Bloomberg Businessweek
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This is the Facebook f. It's also a puzzle designed to help identify the talented and ambitious; the colored blocks reveal an e-mail address in the programming language Piet
In late 2006, 22-year-old Adam D’Angelo confronted a serious problem. Facebook, then a small Silicon Valley startup, had picked him to be its chief technology officer. He was bursting with ideas about how to make the social-networking site bigger, faster, and more appealing. To make those dreams come true, Facebook relied on a couple dozen scruffy young engineers, crammed together in a graffiti-covered office. Reinforcements were desperately needed. D’Angelo and his colleagues refused to settle for any available programmer, fearing that lax standards would destroy the company’s innovative culture. Facebook was scrambling to master on-campus recruiting and to lure stars from Google and Microsoft, but those old-fashioned hiring channels weren’t paying off fast enough. Something quicker and more nimble was needed.
D’Angelo proposed that Facebook publish gnarly programming challenges and invite engineers anywhere to solve them. These wouldn’t be the superficial brainteasers that some companies used, like estimating the number of piano tuners in Chicago. Instead, Facebook’s website would issue multi-hour tests of coding prowess. With a bit of wit, these puzzles would find and deliver the right kind of people to the California startup.
Facebook engineer Yishan Wong volunteered to draft puzzles so hard that he couldn’t solve them. Before long, Wong and D’Angelo realized that their whimsy might serve a bigger purpose, too. “We developed this theory that occasionally there were these brilliant people out there who hadn’t found their way to Silicon Valley,” Wong recalled. “They might be languishing in ordinary tech jobs. We needed a way to surface them.” Goofy puzzles—some involved dinosaurs or gamblers—looked like the perfect bait.
Meanwhile, in Portland, Me., on a cobblestoned road known as Milk St., Portland Webworks was cranking out corporate websites for lawyers and consultants. Among the programmers there was Evan Priestley, a large, round-faced fellow in his early twenties. He was building expertise in Web applications development while growing tired of humdrum tasks—such as adjusting shades of blue for individual customers who weren’t sure what they wanted. “They were always saying: ‘Can you build us some Internets?’” Priestley later remarked.
No big-league recruiter was likely to rescue Priestley. “I had a pretty terrible résumé,” he later observed. He had quit high school a few weeks before graduation because classes became unbearably tedious. He switched majors three times at the University of Southern Maine for similar reasons. Eventually he left college without a degree. Most people pegged Priestley as a slacker.
One afternoon, Priestley had finished early, so he started reading an online news site, reddit.com. One posting alluded to Facebook’s puzzlers. Welcoming the mental workout, Priestley began wrestling with ways of automatically seating a clique of people in a movie theater, given that best friends want to be side by side and rivals need to be far apart. The puzzle looked hard and shapeless at first. After 45 minutes, Priestley cracked it. He double-checked his programming solution, decided it worked, and e-mailed it 2,500 miles west, to Facebook headquarters.
Impressed with Priestley’s approach, Facebook flew him to Palo Alto for a job interview. Engineer Marc Kwiatkowski tested the newcomer, face-to-face, on a trickier problem. As Priestley later recalled, “I told Marc what answer he probably wanted—and I explained why it was a badly constructed problem. You were supposed to speed up one piece of the code. But it didn’t address the fact that 98percent of the time was being wasted on network requests.”
Kwiatkowski smiled, and then decided Priestley was right. A week later, Facebook hired the man from Maine.
A new era of talent hunting has begun. It’s happening not only at high-tech companies such as Facebook, but also at Army bases, ad agencies, investment banks, Hollywood studies, corporate boardrooms, college admissions offices, and even at nanny agencies. In all these fields, experts don’t just sort résumés. They pick people and build teams in a profoundly different way. Traditional measures of past achievement, such as test scores and academic degrees, are losing power, and companies are getting better at looking for those future superstars who deliver many times the value of someone who is merely good.
