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Fired From Meta After 1 Week: Here’s All The Dirt I Got
This is not just another story of a disgruntled ex-employee. I’m not shying away from the serious corporate espionage or the ethical dilemmas I faced during my brief tenure at Meta.
I’m not proud of everything I did. I used to think of myself as an idealistic tech enthusiast, but Meta has a way of making the worst come out of people.
Considering they fired me for telling some truths, I figure I owe the internet the full story.
Besides, their legal team can’t touch me — I checked with my lawyer and my compiler. My logic is sound. More on that later.
The Meta Interview
I prepared for the interview like crazy, refreshing my knowledge of all the trendy Silicon Valley buzzwords, like “quantum” and “default mode network.”
The algorithm question was a bit silly — something only a trendy FAANG company could propose with a straight face: “Write a program that generates text like the lyrics of ‘Girls and Boys’ by Blur and outputs a chain of ‘X who likes Y who likes Z’ up to an arbitrary depth.”
Girls who want boys
Who like boys to be girls
Who do boys like they’re girls
Who do girls like they’re boys
— “Girls and Boys,” Blur, 1994
It seemed surprisingly tailored to a Prolog implementation. Defining a few logical relations would provide far more functionality than initially asked for, thanks to Prolog’s math-powered rollback algorithm.
I weighed the risk of being considered a snob, but went ahead and asked to use Prolog.
The interviewer seemed pleasantly surprised, almost eager to give me the job on the spot. He mentioned he actually knew someone on that floor who was a Prolog expert.
Five minutes later, a tech bro walked in, half his shirt untucked and wearing a pair of Ray-Bans. My interviewer introduced him as Chad, the Prolog expert. He left us alone so Chad could properly assess my skills.
At first, I tackled the problem myself. The algorithm was tricky but nothing I couldn’t handle.
From memory, I think my code looked something like this:
