What My Internship at Facebook Was Like - Part 2

I’ve been enjoying my leave from school these days and although the desire to write this second part has taken a big portion of the wandering thoughts of my mind, it is very difficult to get myself to open my laptop and start writing.

A little different than what promised in the first part, in this part I will be talking about my overall work and more of how I did things than the intern project itself. I figured because there are some things regarding my project I can’t talk publicly about and thus will make this post very short and confusing for some people if I only focus on it.

In this post, I will be talking about:

• My project and how I implemented work-life balance
• Am I going back to Facebook?

Work-life balance is not a myth

If I can point out one thing that I love learning the most from my internship at Facebook, it is the work-life balance. Sure, I learned a lot about backend and data engineering works that I’d never touched before. However, I think being in Facebook taught me a whole different mindset of working, and I am very thankful for it.

Engineering interns at Facebook are usually given a scoped project to work on throughout the 12 weeks. The project’s scope is usually put together by each of their intern manager which was appointed to them before the internship starts. For those who might not know, I interned as a software engineer. I worked with the Workplace team, specifically on its platform team.

The project that I worked on was super interesting. Even though it was out of the scope of my skill set and initial interests, I couldn’t have asked for a better project. It is rather difficult for me to make people understand what my project was without getting into a lot of details which I can’t really do, but on a high level, my intern project was to reduce potential risks on Workplace’s custom integrations. I did logging, created data pipelines based on the logging data, and implemented user flows on the backend and frontend of the Workplace web. I learned a lot of different interesting things in the process.

The ultimate goal of the internship is not that different from other companies. For the company, it is to recruit talents and get the interns to return as their full-time employees. For the interns, it is to get the return offer. It is pretty frank and simple, both parties want the same thing. The internship is often seen as a 12-week interview. Interns will be assessed based on their performance throughout their internship, which will determine whether they get a return offer or not. The work done through the intern project is an integral part of the assessment.

Since the beginning of the internship, I had been telling myself that I wanted to really practice work-life balance which I couldn’t really do in my previous two internships. I knew that if I pressure myself to work really hard for the return offer, it will not turn out beautiful. I have ever experienced burn out very early in my career through my first internship and I have been grateful for it. It was very bad and it was not a pretty experience, but from there I got to know my own capacity and the horrible outcome of overwork. If I hadn’t had the burn out then, I wouldn’t have known until much later of what the consequences of pushing myself too hard were, and would just experience it much later, with potentially worse outcome.

Getting the return offer was not my ultimate goal throughout the internship. It had always been in the back of my mind to motivate but what I really wanted was to really experience work in the most real way. After I graduate, work will no longer be a 3-month thing. I will no longer be able to sit on my second month of work imagining on how good it would be to be back at school again and counting the days until the internship ends. This used to happen in my previous internships. I enjoyed working, but the number of days and hours I put into work just so that I can finish my project in time and impress everyone was not sustainable. I really wanted to learn to change that, and I did.

I forced myself not to think or open anything work-related after I got home from work or on the weekends unless absolutely necessary. I came to work at around 9 and got home at around 6. On the chances where I got home a little late, it was always because I was itching to finish a certain thing (duh nanggung) and not because I felt that I have to. For those who never even think of doing things like that, I’m telling you it works like a charm. 

I was more productive, I focused better on work during the work hours, I got things done, I hit my project’s milestones. I realized that working fewer hours does not mean doing less. I enjoyed my day better and always looked forward to the next working day. The strategy I put worked, and I accomplished my ultimate goal of implementing work-life balance. I have to admit that this is possible because the culture is supported by Facebook. My manager even expressed concern when I submitted a code review request at 11 PM on one of my early intern days (I didn’t work late, I was just hesitating whether I should submit the code or not and just had the courage to do so in the evening). In some companies, especially in most early startups, I can imagine that it can be quite challenging to implement without any change in the company’s culture.

Work-life balance is not a myth and it works like a charm, working at Facebook made me realize this.

Am I going back to Facebook?

Approaching the end of my internship, I realized how much I like working at the company. The goal of return offer that has always been at the back of my mind became the thing that I thought about the most. I took a leave from school for this internship and will end up graduating late. It means that if I got the return offer, it would not be for a full-time role but for a returning internship instead.

So

Um

Yeah

I’m very excited and super humbled to tell that I got and have accepted the offer to return as a software engineer intern at Facebook next summer. I will not be returning to the London office though, but I’ll keep the office location a secret for now.

Thank you for reading the whole thing. I hope to do something useful throughout the remaining free time that I have and I hope I’m doing the right thing by writing this.

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