, as a recruiter, I would be delighted to glean this insight into a candidate's mindset, and gladly put them into the "struggles with collaboration" reject pile.

Facebook employ canny recruiters. If this interaction seems odd to the "well actually" crowd, please be advised that it makes perfect sense to those involved in hiring decisions.

[cchurch]

You think this exchange shows a recruiter conducting a psych experiment?

All I see is a human keyword grep that is clearly failing to do their job: find relevant candidates and forward them on. I say this having been in both ends of the recruiting process and have have struggled with recruiters who had no understanding of how to read a technical resume and rejected JavaScript experts on this basis that they didn't list html in their keywords.

[falsedan]

> You think this exchange shows a recruiter conducting a psych experiment?

No. I said what I meant; which part didn't make sense?

edit: downvoters, if you disagree you'd better leave a comment telling me why im dum

[oneplane]

Well, since you asked...

Your statement is a mismatch between the comment about the lossy filter, and the actual email conversation, which clearly shows the lossy filter in all its glory.

[falsedan]

My statement is about condescendingly calling humans doing their job 'lossy filters', and challenging the deeply-ugly assumption that they should have bowed to the candidate's correctness.

The recruiter wanted to advance the candidate through the pipeline; they told them exactly what they needed to do to proceed; the candidate didn't think it was necessary to modify their position to conform with the requirements, in the face of someone asking nicely.

[oneplane]

Humans are always lossy filters, more lossy in some areas than others. There is also no 'bowing' required, and there is no correctness.

The recruiter wanted to put pegs in holes (which is essentially what selection is), but mistook the request for a red rond peg for 'only a specific type of red' peg. The peg in this situation might have been fire engine red, while the recruiter had poppy red in mind. In both cases, what they both should have in mind is not the color of the peg, but the shape. Swap peg with 'POSIX' and color with Unix, Linux, Unix-alike and you're back in context.

In this specific context, the one setting up the list of requirements should have specified "any posix, unix, linux or similar knowledge" as one single item, and then the recruiter should have matched any response that contains either posix, unix, linux or bsd, or a combination of those. This same problem could have happened if someone wanted a lathe operator that does threads, but the respondent lists NPT, TPI and M, but the recruiter doesn't know the area of expertise to filter for that and thus loses the input completely.

Aside from that, there is emotion and intonation and tone and appearances, but that doesn't have anything to do with the concept of 'lossy filters' and it totally irrelevant regarding that.

[L_Rahman]

We are all lossy filters because the world makes infinite demands on our time and attention and we have finite amounts of it give.

I didn't write this as an indictment of the recruiter.

How could I when I have no knowledge of their constraints, their past experiences or the incentives that guide their behavior? In all likelihood, they're behaving in a way that's perfectly consistent with their environment.

What I can do is form a reasonable guess of what the desired outcome is - the recruiter wants to move a qualified candidate into the applicant pool, the applicant wants a shot at interviewing, and Facebook wants someone who has experience in working with UNIX or UNIX-like systems.

Structuring the response so that everyone gets the outcome they want, as an acknowledgment of the constraints, and not as a criticism of the recruiter makes everybody win.

[mverwijs]

So... Facebook wants employees that do as they are told and not to correct obvious mistakes?

I find that hard to believe.