Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday/Friday – Days 14-18
January 17, 2014
Tuesday felt much more useful. I arrived on the first shuttle in and had a smoothie and some fruit, checked out the campus a little more and then headed to my next onboarding session. For many of us engineers, we come in very practically minded, so as much as I appreciated the ‘Welcome’ shtick, actually getting my hands dirty and setting up a development environment was much more satisfying. It took a good few hours to actually get set up, and a few more to learn our way around what we needed to know to get started.
For lunch I met up with Zach and Alexey from Penn, Alexey whom I had never met. However, it was a real joy to have that sense of familiarity and to talk about professors, classes and people we all knew. Zach is a very down to earth kind of guy and it was good to hear his perspective on working at Facebook. Alexey has experience in startups and consulting and so it was good to hear from him too, as I’ll have to decide in the near future what step I wish to take next following graduation.
The afternoon I finally got to build something! Though it was a very simple web application, it was good to be back in the game. Both I and another good third of the class continued for a good while at home indicated by the surprise on our mentors’ faces the next day. They asked how far along we were and many of us raised our hands to show we’d already completed the whole thing!
We then had about an hour’s break, to watch a series of videos on various technologies, and I used this as a chance to meet my manager. Scott was so friendly and also radiated the sense that he really knew what he was doing. We had a brief chat, and then it was back to the videos for me. After one more session, the day was over.
I managed to get home by about ten past eight and then fell asleep almost immediately. All this new information to absorb and people I was meeting seemed to be draining me pretty quickly.
The next morning I was out on the first shuttle again, had what was becoming my usual breakfast and then went straight to the ‘Rainbow Room’. The Rainbow Room is Facebook’s official music room, complete with a nice piano, a few guitars/basses and an electronic drum set. I was so glad to have that space as it really helped me to relax and I knew it would continue do so throughout my internship.
Our next few hours were again spent in onboarding sessions, thankfully technical, and the material was of a good standard. Some of the engineers were also good communicators as well as being excellent technically. We received two assignments, one easier and one harder. I also came across my first frustrating bug that I only resolved a half week later when I was in a different mindset and had a little more experience.
After lunch we continued on with the sessions, one technical and one on ethics, finishing off just after five. At that point I decided to go back to my desk and hack away on my assignments till six thirty. At the desk next to me was a guy named Pieter with a very dry sense of humor and expansive technical knowledge. Both of which I enjoyed. He was also very helpful whenever I needed something and would take time out of what he was doing to help me navigate my way around all the new things I was required to learn. Dinner was a ‘dinner meeting’ with a fellow intern, to work on an assignment related to advertising and we designed a strategy to help out my mum’s tourism business. As per usual I stayed to catch the middle of the three night shuttles, and then spent the next two hours at home doing my washing and hanging up my clothes properly.
Thursday was my first full day at my desk! Over the course of the day I tried tackling two separate tasks, one of which was complete by the end of the day and the other on which I made good progress. At lunch I discovered the Facebook Acapella Group and joined them for a rehearsal. Most people there could sing pretty well already and it was nice to inject a little more music into my day. The rest of the afternoon I hacked away, slowly getting a feel for how everything worked. By the end of the day I was pretty pleased with my progress, and it wouldn’t be till the weekend that I’d discover it was mostly for naught.
Friday was our final official day of onboarding and that meant that after my morning meeting, it was all talks for the rest of the day. One that was particularly fascinating and inspiring was from the infrastructure team talking about how they had ‘open-sourced’ (made freely available) the design of their servers and data centers. This to me was an indicator of good work being done by good people and used in good ways. Late in the day, our entire intern group walked down to Café “Living the Dream” which was now thoroughly guarded with chairs laid out and bedecked with cameras and screens. To the side stood the man himself, Mark “Zuck” Zuckerberg. For the next hour he gave a Q&A session with the company, carefully listening to peoples’ questions and providing what seemed like incredibly well thought out answers. After the talk I quickly hurried back before sunset, set the lights in the apartment and promptly fell asleep.
My weekend was relatively relaxed, lots of chilling around the apartment. I cleaned up the apartment a little, read the last of Ice Song of Ice and Fire for the second time and generally recovered from the previous week. Saturday night I went out with a bunch of the interns, spent a little time in the pool and enjoyed my locale. Sunday morning I was up at nine AM and decided that as I had nothing planned until the afternoon, I would work for a little on the past week’s unsolved problems. Unsurprisingly problems that had previously seemed intractable to me now came easily. To my distress however, I discovered while searching though some files, that some other individual had already completed one of the tasks I’d been so hard at work on the previous week and that my efforts were in vain. I closed off my laptop and decided I wouldn’t do more till Monday. Better to separate life and work a little more anyhow.
At 1PM I met up with a bunch of other bay area interns (non Facebook) at the CalTrain station. To my delight there was another Australian there, a great guy called Varun. We bonded over the fact that we were the only ones we knew of around. As a group we went to get sushi for lunch but there were a few too many of us for the place to support so we ended up splitting into two groups and meeting again afterwards. After our bills were paid we joined again at a local coffee shop and chilled for a good bit of the afternoon before all going our separate ways. When I got home I took a nap and then took my first supermarket trip since leaving home. Dinner was a simple sandwich, with the TV on some cheesy romance movie in the background and then an early night. I was planning on starting something new early the next day.
At 6:00AM my alarm went off, and I sprung out of bed trying to get into my clothes as quickly as possible. I bounded down the stairs and walked over to the housing complex’s gym. I was anticipating disaster, and my lack of sit-up ability confirmed my worst fitness fears, this was going to be a heck of task. I managed a good fifty minutes before falling over myself and heading back to shower and was pleased I’d at least taken a first step.
Monday was a straight day of work. I struggled a little in the morning learning how to deal with Unicode and UTF-8 code points (international character encodings) and felt I’d wasted a good few hours when 12PM arrived and I had to head off to rehearsal. A few more people were at acapella today and the music was much easier to sight read, making it a bit more of a jam session. I tried to eat a quick lunch and managed to get back to my office for another 45min before meetings till four thirty. I managed to pump out a good bit of work the rest of the day and rewarded myself with a slightly early finish for dinner, skipping some of the queue.
I played piano for a bit before my shuttle arrived but when I arrived home my energy was drained and after a call home, I showered and went right to sleep.
Facebook – Monday – Day 13
January 10, 2014
From Monday, everything changed. First day of full-time work ever. I woke up just before my 7AM alarm, brushed my teeth, took my pills and madly rushed about getting ready. What did I need? Where was my shuttle leaving from? After a minor amount of confusion I walked along the street outside to where a group of young people were clustered, presumably some other interns. The shuttle arrived about ten minutes later and the friendly driver welcomed us aboard.
A short ride later and we passed the sign “Facebook, 1 Hacker Way”, and all of us oogled the campus that we were now entering. We pulled up outside a number of plain looking buildings, exited the shuttle and then entered ‘Building 15’. Inside was as chaotic as the airport terminal from the other day. Over a hundred new employees waiting to receive badges and enter the protected courtyard. I said hi to a few people in line, trying to make friends. I met so many people, remembering names soon became an issue. The only one that really stuck out was ‘Sarah’, an Iranian girl reading Nicholas Nassim Taleb’s book “The Black Swan” (highly recommended). After we all were checked in, we had a short tour and then breakfast at “Café Epic”, one of Facebook’s delicious eateries. I enjoyed a fruit smoothie and some fruit salad in the company of Sarah and a few other n00bs (the Facebook term for new employees).
The rest of the day was filled with speakers on topics ranging from legal compliance to Facebook’s company values. Some of the speakers were decently inspiring, though it was hard not to feel that some of them were more enthused than would be normal regarding a workplace or business. I couldn’t tell whether they actually felt that way or were just trying to get us revved up.
After lunch we received our ‘gear’: company laptops and phones. I had chosen and received a Lenovo Carbon X1 and an HTC One. We then had to set it all up, login and get our systems up and running to actually start working.
During the breaks I walked around campus a little, taking the odd snack from the micro kitchens and generally enjoying the ambience. Facebook campus is covered in art and this makes it a much more enjoyable place to work. Additionally there are posters up all over the place, this is one of my favorites:
The buildings themselves are well designed and spacious, open plan with offices that can be requisitioned along the sides.
After a few final talks, I headed home and collapsed almost immediately. There was way too much to take in. I managed a couple of hours checking out the tools I’d been using and reading new hire information until sleep overcame me. This was going to be intense
Sunday – Day 12
Four hours later I woke up, just before my alarm was due to go off. After a few minutes groaning I bed, I decided that I needed to get up as I would not be catching a taxi to JFK. It didn’t take me long to get ready, but I put off my trip through the icy streets for as long as possible. Finally I dragged myself and my accoutrements down the stairs, and head out into pre-dawn Brooklyn. Once I reached the subway, I accidentally caught the one-per-half-hour train in the wrong direction and was terrified I’d miss my flight. I was to be flying on JetBlue, a low cost US carrier, so I had little faith that they’d wait for me. After another three transfers, I finally made the terminal, an hour and three quarters after leaving.
The terminal was in chaos and I couldn’t understand why. Luckily I had my boarding pass printed and just needed to join the hour long bag drop queue rather than the three hour ticket service line. As I stood I glanced at the departures/arrivals screen and noticed a great deal many cancelled and delayed flights. My own was delayed a good half hour so I needn’t have worried about being late. Evidently the snow storm had caused and was continuing to cause a bit of a ruckus. I made it through security fine, and was waiting at the gate when suddenly the flight next to me was cancelled. Announcements were being made through the terminal letting passengers know that there was no flight availability for three days should their flight have been cancelled. My flight still was listed with the same delay. However, soon I heard whisperings: “a plane slid off the runway” and “I hear the airport is cancelling all flights”, followed by an announcement over the loudspeaker that no more flights were being allowed in or out of JFK due to ice on the runways.
Two hours later and the airport was still closed, with many people already having had to come back after mass cancellations on Friday and Saturday. I hung around trying to catch to scattered Stanford students around the place but none were in the mood. Finally, at around twelve, the airport was reopened. I emailed Facebook to let them know I was on track to make it in and then boarded the plane. About thirty min after boarding an announcement was made that the plane had a broken air vent and that we’d need to wait for repairs. Thus I disembarked and walked around the terminal for another forty minutes before I was finally able to reboard. Twenty minutes later I breathed a sigh of relief as we took off to sunny California!
The staff on the flight were really friendly and informal, the entertainment was good and the snacks were yummy! Despite the delays I’d actually give a pretty good score to JetBlue for everything other than the terrible check-in process.
We landed smoothly late in the afternoon in San Francisco and I immediately caught a cab to Mountain View, thankfully not off my own pocket. After getting to my apartment, I went to the front desk of the complex, picked up my keys and settled in. My place was beautiful. Paintings on the walls, fully furnished with a big double bed, a table set for two complete with wine glasses, a kitchen with a blender, microwave, oven and even a separate dressing room connected to a bathroom with an actual bath! There was a grand piano in the lobby and a pool, spa and gym for all the residents. What a place!
After I got set up in my room I went to buy a laundry card and ran into some nvidia interns on my way. They seemed friendly enough so I went with them to go downtown, searching for food for dinner. After our meal together I was too exhausted to do much more than crash in the double bed, only just remembering in time to set my alarm for my first day…