Gilbert L 梁敬暉

This is a multi-part series summarizing my college life. Before this, there was Prelude, Mountaintop, and Nadir.

Due to the experience from my first work term, I flew into the Bay Area with little optimism. “At least there would be free food,” I thought.

Facebook at the time was known as nothing more than a kiddish PHP shop. skeptics (i.e bloggers) claimed the company had trouble accruing talented engineers; that they had to hire me somewhat reaffirmed the notion.

It soon dawned on me that this was not the case. Most of the people I met at work came from Ivies. Others came from IIT or Tsinghua. The exceptions usually had something interesting to boast (e.g “I started three companies before and sold one of them for a bit of money”). Within a few days, I realized I was working directly with Blake Ross. What talent shortage?

Things got more surreal when, due to a temporary lack of space, I was seated near the “exec team” for much of the first two months. “The Zuck” sat 3 desks away and COO Sheryl Sandberg sat one desk away. Occasionally overhearing their conversations became a habit.

At first, the two felt like a really poorly arranged marriage. Sheryl was a prototypical executive - she came to work early in the morning, directed orders at her assistant sternly, was always on the go, but still found time to say hi to the people around her (me!). Mark, on the other hand, tended to arrive groggy at around 11, looked no more mature than me, and appeared uncomfortable around people. 

Given these observations, I came to think that Mark was perhaps “a little lucky” to be where he was. Thankfully, several all-hands resolved that misconception. Not many FB users remember anymore, but early 2008 was a time when millions of FB users raged at the new emphasis on “What’s on your mind?” The “anti-Twitter-esque-design” backlash resonated with a significant portion of the company and many of them questioned the then 24-year-old. Steadfast and unwavering, “the kid” stepped up at an all-hands and reiterated his position. If I were him, I would have caved.

This is not to suggest that Mark was a narcissistic, iron grip leader. Against privacy uproars, he wisely compromised and reverted changes - perhaps not to the degree that some desired, but to the degree that he felt was appropriate for the company and its clients. That Facebook more than half a billion users today is hardly luck; for seven years, Mark Zuckerberg faced challenges and decisions that could have dealt severe blows to the company. But time and time again, the visionary made the decisions that were beneficial to the social network. For that I respect him much.

This term stood in absolute contrast against the one before. For the first time in my university career, I felt “at home.” Reading “Godel, Escher, and Bach” wasn’t weird: the office had two copies lying around. Working on random projects after work wasn’t extreme: fellow intern Jeff Verkoeyen worked on side projects at work, after work, and through the wee hours. Using GTD wasn’t gimmicky either: product manager Naomi Gleit was an even bigger fan. Outside of work, I hung out with other interns from Waterloo. I socialized, I played, and I smiled. What a difference one term can make.

After I recognized the talent at Facebook, I felt intimidated. The only coding experience I had was as a “tester” deserted in the hallway; how was I suppose to live up to the demands of all these “big shots?”

The code base was enormous and I sought my mentor’s assistance often. One time, he got fed up and told me to “grep the code” (i.e search through the code) myself. This turned out to be the best things any mentor has ever taught me and I still thank him for that.

I worked for the growth team - a large group responsible for user acquisition and user engagement. Like most parts of the company [at the time], projects and tasks were created bottom-up rather than top-down. At first, I contributed my ideas as a mere act of “doing my job.” It turns out though that my colleagues actually cared. They were serious about this whole “an intern is treated just like a full timer” thing.

One time, I suggested looking into how CAPTCHA success rates differ among locales. My “silly idea” resulted in an unexpected presentation to the entire Site Integrity team. Another time, I suggested a new feature to another team through an internal message board; their team lead replied, “Yes, that’s an excellent idea - Mark [Zuckerberg] had suggested that too, so you’re on right track. =)” I became so comfortable with throwing my two cents out there that, near the end of the term, I typed up a lengthy e-mail ranting about the registration process. I don’t remember much of what I wrote now, but I believe my attitude was bad enough that I probably would’ve been given a warning had I been at some bigger corporations. Instead, a number of the people on praised or welcomed the critique.

Not everything was pretty and rosy, of course. Once, I was assigned a bug that seemed mundane at best: numbers didn’t add up. But what seemed like a simple arithmetic error culminated into a frustrating two week mystery. For days I stared at the same pieces of code. I escaped to the game room, came back, went to lunch, came back, rip-sticked around the office, came back, and concluded nothing. The problem drove me crazy. But just as I gave up making stupid hypotheses, the notion that a small but significant amount of the servers were crashing (for whatever reason) finally struck my mind. I didn’t know why they were crashing, but I knew everything would make sense if they were crashing. The bug fix was crazy: it resulted in a significant “dent” in the user acquisition graph. For an analogy, imagine doing something that caused the Dow Jone Index to go move by 10%. It was fantastic.

Later in the day, VP Chamath dropped by to congratulate me. To this day, his recognitions and my team’s acknowledgements stand as the cornerstones of my self-confidence. It’s one thing to get a “nice” or “generous” praise from a teacher or professor; it’s another to earn a number of praises from extremely talented people. I felt like I belonged - not just socially, but talent-wise. They were changing the world and I could, too.

I considered quitting university to join Facebook full time. Had I done that, I would probably be a multi-millionaire by now. I decided against the idea even though I knew I could’ve gotten rich. Simply put, I had years ahead of me to get rich and I had years ahead of me to pursue the Valley Dream. Yet a person only has four years to explore and meet people in a safe, innocent university setting. The latter seemed more valuable.

As usual, the end of term meant returning to Waterloo. Despite my enthusiasm for the young company, I decided against returning for another term. A term had Facebook made me realize how much I loathe working under a strict hierarchy, which meant that I would never even consider working full time at a large corporation. Four months would be the maximum time I could bear working in a bureaucratic environment, so I wanted to learn everything I could from bigger companies before I never touch them again.

My goal was obviously Google, but their strange interviewing system eluded me. Next stop was Amazon!