Hav­ing cleared a few phone inter­views, I was invited to Face­book head­quar­ters for on-site inter­views. This, dear reader, is my story⁰.

27^th Feb­ru­ary 2011

On 27th Feb­ru­ary, 2011, around 12.00 IST—somewhere early in the morning—my fairly wor­ried¹ par­ents dropped me off at Indira Gandhi International’s newly built Ter­mi­nal 3. Admir­ing the airport—both the dec­o­ra­tions and the build­ing itself—I checked in fairly com­fort­ably; trav­el­ing Busi­ness class, Emi­rates on this route I was allowed to wait for board­ing at the ITC lounge.

A brief descrip­tion is in order at this point—all around me were peo­ple dressed ele­gantly in suits, sip­ping their sin­gle malt whiskey glasses, look­ing impa­tiently at their watches and futilely try­ing to con­nect to the Air­port Wi-Fi. Faintly bemused at the sur­round­ings, I set­tled in, got my lap­top out—happily sip­ping my first cup of cof­fee² and nib­bling on a sand­wich to pass the time. Hav­ing man­aged to enable WiFi, I Facebook’d and Tweet’d my time away.  I also met Pro­fes­sor J.^a at the lounge; he was a bit sur­prised to find a not-yet-graduated stu­dent sit­ting there.

Being a bit anx­ious about miss­ing the flight, I heard an announce­ment that had my flight num­ber in there some­where and I—finishing my sec­ond cup of coffee—left the lounge and sat down next to the board­ing gate, hog­ging the sole func­tion­ing power point (the ~5 other points, sadly, being dys­func­tional). I passed some time look­ing at the expres­sions of peo­ple who—1. Saw that my lap­top was con­nected; 2. Decided to charge their own elec­tri­cal para­pher­na­lia; 3. Tried their hand at each of the plug points; and 4. Real­ized that only the one I was using worked. My only excuse for not sav­ing them the effort was that I had been a bit, ah, miffed at real­iz­ing that the announce­ment had been about a delay in the flight—not a call for boarding.

As this was the first of two flights I would be tak­ing, I was a bit wor­ried about miss­ing my con­nect­ing flight—luckily enough, we took off and reached an hour before the sec­ond flight took off—but I’m get­ting ahead of myself here. The flight to Dubai was pretty amaz­ing. I can­not move ahead with­out describ­ing my seat in some detail.

Busi­ness class seats involve a com­pletely auto­mated chair that stretches out to a fully hor­i­zon­tal bed at the press of a but­ton. It was also pos­si­ble to adjust how far each spe­cific part of the seat goes up and down—allowing rather inter­est­ing pos­tures. Each part of the seat seemed to have a vibra­tor that could be switched on for a mas­sage. At a com­fort­able dis­tance, a rather large touch-screen view­ing screen with an in-flight enter­tain­ment sys­tem loaded with a few hun­dred movies, songs, tele­vi­sion shows and radio channels—my only grouch being that they had very few rock songs; no Iron Maiden for instance.

The most inter­est­ing part about the seats were the controls—I believe I already men­tioned that the screen was touch enabled; apart from that there was a remote that could be used to switch chan­nels, adjust vol­ume, switch on lights and a small touch panel that could be used to manip­u­late every­thing all over again. Con­sid­er­ing the redun­dancy involved, you’d think that the func­tion­al­ity involved was crit­i­cal³.

Food was good, though I didn’t rec­og­nize most of what I ate; par­tic­u­larly in the starters por­tion. Cof­fee was fine, and I think I had just a cup or two of almost black cof­fee on this par­tic­u­lar flight. I whiled away most of the time lis­ten­ing to music, read­ing a novel on my Kin­dle^b, and prepar­ing a bit for the on-site interviews.

Dubai air­port was a pleas­ant expe­ri­ence, though I had very lit­tle time to spend there dur­ing this part of the jour­ney. The flight to SF was on time, so I had just about an hour to go ahead. Sur­pris­ingly enough, even those who were just trans­fer­ring from plane to plane had to pass through another secu­rity check. Where you had to remove your belt, shoes, any­thing metal­lic, pass through the scan­ner and move ahead.

The most inter­est­ing part was the extra­or­di­nar­ily large num­ber of con­nect­ing flights at the airport—all Emi­rates, lead­ing to many dif­fer­ent gates spread along an extra­or­di­nar­ily long build­ing struc­ture. I arrived at my gate on time and boarded the next flight more or less painlessly.

The plane, the seat were just about exactly the same. I had an aisle seat in the cen­ter row again, though on the oppo­site side of the plane this time. Set­tling in for a long haul, I kicked off my shoes, handed over my jacket, got my faith­ful old Kin­dle ready, along with the copy of TAOCP I was car­ry­ing for last minute prepa­ra­tion and set­tled in comfortably.

Unlike the other—saner—passengers I decided to stay awake through­out the flight—my half-baked plan being that as I would be arriv­ing at some time in the after­noon at Palo Alto, I’d rather exhaust myself com­pletely and stay awake till night time (PST) and have a good night’s sleep to be fresh for the inter­view. I had my faith­ful Kin­dle, a ridicu­lously well stocked inflight enter­tain­ment sys­tem and all the cof­fee in the world—there was no way I was going to sleep.

I know you’re expect­ing me to say some­thing along the lines of—“And then I imme­di­ately nod­ded off”; but I didn’t. I com­pleted the novel, watched a few movies, drank 4–5 cups of bit­ter, sug­ar­less and milk-free cof­fee. I even worked out a few prob­lems of TAOCP before decid­ing that solv­ing exer­cises on a flight might just be much too much, even for me.

I did attempt to sleep, but only suc­ceeded in watch­ing around half of Dabang on my neighbour’s screen. Watch­ing a muted Hindi movie with Eng­lish sub­ti­tles is far more fun than it ought to be.

Finally, when we were just about an hour or two away from land­ing, I had the bril­liant idea of shav­ing on the plane—Emirates had pro­vided a full shav­ing kit, and I thought I might actu­ally enjoy shav­ing for once—considering that I avoid it as far as pos­si­ble when the bath­room hap­pens to be sta­tion­ary and not a few hun­dred meters in the air. The results of that par­tic­u­lar exper­i­ment can be sum­ma­rized as—Don’t Shave in an Aircraft.

The land­ing was com­fort­able and we dis­em­barked eas­ily, immi­gra­tion forms in hand. I com­fort­ably waltzed through the var­i­ous checks, with the immi­gra­tion offi­cer being sur­prised at the total amount of time I would be spend­ing in SF—and com­ment­ing that my inter­views would prob­a­bly take lesser time than I had spent wait­ing to clear immi­gra­tion (this pre­dic­tion would turn out to be Not True—I had waited for as long as one inter­view would be).

Sole suit­case in hand, lap­top in my back­pack I was in for a pleas­ant surprise—some ladies from Emi­rates were stand­ing out­side with a board wel­com­ing First Class & Busi­ness Class pas­sen­gers; on inquir­ing I found out that I was eli­gi­ble for a lim­ou­sine ride to wher­ever I was headed (yay!). My lim­ou­sine was sched­uled, and as I waited out­side I chat­ted with a Google engi­neer on her way to office—she had appar­ently been on the same plane. Dis­cussing Google hir­ing pro­ce­dures, we caught our respec­tive limousines—and it was time to reach the hotel.

The ride was short and pleasant—and as I hap­pened to men­tion before—it was in a limo. The Palo Alto Sher­a­ton was a nice hotel, high­lights of my room involv­ing a nice and fast inter­net con­nec­tion⁴. Another inter­est­ing inci­dent was that I was sup­posed to pro­vide a credit card which would be charged for inci­den­tal expenses; of course, I handed over my GSoC card; the hotel clerk was per­haps a bit sur­prised to see me grin­ning madly as I handed the card over—but then, I did find it rather amus­ing that my stay was spon­sored by Face­book and the inci­den­tals were cov­ered by Google.

I unpacked, set up the lap­top, called home the n^th time to con­firm that yes, I was fine, and no, I had not been eaten by sharks or rabid dinosaurs. I spent some time revis­ing basic algo­rithms (net­work flow, Ford-Fulkerson—stuff I was weak on) and then feel­ing too sleepy to be pro­duc­tive, decided to explore the nearby market.

A short, 5 minute walk away there was a rather inter­est­ingly built market—bookstore, cafes, cof­fee shops, etc—I don’t remem­ber the name exactly. After roam­ing around for a few min­utes and see­ing all the options there were in that area, I had another black iced cof­fee, picked up a copy of Nat­Geo and returned to the hotel. Spend­ing some more time revis­ing stuff, watch­ing TV and surf­ing the net—I acci­den­tally fell asleep around 8.00 pm—I woke up with a start at around 10.30, which was just in time to be able to order room ser­vice^c.

Finally—roughly 36 hours after my jour­ney began—completely exhausted and extra­or­di­nar­ily ner­vous, I fell asleep.

28^th Feb­ru­ary 2011

For once, I didn’t oversleep—there was no way I was going to risk miss­ing the inter­view. Up and about fairly early, I got ready fairly quickly; gulped down break­fast and decided to wait for the pick up—someone from Face­book^d would be pick­ing us up at around 10.30am.

I must admit to a faux pas at this point. The inter­view invi­ta­tion let­ter had explic­itly men­tioned that a suit⁵ was not required—instead, busi­ness casual would be per­fectly fine. I did what any self respect­ing nerd with­out a dress sense—or under­stand­ing of what busi­ness casual actu­ally meant—would do: I searched Wikipedia:

A com­bi­na­tion of col­lared shirt (such as a dress shirt or polo shirt), cot­tontrousers (such as khakis or blue, green, brown, or black trousers) with a belt, and mod­est shoes (such as loafers) with socks is gen­er­ally accept­able. A blazer or busi­ness jacket can option­ally be added.

Accord­ingly, I dressed in—you guessed it—blazer, trouser and a shirt. Suf­fice to say that I was more or less hor­ri­bly over­dressed and let’s leave it at that.

As I waited down in the lobby, I found that there were quite a few other peo­ple who seemed to be students—my first assump­tion was that they, too, had come for interviews—which, as it turned out, was cor­rect. We had coa­lesced into small groups by the time S. arrived to pick us up from the lobby—a few short intro­duc­tions later, we were off.

As we all were rather ner­vous, there wasn’t much in the way of conversation—understandable, but some­thing I would regret later. We made a few more stops along the way, pick­ing up other can­di­dates who had come via the shut­tle. Finally, we reached.

12410 km later: 1601, S Cal­i­for­nia Avenue, Palo Alto. Face­book headquarters.

A few short for­mal­i­ties involv­ing vis­i­tor passes after­wards, we got a guided tour of the Face­book campus—beginning with a phys­i­cal wall where we were allowed to scrib­ble⁶ we saw where every­one worked, passed Mark Zuckerberg’s glass office—and saw him too—the lounges where you can work when you get bored of your nor­mal desk, the bas­ket­ball court, bbq area/roof, the laun­dry dump, and finally reached the din­ing area.

There were rather inter­est­ing posters spread out through­out the office: appar­ently you’re allowed to dec­o­rate how­ever you want to. A recur­rent theme was “The Son of Man” painting’s vari­a­tions spread out every­where. Of course, I didn’t rec­og­nize the paint­ing as such—but found out about it when I saw it some­where on the inter­webs after return­ing. Apart from the hacker-culture posters encour­ag­ing mak­ing and break­ing code, there were also snack areas spread out throughout—various types of cof­fee vend­ing machines (which is what drew my atten­tion) amongst other things.

The work­space was extremely democratic—large tables with huge mon­i­tors for every­one: no cubi­cles or offices—apart from the one I referred to ear­lier: Zuckerberg’s. Mac­book Pros seemed to be the stan­dard lap­tops, with a few lenovo lap­tops look­ing sad, for­lorn and out of place here and there. The gen­eral impres­sion was of bustling, infor­mal busyness.

The theme for lunch that day was Johnny Cash—ribs, fried chicken, pinto beans and baked car­rots. Not want­ing to fall asleep dur­ing the inter­views to be held soon—I ate lightly, looked around and had yet another cup of black, hot cof­fee. We were joined by a few FB engi­neers, but all con­ver­sa­tion was a but muted.

Up next was a conversation—group dis­cus­sion with 2 Face­book engineers—anything we wanted to ask about how Face­book worked, behind the scenes tech­nol­ogy, cul­ture, etc. A rather inter­est­ing, hour long discussion—mainly cen­tered around the adver­tise­ments and per­for­mance reviews—later, it was time.

We split up, each assigned an interviewer—us under­grads and grads went through 3 inter­views of around ~45 min­utes each, fol­lowed by 15 min­utes breath­ing space—the sole PhD student—M.C.—had to suf­fer through 4. Finally, after 3 hours—and almost falling asleep in the last interview—it was over! I man­aged to inhale another cup of black Columbian cof­fee some­where in between interviews—indeed, I almost fell asleep while sip­ping it.⁷

I spent some time talk­ing to M. and D.—who had also come dur­ing on cam­pus place­ment and had arranged inter­views and referred me, respectively—and dis­ap­point­ingly, it was time to go. I had sin­cerely been expect­ing that results would be imme­di­ate, and that my 3 month nail-shredding-ly long wait would finally be over. It was not to be.

I met quite a few other guys out­side the office—where we decided to wait for the final inter­vie­wee. We just about ripped apart every sin­gle ques­tion, dis­cussing the solu­tions we could get at from every pos­si­ble angle; and nig­gling at the ones we couldn’t. A short bus ride back to the hotel, and a quick change of clothes later it was time to explore down­town PA!

We were  a rather eclec­tic group—the jet­lagged Indian Civil Engi­neer, the Ser­bian PhD from Illi­nois, the mar­ried Brazil­ian MS stu­dent from Cor­nell and the two Canadians—one of whom also hap­pened to be a diver.

The Sher­a­ton is pretty cen­trally located—so every­thing was pretty much walk­ing dis­tance. Hav­ing a look every­where, we found a nice restau­rant where I had minia­ture burg­ers (slid­ers?) of a sort while we again dis­cussed the inter­views. It was pretty much the only thing on the top of our minds at that point. Din­ner and dis­cus­sions over, we headed back to the hotel—and decided to wait out in the lobby as one of us was catch­ing the flight back to Cor­nell that night itself.

After return­ing to my room I found that I was not sleepy—and that I really wanted to visit Stanford—both to meet a class­mate (R.) and see the place where Knuth teaches. Call­ing her up, the con­ver­sa­tion was along the lines of “Hey—Kunal here! … the one from India … XII L … yes, that par­tic­u­lar Kunal … can I come over?”. I rather incon­sid­er­ately intruded as she was work­ing on her assign­ments, but again—I assuage my guilty con­science by the fact that I didn’t have any other time to visit before leaving.

Catch­ing a cab, I reached Stan­ford, where I promptly man­aged to get lost. A few min­utes worth of con­ver­sa­tion about direc­tions and signs later I man­aged to catch up with R.—who took me on a tour through the awe­some Stan cam­pus. Start­ing from the houses, to the main insti­tu­tional area—we cov­ered quite a bit of the main cam­pus area.

1^st March 2011

Chat­ting, and walk­ing around cam­pus, I kind of acci­den­tally also caused R. to miss a work appoint­ment with some­one. See ref­er­ence to excuse above. Finally, at around 2 am in the morn­ing it was time to catch a cab and return to the hotel (there’s a limit to how much of some­one else’s time I can waste).

As luck would have it, the cabby on the way back was inter­ested in chat­ting. On find­ing out that I had been inter­view­ing at Face­book, he kind of opened up and told me about how he had once fer­ried Sean Parker and just about dis­cussed his life his­tory with him. He dropped me off within a few min­utes and left hap­pily (I had by then under­stood the nuances of tip­ping in the US—a fairly dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence than in India).

Exhausted, I returned to the hotel room and jet lag finally caught up with me. I absolutely could not get to sleep. Thanks to free and rather fast net access, I man­aged to pass the time (I even filled out Google SF’s appli­ca­tion form dur­ing that time!) till around 7–8 in the morn­ing; after which I packed, dressed and got ready to leave.

Break­fast was inter­est­ing, and rather heavy—again, some­thing I didn’t rec­og­nize but involved scram­bled eggs, bur­ri­tos and straw­ber­ries. And of course, even more cof­fee. All packed and ready to go, I reached the hotel lobby and met up with M.C. again—he had his flight at around the same time, though his would be domestic.

We had both booked the same super shut­tle, and ended up being 2 of 3 pas­sen­gers on the way to the air­port. A short discussion—and exchange of con­tact details later—it was time to fly back! I had been a bit ner­vous about the much talked about TSA secu­rity pro­ce­dure, but it merely involved stand­ing with my hands up in a machine that looked like it would tele­port me some­where (Beam me up, Scotty!)—which was cool.

I had some time to burn at the air­port, which I spent hav­ing lunch, read­ing the kin­dle and get­ting thor­oughly bored. Sadly, the shops at the air­port were pretty much use­less and full of touristy junk that I would never touch—so they were not much of  a distraction.

Again, the same old routine—boarding, get­ting a place to sit, hang­ing up the ol’ jacket—of course, this time I was trav­el­ling econ­omy so the expe­ri­ence was not that luxurious—but still pretty com­fort­able. Thank­fully, the flight was just about three-fourth empty and I switched to two adja­cent empty seats once we took off and spread out comfortably.

By this point my body had just about had enough with my delin­quent behav­iour and cof­fee over-indulgence—and I was about to be pun­ished. Most of my mem­o­ries of the flight back are of flashes of lucid­ity between a state that could be char­i­ta­bly referred to as “passed out” but per­haps more accu­rately referred to as “dead”. I some­how man­aged to wake up in between in time for meals and watched the odd movie in a veg­e­ta­tive state, but mostly spent the time recovering.

Another inter­est­ing coin­ci­dence was that around half the flight crew on this flight was the same as when I had been fly­ing in the reverse direc­tion. One of them rec­og­nized me and pretty much was amazed that I was return­ing from SF so soon—I really wanted to ask him how he man­aged to stay awake with such a hor­ri­ble sched­ule but missed the chance.

2nd March 2011

The only notable part dur­ing this par­tic­u­lar day was the switch over between flights. The same rou­tine in the reverse direc­tion, though I did get to explore Dubai Air­port. I also hap­pened to run into another Civil Engi­neer who was com­ing to IIT Delhi soon—for a con­fer­ence. Manda­tory shop­ping (choco­lates) com­pleted — and stuffed into the bag, it was time to board and return home!

3rd March 2011

At some­where around 3 in the morning—I was back in India. This par­tic­u­lar flight had been spent watch­ing movies. Dis­em­bark­ing com­fort­ably, I was wel­comed at the air­port by an excru­ci­at­ingly long wait at the bag­gage belt—though the lug­gage from Dubai to Delhi was rather interesting—microwaves, tele­vi­sions, the occa­sional bedroll—and of course, the fam­i­lies dis­cussing how to pass through cus­toms with­out pay­ing duty.

Add a rather large num­ber of irri­tated, grumpy and drunk men to the mix—and you know the wait wasn’t exactly some­thing I want recall in detail. Finally, my suit­case arrived and it was time to go!

My par­ents had come to pick me up, and the drive back home was me relat­ing just about what this blog post cov­ered. While I could go all recur­sive and loopy and re-type every­thing in this post and then again loop back and once more and once again after that and … I’ll restrain myself.

Finally home—it was time to sleep! My ~100 hour long adventure—which involved spend­ing ~40 hours sus­pended in the air in a metal cylinder—was over.

[0] This post is as much for mem­ory as it is for posterity—excuse the length; or per­haps skim the post if you want. I have a chronic inabil­ity to take pho­tographs on vacation/journeys—I’d much rather enjoy myself in the moment than record it for faint mem­o­ries in the future. This is also (most prob­a­bly) the longest post I have ever written.

[1] This was the first time I would be trav­el­ing alone. Of course, their reac­tion would have been more appro­pri­ate if I had been trav­el­ing on foot. With a large stick to ward of wild ani­mals and some gold coins to buy pas­sage on pirate ships.

[2] Keep a count—you will be quizzed after the arti­cle is over.

[3] Of course, if the chan­nel in front of you was stuck on, say, a K-serial or per­haps Indi­aTV I can under­stand the need for hav­ing 2 back­ups for chang­ing the chan­nel. Par­tic­u­larly in 16 hour long flights.

[4] The fact that the inter­net con­nec­tion is what I remem­ber most vividly about my room says a lot about my over­all personality.

[5] Inci­den­tally, I did end up wear­ing a suit for my Visa interview.

[6] I refrained in the hope that I would get a chance to add my name later.

[7] For those of you expect­ing a detailed, blow by blow account of the inter­view pro­ce­dure, ques­tions and detailed answers—that won’t be hap­pen­ing here. Move along.

a I had worked for him, once.

b Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay, for those inter­ested in fantasy.

c A club sand­wich, for the hungry.

PS

8th March 2011

M. had told me that the results would be out on Monday—and I stayed up Mon­day night—beyond mid­night, thus the 8th—wait­ing eagerly for the results. At around 3.00 am I mailed her ask­ing about what happened—and imme­di­ately got a reply ask­ing if she could call me.

I imme­di­ately replied in the affir­ma­tive, feel­ing that I had been rejected and she was call­ing me just to let me know in a politer man­ner than an email—’cause of the long flight etc.

Well, her first words were—“I have good news!”.

Hap­pi­ness ensued.