Facebook Interview and IPO

In 2007, I submitted my resume to Facebook for fun. I didn't think I would get an interview but since I got nothing to lose, I thought why not?

To my surprise, I got a reply and an invitation for an interview.

I went through two interviews: one with HR and the other with a technical person (Software Engineer, who else right?). The HR interview was just an opening; they wanted to get a feel of me as a person.

The technical interview was awful: I got paired with probably one of their smartest engineers. I recalled one of the "big" questions was how would I improve memcached (a distributed memory object caching system) performance.

I knew what memcached is back then but since I have never used it, I wouldn't know much technicality of the underlying system. NOTE: the answer was to switch memcached implementation from using TCP to UDP, which, apparently was an on-going internal effort at Facebook to have a faster memcached system in the planet.

Let's just say that I was not Facebook material :). I don't feel bad to admit that considering that Facebook have plenty smart people.

Fast forward to the end of 2011, they knocked on my door one more time.

I politely declined the invitation because I was involved in a long-term project and I enjoyed (and still do) what I do.

Last week, Facebook IPO-ed with starting price of $38 and peaked at $45.

Hmmm......

To put things into perspective:

http://www.insidefacebook.com/2012/02/06/facebooks-99-taxes-restricted-stock-units-rsus/

Such is life. Oh well. As long as you're happy even if you don't win the lottery right? (^_^)