Blake Ross posted a note on his Facebook profile about how to get hired at Facebook. It’s great for a few laughs. Little does Blake know, if he changed every instance of the word “Facebook” for “Venture Capital” he’d have a good primer on how to get a job in VC ;)

In case you can’t read Blake’s note (since it’s behind the Facebook Wall o’ Secrecy), I’ll reproduce it below. This is a straight reBlog, all due credit to Blake:

A lot of people ask me how to get hired at Facebook. The best way is to be brilliant and visionary, but say you can’t do that for some reason. Maybe intelligence isn’t your strong suit. Maybe you’re just an idiot. Even in such dire circumstances, there are things you can do to mask your borderline offensive ineptitude: learn the Facebook lingo.

You can’t walk the hallowed halls of Facebook without hearing the word “incentivize,” so you’ll probably want to start there. That’s not to say the word is good. Personally, just hearing it incentivizes me to strangle the person who uttered it, so I usually go with “motivate” or, for emphasis, “motivatize.”

Bad: I fear that we’re incentivizing developers to make poor choices that worsen the user experience.
Better: I fear that we’re motivatizing developers to poor choicize in ways that worsen the user experience.
Best: Our developers keep fucking over our users.

Another very popular term you’ll want to bandy around is “high leverage.” Many new Facebook hires make the mistake of believing that even low leverage projects are good because, you know, at least they have some leverage. These are the same people who blushed when their prom date said they possessed marginal attractiveness. Always keep in mind that the word “leverage” is a synonym for the word “chance of keeping your job.” Having little of that is a bad thing.

Note that leveragedness comes in many forms beyond high and low. A project could be sublimely leveraged, ridiculously leveraged, or even medium leveraged so long as it’s cooked enough to eat. Your project should ooze leverage from every nook and orifice, to the point that passersby are stopping to say “Whoa! That’s some leverage! Hey Marcia, come check out this leverage!”

If you’d rather skip the interview entirely, just work everything into your greeting:

You: Hi, leverage!
Interviewer: What?
You: Sorry, I meant Hi John. I’m just a little nervous because it’s really incentivizing to meet you and become a node in your social graph.
Interviewer: You are hired. Here is your desk.

So there you have it. If you can work these terms into your Facebook interview, I can virtually guarantee that you won’t sound like a blithering idiot. Instead, you’ll sound like a massive tool. But knowing you, that’s a huge step up.