2022 Meta Software Engineer Internship
It’s been a while for me to write articles. 2023 was a fantastic year, and I prioritized other things over writing. At the beginning of 2024, I feel like it’s an excellent time to pick up this interest since I have learned so much during the past year.
In 2022 summers, I am fortunate to get the chance to work at Meta as a software engineer intern. It was a great experience with all the benefits and the fantastic working spaces. Most importantly, I learned a lot from my mentor and colleagues about how to become a better software engineer.
This article will conclude what I have learned through this internship.
Not Only Coding
When I received my task at the beginning of the internship, I had no idea what I was looking at, and it freaked me out. It’s my first time working at such a big tech company, so I am clueless about how to approach the tasks. After spending two weeks reading documentation and asking questions, I desperately want to start coding because I feel like no progress was made by me at all. But that is not the case. I did make progress. It’s just not coding.
I spent another one-and-a-half weeks reading more documentation, asking more questions, and communicating back and forth with my managers to ensure my design plan was valid. Eventually, I finished my task earlier than the deadline and completed two more extension tasks during my internship.
Hence, coding is not the only duty of a software engineer. Understanding the systems, clarifying stakeholders’ requirements, absorbing the latest developing knowledge, and writing clear documentation are all crucial to helping you and your team design a better system for the company.
Steps to Solve the Assigned Task
- Documentation
Documentation is an excellent place to start when trying to understand a new technology, whether a system, a service, a framework, or a language. The first thing to do when joining the company is to figure out where to look up documentations and read through them, which will onboard you faster.
2. Codebase
Sometimes, the documentation lacks instructions for implementation. Instead of trial and error, which is significantly time-consuming, the codebase is your go-to place for usage examples.
In addition, before implementation, make it a habit to look at others’ repos that use the same framework as you for reference. By reading others’ code, you might learn to write code with better readability, avoid a gotcha, or discover something you neglect.
3. Ask People
Asking doesn’t mean incapability or incompetence. I had a cognitive bias at that time, thinking that I had to traverse through every documentation and related codebase before asking my colleagues or manager; otherwise, I would be wasting their time by disturbing them with something I could look up myself.
I am wrong. Well, partially wrong.
Yes, it is nice to have some high-level understanding before asking others, but it is unnecessary to know the whole system from the inside out at the beginning. Before diving into the details, iteratively ask your manager or other senior engineers to make sure your solution looks valid to them. By doing this, you will know whether you are on the right track and save up all the time reading unimportant docs and code.
Yep, and that is all that I learned from this internship, boiling down to one article. It may not be much but is definitely useful.
This is my first time working at such a big tech company, and I realized that software development in companies is very different from the ones at school. It takes much longer for a code change to take effect in a big company. It first has to be reviewed and approved, then run tons of checks to ensure it can be merged into the main branch, and lastly, deployed through all different stages until it hits production. Thus, I did learn some lessons that schools doesn’t provide.
I am very grateful to have this opportunity to intern at such a prestigious company, which I believe did help me get into Bloomberg afterward. I watched the movie “The Social Network,” which tells the story of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg many many times, admiring him for turning a website hosted on servers in his dorm to the mega company it is today. Hence it felt unbelievable when I received the offer letter from Meta.
Seattle is such a great city to explore with friends in summer time, I had a great time. This internship will always be memorable.
