Amr Awadallah Blog

I lead a team at yahoo called PIE (short for Product Intelligence Engineering), our job is to deliver the systems and the insights that make yahoo products better for our users. It is a very exciting group to be working for since you will be constantly challenged with hard problems and you will always be working on new things. We are also tasked with building one of the largest BI datamarts in the world (if not the largest).

The team is growing and we currently have about 20 open positions, we need two types of folks:

1. Deep Analytics: Problem Solving, Analytical Thinking, basic Statistics, SQL, HTTP/HTML basics, Programming experience, Regular Expressions, and a good product/business sense (Microstrategy knowledge is a plus).
2. Data Systems: Strong SQL and RDBMS skills (Oracle preferred), data warehousing experience, dimensional data modeling experience (star/snowflake schema design), database system design experience, and DB optimization experience (Microstrategy modeling and report development is a strong plus).

Of course it goes without saying that strong oral, written, communication, and presentation skills are a must!

If you fit the mold, then please send email to:

Cheers,

— amr

This happened to me, and to many other students (at Stanford at least).

Facebook’s initial growth seed was based on an unsolicited spam campaign that they did in fall of 2005. What they did is crawl the university for email addresses of students then registered them en mass and sent them unsolicited registration emails like this one below:

Subject: confirmation email
Date: Tue, 20 Sep 2005 05:27:57 -0700
From: facebook.com
To: aaa@stanford.edu

Aaaa Aaaa,

You are receiving this email because you just registered at facebook.com. To complete your registration, please follow the link printed below:

http://stanford.facebook.com/confirmation.php?id=216914&code=164252308

Thanks!
the facebook team

Notice that the URL in the email is stanford.facebook.com, this tricked me into believing they were affiliated with Stanford, so when I saw that my name was wrong in the email (it is says “Aaaa Aaaa”), I went to the site and completed the registration to fix my name.

Don’t get me wrong, Facebook is a very nice service and I love their UI, but last time I checked SPAM was illegal in the US, so they gotta pay up. Let me know if you can help :).

— amr

For the benefit of readers of my blog whom do not know, I maintain a link blog on Yahoo MyWeb to which I post interesting links that I come across with a short snippet of commentary (sometimes the commentary is just a key paragraph from within the article, other times it is me commenting).

I add links spanning multiple topics, but specifically tech, search, games, and virtual machines.

You can access my Yahoo! MyWeb Link Blog at:

http://myweb.yahoo.com/myweb?ei=UTF-8&dg=0&friendid=_yTCw2tm3OPXYc0-

and the RSS feed is at:

http://myweb.yahoo.com/mywebrss/user/_yTCw2tm3OPXYc0-/urls.xml

Cheers,

— amr