Blogjer - Technology at a glance

Facebook want you if you can solve their puzzle.

Tech company as big and as complicated as Facebook is not a surprise candidate to be among the companies admired by computer science & IT students grads or even the experienced worker.

Apart from its ‘glamor’ image, the compensation package for engineering related post it very attractive where 70k is very common. Top notch fresh grad from prestigious universities such as Standford or MIT are said to be paid up to 95K per year.This is a whole lot of money right, although in average, Facebook employees earn only 41K.

You know what this means? Facebook’s engineers can easily broke into the Forbes’s top 10 paying job in the US after working for few years!!

With much stake to offer, the entry path definitely not an easy one. Beside the normal hiring process, one way to be there is through the programming puzzle, The writer himself(who w solve 2 puzzles to get on board.

For fact, Facebook receive nearly 1,000 submissions a month. Out of that number, only 10% of submissions are fully correct, but only the best of the best get their chance for interviewed. In average, about 5% to 10% of Facebook new engineers are hired because of their puzzle submissions.

A golden opportunity that rarely to come, especially to highly skillful techies, whom without any formal certification or degrees. But the fact above reminds that the puzzle is not an easy task, and keep in mind Windows specific solution is not accepted. So forget about .net.

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The (not so true) Penang manufacturing plants crisis

Lately, the retrenchment, VSS, and laid off has gotten more highlight online and offline. Although certain parties deny that economy is in crisis, but the fact that it has started impacting the manufacturing sectors earlier than expected is the sign that it will later impact downstream & upstream industries dependent on it.

Malaysia particularly Penang, where most of manufacturing facilities are residing have started to feel the pain. There are numerous emails saying this and that companies are going to close, VSS or take a long shut down during incoming holiday. Although there are indeed companies which are affected, but some appears to be inaccurate.

For instance, on one email circulated around (copy here) where it states that AMD Penang is going to offer VSS to 500 employees appears to be untrue. The truth is that, this is the number for worldwide retrenchment, as denied by its HR.

But if you do quick googling on this matter, a lot of blogs & forums have posted this news without doing any early fact finding. If you pay a little more attention to the end of first search result page (SERP), you’ll figure out the correct news. But the problem is most of us doesn’t pay attention to that and how many of us actually do some ‘googling’ or researhing before making any posts??

Yeah, I know that you’re not a journalist, but at least be little bit more responsible of what you’re writing.

Imagine if this post read by anyone who has son/daughter/husband/wife/relative working in AMD. What will they feel? And what will happen if they happen to have stroke or heart attack???

It is nature that such news gaining a lot of attention, and spreading like fire. Everyone wants a piece of traffics from such ‘breaking’ news right?? Everyone wants to be the first to report it without thinking of the consequences.

Obviously this is not the first case and not that serious. If you have a good memory, few months back there was a similar issue where a journalist from 1 local online news portal resigned after admitting posting a fake news that he received from unconfirmed resource.

But the damage has been done. It has been read by thousands of people who will misinterpret it, although he appologized about it later on (at least he does so once he’s aware of it). So the responsibility to post only accurate news not only at the hand premier online news portal or mainstream media (which we see sometimes lacking of it), but it has to start also from you and me as well.

Rafe’s anti layoff spreadsheet - IT jobs for unemployed

A while back, CNET’s Rafe have compiled a ‘Tech layoffs: The scorecard‘  which list down the IT companies and number of employees getting laid off in IT industry.

Now, he is doing something better with the ‘anti-layoff spreadsheet‘. It list down jobs available/companies hiring that gathered from the word spreads through his Twitter (Twitter rock!).

Good luck in your finding for job, and kudos to Rafe

Jobs@Lowyat.net - a new job portal in town

jobslowyat

Have no luck in finding jobs with the established job portals? Try Jobs@Lowyat, the new kids on the block. Lowyat.net needs no introduction to Malaysians. In the past few years, the portal which is very popular with its forum has grown tremendously. It has sub sites such as Multiplay (for gamers) and Wheels under its roof.

Jobs@Lowyat, the new addition to Lowyat.net, is still in beta, with 39 jobs posted at present, where most of them in IT related industry.

If you’re used with other job portals such as Jobstreet.com, you’ll notice how ‘lite’ this portal is. On the job listing, jobs are categorized by its industry type, and is viewable via separate tabs for ease of navigating. Each job shows how many applicants has applied for the job.

Job seeker -No registration required, thus each job applications require you to fill in a simple form and upload your resume.

applyjob

Employer - No registration required as well. Anyone can post jobs here by filling a simple form and upload the job details.

postjob

There is also widgets to display jobs available on any web pages, but somehow it’s not working here.

With current economic crisis sprawling all over the world, job portals are among the most sought after websites on the net. If you’re one of the unlucky in this crisis, don’t let it bring you down with nonsense act like this.

Those whom are still unemployed, keep your effort up. Pay day is not the only source of income. Look around you and you’ll be suprised with other unnoticed opportunities.

Checking your Jobstreet Job matches on the fly

jobstreet

This tip is only applicable for Jobstreet account holders. This is not a hack, it’s just utilizing what is already there.

First of all, you need to know what RSS, RSS reader is. Jobstreet is kind enough putting this piece of info on their website as well as the RSS reader available out there.

The final step is to add this RSS URL below to your RSS reader. Don’t forget to replace <your jostreet login iD> with your Jobstreet ID. That’s all. You can check the job match immediately.

http://myjobstreet.jobstreet.com/lina/rss.asp?login_id=<your jobstreet login iD>

Apart from being faster, no signing into Jobstreet.com is needed, you can identify which matched job you has already read, based on the default RSS reader marking feature.