That time Facebook took a chance on me

Published on Medium here.

Last summer was one of the best summers I’ve had in life and at work. This piece should’ve come a long time ago, but now is better than later. This is part of a larger story of how I became a coder at Stanford, but we can hold off on the big story for now :)

Facebook U — baby’s first steps (aka lines of real code)

Life at Stanford was all fun and games until the first person in our freshman dorm scored an internship. The next quarter, I stumbled upon Facebook’s Freshman program (FBU) and applied on a whim. One of my best friends gets accepted, so we all celebrate for her. Can’t help but think, where is my call? Spring break rolls around and I get the call — Denise, from FBU, delivered the news that would change my life. FBU is essentially an 8-week hackathon, where they teach 50 of us iOS programming and we build an app in small teams.

Facebook took a chance on me, so I stepped up and did the best job I knew how. I got very lucky with my team. Patricia and Cheenar really taught me effective teamwork, because they both had much more experience than me. Our manager, Jason, would always swoop in and save us during times of woe. He would also take an hour or two during a few Fridays to teach us three something cool about code — again, what a stellar mentor. I was soaking in all of the knowledge I could find (and, of course, eating all of the Facebook food and ice cream).

Me cheesing after my first internship :)

I felt so confident and empowered after that summer that I boldly dove into some awesome (but time-consuming classes). FBU made a confident Computer Scientist out of me — I would always fight for success, even in the face of failure. Thank you, Facebook.

First Internship — exceptionally mediocre

After a successful year of awesome classes, I arrived on Facebook campus feeling pretty confident. I was in charge of refactoring critical section of the graph search pipeline. This was the Frankenstein of code and, after hours of C++ bugs, I felt pretty annoyed by the project. Outside of Facebook, many think the engineering structure is top-of-the-line. The reality is that everything is being held by duct tape, and, as I peeled the duct tape, I found that there was only more duct tape beneath. For example, one method I was fixing started off as a 150-line method, but, over time, somehow expanded to ~500 lines.

I’m grateful to my manager, Igor, and those who helped me a lot along the way, like Ves, Nidhi, and Sergey, but I didn’t feel proud of my work. Somehow, I managed to do well enough to get a return offer. Maybe I was too hard on myself, but, yet again, Facebook took a chance on me. This summer taught me to not become complacent and overconfident. At least I learned how to solve a Rubik’s cube while my code compiled (thanks Henry!) and friends came to visit often, like Dr. Matsko below.

My high-school math teacher visited me at work that summer!

Last internship — this is what life should be like

After my internship, I took a few more machine learning classes and quickly hopped off the ML / big data train and hopped on the systems / theory train for a while. Life is great when you don’t have to fake your love for “big data” or “machine learning” or whatever the hype is these days. After an amazing visit to Facebook New York, I quickly accepted my offer there — the Facebook three-peat began.

First off, a special thanks to my manager, Felix, and the rest of Messenger Infrastructure for making me feel welcomed and just being an awesome group of engineers (with great taste in food!). I knew I wanted to be on Messenger Infra after meeting Felix during my New York visit, and my amazing systems experiences in my Compilers and Operating Systems classes (shout out to my wonderful team members!).

I had the opportunity to added a cache layer to a multi-regional database, which, as most coders know, is the lowest hanging fruit of system optimization. I knew I was having a great time, but it turned out to be much more formative than I realized. It was really exciting to build something from start to (almost) finish, and deploy it into the wild. My experience this summer completely convinced me to do systems / infrastructure work full-time, and Felix’s mentorship and project choice played an important role. Above all, I felt very proud of what I accomplished — even though I crashed some servers along the way.

My brother visited me during my last days of work!

That time we hit 1 billion monthly active people :)

Thank you, Facebook

“Give more than you take,” says Zuckerberg. I am eternally grateful for how much value the company has brought to my life, and I can only hope that I gave back as much value. I vow to pay it forward. There is so much more untapped talent in the world— if I could help empower even a few budding computer scientists, I would feel very lucky.

I know that I had it in me to succeed, but, regardless, thank you Facebook for taking a chance on me. I have been very lucky in life, and I am forever grateful.