Facebook offers jobs to hacker
Late this January, some 75,000 people around the planet sat in front of their computers and pondered how to make anagrams from a bowl of alphabet soup. They were participants in the Hacker Cup, an international programming battle that Facebook organized to help it find the brightest young software engineers before competitors like Google do. After three more rounds of brain teasers, Facebook will fly the top 25 coders to its head office in Menlo Park, for an adrenaline-soaked finale this March that will award the champion $5,000. In return, Facebook gets a shot at hiring the stars discovered along the way. "I'm in an all-out land grab for talent," says Jocelyn Goldfein, Facebook's director of engineering and most senior woman on its technical staff. The social network builds almost all of its own software, and young, smart coders are the company's most critical asset as it manages the comments, photos, and "likes" of more than 800 million users.