What can I do to maximize my chances at a high intern rating at Meta? And what org to join?
Hello! I'm joining Meta as a SWE intern in the Summer of this year and would like to maximize my chances at getting the highest rating possible, alongside setting myself up for a high growth rate if I'm able to join as a New Grad. Sorry if this is really long, I wanted to bundle my questions to not have to give context multiple times.
For full context, I'm in my last year of University with 4 previous internships of experience (1 at a large bank and 3 at small-mid size companies) and I'm currently doing an internship until April at a SaaS tech company (think like public ~40B market cap, 8.5k employees) with a sizeable amount of ex-FAANG employees so it's much more relevant than my previous internships have been. The Meta internship is in the summer for 16 weeks and would be my 6th final internship - my University is big on internships and requires you to do 6 of them which is why I have more than usual.
Onto my main question, I want to try to go all in and get a GE+ rating at the Meta internship and do my best to grow as much as possible there (at both engineering skills and climbing the ladder). I've watched the series on securing intern return offers but I'd like some advice on what I can do to go beyond that.
I think I'm in a unique position where I get to do another tech internship right before, and would like some advice on what I can do here to practice some of the things Meta would also look for to achieve GE+. For context, I just finished my first month (1.5 weeks mandatory onboarding, 2.5 weeks actually working) and merged ~20 PRs, my manager and team says I'm doing really well here but I have no idea what Meta's standards are for code velocity and quality so doing well at Meta might look totally different. However, to be completely honest, I've also been pretty lazy at the current internship since I don't care much for a higher rating (+ tasks have been kinda boring lol) and only working ~20 hours/week so I could be doing much more, which I realized I need to change if I want to get into good habits before joining Meta.
Additionally, team matching starts soon for Meta and I was looking into what to select. By far my highest interest is within Reality Labs related work but I don't have much experience with VR. Would RL make a bad choice for my goals? At my current internship I'm mostly working on Dist Sys and ML Infra for abuse detection/prevention.
Thanks in advance and apologies for the really long questions.
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Discussion
(2 comments)- 1
a month agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course HeroYour goal as a Meta intern is to function as a fully-fledged E3 by the end. That means the ratings are roughly the same (just drop a third of a band):
- Intern Meets All Expectations (MA) = E3 MA- to E3 MA
- Intern Exceeds Expectations (EE) = E3 MA+ to E3 EE
- Intern Greatly Exceeds Expectations (GE) = E3 EE+ to E3 GE
When an E3 starts performing at very high Exceeds or Greatly Exceeds level, they are now functioning as an E4 or 85%+ of the way there. To understand E4 expectations, go through the learning path: Nail Your Promotion: Junior To Mid-Level (L3 -> L4)
I've worked with a few GE interns, and here's the traits they had:
- Very high diff count (around double the average intern or more). This velocity should translate to you not only getting your entire intern project done on time but early as well. If your intern project has any bonus features, you've done them all
- Very high diff quality (starting from Week 3-4, your diffs rarely get rejected)
- Asks very high-quality questions
- Can disambiguate tasks on their own (particularly the decomposition bit)
- Communicates project progress very well (interns only need to write 1-2 Workplace posts to get an offer, but GE interns will write 5+)
- Starts helping other people on the team (other interns alongside E3s)
- If working on product, has some product and design sense
- Shows some initiative, taking on tasks without people asking them too (fixing some bugs in the backlog, adding test coverage, etc)
This is an incredibly high bar to clear, so don't feel bad if you don't hit it. Only 5% of interns can go into this bucket. The vast majority of Meta interns spend most of the 3 months learning how to code at a FAANG level and developing basic communication skills.
- 0a month agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
And what org to join?
I remember when my intern showed me exactly what he got in team matching, and it wasn't much. That makes sense as interns are the most expendable, and there's so many of them. So my broader point here is to not worry about this too much as you don't have a lot of control anyways.
My main advice here is to pick whatever tech stack you're best at, which is ideally the one you're the most passionate about. The tech stack was the one meaningful thing my intern showed me that he was allowed to put input in for (he chose mobile as an interest). The type of org doesn't matter as you are just an intern (i.e. you aren't held responsible for scope). Every org will have some internal tool that an intern can work on for 3 months. What matters is the quality of intern manager, but you don't have a choice there as an intern anyways. Every org will have terrible intern managers, great intern managers, and intern managers in between.
If you want to get a head start, use side projects to bolster your raw technical mastery of that tech stack. Use AI as little as possible to actually learn the concepts and maximize your chances of impressing your Meta teammates.
