The fundamental difference between Beijing and Silicon Valley is not the sky color, but the fact that on one side the young people are talking about buying a new house, a new car and getting married, while on the other side young people are talking about how to change the world.Now and then we can read from the newspaper or the Internet that a Silicon Valley company is valued over 1 billion US dollars. Also we can see many famous US IT brands on the Internet such as Google, Facebook,Twitter, Amazon... People are still wondering about why US companies are so creative. While in other places such...

There are a lot of friends asking me about the basic flow of how Silicon Valley companies recruit engineers. As a candidate, I tried Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Oracle, and I received offer from all these companies. As an interviewer, I have interviewed no less than 300 people and I know about the process of recruitment. I write this article with the hope of inspiring people who want to go to Silicon Valley or who are preparing for interviews or who are in the design of the recruiting process for start-up companies with limited experience.Chance for an interviewThe easiest way to get an interview...

Editor’s note: Pedram Keyani has been an engineer at Facebook since 2007. He is a manager on the Site Integrity team, the inventor of Keg Presence and a Hackathon enthusiast.Looking for internships and jobs after college can be exhilarating, especially for people with engineering and other technical expertise. In an otherwise tough job market, demand for software engineers is higher than ever right now. You may find that companies are actually competing to pay you for the knowledge you worked so hard to acquire in school.But as pumped as I was when I started out, I also felt a lot of st...

Yesterday  I published a piece about Newry in Northern Ireland, which is looking to help boost its economy by encouraging a startup ecosystem. A little later, a post entitled ‘You will not be the next Silicon Valley, please stop trying‘ appeared over on Pando Daily, in which the author decided pull a bunch of Irish stereotypes out of the bag to attack the idea.Now, I could detail everything that’s wrong with the article, but the comments there do a perfect job of ripping it apart. It certainly missed the point of what’s happening in Newry. Indeed, if Trevor Gilbe...