I'm not here much, but I want a forum to talk to about this.

I work as a data scientist. Wife and I had a baby 3 months ago. I bought a house several days ago in NE Ohio. The very next day, a recruiter from Facebook contacted me. I'm not an ambitious person. From what I read, dying olds regret working too much. I never expected anything like this or ever cared about working at a company like that. I had a call, said I don't want to move west, and turned him down.

I talked to my family. They said I'm dumb af. I went back and booked an interview. It's next month.

I more or less know what to expect and how to prepare. But anyone have any advice about interviewing at a place like that? Or working there for that matter? I would be able to choose between menlo park and Seattle. I'm 99 percent leaning Seattle. I plan to move there for 2-4 years, slam my student debt with my majorly increased pay, and then move back home for a remote position or a good local one. Any general advice or info about this would be appreciated. Thanks!

I tell myself that I couldn't work at a place like this. Or at least not work there if I had no power to deal with the situation because this seems like a pretty big failure of management.

Cannabusto, I can't talk too much about Facebook or the data scientist interview process there. But I will say that if your attitude is "dying olds regret working too much" (which I 100% agree with) then I think taking a super high paying job that probably doesn't come with that much extra work, is a no brainer to me.

My compensation has increased substantially over my career but my standard of living has increased only marginally because I'm happy and my goal is to relatively quickly be able to maintain my standard of living with savings (and possibly part-time work).

Also if you'd consider a full time positions in NYC, pm me and I can tell you a bit about an opportunity there.

I’m obviously biased but living in california (or seattle) has to beat ohio any day of the week.

Thanks, appreciate it. I'll pm, sure. Pretty sure I'd choose Seattle, if I'm lucky enough to get the job, as that is also a choice. Those are my only 2 options. And yeah, living in California may well be better than Ohio. But the way I see it, the vast majority of life utility/satisfaction comes from my relationships, my attitude/peace of mind/"internal well being", and my health. And those don't vary much with location. Certainly not enough to justify the cost difference. Of course, everyone's different.

with that attitude, you can't make a wrong decision, but if it's really good for your career i see no downside to the fb gig if your family has no issues relocating

uprooting with a small child is way easier than 5 or 10 years down the road

I didn't work there long after he came onto the scene. I actually didn't have to work with him very much, he worked on a different project and our overlap was fairly minimal but I had to be in some meetings with him and it was excruciating.

Ironically he reached out to me several times asking me to come back to that company.

Yeah, totally agree on the kids. Would like to be in the same place for at least 15-20 years by 2022 or 23

Yeah Seattle sounds like a better option for you, if it's for just this one job and also a more normal place for you to settle down if you don't feel like moving back in a few years. Is NYC not an option for you btw - I think Facebook has an office. I'm not familiar with data science interviews but FANG interviews are supposed to be fairly intense and speed matters. Good luck!!!

Fanng rejects a ton of people so don't get your hopes sky high imo

i 100% believe i couldnt deal with this on a regular basis. i'm way too volatile and just reading that slack exchange triggered me

Good thunderstorms in Ohio, fireflies in Ohio. Way too much horizon in Ohio.

Thanks guys. Yeah, I won't get my hopes up. And hey, if it doesn't work out, I can at least live in my new house.

NYC would be an option I'm told, but no openings there currently.

Wtf.. just got a text message from Google saying they blocked someone with the password for ‘random email’ from signing in...

So, this cell phone number is only a few months old and they have just given me everything I need to hack the account or nah?

The email was a full name and they lived around here per google.

Did the text message really come from the real Google?

On the other end of the hiring spectrum, here is an article from Hacker Newsletter that paints job hunting as a dystopian nightmare

Worth noting the guy is 50 and his complaints about age discrimination are probably quite real

From 220-00 ??

Imagine doing it when you aren't a developer...

From that list, I think everything seems reasonable except 1, 7, 10. Most good companies, probably because the job market is hot, seem to be fairly quick in their decision making process these days, certainly more so than they used to. Also, if he got just two onsites and one offer, I don't know how he can make a statement like this - recruiters can be much worse about following up with rejections, especially if they aren't 100% sure. They may want to leave you hanging just in case their preferred candidate declines their offer.

Also employers seem much more reluctant to ask salary numbers than before. A lot of companies nowadays offer constructive feedback, maybe not at the level of detail that you'd want, but certainly more so than they used to in the past.

I will add that those numbers (82/25/15/2/1) are bad enough that I don't think he's aware enough of how he's coming across during interviews for me to take seriously comments like this: "I got all the way to the end, nailed everything perfectly and then never found out why I didn’t get it." It's far more likely that he's unaware of what he's doing poorly (relative to other candidates) than that he's nailing everything and mysteriously getting rejected. Age discrimination is a factor but if he got past just 2 out of 15 tech screens, it's just about impossible for him to nail everything perfectly in any onsite.

It's also a bit strange that he's spent years as "VP of Engineering" at various companies and managed 35-45 people at some point but can't seem to empathize with how hard it is to hire people and why things are the way they are from that end.

Also the guy is desperate enough for a job to apply to 82 jobs but doesn't seem to have a linkedin page. At this level of seniority and experience, you don't really want to apply to jobs, you should have enough of a network to get more interviews than you can handle with just referrals and recruiter spam.

Edit: actually just found his linkedin page - having just 234 connections is the real WTF if you're a consultant who's worked at a gazillion places and held high-level positions at several of them.

i don't think my job has any idea of what they want me to do. the lead dev asked me what I was hired for and seemed to genuinely not know what was going on. communication's basically 0

i wasn't really told what the hell to do this week so i dove head first into the source code/documentation so if the project management thing doesnt shake out at least i can contribute there maybe.

Bad signs. Just try to learn everything you can and then start looking around for something better. My first real web programming job was completely psychotic. I found something better and was gone in about 4 months.

it just seems like classic bad morale/disorganization/apathy.

it was my first 8 hour day. the whole office, except the QA/testerr guy, took two hour lunches today. i took a ~40 off campus and was worried it was a little long until i came back and i was the only one there lol.

maybe it was just a friday but no one including my boss seems to have much of a sense of haste or urgency whatsoever, maybe it's the background i come from being much more rigid, idk. I don't mind it - i'd just like a little more direction. maybe everyone feels that way and that's why i'm here to help with that, idk. something weird is going on though.

the project is surprisingly good though - the backlog is pretty gnarly but the project seems to be doing ok. they have some impressive benchmarks and some cool stuff they've done. I'm actually really, really impressed with their product.

Yeah the linkedin thing is weird. I don't even try to maintain my linked in and I have 168 (I had to go look, I thought it might be super low)

I've been involved with hiring people for a long time and some orgs are terrible at it. Will have open recs forever and never hire anyone, even though good candidates (from my point of view) keep coming by. I once volunteered to do a recruitment event, sort of a speed dating for jobs thing, and found several extremely promising people there, who I begged the recruiter to call and have come in, and she never did. She only liked people who had the right words on their resume, most of them were terrible.

In orgs where the hiring decision was made within the dev org, I found that turnarounds were super fast, usually same or next day. We interviewed the guy, had a short meeting, and decided whether to offer. When HR is involved, god, just you know, good luck. Chances are good neither you nor the guy you wanted to hire will ever know why he's not working for you now.

Also a lot of places with open jobs will put anyone through the interview process, just in case they turn out to be some kind of rare butterfly, even if they aren't actually looking.

It is definitely weird how often I simultaneously hear how hard it is to find developers and how hard it is to find a job. I suspect one or both party actually means "hard to find a situation that is greatly in my favor"

re: the job hunt, i mean i got 2 offers in 2 interviews from 2 places i applied to, maybe it's because i'm fresh out of school or just dumb luck but it didn't seem that hard.

i definitely agree with the process taking ****ing forever though.