Comment by ryandvm
2 days ago
> Or (b) that he was personally downloading porn either at the office or a corp VPN
Man, if Facebook is hiring people this dumb, it's going to make me feel a lot worse about getting rejected after interviewing there.
2 days ago
> Or (b) that he was personally downloading porn either at the office or a corp VPN
Man, if Facebook is hiring people this dumb, it's going to make me feel a lot worse about getting rejected after interviewing there.
Mate, I got rejected by Cambridge University.
I've lived in and around Cambridge for a very long time now. I've met a lot of Cambridge undergrads and graduates. Let me tell you: they are a mixed bag.
Don't misunderstand me: there are some very smart people at Cambridge University. Very smart indeed. And I think if you took any cohort from Cambridge Uni versus a similar cohort from another university you'd certainly find that, against most universities, the Cambridge cohort would be smarter on average. In fact the place is genuinely awash with very smart people literally everywhere.
But that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of people that went to Cambridge who clearly found a way to blag their way through the interview process that may not have been particularly closely correlated with their intellect. The same will be true of Meta, Google, etc. I swear, the interview processes at these companies are probably more of a sop to the egos of company leadership and people who already work there than they are any more effective at filtering down to good talent than less byzantine and overwrought hiring processes.
You just have to make your peace with it.
Cambridge alum here. Agree; admissions is a crapshoot. Job interviews are a crapshoot. C'est la vie.
I went to a similar school. It depended on major. If it was a major that the school was known for, say the top ranked CS school...then it was 100% that a grad was someone who was noticeably much, much smarter than most people. If they were at the same school but in a much less well recognized major (at my school...let's say history), then they were much closer to the average. If you are seeing students at Cambridge who are in prestige majors but without obvious skills...something else is happening and it isn't good. Otherwise, you are probably just seeing the differences between different majors.
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I agree with your point, but UK students also have to get very high grades in standardized national exams. That’s by no means a perfect measure of intelligence either, but it’s not something you can just blag your way through in an interview.
I worked there for years. I assure you, based on my experience, that there are a lot of dumb people there making > $500k/year.
There's a strong luck component to interviewing.
Which interviewers you get, vibes, which team is hiring, whether the folks in your hiring bar are grumpy, ...
Best thing you can do is know several people who can act as direct hiring manager.
20 years ago, this wasn't the case (at least in tech in SV). If you are seeing this today, its because of something (or somethings) specific. Could be the general increase in size of the companies or industry, a problem with recruiting or a problem with the universities that feed into that industry. Maybe a combination of those things. But 20 years ago, you could tell who worked in tech and who didn't.
I still hold the line on interviewing. Maybe some don’t. I am sure it is true. My team us too small with too much responsibility to tolerate mediocrity to any real extent
This person is supposedly an executive. I doubt most executive could pass an FAANG technical interview.
In a related article linked at the bottom of the article's page, it says Meta confirmed it was a former data engineer:
https://torrentfreak.com/meta-confirms-data-engineer-is-behi...
Multiple articles, multiple cases, multiple people.
Today's Torrentfreak article is about "an executive" and references the article you have linked thus:
Close reading of both allows for a not spelled out possibility ... that "the data engineer" is also the son of the first mentioned "an executive".
Or not - still much is under the fog of reporting ongoing partial disclosures.
I doubt executives even go through the typical employee interview hazing. It's more vibes and "do you know the right people or go to the right prestigious school?"
You may remember this story, from a month or two ago: https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/07/on-the-run-for-20-yea...
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Executive (and upper management) hiring is much more about owning and using risk, getting the management unit (your part of the org) all aligned and singing the same tune, and for executives showing that you've done this successfully across distinct business units (eg sales and engineering).
There's then a much more serious alignment pass.
Relationships can and do pre-vouch for big pieces of this such as alignment - if you've worked with someone for a decade, you are probably mission aligned.
is "executive" a well defined term for american corporate law? like "a person who can allocate funds from the master bank account without approval" or something like that?
generally unilateral decision making (up to a point) + supervisory functions of an entire group / department / vertical
e.g. they own all of Finance (or Ops, or Legal, or whatever), and have the ability to hire, fire, and use their own budget, albeit it with strings.
"Officer" is typically anyone who can bind the company contractually.
Not really, It's just another term for upper management. It's just shorthand for any employee whose title begins with "Chief" or has "Executive" in it (among others like Chairman, President, etc).
Usually, people who can make large decisions for the business without approval from higher-level employees.
They are, they probably just did slightly better at regurgitating leetcode problems than you
Did you apply for the VR porn training team?
I wouldn’t, lack of moral fiber is a key factor they look for
It’s a massive company, with more than 75k employees. At that scale you have to have a lot of dumb people
and, like, literally you need some dumb or mediocre people.
you don't need 75k generals or fighter pilots, you need average folks who are going to STFU and get the unfun, unsexy tasks done.
you go trying to hire a Stanford/MIT hot-shot rockstar type and they'll either crash out or jump ASAP once they realize they got nailed with drudgery.
> ...you need average folks who are going to STFU and get the unfun, unsexy tasks done.
This task might have been the sexiest work available at Meta, and there's nothing average about a guy that can single-handedly "process" 2,973 porn vids.
If Mark ever needs a right hand, this man is it.
The employees at any particular company are a random sample of the population, and will therefore have traits that occur in the larger population.
No? It’s not a random selection. The interview process doesn’t just randomly pick people
To be fair, you'd have to be pretty dumb to apply to work at Meta anyway.
Or ideologically aligned
How is their network security that lax? I feel like if I tried run a torrent at work, netops would be hunting my ass down immediately.
In my experience, executives get special treatment.
like, literally send a request to the board for unlimited, no restrictions stuff.
this has happened at two (2) orgs I've been at.
executives take risks and responsibility, so the CTO/CISO got sign offs from everyone and took it to the board and got full CYA in both cases, too.
as someone once forced to put Windows XP back on a hospital CEO's laptop in 201X... yeah.
also all the incident reports i used to file about doctors getting malware went to the circular file.
maybe that's why they got nailed with ransomware years later (:
It's even worse that they overpay people who do this type of thing while at work.
Does anyone honestly believe that Zuck doesn't have his own history with filesharing? Any computer nerd from that time would have deep knowledge of filesharing.
Zuck & co released Wirehog in late 2004… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirehog
we was all running napster
but i ain't dumb enough to do it off work IPs
Just tell yourself that they rejected you because they thought you had too strong a moral compass and you wouldn't click with the company's overall lack of ethics
Who'd have thought a Meta exec would be arrogant enough to assume they can get away with this (!!). /s