Non-Traditional Internships: Facebook - Easy to Use, Hard to Land an Internship

Today Intern Memo sits down with Charles Cheever of Facebook. Charles is in charge of engineering for the Facebook platform. He's the life blood that makes all those apps possible. So basically, when you get fired from your job for literally spending 80% of the day playing scrabulous, you can blame him to make yourself feel better. But the truth is, at the end of the day the blame will rest squarely on your own hulking shoulders.

Intern Memo: How many interns does facebook hire each summer?

Charles Cheever: It's changed each summer since we've been growing so much. This year, we'll probably hire about 20 or 30.

IM: Do you guys typically prefer a candidate with a Computer Science background?

CC: There are different roles throughout the company, but most of the interns we'll hire this summer are engineers, and for engineers, a CS background is almost essential. We do have a couple of college dropouts without much formal schooling though. In this way, its sort of like the NFL. Your best bet is to go a D-I school and be a star there, but if you're Antonio Gates, then there's probably a spot for you.

IM: What do interns at Facebook actually do?

CC: Most of our interns are software engineers.

IM: What's unique about the facebook intern experience?

CC: There are a lot of things, but two of the most interesting are that there are a lot of full time engineers at the company who dropped out of school or just graduated from college, so its not unheard of for interns to be older than the full-timers they work with. And the other interesting thing about Facebook for college students is that all one's classmates are familiar with the product and use it. I guess you get that flipping burgers at McDonald's too though.

IM: What's the most valuable thing an intern should know before a summer at facebook?!

CC: Learn 1337speak. Python ftw.

So if you're the type of person who believes things like "reach for the stars, if not you might land in the clouds," and you're largely under-qualified to work for facebook, who cares! Apply anyway! What's the worst that could happen? But don't let your expectations be skewed by the fact that you spend 4-6 hours a day on facebook.

Have a great weekend. We'll be back with a special non-profit edition next week in honor of the holidays.

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