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During the past 20 years, the author has watch China move from being a developing country into an industrial superpower
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Even the Puzzle Master’s identity and contact information became a baffler. The puzzle site’s opening picture never showed Hsu or any other individual. Instead, visitors saw an odd version of a lowercase f, consisting of many brightly colored rectangular slivers, all pressed together. Most viewers thought it was abstract art. The right ones realized that the f was a puzzle in its own right, written in Piet. Piet is a computer language in which all terms are represented as rectangles in the style of abstract artist Piet Mondrian. Thousands of people looked at the f each week. During a 30-month span, only 42 figured it out. The program yielded a secret e-mail address at Facebook, so solvers could alert the social networking company to their prowess.
From 2008 to 2010, outsiders e-mailed as many as 200 attempted puzzle answers a day to Facebook headquarters. It didn’t matter if the vast majority of submissions were clumsy or wrong. It was so easy, fast, and cheap to evaluate entries automatically—and then have Hsu take a closer look at the best submissions—that puzzle solving became a valuable tool in Facebook’s hunt for new engineers. Mainstream candidates were also encouraged to try the puzzles. Willingness to spend hours on a puzzle helped establish who really wanted to work at Facebook; clever solutions sharpened Facebook’s ability to spot the best coders. As of February 2011, Hsu estimated, some 118 engineers, or 20 percent of Facebook’s technical workforce at the time, had solved puzzles as part of their path into the company.
One of Hsu’s favorite discoveries was David Alves, a 2001 high school graduate who was still working his way through San José State in 2009. Alves’s college wasn’t known as a computer-studies citadel. Once Alves solved a puzzle and caught the eye of Facebook’s recruiters, however, the sidelights of his résumé commanded attention. He regularly earned top-10 recognition in programming contests pitting as many as 600 entrants against one another. He was president of San José State’s computer science club. Alves might have come from an obscure school, but he was ready to contribute.
These days, Facebook has a big, polished recruiting department, led by Lori Goler, a former Walt Disney and EBay executive. Many of the gung-ho engineers who championed offbeat programming challenges during Facebook’s coming of age, including Puzzle Master Hsu, have moved on; puzzles now are more tightly integrated into other recruiting methods. Last month, Facebook installed a new batch of puzzles, involving variables such as k and n, to replace the old bafflers involving dinosaurs and Red Bull.
Even so, Facebook keeps hunting for engineers without staring at résumés. At least five times a year it stages free-wheeling coding contests either at university campuses or Facebook headquarters. These events, known as hackathons or Hacker Cups, take on a carnival-like quality, as contestants race to complete programming challenges within a matter of hours. At one contest last year, Facebook offered a prize of $500 and a chance to meet company founder Mark Zuckerberg. The winning entry was a smartphone app called Airchalk that lets users wave their phones and create images on a whiteboard. It delighted Facebook’s judges so much that they decided the creators deserved even more. The contest champions, brothers Hani and Islam Sharabash of the University of Illinois, were hired on as summer interns.
Excerpted from George Anders's The Rare Find: Spotting Exceptional Talent Before Everyone Else, to be published by Portfolio on Oct. 18.
Anders is the author of four books and the former West Coast bureau chief of Fast Company magazine.
