What My Internship at Facebook Was Like - Part 1

This might be a very boring story if you have read tons of similar blog posts about interning in big tech companies, because truthfully what I’m going to tell you in this post might not have much difference with the ones you’ve read before (I honestly haven’t read that much). This post however, is titled ‘What My Internship at Facebook Was Like’ not ‘What Interning at Facebook Is Like’ or the very common Youtube-like ‘A Day In The Life of A Software Engineer Intern at Facebook’ because this will be my personal experience, with few general explanations of Internship at Facebook, and I’ll be telling you how I feel, as an emotional folk, about my internship and the work I did in the three months I spent at Facebook London.

As the nice girl I am, I’m going to split this into consumable parts that hopefully will be informative and less boring than it should be. I will also keep this as short as possible. Feel free to jump to the part that you are only interested in. I’m definitely giving you nasty look when you do that though.

1. The benefits in pointers
2. The culture
3. My intern project
4. Am I going to go back?

In this first part, I’m going to talk about the first and second point.

The benefits in pointers

When things are put into pointers, they look less boastful and have less emotion. -No one but maybe Irene

1. Salary- Yes, my internship at Facebook is a paid internship. I’m not going to tell you exactly how much I earned because everything that has numbers are supposed to be confidential. However, if you are reading this it means you have an internet connection. And if you have an internet connection it means you can open Glassdoor, Blind, Salary.com and stuffs like that. What I can tell is that it’s huge. I earned more than my dad does in a month. Yippie. I feel like a breadwinner already.
2. Accommodation - And yes, getting to and from London is taken care by Facebook’s immigration partners. Visa in the UK is surprisingly very easy and convenient to get compared to the US, the immigration partner also took care most of the process, and of course, it was all paid for. They have two options for housing, a certain amount of money or an all-in corporate housing. Of course, I chose the corporate housing, as it is more cuan. The housing is luxurious. I’m not even kidding. I got a one bedroom apartment while most of my friends share a two bedroom with one flatmate, I guess this is because I was the only girl among the undergraduate interns at my batch and they couldn’t pair me up with anybody. There was also a housekeeping facility. Once a week my apartment would be cleaned and the sheets changed and stuff. It felt so posh. I felt like a rich expat of London.
3. Food- Free food is an integral part of anyone who works at a big tech company, and Facebook is no exception. They give free buffet meals three times a day. In the beginning, every single meal was a wonder. But at the end of the internship, I got kind of used to it. Breakfast was always good though. They have all varieties of fruits, they serve smoked salmon every morning, and they serve Asian porridge with gyoza once a month. They also have a ‘micro kitchen’ on every floor where you can get coffee, tea, drinks, and snacks all day. They have a donut-I meant doughnut bar that serves sweet treats and ice cream every day. Before I went to London, Ricky and I made a promise to work out and cut on food, as we were away from each other and wouldn’t have the chance to go on fattening dates. I did work out more, but all these food choices definitely didn’t help (But Ricky himself gained a lot of weight in Singapore so I don’t feel so bad).
4. Transportation and Wellness - At Facebook, interns are treated as full-time employees. And like full-time employees, we were entitled to wellness and transportation benefits. I could reimburse my public transportation and wellness (gym, massage, Headspace subscription, etc) expenses up to an amount (which was enough for me to cover all my transportation and wellness benefits throughout the internship).
5. Leisure - At the London office, Facebook still maintains its ‘BFF program’ which is basically where full-time employee/intern of the tech teams can arrange any event, be it dinner, lunch, watching movies, musical, or going to London landmarks which other tech employees can join and the expenses can be reimbursed to Facebook to a certain amount. Which is amazing. I did a lot of meals on weekends, went to an aquarium, visited the Tower of London, and watch a movie. All for free. It’s amazing and a perk like this is probably only given at Facebook.

Phew. That was a long part and it’s not even all of it. I don’t want to bore you further so let’s just say that the benefits are that good. I can’t even ask for more.

The culture

This is where things get a little more subjective and more lenient to my personal experiences and feelings. In short, I really like the culture at Facebook.

The engineering culture itself is pretty straightforward: Have an idea, measure the potential impact, propose to team, gets an approval and implement. Even for smaller ideas, very often I got directly into code and discussed the idea further during the code review. The code review process is surprisingly short and straightforward, unlike what I mostly heard about the thorough and wholesome process in other big tech companies. It went almost faster than any code review I went through in my previous internship at Dekoruma. Mostly because trivial stuffs like indentation and conventions are already taken care of by linters and generator scripts.

I did ship stuffs 2-3 times a day to production. The testing and deploying infra is that godly (dewa). ‘Move fast’ is still in the values even though ‘Break things’ is not. I can say the underlying infrastructure really supports the value and bring significant impact to the company’s engineering culture.

At Facebook, we use our own product, which also happens to be the team I was working at, Workplace. To be very honest, I had never heard of the product until my manager emailed me telling about the team I was assigned with before the internship started. Using Workplace really impacts on the open culture at Facebook. The Facebook-styled feed filled with relevant posts bring the relevant and important stuffs to attention. And because the important communication happens mostly through public posts, it becomes more visible and more open rather than the good old emails. Teams communicate better, and what each person is working on becomes more visible and open for others to contribute in. Workplace is a greater platform than let’s say Slack for communications between people and teams in my objective (probably a little bit subjective) opinion and it really supports one of Facebook’s core value which is to be open.

Throughout the three months of my internship, I experience no ‘political stuffs’ going on throughout the company. I feel that in the company, you can reach higher levels or positions really based on your performance and your peers’ acknowledgement of your impact to the team. The thing I like the most about the culture is that no one I’ve ever interacted with feel that they are good at everything. People would always reach out for help to other people regarding stuffs they are not an expert in. People in London can simply ping folks at Menlo Park and other offices or set up an online meeting with them discussing about something or even asking help about something. It’s incredible how different people in different offices working on different stuffs can be very connected!

I don’t want to make this longer than people can handle but yeah, I genuinely like the culture at Facebook. There are a lot of new experiences related to this culture, and a lot to learn from.

The next part will be about my intern project and whether I am going to go back to Facebook. I haven’t written any part of it but since I have a lot of time let’s just hope I don’t procrastinate. Thank you for reading the whole thing and I hope it was helpful!

I create this little space on the internet to write my thoughts and reflections on being a human, a woman, and a software developer. I don't have Instagram/Twitter but I can be found on LinkedIn. Feel free to contact/give feedback/tell me your story through my email: ivanaairenee@gmail.com