Nov 1, 2022 4 min read

How To Get A Meta Interview In Three Easy Steps, Step 1: Study Your Prey

I have always wondered if I am MetaMate material. For many computer programmers, working at a company like Meta is the holy grail of jobs. You can look forward - help build a better, more legless world - while still working on down-to-earth technical problems like how to insert more ads into a sundowning grandmother's thread about JFK Jr.

But I've always doubted that I have what it takes. I'm an okay programmer, but am I good enough for Meta? What type of person becomes a Meta employee? And how can I pretend to be like them?

I decided to embark upon a research project to find out just that. And, reader, in just three easy steps, I found out what it takes to land an interview at Meta. And these lessons can work for anyone!

I hope you'll join me on this adventure. Over the coming weeks, I'll be sharing my secrets with everyone who, like me, dreams of a better horizon: a Meta Horizon.

Step 1: Study Your Prey

Naturally, the first thing to do is scrape as much data on Meta employees as possible, then use machine learning on that data to help yourself become more like them.

We'll start by using LinkedIn to get this information. LinkedIn is a wonderful place to find out about a company and its employees. It is, primarily, a website where people are desperately trying to sell themselves to potential employers. This makes it a treasure trove of information about them: specifically, what it is about them that they believe makes them employable.

You'll need to write a LinkedIn scraper. For our purposes, we're targeting the search results for Meta. Using Selenium to automate our browsing behavior, we can pull individual profiles from as many pages of the search results as we want, then we can use Scrapy to parse that data. For some reason LinkedIn seems to want to prevent people from doing things like this, so you'll need to be very careful to read through the obfuscated HTML and CSS to find matching patterns.

You would think that this would have a simple class or id like "about".

Instead, it's hidden all the way down here. This is because they fear us and what we might do with their forbidden knowledge.

Once the scraper is written, you'll need to keep a close eye on the scraper so you can continually fill out captchas, and to get a critical mass of data you may need to keep the scraper running for hours at a time. Don't worry! Being able to recognize which image is the correct way up is a key skill for any aspiring Meta employee.

This may be a frustrating process, but ultimately you should have a big dataset of Meta employees: names, titles, bios, images, job history, and more. And once you have that, you can plug it into GPT-2!

GPT-2 is a text-generation machine learning model famous for being trained on the whole internet and having no serious problems from that whatsoever. For our purposes, we can use the bios of Meta employees to "finetune" the model, so that it can create infinite new potential MetaMates.

By creating new employees from our data, we can find new insights into what makes a Meta employee successful, and even some potential tricks for our own applications!

We can begin by studying a few sample MetaMates:

Product Marketing @ Meta | Professor at NYU | Speaker.

Bio:

Here's a fun video that highlights one of the most devastating aspects of Pokémon Go: The pattern of change.

In today's world, most of us don't even know who we are. We're not even connected with our relatives or friends. We're just in it together.

Research Scientist at Meta Reality Lab

Bio:

I want to travel the world. I want to meet people and build relationships. I want to feel connected and connected to people. I want to use social media to communicate with people about their interests. I want to live my dream: a computer.

Product Partnerships Manager @ Meta

Bio:

I love the technology and the experiences I develop. I enjoy my role in a gaming culture and enjoy learning new things. I love to engage people by selecting new topics and engaging them in lively, engaging dialog. I value the opportunity to engage and bring people together to solve problems. I strive to bring the greatest of both worlds to life. I work in a highly paid environment.

Digital Sales & Marketing Strategy and Operations Manager at Meta

Bio:

He was never the same. He was an unknown quantity. He was always a memento of a match he had missed.

He always had a mentor who was always there, always on his side. Understanding that he was a part of something big was key.

A mentor was one who always gave him a push.

Product Growth - Facebook App at Meta

Bio:

I'm a professional social media influencer, and a member of the tech industry in all forms.

My interests range from healthcare, to tech startups, to tech policies to education. I enjoy meeting new people who share my passion for the tech world.

Notice any trends? I'll check back in soon with an update on what steps we can take to study our prey further, and how we put this into action. I'll give you a hint: it's never enough just to study your prey!

You must learn how to become them.