Five Things I Hated About Being an Intern at Facebook

Engineer interns unite!

Most of these seem true about any well put together company that has set the boundaries between the code and breaking of said code. As a software engineer intern at Animoto in NYC, these were all completely true, and I know other interns at other startups in NYC that also had high expectations out of their SE interns.

Interns can't learn unless they build and break, and shouldn't be put out in an island so they don't have to worry about breaking. If your system is built out well enough, no intern would be able to push out code that breaks in production.

Unlike Phillip Su's post, this is all just very thinly veiled sarcasm to make Facebook look like a good place to do an internship.

While I think Phillip also was being sarcastic, he actually gave good insight into why I wouldn't want to work for Facebook: too much code being shipped, not enough meetings (which results in disorganization, fragmented or duplicated effort), and too many decisions made by engineers (which means less consistent, less usable products).

I love the sarcastic titles that end up being love articles about how great it is to work at Facebook. Why the passive aggressiveness? Why not just title this "Five Things I Love About Being an Intern at Facebook."

All these articles make me think this is how Facebook conducts their meetings and communications. "Hey Bob, I really hate your work." "Oh, you LOVE it, right?" "Yeah, that's what I said."

Viral Marketing 101.