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...

Usually when a new joiner involves in a new project, he will spend much time on understanding the background of the project, the current status of the project and the requirements of the project etc. It is very easy for them to get lost in this stage. So to effectively help them involve in the project, we need have some people guiding them, giving them some useful instructions. What should we do to help them? Here are some steps I take.1. Project backgroundIn this phase, I will introduce to them some project background such as why we have this project, what is the project target and the curren...

I've used a lot of languages (professionally) over the years: (off the top of my head) Cold Fusion, HTML, Javascript, php, SQL, CSS, ASP(classic & .net), C#, Ruby, Flex, Java, & Clojure. Each language has pros and cons. Being a programmer, it's easiest to discuss the cons - and in general I believe it was best said:I hate all programming languages - Matt FoemmelI think it's important to start with this in mind. At some point you're going to hate what you're advocating, so imagine how other people feel about it.In 2008 I introduced Clojure into a DRW codebase. This blog entry focuses o...

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...

Over the last few weeks I’ve been interviewing with Google for a job doing primarily JavaScript development. I didn’t end up getting the job but I thought I would share the process of interviewing for Google as it was both very exciting and a humbling experience. I can’t reveal everything as I’m under a few NDAs. I’m not going to mention the products or teams that I was interviewing for but you may be able to guess.For those that don’t know me, I’m an independent developer/designer. A majority of my work falls into the four categories of JavaSc...

I've always considered myself a bit of a software junkie. Nothing excites me more than a great piece of new software.Some of my best childhood memories are our trips to Grandma's house, where I'd have access to a computer with a dial-up connection that I'd use to obtain freeware and shareware.I'd bring 4 or 5 floppies with me and try to cram all the games, waveform editors, and utilities that I could sneaker-net home.Luckily today, excellent software written with passion oozes out of the app ecosystem. OS X and the App Store really fuel an economy of software built for humans by people tha...

1. Use PHP only when it is necessary – Rasmus LerdorfThere is no better source than the creator of PHP, to learn what he can do. Rasmus Lerdorf created PHP in 1995. Since then, the language has spread like a wildfire rate in the developer community, incidentally changing the face of the Internet. However, Rasmus did not create PHP with these intentions. PHP was created for the needs of web development. As is the case with many other projects with open source, have become popular, philosophy or even narcissism has never been the driving force. It wa...