A sold-out city? The fight to save Dublin's nightlife - <AUTHOR> https://www.huckmag.com/perspectives/activism-2/a-sold-out-city-the-fight-to-save-dublins-nightlife/ <comment><USER2> I understand the opening sentence is a rhetorical flourish... but it is also astoundingly wrong.

> This year, on Imbolc – a Gaelic tradition that sees Ireland celebrate the > patron saint Brigid, a Celtic goddess...

Imbolc is a celebration of the _Goddess_ Brigid, which very few Irish celebrate. The feast day for _Saint_ Brigid is on the same day, and is celebrated more widely. While she was possibly a Christianised version of the goddess, she is probably a real person who was later given the characteristics of the Goddess by her hagiographers and by confused lay people. Apparently the tradition continues.

> ...who allegedly had 7th-century lesbian romances and carried out the first > abortion on the island...

I don't think that the 'allegedly' is a strong enough qualifier here. It's a relatively modern interpretation of a piece of hagiography (rather than a text considered to be more historical). Historically, neither has been asserted by the Catholic church or by scholars generally.

And finally... The goddess clearly existed much earlier than the 7th century, so assuming they're talking about the saint... she lived from the middle of the fifth century to the first part of the sixth. The _book_ about her was written in the 7th.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brigid_of_Kildare](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brigid_of_Kildare)

<comment> xkcd-sucks Your comment highlighted the similarity between religion moving into new places and crossover [fan]fiction. It's neat how things develop

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Dublin has been having a bit of a boom (of which tech is a major driver) in the last decade, but this just feels like another symptom of the city which is not allowed to build denser or to sprawl with the result being anything less profitable in terms of land value is getting pushed out of the city (including many families who have lived their behind) while rents reach some of the highest levels in Europe

<comment><USER4> Why isn't the city allowed to be denser?

<comment><USER5> Partially because people don't want it to be, too. Irish people have an obsession with land, and see any dwelling that isn't at least a semidetached house with a back garden as a "temporary space" for students and unmarried young couples. We just don't like apartments.

<comment><USER6> > We just don't like apartments.

People have legitimate reasons for not liking apartments in Dublin of which noise is a major reason.

Lax planning & building regs. dictated to politicians by developers ensured that apartments were small and had neighbours on pretty much every side.

Most people who left apartments did so for valid reasons, not an obsession with land.

Living long term in 98% of apartments in Dublin would ruin your quality of life.

<comment> barry-cotter I'm Irish and I live in a 60 square metre flat with my wife and we're expecting a baby. I can distinctly hear one neighbour's music most evenings and while the other is quieter I can hear them shagging. This is not a big deal. If most of the population of Shanghai can do it Irish people can too. My quality of life is great.

<comment><USER6> I lived in a "nice" apartment which had neighbours attached above, below, to the back & 2 to the same side(staggered, joined apt blocks).

There was 0 chance of being able to sit quietly in that apartment and just concentrate or listen to music at an ambient level.

It's great that your tolerance level for noise is that high - most peoples' aren't, thus the constant exodus to the surrounding counties to get a house(which itself is no longer doable with a sane commute (<1 hr))

Dublin's population is 1.3 million. It's not London. It's not San Francisco. It's not New York.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The reason I didn't even consider Dublin over London or another major European had little to do with the rent prices as it had to do public transportation.

Being dependent on mainly in Dublin means you'll likely want to restrict yourself to areas which can get you to your workplace with zero connections (and everyone else who works in your general area will probably feel the same). Being an especially wet country (nowhere near as bad as the west of Ireland, mind), means even this is gonna be an utter misery many mornings and evenings. As far as nightlife is concerned, with a better public transportation system you can get away for ages by just continuing to push stuff further out.

In London I've the option if I want to live pretty far out (but still on a line that stops near my office) and live alone for not a whole lot more (if anything) than I'd pay to live within walking distance and share. Hardly anyone I know on my pay level in Dublin could even consider living alone, which puts even further pressure on living as near to work as possible.

<comment><USER8> I've lived in Dublin for two and a half years years. I like to tell about its public transport to people who complain they have it bad in their city (not that it's an excuse, it's just extremely entertaining to see their reaction):

\- There's one suburban train service (DART) that kinda goes through the centre and then just takes you to suburbs. It's like an S-Bahn except it doesn't stop anywhere useful in the city itself. Unless you live in one of the expensive suburbs it takes you to, you can basically forget about it. I've only used it to get out of the city for hikes.

\- There's two tram lines, that until a year ago didn't even cross. Oh, and the trams are _extremely_ slow because they have barely any dedicated lanes in the centre, instead sharing the street with the rest of the road traffic. Even when they are on dedicated tracks, they're still absurdly slow for some reason (in comparison to all other tram systems I've used elsewhere).

\- There's buses. They're ugly, loud and extremely uncomfortable. They have no timetable, instead they leave their terminus at some fixed time and then go as fast or as slow as they can, sometimes skipping stops if the traffic is bad. [1] Since this means you basically cannot make distributed, reliable connections between buses, they maximize their usefulness by running most of them through a single choke point in the city centre, where it can take up to 30 minutes to go through. Each line has a ton of stops, and every time passengers get on the bus, they go single-file through the driver that asks for the target stop and charges their pre-paid card accordingly (or you can go through a separate card reader that just charges you a daily flat rate, but that doesn't make sense if you're not commuting a long distance that day).

And that's it. Nothing else. Unless you're lucky enough to be on the _two_ tram lines or _one_ commuter train, you're stuck with shitty, expensive buses. Don't move to Dublin.

[1] - There is real-time bus tracking, but this doesn't help you to make a connection, just to leave home/work and not have to stand in the rain for too long. Just hope you bus doesn't get stuck in traffic along the way.

<comment><USER9> > There's buses. They're ugly, loud and extremely uncomfortable

Ireland didn't invent these buses just to annoy you, the Volvo buses used in Dublin are used worldwide, including London and Berlin. They're as modern as you can get.

<comment><USER8> They look good from the outside. It's when you actually want to use one that things go downhill:

\- Extremely rattly and loud. No idea why, but I assume it's because of the extra resonance created by the double-decker design. Any time the engine is idling, you're shaking with it, and you're likely to get a headache in the long term. Don't even get me started about how it leans and kips hitting tree branches on tight corners in Sandymount. I don't generally get nauseous in public transport, but Dublin buses would without fail get me extremely dizzy.

\- Terrible seat design and spacing. I'm not a tall person, but there's some rows where I can barely fit my legs. Not to mention the seats tend to bend back with use, giving the person behind you even less space.

\- Dirty. I haven't ever seen a single bus without an empty can, bottle, or other packaging. Spilled liquids are common, too. But that's a general Dublin problem - for some reason it's one of the nastiest cities I've seen, people just don't seem to care for it at all.

Just to be clear - I'm not comparing this against an imaginary Perfect Bus. I'm comparing this against existing bus systems I've used and loved (Warsaw, Munich, Berlin, ...).

<comment><USER9> This must be a route-dependent thing (e.g. Sandymount routes would have lots of students on them). My routes rarely/ever have trash or liquids on them, hit branches etc.

Again re: seats and engine....these are the same seats and engines used in Germany and England also.

Still, I prefer the trains to buses in Dublin.

<comment><USER10> I would think Sandymount routes would have few students on them, considering the price of living in that part of the city. What's more, blaming the problem on students/young people (ie. me and my peers) seems short sighted.

I have lived near Ballymun/Glasnevin for years (where there are indeed students), and would consider the problem similarly widespread everywhere I've seen in the city.

I think the mentioned problem of the choke point in the city centre was the important one for me; it's impossible to get from where I live to more or less anywhere else on the Northside without a half hour's bus to O'Connell, a change, and then a 30 minute bus again in the other direction, even if where I am trying to go is just a 10-15 minute direct drive from where I started. Walking to my destination, no matter where it is, has almost always taken a similar amount of time as getting a bus, since I moved to Dublin.

All this said, there's new bus routes coming in, so we'll see if it changes. I'm leaving the city ASAP though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In SF, that happened to Cocomos. It was a great club that was closed and sold for development. That's understandable but it brings to mind the Yogi Berra quote, _Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded._

</comment><comment><USER12> As an aside. Great to see so many HN readers from Dublin. We should totally do a Meetup at some stage. Check my bio if you are interested!

<comment><USER13> Dublin has plenty of shitty meetups. I wonder if an HN one would be above or below the average.

<comment><USER12> Fair point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Meanwhile in Berlin: [https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/02/berlin-germany- housin...](https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/02/berlin-germany-housing-rent- how-much-price-landlord-policies/582898/)

</comment><comment><USER15> Tech workers move into a city and drive up rents. They complain about lack of density driving rents up. Meanwhile, New York and Chicago are not really tech hubs, even though they have dense downtowns. Hong Kong should be the center of the tech universe with all that density, but alas it is not. Maybe the thing that makes tech workers want to live and work somewhere is lack of density?

<comment><USER16> Given many tech workers can work remotely it seems bizarre that we even need to live in city centres.

But alas, businesses still want everyone in the office (often all the time as well).

<comment><USER17> I mean, a convenient commute is nice, but so is access to cinemas, museums, restaurants, bars, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> 79 hotels. Wish we could build like that in the bay area.</comment>


Ask HN: Best Introduction to Sales? - <AUTHOR> I know almost nothing about Sales. I'd like to learn more, since I think it'd be instrumental in better understanding markets.
When I look online for good sales books to read, they all seem based on method / gimmick.
Is there anything more about the general process of sales and/or sales theory? I just want to understand the basics better, not like a 10 step checklist to closing every sale ever. <comment><USER2> The topic is too broad for a "best," but here are some really practical places to start:

Sales for engineers: [https://hackernoon.com/sales-101-for- engineers-6fcd1b49cffa](https://hackernoon.com/sales-101-for- engineers-6fcd1b49cffa)

Enterprise sales, which is the process that people often think of when they say "sales": [https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/enterpris...](https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/enterprise_sales)

SaaS: [https://stripe.com/en-US/atlas/guides/business-of- saas](https://stripe.com/en-US/atlas/guides/business-of-saas)</comment>


DEFCON – The Full Documentary - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ctQOmjQyYg

<comment><USER2> I've noticed that most of the people in this video are fat for some reason.

</comment><comment><USER3> I turned off after they spent five minutes talking about driving to DEFCON. Eh.

<comment><USER4> You missed out, it's a good doc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Watching it now! Thanks</comment>


Rails is more than just a Framework - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/codemy-school/rails-is-more-than-just-a-framework-2685dd045e5

<comment><USER2> Rails is more than just a framework, it's a religion.

</comment><comment><USER3> At no point in this post is there anything remotely resembling an example of what the author is talking about. With the exception of the _reference_ to active record, the author could be talking about literally any other framework or toolset.</comment>


Ask HN: What follows after a great idea? - <AUTHOR> Ok, so, there is a lot of talk about startups and new businesses. However, despite the number of sources I read, I can't figure out where to now. I have several great ideas for products, small-batch start up. Eventually an UNfinished plan for expansion and so on, but I am just sitting around with these ideas in my head and don't know what/where to continue.
Do you register the company first? But how do you register, if you have no personal capital, and would depend on VC funding. Do you look for partners/co-founders first? . . .
Where does one go after the birth of a great idea? Is there a step-by-step guide for making your own business? <comment> jerome-jh There has been so many posts about this. I remember one about a university teacher talking to his/her students along those lines:

\- take a week to put your ideas, sub-ideas and as much details as possible _on paper_

\- _then_, turn to the internet and see what already exists, analyse how they did things, how it differs or resembles what you envisioned

\- modify your own project based on that analysis

I cannot remember the rest, but you have the main points on how to handle "the idea". As to start a company, the moto is mostly: talk to customers and adapt.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your input! But where do you find these customers, when there is no company, and no one even knows about you?

<comment><USER2> If you're intending to create something to sell then presumably you have people in mind to whom you will sell it. Who are they? Where are they? How will they find out about your product?

Answer those questions, identify those people, then go and talk to them. If you _can 't_ identify those people, how will you sell to them?</comment></comment></comment>


Haml Sucks for Content - <AUTHOR> http://chriseppstein.github.com/blog/2010/02/08/haml-sucks-for-content/

<comment><USER2> terrible title, this post actually explains how to use Haml the plugin to generate all sorts of content using its existing features like filters properly. The confusion is that "Haml" refers to Haml the plug-in as well as Haml the syntax for generating HTML. The syntax is not ideal for content, and that's why it supports things like inline HTML and markdown filters, just as the outline explains.

<comment><USER3> The title is in the reddit linkbait genre that is becoming increasingly common on HN.

<comment><USER2> On Twitter, someone gave an alternate explanation that I'll pass along without agreeing or disagreeing. They suggested the title was a honeytrap to get Haml haters to read the post and then be surreptitiously educated on why that argument against Haml is invalid.

Update... That was Chris' explanation!

<comment><USER4> Well I got caught in that honeytrap, so the title does work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As an experienced and enthusiastic Haml user, I find that this matches my experience exactly. If you're a Haml-hater, please read this post.

</comment><comment><USER6> the only thing it's really ideal for is software engineers writing their own HTML. in professional team environments in my experience designers always like to be able to at least dip in to HTML, and as "illogical" as this might seem to a programmer, they are _never_ going to learn something like HAML - it's just too complex and programmery.

<comment><USER7> I'm half programmer, half Web developer. I'm great at both (I don't mind saying). Being from both worlds, I don't get the need for HAML. HTML is so easy as it is. From my point of view, any programmer who can't write HTML with proficiency is deficient somehow.

<comment><USER8> Wow. You definitely are half a programmer! Burned!

HTML is a huge pain in the ass to write:

* It requires balancing tags

* It's verbose

* It is crudded up with syntax (</-="") and keywords

* It consistently runs right off the 80 column right margin

* It's an enormous pain to extend

* It's slow to read; for instance, try picking the plural version of a constantly-used class name out of tag soup

Haml isn't a shortcut to writing HTML. On the contrary, to use it well, you have to know HTML well. What Haml does is to solve the problems that make HTML a pain to use to express user interface in.

<comment><USER7> I guess I set myself up? You make some good points about why HTML is a pain in the ass. I'm just desensitized to it to the point that it doesn't bother me anymore. In fact, I didn't even think of the issues you brought up.

<comment><USER8> I was once like you.

What it took for me was writing a UI in Haml with very minimal, semantic markup and all the controls keyed in jQ off classes and IDs.

When you structure your HTML, CSS, and Javascript correctly, Haml is absolutely gorgeous. You're no longer writing in HTML: you're writing in a DSL designed to express user interface. For instance, a "save" button encoded in a DIV in Haml:

        .button#save

That's it.

<comment><USER7> Does Haml allow you to control how the actual markup is produced? Some browsers are dependent on a lack of whitespace between nodes in order to render properly without adding some extra padding (IE for instance). For me, the main issue is control over my markup. Exact and precise control, which is necessary.

<comment><USER9> Haml does allow for finer-grained control over whitespace, but even if that's not enough, when needed you can still "embed" plain-old html directly inside of your Haml files.

I guess I fail to see how html has any advantage over haml. The absolute worst case is that you're still writing html in 90+% of the cases (which you'd be doing anyway without haml), and in the best case, your markup becomes much more DRY and readable.

<comment><USER10> HTML has an advantage because that's what people know, particularly designers.

Some designers I've worked with are ok with haml, others steadfastly refuse because their workflow is so HTML-centric.

<comment><AUTHOR> Tool support is a good reason to not use haml. I expect tool support will be there some day, but it's not really there yet. RubyMine has very nice haml support tho.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Where to start counting, 0 or 1? - <AUTHOR>

My hypothesis: It's more usual to start with 0 when counting steps and with 1 when counting things.<p>Maybe that's why programmers start with 0, they usually count steps. Age also starts at 0, nobody is born being 1 year old, although we are living our 1st year of life. Races also start at 0. When you want to know how many eggs are in the basket it makes little sense to say, oh i have an empty basket, 0 eggs, let's add some, now i have 1 egg, 2 eggs, etc. <comment><USER2> When my littlest brother was learning to count, he would count the first object twice (0, 1) then continue as normal.

Honestly, it depends on the situation, and I think you got it right. Things start at 1, steps start at 0.

But starting at 0 presents a problem. If I have a set of stairs with 5 steps, I either count the ground or the landing in my steps but never both. If I want to get to the middle (3rd) step, if I'm at the bottom I just count 1, 2, 3 steps and I'm there, but if I'm at the top I only count 2 steps down. There are really 6 positions I could be, but only 5 steps. You guys may have this down, but it still trips me up sometimes.

</comment><comment><USER3> Age starts at 1 in some countries. I know this is the case in both Taiwan and the Philippines, not sure where else. Someone who is 10 in the U.S. would be considered 11 there.

<comment><USER4> With computerized registries, age surely starts at zero, as in zero year and so many months. With rounding, age 1 will start after the sixth month.

For children's growth status tracking, the UN has a method in computing for children's age and have been localized. I have used the Philippine reference and age is computed in months. There is a 0 month age.

Culturally, I would presume you might be referring to parts of the Philippines where people start counting age at one. I have never heard of this. We celebrate the first birthday the usual way: one year after birth.

<comment><USER5> _With computerized registries, age surely starts at zero_

Except that, by convention, in China what you consider zero is already "0 years 9 months".

Its similar to describing the epoch time to my colleagues. You know, epoch time: the number of seconds which have passed since midnight (GMT) on January 1st of the 45th year of the Showa era.

Incidentally, you want to have some fun in outsourcing? Try convincing your Indian outsourcing team that it is Very Bloody Important that their code account for the edge case when the last day of one era and the first day of another era fall on the same day of the Western calendar. ("The data are passed in as strings, the strings are always in the same format, why can't we use string compare? It saves the conversion into a date." "That is premature optimization and will introduce a bug for the following dates:..." "There's only a few of them!")

<comment><USER4> That was what I meant when I said zero is zero years and so many months. Using integers (or even decimals) and without rounding, 0 years and 9 months is really zero. One will start 12 months (or the number of months the calendar is using) after the date of birth.

Edge cases, I would estimate, would account for 30% of a program's logic. When doing the first cut, I classify those as exceptions: abnormal values that generate, well, exceptions.

Time-bound edge cases are abundant, especially in financial apps. End of periods, beginning balances, ending balances.

Other edge-case values are max and minimum values, limits of whatever sort. And these don't include limits of systems, like how many times a stored procedure can be dropped and recreated, that are not commonly known or just ignored hoping the app will hold before the longint limit will be reached.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Dijkstra argues 0.

[http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EW...](http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD831.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> In my opinion, convention means nothing.

Do what makes sense according to the problem you're solving.</comment>


People Over 30 Don't Invent Online - <AUTHOR> http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2007/06/17/old-people-dont-invent-online/ <comment><USER2> Ok, this is too emotional, but here are my two graying cents.

The truth is that kids, however innovative, create sites for kids. I never really used any one of the startups everybody's talking about, except maybe Flickr, but then Flickr wasn't created by kids.

On the other hand, adults, however slow, are capable of creating systems for everyone, if they are capable of anything at all.

And most importantly, adults can build infrasrtuctures on top of which kids can play their games. See the difference? Or show me a protocol, a platform, or a decent programming language created by a 15 year old.

<comment><USER3> Excellent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I hope this kid works quickly. He needs to finish up by 30 because his mind will go blank by then.

This argument is always puppeted by VCs. The younger kids get compelled to compete the adults, and the adults get compelled to show they can compete. The difference is the adults usually have the skills and experience to pull it off. The kid needs all the fuel he can get from naysayers.

It actually plays into both age groups irrational desires. Clever.

</comment><comment><USER5> I guess I picked the right year to turn 30. Never seen so many "us vs. them" ageist articles before.

I'm strongly anti-ageist having been too _young_ for everything in college (started early), and now apparently I'm too _old_ for the Internet.

The most awesome thing about being a long-lived primate is it's like you can start over, but with experience. Your twenties are like another lifetime, all in the past! It doesn't matter how good or bad things were, they're over, and no matter your age you have to continually make things good in the present.

Buying into this "over 30" nonsense is as wrong as buying into the "you can't, you're just a kid" nonsense most of us already learned was bogus. Do yourself a favor and _expect_ yourself to keep coming up with good stuff your _entire_ life.

</comment><comment><USER6> Where do you draw the line between improving on an existing idea and creating a new idea? Most, if not all, new ideas have their basis in existing ideas.

</comment><comment><USER7> Yes if you're over thirty, don't even try to be creative. Give up now because you just can't do it. Its impossible. You're just a drone.

</comment><comment><USER8> flamebait</comment>


Facebook recruiting and Unix systems - <AUTHOR> http://imgur.com/hw2pnDt <comment><USER3> 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.

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.

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.

<comment><USER4> 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.

<comment><USER5> > 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.

<comment><USER5> OT, did you actually embed your password in the username to enable random users share it?

<comment><USER5> Apparently they did...

<comment><USER6> Interesting... Is it a social experiment?

<comment><USER7> Deniability? Make your password public, stop being responsible for your postings.

<comment><USER5> I, pwdisswordfish, accept all responsibility for all of my posts, past, present, and future.

<comment><USER8> Ironically, you could always claim that acceptance of responsibility was written by someone else (and perhaps it was).

<comment><USER5> I am verbify, this actually works

<comment><USER9> But can you nounify it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Recruiter: We're looking for someone to fix the pipes.

You: Yes, I'm a qualified plumber and can do the job.

Recruiter: Sure, but can you fix our pipes?

You: Off course, that is is what I was trained to do.

Recruiter: You keep saying you're a plumber but we need someone to fix our pipes

You: I can do it.

Recruiter: we need someone who have worked with pipes.

You: I have worked with those.

Recruiter: Sure, but we need someone to fix our pipes.

etc

<comment><USER11> So it says here you've worked with pipes in large commercial buildings and small residential buildings.

But this position is primarily for pipes in park bathrooms. Do you have any experience with that type of pipe?

<comment><USER12> Please draw a triangle with 2 perpendicular lines.

<comment><USER13> Actually, any right triangle is "a triangle with 2 perpendicular lines"...

<comment><USER14> Get out of here, Pythagoras! :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> 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.

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.

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.

<comment><USER16> It's a new-grad. They're generally not going to be masters of etiquette when facing social challenges.

<comment><USER17> That actually makes it more problematic. New grads trying to break into an industry should be especially respectful. If someone can't strategically avoid confrontation when the situation calls for it, that does not bode well for their ability to work in a team.

There are many new grads who are capable of appropriately dealing with social challenges. Those who can't have only themselves to blame.

<comment><USER18> True, but the recruiter on the other hand should show more experience and cognition. The emails might refer to systems the recruiter doesn't understand, but the actual words make complete sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> 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.

<comment><USER20> Verbatim exchange:

 _Thanks for the quick response and clarifications. Experience with Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems is largely transferrable thanks to the standardization that resulted from the POSIX specification. As a result, the terms "POSIX" and "UNIX-like" by-and-large refer to the same thing.

My experiences are in particular with developing software for Linux platforms, which are the most popular of the UNIX-like operating systems. I also have experience using POSIX-specified APIs to ensure consistency and portability. 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've updated my resume to indicate my familiarity with Linux, POSIX, and UNIX- like systems. Please let me know if there is anything else you need.

Thanks for your time and consideration, Stanley Zhang._

Response:

 _Hi Stanley,

Thank you for the tutorial. We're looking for experience working on Linux and Unix.

If you do not meet the above, please let me know if there are other roles you'd like to rank.

Best, _________

I'd love to see you defend why the guy who wrote the first half is bad at technical communication and needs to develop a professional attitude, and the recruiter -- who copies and pastes the same incorrect response over and over, showing no indication that they read a single word -- is a professional communicator with a good attitude.

<comment><USER21> >I'd love to see you defend why the guy is a professional communicator with a good attitude.

He's not, but that doesn't matter. You're going to be hard pressed to _only_ ever communicate with professional communicators with good attitudes your whole career. So if you ever want to be taken seriously and have a successful career, you're going to need to learn what battles are worth fighting. Hell, maybe it was even a test to see if the guy worked well on a high-stress team. If he can't handle one person not understanding the difference between Unix and Unix-like, how's he going to handle someone who puts a tab as an indent instead of two spaces?

The recruiter was wrong. But it doesn't matter. Stanley (hopefully) learned a valuable lesson here, and that lesson is "pick your battles". Life, especially corporate life, is full of nonsensical requirements and TPS reports and if you fight every single one of them your performance review will read "not a team player" every single year.

<comment><USER22> > What are your weaknesses?

I don't play well with idiots, or nonsensical bullshit.

<comment><USER23> Recruiter is not a technical person. If you want technical people recruiting you work somewhere smaller. The real weakness is inability to communicate with non-technical members of staff.

<comment><USER24> The recruiter needn't even be a person. A blind monkey can detect that "UNIX" doesn't match "Linux and UNIX-Like" and reject an application. Pure text matching. Recruiter literally doesn't even need to know how to read.

Most people can't communicate with blind monkeys though, so I wouldn't fault anyone for failing here either.

<comment><USER25> I would assume at this point that this is some advanced AI experiment Facebook was running to interact with future employees.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> 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.

<comment><USER27> I disagree. It looks like the recruiter is clueless or maybe even trolling, and applicant was going out of their way to be helpful. They could have just updated their resume, and allowed the recruiter to remain ignorant, but imo that would have been very rude.

<comment><USER28> If you're looking for someone who has actual high level expertise working on AIX or FreeBSD, having some dude tell you that Linux is the same as Unix or asserting that knowing what POSIX means is equivalent to having production knowledge of AIX/FreeBSD for a production engineering role is not very productive.

The recruiter handled himself professionally and should be commended for not being bullied. Mr. Zhang sounds like a punk, and would probably be better served by pulling the image.

<comment><USER29> If the recruiter is looking for FreeBSD experience and not just *nix experience he needs to be a hell of a lot more explicit. As is it just sounds like the recruiter doesn't know what he's talking about and is trying to just go based on keywords.

Especially since this is a UX research internship, and the candidate made perfectly clear that that is how the recruiter was coming across, so the recruiter had every opportunity to clarify.

The candidate didn't handle it perfectly, the recruiter however handled it far worse.

<comment><USER28> Read more carefully. It was a production engineer internship, not UX research.

Early phases of job applications are about following directions and saying what you need to truthfully say. I'm actually surprised that my original comment was voted into oblivion -- its a pretty obvious reality. The recruiter did his best to say "Just write Unix" without crossing a line.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Reminds me of this: _If Carpenters Were Hired Like Programmers_ [http://www.jasonbock.net/jb/News/Item/7c334037d1a9437d9fa650...](http://www.jasonbock.net/jb/News/Item/7c334037d1a9437d9fa6506e2f35eaac)

\--

 _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?_

 _Carpenter: Well, I 'm a carpenter, so I build houses, and people pretty much paint them the way they want._

 _Interviewer: Yes, I understand that, but can you give me an idea of how much experience you have with brown? Roughly._

 _Carpenter: Gosh, I really don 't know. Once they're built I don't care what color they get painted. Maybe six months?_

</comment><comment><USER31> While both parties here could learn how to communicate better, there's an important distinction:

The student is representing only himself. The recruiter is representing the company.

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.

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?"

Also, putting Unix on the required skills for an intern position? What did they think was going to happen?

</comment><comment><USER32> Take this as a lesson in people handling. As a rule when dealing with business situations:

\- Keep messages simple. Less information to process is better.

\- If the response seems strange, start by assuming miscommunication and misunderstanding. Do not respond with more complicated information.

\- When in doubt, say what they are expecting to hear and sort it out later when you talk voice or in person.

A more fruitful exchange would be:

Recruiter: We require having UNIX experience. If you have it could you update your resume and resend?

Candidate: Resending with UNIX experience written in.

Recruiter: Thanks! We'll be contacting you shortly.

<comment><USER33> That was my thought all along. My suspicion is one of the directives of the recruiter is to weed out people that are getting hung up on proving their point and/or stubbornly arguing about inconsequential things. The recruiter gave the candidate multiple chances to redeem himself, but no cigar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> 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.

<comment><USER35> How does it keep happening if you know about the previous instances? Does each student just stubbornly repeat the same conversation?

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> 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.

If you are lucky, maybe you have some friends at Facebook that can intervene on your behalf. If not, there's other companies.

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.

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.

After that I went and joined a startup. Quite happy now. We stole a few engineers from Google even :)

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.

<comment><USER37> On the point of needing friends, I don't think this is necessary given that this post hit 500 points on this site. This almost definitely will be posted to some internal group for recruiting feedback.

edit: Looks like it's been posted already internally judging from one of the other posts

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Here are the facts about Unix.

* The name "UNIX" or "Unix" is trademarked.

* 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]

* 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.

[1]: [https://archive.org/details/bstj57-6-1905](https://archive.org/details/bstj57-6-1905)

[2]: [http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/linux-vs-unix-crucial- differenc...](http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/linux-vs-unix-crucial-differences- matter-linux-professionals/)

<comment><USER39> If I quizzed engineers, what percentage of them do you think would get that exactly right? Prior to your post, I had myself thought — as Stanley seems to — think that Unix referred to the operating system by that name. I did not know that,

> _By decree of The Open Group, the term "UNIX" refers more to a class of > operating systems than to a specific implementation of an operating system; > those operating systems which meet The Open Group's Single UNIX > Specification should be able to bear the UNIX 98 or UNIX 03 trademarks > today, after the operating system's vendor pays a substantial certification > fee and annual trademark royalties to The Open Group._

But if I were exchanging information with a candidate, what Stanley provides is more than I would expect from a candidate (even from industry; he seems to be a student); that he isn't _exactly_ on the mark should have been fine. If we really wanted exacts, the recruiter had ample opportunity to explain his/her position, but instead, we get nothing. Stanley took the time to both give his view on things, and give a simple layman's answer that conforms to that view when the tech jargon didn't seem to go over well. That he might be _technically_ wrong is incredibly nitpicky, and I am not persuaded that that was the issue the recruiter had.

It still seems like an extremely weird qualification to _require_ , doubly so again for an intern level position: you would still be likely to pass over extremely qualified candidates who just never touched a "UNIX".

<comment><USER38> All I am saying is that when technology people like us are debating about terminology, we can cut the recruiter some slack, be nice to him or her and be more explicit in our communication to the recruiter.

For example, instead of responding to

"We are looking for experience in Linux and Unix"

with

"I have updated my resume with POSIX",

respond with the following instead assuming you indeed have real Unix experience with a system like Solaris,

"I have mentioned Linux and Unix more explicitly in my resume in the following manner: Debian (Linux), CentOS (Linux), Solaris (Unix) and FreeBSD (Unix- like).

<comment><USER39> That is something I would never do, because by doing so, I would by lying. Under the same beliefs as Stanley, I do _not_ have experience with Unix.

He does also, at various iterations, include UNIX, Linux, _and_ UNIX-like on his resume, not necessarily at the same time. If there's a particular order, or casing of the word Unix the recruiter is looking for, he or she should just name it.

> _be more explicit in our communication to the recruiter._

The long, technical response _is_ the explicit response.

<comment><USER38> > He does also, at various iterations, include UNIX, Linux, and UNIX-like on > his resume.

Where did you find his resume?

<comment><USER39> In the original post. I don't have his entire resume; I am relying on the image on the linked-to Imgur URL. I am interpreting the sections of the image that start with "SKILLS" as a screencap of his resume, my interpretation is that they are interspersed with the email chain in order to give us context as to what is on his resume, since it is material to the discussion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> 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)...

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?

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.

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.

<comment><USER28> It's not a bad gig, but it's sales. You need to fill and maintain your funnel of both candidates and customers.

Typically you get a cut of the action (10-20% of first year salary or annual rate) or spiffs. If you have a good network of contacts, you may be able to specialize in some niche that pays more.

<comment><USER40> The most appealing thing to me about that is performance based pay. It's not hard to imagine closing dozens of hires a year in a moderately interesting company. It probably feels great too, as you're greatly helping individuals and managers and the company by landing talent.

In an engineering org, I typically see low salary multiples for the lowest and highest performers. The lowest may be barely responsive while the highest is trading away health and life to make something happen. There is a real ceiling for pay vs effort and talent in technical roles. Tech management roles can allow for less effort and incentive programs are easier to come by, but it is still very seldom performance based where again the difference between the worst and the best is marginal. Cynically, it seems the most effective game theory to maximize ROI in a technical org is to be a shitbag and perform minimally. I can't bring myself to slump like that.

I am really thinking I need to transition into something like this or sales to build wealth in a few years. I would trade 10 years of grueling effort for financial freedom. I traded 15 years of basically unpaid grueling learning to become a systems expert. Very silly from an ROI perspective. I can always get intellectual stimulation from open source I guess, but I'd caution anyone from taking the path I did.

<comment><USER41> Your thoughts don't seem wrong, but I'm reminded of the phrase 'Grass is greener on the other side'.

In a recruiter role, networking might be everything. You can be great and know the domain specific knowledge, but missing out on one contact might cost you your salary.

To me it seems to be a very risky job. Isn't this similar to being a real estate agent in a way? Sure, we see the successful ones, but obviously there are people who go months without a sale.

<comment><USER40> Yeah most things follow a Pareto principle, and I'm sure this is no different.

Whatever I do career wise, I aim to be one of the best at it, at least the best that I can personally be. I suspect it would take a while to learn all the soft skills and what candidates and managers are looking for, but I don't think I'd have any trouble rising up. Likewise for sales, that is likely a very grueling job, but I think it comes with commensurate pay for high performance.

The real gap here from my perspective being in a deeply technical role, you really don't have high upside, even at lauded companies, vs these other roles at those /same/ companies.

Maybe I am just looking for excuses and entrepreneurism is the answer, but on glance it seems like the path to becoming a {talent,sales} rainmaker is far less risky for a good piece of the pie?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> 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.

<comment><USER43> No - the recruiter is not doing their job. They are marking time in a role and collecting a paycheck, but decidedly not doing their job.

<comment><USER42> And yet that's the hand you've been dealt. You can be right, or you can get the job.

<comment><USER43> I'm not disagreeing with your main point -- no one gets into the club by arguing with the bouncer.

My point is that the recruiter is a collossal screw-up, and its imprecise to describe what they did as 'doing their job'. Unless their job is to alienate qualified applicants.

<comment><USER42> There's no argument there. I would actually like to learn more about Facebook's recruiter situation to understand how this can happen. That's definitely something you want to avoid in your own company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> 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.

</comment><comment><USER45> True story, I once got an email from a recruiter asking for someone with experience in C, C+ and C++.

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.

I found it amusing, but didn't start an argument..

<comment><USER46> Years ago I had a recruiter pull a list of questions from their technical guy to ask. The first question was something about constructors in C. I carefully explained that the question made no sense for C but would for C++. They insisted the question was correct, so I told them what the answer would be in C++.

They also asked me about if I had experience with the EMACS editor, but spelled out the letter E-M-A-C-S. Why that was an important skill I have no idea. Especially since this was for a contact that several companies were competing for and I was hired by the winning company to work on it. No special knowledge of EMACS was required. Any text editor would work.

<comment><USER47> Regarding the Emacs question - could be a weedout/profiling question. I've asked recruiters in the past to screen candidates for familiarity with certain tools as a shortcut for identifying candidates with higher aptitude for what I'm hiring for.

For instance, when I'm hiring a vSphere admin, and I ask my recruiters to put anybody that wasn't immediately familiar with RVTools (among other things) at the bottom of the resume pile. It's a dead simple and ubiquitous utility for vSphere admins, and is a pretty good shortcut for eliminating people with too little experience or too hands-off experience from contention. Sure, it might end up accidentally selecting against what would otherwise be good candidates, but in general I've found it helps accelerate forced ranking of candidates.

That's probably a bit more directly applicable to the role than your Emacs question, but they might be trying to feel out what 'kind' of a developer you could be. Those that favor Emacs, Vim etc tend to be rather different than those that use Visual Studio, etc.

<comment><USER48> You sound like my racist grandfather: "Those that favor Emacs, Vim etc tend to be rather different than those that use Visual Studio, etc." Yeah? How are they different? O Great Arbiter of Skills, how did you come to this conclusion?

<comment><USER49> Honestly, while I would not stake a hiring decision on the distinction, I see quite a difference in the two. Comparing a coders chosen habits to racism is a huge stretch.

<comment><USER50> That's not what was compared. The comparison to racism was to the poster who said EMACS users are "different" from VS users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Other comments say this guy should learn how to communicate better. I agree with that.

Knowing the person you're talking to helps greatly.

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.

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.

Personally I'd dislike working with this guy. I can tell he's a smart guy but he's misdirecting his intelligence.

<comment><USER52> > Put the skills from the job listing on your damn resume.

He did. Everyone seems to be scrolling by that screenshot. He's trying to be honest -- the poor bastard.

A few more interactions like this though and he's bound to start telling white lies on his resume. Eventually he'll start to think "sure, I've got like '4 years'ish of experience in that... fuck it..." And so it goes.

Pretty soon he's just like everyone else who doesn't bat an eye at "10 years of Swift experience" and all that garbage.

Frankly, if Facebook is hiring recruiters fresh out of HS with no tech background and treating fresh, naive, honest soon-to-be devs like this, then they've failed their own interview. This is nothing short of ridiculous.

<comment><USER51> I agree that it's terrible and it promotes bad behaviour. I'm yet to see a system that outperforms it though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> 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.

<comment><USER22> Unless you have competent recruiters. Are you saying that incompetent recruiters are the norm?

<comment><USER54> In all fairness, at scale. it takes one incompetent recruiter out of literally hundreds, or one badly managed case from an otherwise very competent recruiter, out of thousands a day, to get something like this to happen. Any large enough system will have component-level faults.

Sure, it is Facebook, they know how to build systems that are tolerant to faulty components. If they cared about preventing this, they could send resumes to multiple recruiters and proceed based on some sort of consensus. But that's the kicker, turns out their recruitment organization is already a fault tolerant system. The particular fault tolerance mode here is that they don't care about a certain rate of false negatives, no matter how egregious in hindsight, as long as they have few false positives. Sucks at a human level, but in some ways it probably _is_ the optimal system based on what the objective function is for a large company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> 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.

The proper response here is: "I have experience in Linux and Unix. Updated resume is attached." Done.

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.

</comment><comment><USER56> 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.

<comment><USER57> > is not only embarassing for FB but for the recruiting profession in general.

I don't think the profession has any room to be embarrassed:it seems like a check your dignity at the door type deal. I've dealt with plenty of recruiters as an applicant, an employee being hounded for referrals, and even in just social situations, and I can't think of a single positive thing to say about them.

I'm usually not comfortable with such blanket statements, but it's literally 100% of the ones I've interacted with. I've yet to meet one that knows anything about the jobs they're hiring for, or one that doesn't give you the dirty feeling of being used after a conversation in any capacity with them. The worst was meeting them in social situations when they'd hear I worked for Google: 90% of the time they'd immediately get a predatory gleam in their eye and the tenor of their interactions with me would immediately shift. It was sickeningly transparent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> > 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

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.

</comment><comment><USER59> I don't work at facebook I work at a healthcare company and I would accept this rejection as a solid weed out.

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.

<comment><USER60> It's not exactly easy. The student has to figure out if the position genuinely needs UNIX experience or not. The recruiter doesn't seem able to communicate this. If so, it would be dishonest to claim experience the student doesn't have.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> 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.

However, keep in mind this guy is recruiting for internships, so I assume he's not the most experienced recruiter on the team.

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.

</comment><comment><USER62> I never went to a elite enough school to be _reached out to_ 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.

<comment><USER63> Facebook reaches out to me every few months and don't have a degree. I don't have the time or patience to study for their fresh-out-of-cs-grad style interview process though so only go with companies that test for what actually happens on the job vs in a text book, of which there are plenty.

<comment><USER62> You can't beat the RSUs

<comment><USER63> Even if true you can still beat a hundred other things like not having to be on-call, base pay, location (remote vs Manlo Park/ManFrancisco or being senior enough for their alternate locations), and lack of Test Driven Development (feel free to prove me wrong here). It's far easier to get a fat base pay somewhere sensible that knows how to manage a remote team, where you can then live in a low COL area or with better housing and cultural options, than to deal with bureaucratic nonsense for the chance of cashing out a few extra dollars in a few years in a high COL area where you don't have a life outside of work for that time, IMHO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> 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.

</comment><comment><USER65> Somewhat on topic. Does anyone use actual Unix? Is it even something you can install anymore?

<comment><USER40> You can basically buy the right to call yourself UNIX today from The Open Group. The most extreme example of this is z/OS, but Mac OS is also UNIX.

As for a singular product it was always kind of muddy. There was early UNIX, Research UNIX, BSD and then System III and System V as products from AT&T. The last product that was "pure" UNIX was System V Release 4. You could buy it into the 90s for 3B2s and PCs. It had lots of derivatives that used it as the port base like Solaris, Interactive UNIX, UnixWare etc and the code was also widely incorporated into other port bases (AIX, IRIX, etc) that predate or incorporated lots of different code like OSF/1\. IIRC Novell came to own this "pure" UNIX and then sold it to SCO.

I would say any of the BSDs are UNIX today, but that caused a pretty big legal gaffe between AT&T and BSDi in the early '90s and limited adoption at a critical point. OpenBSD to me seems like the spiritual Research UNIX continuation.

<comment><USER66> Could we crowd fund a campaign to buy a unix license for linux and end this silliness once and for all?

<comment><USER40> It would be pretty comical to do so, just to muddy the already muddy term. But it has very little practical utility. I don't think any regulatory body requires a "real" UNIX these days -- sure, some products require a particular OS like AIX but I haven't heard of a spec/customer/vendor demanding "UNIX". Most clueful people would talk in terms of POSIX and {POSIX, UNIX, Linux}-like to describe the desire for portable software APIs or whatever.

Upon more thought, maybe all caps UNIX should refer to the legacy AT&T system. In the modern lexicon, Unix is mainly two things: a command environment (i.e. a shell with UNIX-like built ins and pipes) and a philosophy (shell, simple short commands, pipes, hierarchical file system, less is more etc). This use still has great meaning to me and I wish more people would spend the time to learn the culture, reading books like those by author Peter H. Salus. Using those definitions, it should still be common to talk about "Unix shell scripting" or thinking about software design in a "Unix environment", even if that were to execute entirely on Linux in practice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> 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.

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.

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.

<comment><USER68> Probably internal – when I interviewed with them in the past an internal recruiter (I was familiar with through friends / on-campus stuff) gave me some super dumb technical questions on the "initial screen". Very basic pseudo data structure stuff, but still. It was obvious she was trying to map the words I had said to some pre-provided solution.

They should probably stop doing that.

<comment><USER69> That's somewhat common, in my experience. It's just a basic quiz to screen out obviously unqualified applicants.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> 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.

</comment><comment><USER71> 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.

</comment><comment><USER72> 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.

Anyway, I guess he figured it out since he did well enough to get a return offer.

Apparently things have changed a bit.

<comment><USER73> No, that neighbour is now just interviewing for internships :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> TL;DR: A recruiting conversation insisting that each party 'get bent' with utmost professionalism.

 _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._

</comment><comment><USER75> Put yourself in the recruiter's shoes for a second.

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.

No one engineer at Facebook is familiar with the sum of technologies worked on by engineers at Facebook.

It stands to reason that recruiters are in the same boat.

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.

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.

<comment><USER76> If I'm a recruiter and an intelligent-sounding person comes to me and says theyve used Oberon which is like Modula I would do 30 seconds research and understand if that is true, maybe reach out to my peers for more info.

If I didnt bother accepting anything beyond an exact keyword match of something I didnt understand then I was probably a lousy recruiter and likely not worth my paycheck.

<comment><USER42> In your experience, does it make sense for Facebook to also hire low-level recruiters to go over a mass of students? Would those recruiters be expected to do the same?

<comment><USER76> I'm not a recruiting manager. You cant really turn this situation around on me.

I dont make the rules. If your job is procuring or selling a resource and you have little/no appreciation of said resource then you're effectively a spam bot.

Imagine a car salesman said to you "Im a low level guy. I dont really know cars. But I bet you'd look great in this blue one". Does that sound acceptable to you?

<comment><USER42> I misread your original comment as "I'm a recruiter but..."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> 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.

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.

So please, do share the name of this recruiter.

<comment><USER78> Doxxing/outing people here is probably against site rules, and if it's not, it's still unprofessional and likely to reflect just as badly on the him as on the recruiter. The recruiter can say to his boss, "shit, I didn't have enough coffee that day!" and be forgiven; Stan won't get the same forgiveness.

<comment><USER77> It does not matter what recruiter says to his boss; what matters is that we will know this person and avoid all contact with him; it is not his boss (as if the boss cares) he should seek forgiveness from. Stan does not need forgiveness for there is nothing to forgive him for; the only thing he will get is respect for standing up for the gross incompetence and bullying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> 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.

</comment><comment><USER80> 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?

<comment><USER50> > _this subsequent post increase your marketability?_

It did in my eyes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> 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.

The lesson that should be learned: HR should have some technical background to do technical hiring.

</comment><comment><USER82> If true, this is truly hilarious. (I'm sure the young man will do fine with another employer.)

</comment><comment><USER83> 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.

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.

</comment><comment><USER84> 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 - <USER2> 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).

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.

</comment><comment><USER85> 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.

</comment><comment><USER86> You are technically right but also very wrong.

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.

You will encounter many similar situations in your career, especially when working with people in areas of expertise different than yours.

Luckily, it is a skill, not a gift. So it is just up to you to get better at it.

<comment><USER87> I'm sorry, but we're looking for social skills, not empathy. -Facebook Recruiter

</comment></comment><comment><USER88> Was this conversation with a recruiter?

I'm hoping this is a yes. That was... incredibly difficult to read.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes it is...

</comment></comment><comment><USER89> 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.

</comment><comment><USER90> This bit in particular I think did you in:

 _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._

These two sentences could easily be read as

"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.

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!

<comment><USER91> He is actually incorrect in this case as Mac OS is certified UNIX so is a UNIX and not just UNIX-like [*]. If the recruiter was being clever and wanted the applicant to understand the distinction or answer with the magic OS X words I'd be impressed.

[https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/1489/is-mac-os-x- un...](https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/1489/is-mac-os-x-unix)

</comment></comment><comment><USER92> This exchange reminds me of this old Dilbert strip, one of my all time favorites: [http://dilbert.com/strip/1993-11-09](http://dilbert.com/strip/1993-11-09)

</comment><comment><USER93> The right answer is to say

"Oh, you're exactly right. I've updated my resume accordingly.

...//Unix //Linux"

and have that be the end of it. What is the point of arguing here but to prove some kind of imagined superiority?

<comment><USER94> "Ha! He's lying on his resume! Rejected".

</comment></comment><comment><USER95> 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!

</comment><comment><USER96> 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.

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.

</comment><comment><USER97> Were they begging the OP to lie? Or perhaps it was a chatbot?

<comment><USER11> No it was a non-technical recruiter just looking to check off their box that the person had "UNIX" experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER98> 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.

</comment><comment><USER99> 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)?

</comment><comment><USER100> 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.

The recruiter was basically trying to help you, most would have just filtered you out and not even replied.

Recruiters don't have technical experience, so don't expect them to understand the nuances of OSes etc.

<comment><USER101> > Recruiters don't have technical experience, so don't expect them to > understand the nuances of OSes etc.

Yes, you should. If they don't understand what they should be looking for in a CV, they should not be recruiting for the position.

</comment></comment><comment><USER102> Good summary of difference between Linux and Unix:

[http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/linux-vs-unix-crucial- differenc...](http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/linux-vs-unix-crucial-differences- matter-linux-professionals/)

"Mac OS X is also a certified Unix operating system".

</comment><comment><USER37> Hey recruiters,

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?

</comment><comment><USER103> Just send the recruiter to the Linux Wikipedia article and have them read the first line: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux)

</comment><comment><USER104> Wow. Great thread. I'm personally waiting for n-gate's take on this.

</comment><comment><USER105> 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.

</comment><comment> foo-man-chu Part of working in the industry is learning to work with recruiters.

<comment><USER106> Or with other people in general.

</comment></comment><comment> real-hacker The HR person should at least understand the very basic technical terms, a.k.a, what it is and how are they related.

I know HR/headhunters who think Hadoop/AWS are programming languages.

</comment><comment><USER107> Bio-droid recruiter. You shouldn't feel bad about it. Hopefully these sort of obstacles will be removed with automation of recruiting processes.

</comment><comment><USER108> HR is basically keyword matching nowadays, person doing hiring is completely unaware of intricate details of the domain, it applies not just for IT.

</comment><comment><USER109> Sooo, no UNIX, then?

</comment><comment><USER110> I wish I went to a prestigious enough university for a Facebook recruiter to reach out to me for internship opportunities.

<comment><USER111> but id you did, youd be so arrogant from your perceived IQ that youd blow the chance with your response email

</comment></comment><comment><USER112> I am updating my resume to list Unix to Unix Like , did not thought that i was lying on my resume till this date.

</comment><comment><USER113> > We're looking for experience in Linux and Unix, not just Unix-like OS.

...

> We're looking for students with experience working on Linux and Unix.

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.

</comment><comment><USER114> Interesting. I almost feel like he spoke to an ai chat bot. Could that be the case?

</comment><comment><USER115> 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? .... ..

</comment><comment><USER116> So the people who are currently working at Facebook do so because they lied?

</comment><comment><USER117> Robots are going to do what robots are going to do.

</comment><comment><USER118> Cutting off your nose to spite your face...

</comment><comment><USER119> yeah she's not known for being the kindest person around..

</comment><comment><USER120> Unless you value money over all the other goods in the world, why would you want to work for Facebook?

<comment><USER94> Money can be exchanged for goods and services.

Besides, there are other upsides: you get to work at a company that values developers, you'll have lots of competent colleagues and you'll learn a lot, and you'll work at a product that hundreds of millions of people love.

</comment></comment><comment><USER121> Facepalm. Somebody show this to Zuck. Change needs to begin at the top.

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.

EDIT2: [http://www.jbox.dk/sanos/pdp11.htm](http://www.jbox.dk/sanos/pdp11.htm)

<comment><USER38> Did you read the email exchange carefully? The Facebook recruiter did not ask for experience with the AT&T Unix systsem of 1970s. The candidate perhaps assumed that incorrectly.

Facebook asked for actual Linux and Unix experience which indeed many people who have worked on GNU/Linux systems like CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu, etc. and Unix systems like AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, etc. have.

<comment><USER121> Truth be told, I didn't remember there is a distinction between Unix and UNIX. I also didn't know/remember that Solaris and AIX are proper Unixes. These are probably things that a systems developer should know. Given this distinction, I am starting to empathize with the recruiter – when an unqualified candidate is trying to sell me / pedant me on something they're actually unqualified to talk about.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Using shock images like Goatse to fight online scammers - <AUTHOR> Scammers are becoming more and more a problem for me... fake CL house rentals, people asking for banking information, etc.
The problem is that, for the most part, there's no way to retaliate.
So I was thinking of doing an easy reverse fishing attack.
Basically you reply with:
"Sure, here's my banking info https://chasebankint.com/1xv94"
this URL SEEMS like a fake banking site but when you load it download a shock image, audio, locally, and then display these to the user.
A shock image is an image that's VERY disgusting and can basically borderline cause brain damage. Not literally of course but you can NOT unsee these things.  They're VERY VERY NSFL....
The audio could be various things like audio from pornography or a message scolding them, etc.
There are also various ways to lock up the browser to KEEP them on the site.
The upside here is that this could be used against scammers.
But it would also be weaponizing an attack and commoditizing it so that it can be used against regular/innocent people.
I was thinking that one way to avoid this would be to require the user to make a payment, validate their information against a card, and they can later receive a refund if they like (maybe keeping a portion for charity or to fight online scammers).
Thoughts? <comment><USER2> My first thought is that youtube and facebook content reviewers get paid for being exposed to the worst aspects of human nature, albeit not nearly enough. Why should you do it for free? In any case, a low-effort method is to save your ransomware emails and use the attachments on them in your subsequent replies to scammers.

I'm not convinced that locking a browser to keep it on a site is feasible, so maybe my skepticism will be of some use if it motivates you to prove me wrong. I'm confused by your last paragraph, but email services to which senders pay a refundable deposit are not a new idea.

</comment><comment><USER3> It is pointless. They are most likely hardened fellows who will not respond to it with much of a reaction.

If you want to accomplish something, try to decrease their profitability. For example, write a bot that responds to scam emails, tries to get them off script, and spend a lot of their time.

If 90% of their time is spent on your bots, that's profits down by 90%. If they have a profit margin of 50%, then they will be making a loss with your actions.

</comment><comment><USER4> I used to answer spam emails and include a word document with all of my 'information'.

The word document contained various photos of shit in the toilet with the occasional goatse thrown in.

The scammer would get so angry and always send me a response.

It always made me laugh.</comment>