Editor’s note: This post was written in 2019. The policies and benefits described here reflect that time and may have changed since.

Hi Brian, I just left you a message. I have some fantastic news for you. We would like to give you an offer. Congratulations and great work! Call me when you are free to discuss the specifics.

About two and a half years ago, I got this email from a recruiter at Facebook headquarters. I could hardly believe it: I had actually landed an engineering offer from Facebook. If you watched my earlier livestream with Aya, you know that back in mid-2015, a friend referred me internally at Facebook one morning, and I was rejected that same afternoon.

At the end of 2016, I took another run at Facebook. This time I prepared much more thoroughly and made it through round after round. Even so, the moment the offer arrived, it felt completely unreal.

After all, Facebook is one of the FAANG companies (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google) that countless people in Silicon Valley dream of joining, and its engineers compete with talent from all over the world. I knew before interviewing that my chances were slim, so actually getting in left me over the moon.

Two and a half years later, I have a much better feel for the job, and many more observations. Let me share them here, starting from the offer itself.

Starting From the Offer

After I confirmed I was joining Facebook, the standard system emails arrived: sign the contract, fill in personal information, and complete a background check, including a criminal-record check. A few days after I submitted everything (presumably once the checks came back clean), the onboarding materials arrived, asking which work email address and equipment I wanted.

At Facebook, like at many Silicon Valley companies, every employee is issued a laptop and a phone on day one. For the laptop, you can choose an 11-, 13-, or 15-inch screen, running Windows or macOS. For the phone, you pick the latest or previous-generation iPhone, Samsung Galaxy, or Google Pixel, and you can even choose whether your carrier plan runs on AT&T or Verizon.

New hires begin with two days of training: everyone in the same start cohort, at Facebook offices around the world, goes through them together. The content is mostly the company’s culture and values, and they hand you the equipment you chose and help you set up the internal systems.

Six to Twelve Weeks of Engineering Bootcamp, Then You Choose Your Team

Non-engineering employees at Facebook usually finish the two days of training and go straight to their teams. Engineers, on the other hand, are paired with a mentor at the end of day two and move into training built just for engineers.

At Facebook, engineers go through a 6-to-12-week engineering bootcamp. It feels a bit like being back in college: you take classes tailored to your specialty and needs, and between sessions you work on tasks that teams across the company (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, Messenger, and more) create for bootcamp engineers.

These tasks range from small changes of a few lines of code to building an entirely new feature, and all of it is real product work. Within hours of shipping a change to a web page, I could see it live in front of more than two billion users around the world.

Then, when bootcamp ends, each engineer chooses a team (department) to join and officially starts work.

For engineers new to Facebook, working directly with people on different teams is how you figure out your strengths, your interests, and your working style, and which team fits you. This period is also when team managers pull out all the stops to recruit strong engineers to their teams. A single experienced engineer might have as many as 20 to 30 managers courting them. People generally choose carefully, because once you join a team, the company expects you to stay at least a year before switching.

Compared with other Silicon Valley companies, choosing your team after you join is a distinctive kind of freedom at Facebook, but it is also a welcome dilemma. The most common question among new hires is this: do you join the team whose work genuinely excites you, or the team whose people are a joy to be around? Either way, you might second-guess yourself a few months later. There is no standard answer.

Personally, I think joining first and choosing your team afterward is one of Facebook’s advantages in attracting strong engineers. Working together first reduces information asymmetry and helps you avoid discovering a mismatch only after you are already on the job. It is good for the company, too: people who are happy working together produce better work.

The Silicon Valley Commute: Shuttles From Almost Every Bay Area City

As more and more people move into the San Francisco Bay Area, traffic around Silicon Valley keeps getting worse, and our company parking lots are constantly overflowing. To encourage employees to take the shuttles, the company now runs shuttles from stops in nearly every Bay Area city, all with Wi-Fi on board.

I live in the East Bay, and I take the shuttle to and from work every day. It takes longer than driving myself, but traffic is much less stressful when I can listen to a podcast or do other things instead.

Eating at Facebook: The Legend of Gaining 15 Pounds in Your First Year

The overall office environment at Facebook’s headquarters campus ranks among the best in Silicon Valley. For example, the company’s multiple cafeterias serve free breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Breakfast and dinner are only at the larger cafeterias, while lunch comes with a truly dazzling range of options.

Breakfast includes seasonal fruit, American breakfast items, yogurt, bread, and even Chinese-style congee. Drinks include orange juice and smoothies. If you have time, you can use the ready-made pancake batter and make yourself a pancake. Friday breakfasts feature smoked salmon, a weekly highlight.

If you miss breakfast, every floor of the office has a kitchen stocked with cereal and basic fruit like bananas and apples to tide you over.

For lunch, beyond the big cafeterias, there are smaller spots serving noodles, BBQ, Indian food, Vietnamese sandwiches, Mexican food, American burgers, pizza, salads, and more. With so many options, the moment lunch hour arrives everyone opens the internal app to check what each cafeteria is serving that day. The cafeterias serving popular Japanese, Chinese, or Korean dishes are usually packed, with a long wait before you get your food.

So that no one is ever “too hungry to be creative,” the kitchens are also stocked at all times with snacks of every kind, coffee, tea, and energy drinks. One of the more unusual snacks on hand is Pocky, all the way from Japan. With food this accessible and choices this plentiful, it is no wonder I heard a funny rumor when I joined: people joke that in your first year at Facebook, you gain an average of 15 pounds (6.8 kg).

Gyms, Classes, and an Arcade: Everything Is Here, If You Have Time

To keep the legend from coming true, of course, there is always exercise. The company has a gym on site with fitness equipment, and fitness classes run all day long, from yoga and aerobics to Pilates. The popular classes fill up fast. If you would rather exercise off campus, you can pay for small-group classes or one-on-one coaching yourself, and the company reimburses up to $720 a year (about NT$22,600) toward fitness and exercise spending.

The campus is huge, so walking to a meeting in another building can easily take 10 to 30 minutes or more. People ride the company bikes provided, or hop on the campus shuttles.

There is also a health center on site where you can book medical and dental appointments at work. If you need to mail a package, there is a drop-off point for anything you have already labeled, saving you a trip to the post office or FedEx. There is even a hair salon on campus. In short, all of these facilities exist to remove the time and energy drain of daily chores, so employees can focus on their work.

Speaking of which, the two most famous visitor spots at Facebook’s Silicon Valley headquarters are the “dessert shop” and the “arcade.”

The dessert shop serves ice cream, frozen yogurt, baked desserts of every kind, and candy, all free, of course. After lunch every day, visiting guests gather there for a post-meal dessert, and the line is impossibly long.

The arcade has all sorts of large arcade machines, dance machines, and so on. The story goes that it started when one employee bought an arcade cabinet on eBay and put it in the office. The company did not say anything, so more people bought machines and brought them in. The company provides the space now, but the machines are maintained by employee volunteers. The arcade is a lot of fun, though these days it is mostly employees bringing guests to play. Working there, you are usually too busy to play yourself.

The Benefits

Facebook employees get 21 days of paid time off (PTO) a year. For Silicon Valley companies competing for talent, that is not the most generous; some companies even advertise an “unlimited vacation” policy.

Honestly, though, I prefer rules written in black and white. “Unlimited” vacation can never truly be unlimited, and in the end everyone is left guessing where the company’s real tolerance lies. When we want to take time off, the internal leave system does not require manager approval. (As a courtesy, I still talk to my manager first for longer trips, but for a day or two, I just file it in the system and I am done.)

The company also gives new parents 87 workdays (about four months) of parental leave, to be taken within the first year after a child is born, at full pay. Among tech companies, probably only Netflix (one year) and Twitter (5.5 months) offer more than Facebook. The policy changed again recently: California requires mothers to take 6 or 8 weeks of disability leave after giving birth to recover (depending on the type of delivery). The company’s 87 days used to include that California leave, but now the disability leave is excluded from it. So mothers at headquarters can now start leave four weeks before their due date, take their 6 or 8 weeks of California disability leave first after the birth, and then take the company’s 87 workdays of parental leave. All told, it can add up to as much as 29.5 weeks, giving mothers considerably more time at home with the baby and to recover.

Three Big Company Events a Year

The company holds three large events each year: “Take Your Kid to Work Day” on a Sunday at the end of April, a summer party in August, and a holiday party in December.

Take Your Kid to Work Day is normally a workday event, but there are simply too many employees now, so it is held on a Sunday. The company sets up all kinds of play facilities for kids and designs activities that help them understand where Mom and Dad work.

For last year’s August summer party, the company rented a convention center along with lots of amusement rides and games, all free, including basketball games, darts, and even a Ferris wheel. Families and kids are welcome, so everyone can join in.

At the December holiday party, each employee can bring one adult guest. Everyone dresses up, and there is food, drink, and dancing across differently themed areas. It is held before Christmas each year, to thank everyone for a year of hard work.

Beyond the company-wide events, each team usually has a team-building activity every quarter, time for teammates to build relationships outside of work. Common ones include go-karting, escape rooms, crafts, laser tag, and plenty more.

The Open Culture: Q&A With Zuckerberg Himself

Beyond all these tangible benefits, the most noteworthy intangible at Facebook, in my observation, is its “Be Open” culture. For example, after joining, every full-time engineer can see all internal documents and code (you sign a confidentiality agreement, of course, and internal information may not be disclosed outside). If you are interested in sitting in on any internal meeting, people generally welcome you to listen in.

Every week, CEO Mark Zuckerberg hosts a one-hour Q&A at headquarters for all employees. If you have a question you want to ask him directly, remember to arrive early and sit near the question microphones. I attended one when I first joined, and I even asked Mark a question about how team selection works!

The company also defines a manager’s main responsibility as helping the team grow, removing obstacles, and genuinely empowering people, rather than top-down command and control.

That culture creates cohesion and disciplined execution, often helping the company hit its goals more efficiently.

The Expectations, and the Pressure, Are Also Top-Tier

After all these benefits and all this freedom, do not forget what they are for: attracting top talent and creating more value for the company.

The other side of that coin is the reality of “perform, or leave.” As a rule, engineers at the two most junior levels must be promoted within a set time frame. If the time runs out and you have not leveled up, whether for lack of ability or lack of impact, the company will manage you out. In my two-plus years here, I have personally seen a few colleagues leave around their six-month or one-year mark for not meeting the bar.

Even within an already hyper-competitive Silicon Valley, Facebook is known for its fast pace and high pressure. There is almost always more work than there are people to do it. The upside: if you are ambitious and full of ideas about your career, you have a better chance here of working on projects with real impact. But if you are looking for a company with lots of money, little work, close to home, a comfortable place to “retire,” Facebook is not for you.

On the other hand, after one year at the company, internal transfers are easy for engineers. If you want to switch teams (departments), your manager cannot block you. The point of this policy is to give engineers who do not get along with their manager, or are unhappy in their current situation, an option besides quitting outright. From the company’s perspective, keeping the employee inside the company is far better than losing them entirely.

An Environment That Keeps Pushing You to Improve

I have been at this company for over two years now. I started out knowing nothing and have recently begun mentoring new hires and teammates.

Overall, these two-plus years taught me how a world-class company attracts employees, brings them quickly into its culture and technology, and keeps them happy and productive day to day. On the other hand, I have also seen that the pressure here is genuinely intense, and it has pushed me to keep improving myself. There are plenty more stories from along the way, which I will share another time.

In short, this is a work environment that keeps pushing you to sharpen yourself and level up. I have met so many smart, humble people here, all energetic and working hard to contribute. I truly feel lucky and grateful to be an engineer at Facebook headquarters, working to make the world more open and connected.

What else would you like to know about working at Facebook? Feel free to ask in the comments. As long as it does not touch internal confidential information, I will do my best to answer.

This post was originally published on my former blog, 「半路出家軟體工程師在矽谷」 (May 4, 2019; the site is now offline, and the full text is preserved via the Wayback Machine). It was lightly edited for this republication.