I have worked at the likes of Intel, Cisco, and several other large companies that aren't so well known. I work as a principal engineer, and after about 25 years of professional software development, as well as a natural aptitude for it from an early age, I can say without feeling like I am boasting that at this point in my career, I have mastered my craft.

Interestingly, after 3 attempts, I have yet to get hired at Facebook (aka Meta). This is kinda funny, as Facebook Marketplace was for quite a long time an app that was handled by a company other than Facebook, and I was the lead engineer of it. I kinda despise FB, and aside from their oversized salaries, I can't see any strong reason to work there, but I guess it has become kinda my Moby Dick thing and I want to get the job just for the sake of proving to myself I can get it.

In either case, most recently I embarrassingly didn't make it past the first technical screening interview, even though I can say I knocked it out of the park. The interviewer escalated and tried every angle to stump me, and with ease I was able to solve every one of his progressively more difficult problems, and also I feel I had a good casual positive rapport with the interviewer.

Yesterday, I found that I didn't get the job.

Today, I looked at my analytics for my blog. Dear reader, if you are here, keep in mind that you are all alone, typically, as no one really reads this blog. I more write it for my own enrichment, and on a really good day, I might have 1-2 visitors stumble upon it.

In the past two days, I had about 10 new users viewing it.

My guess is that they were FB hiring people, that were looking into my web presence to find out more about me. If you combine this blog, twitter, facebook, reddit, etc; you eventually will come to a picture of someone who's counter culture mindset would not align with facebook's core beliefs.

This was the text of the rejection letter:

I wanted to thank you again for coming to interview with the Meta, and for your patience as we collected feedback.  

We were able to review feedback with the team, and unfortunately at this time we will not be moving forward in the process.   

Unfortunately, due to company policy I am not able to share feedback from the interview.  

It was really great working with you and I would really like to stay in touch. If it's OK, we'd like to keep your resume on hand as future opportunities present themselves and we continue to grow. After 12 months have passed, we can revisit this with you again.

So I'll never know if my personal beliefs ran counter to their culture, or if some other minor thing threw off my interview acceptance. I guess I'll just have to accept the mystery. On the plus side, for a moment I had more readers of my blog ;)

Perhaps I should get a new, better white whale than a job at a company that I despise. Something that has a little more personal meaning and won't be hollow upon achieving it.