Meh, advice-shmadvice. Who am I to give advice? What’s experience good for in our field? I used to know how to write a keyboard driver and floppy disc formatters with non-standard densities. I’d be all but obsolete today if I hadn’t learned continuously. Oh, so maybe this would be one piece of advice: learn how to learn, and stick with principles; mastering individual technologies will follow. Technology is a great servant but a terrible master. The best people in our métier are those who know how to quickly become experts in some particular field. […] First and foremost, the ideal Facebook engineering candidate should be good at coding. I know this sounds silly, but a surprising fraction of the people we interview could improve their coding skills instead of focusing on mastering specific languages or technologies. We look for good generalists able to move freely within the organization.
— 10 Questions with Facebook Research Engineer – Andrei Alexandrescu
