I was contacted via email by HR, who said my friend had recommended me for an interview spot at the company. I was pretty surprised by this, but have found that this is how Facebook often operates.

We scheduled an interview for a few days later. I thought it was going to be a technical interview. When I got on the phone with the interviewer, he asked me about what I've been working on recently. I got into describing my research project, which I probably took a good 10-15 minutes to explain. He basically just verbally nodded through the whole thing.

He then asked me about what positions I was interested in interviewing for at Facebook. In my push to prepare for what I was expecting to be a technical interview, I somehow neglected to actually figure out what specifically I could work on at Facebook. I mentioned doing something with the large datasets they work on, since my research focused somewhat loosely on large-scale data analysis. I should have prepped for that, but no problem.

He then told me that he'd be happy to set me up for a phone interview with an engineer as soon as possible. I was like, "Whaa?! I thought you were one!"

Not actually, but I did say that I'd be happy to interview with an engineer, and so he got that set up for me. I'll come back and post once I've had my actual technical interview (instead of just an HR sanity check).

What have you been working on recently?