Facebook rejected me for a position a couple years ago.

After six phone interviews, Facebook wanted to challenge me with an exercise. They asked me to create a research plan to improve their “chat”. They gave me 48 hours to respond and said writing the plan should take about 1 to 2 hours.

Any research plan that someone’s spent only an hour or two is gonna be a worthless piece of s. There’s no point in reading or considering some half-assed plan; it’s a waste of a good hour of my time, and five minutes of the reader’s.

I spent all 48 hours writing the plan. An actual plan. On how I’d go about improving their chat. After about 35 hours, there was daylight remaining! I started to conduct the initial research with the remaining time. Might as well. The technical term for this part of the research would be called “talking to people and feeling things out”, which is essentially $0 in logistics cost to conduct. This part of the pre-research saves you tons of time down the line though. It helps build a better hypotheses before you actually do the research.

After I created the report, I sent it off to Facebook. I was promptly rejected. The rejection email had two sentences. No feedback, no comments, no request for clarification. “Thank you for completing the chat exercise. After careful review I wanted to let you know we will not be moving forward with your application.” What!? Seriously? After all that work? How rude.

After using six interviewer’s time before this exercise, you’d think they’d give me a little feedback or give me a sense of what they were looking for. It has to be the quickest weirdest rejection I’ve ever gotten.

When I was rejected by Herman Miller, they gave me a call first, and they also sent me a nice two page personal letter joking about how the ordeal was more intense than the Apprentice (it had come down to me and one other person). When I was in school and got rejected by IDEO, they sent me a nice postcard. Facebook, an impersonal two sentence rejection. I suppose they’re good at the impersonal:P

Anyway, a friend told me it might be interesting to share the actual proposal. It was written and planned in two days with about an hour of sleep. Looking at it now, it IS rather DENSE AS FU$K. But this is what they would seriously need to do (along with a few other things I learned in the last couple of years) to improve that chat. That and a budget of about $500,000 which they can find between their sofa seat cushions in the coffee room.

http://potluckwtf.com/fbchatcopyrightKoNakatsu12MAY2011.pdf

I was already starting to form my own company, so the rejection was easy to swallow. If you’re ever interested in a job there, don’t do what I did, just do what they asked for:) Spending all that time didn’t meet the objective, but I’m still gonna post it as a sample piece of what I’m capable of though: http://potluckwtf.com/projects_r2.html