Pros: The best thing about a Facebook internship is definitely the culture and the benefits. My team was very relaxed, and I didn't feel pressured to overwork. Free food as an intern is great.

Cons: Working for a giant corporation can sometimes be depressing in a moral way because you worry a lot about whether you're actually ruining people's lives.

Pros: Smart people who take their jobs seriously (they don't want to lose their jobs!). Most of them are friendly and respectful enough, despite you may disagree with them politically, culturally, or on work matters. Extremely good amenities, perks, and compensation. Google is the only one that can match Facebook on most perks. Pretty much everything is built in-house, so there is some way to get people to help you/fix bugs instead of bugging an open-source community that may never want to patch.

Cons: Work-life balance is not great if you come in not knowing a particular language, say, C++, because debugging through any codebase can be very tough. Many things to fix at Facebook, so you will be easily distracted and can put risks on achieving impacts on your primary goals for the half. While in-house tools are great from a "please fix it" approach, it also usually comes at the cost of usability and stability. We really could use more help in making tooling accessible and useful. Impacts are "go big or go home." Everyone is obsessed and measured by impacts. This could be a CPU win, an engagement metric move, or power reduction or productivity. But ultimately, we are chasing the big stuff in the name of promotion and forget we need to grind through the small stuff that are actually most important to a healthier work-life balance and reliability.

Pros: Great pay, even by Silicon Valley standards. As a lover of systems, it was amazing to work with the behemoth that is Facebook's data pipelines.

Cons: They put us in Redwood City (some were in Menlo Park, I believe), which somehow resulted in a 1-hour commute on a swaying bus. Parking was limited, and it was a bit too far to bike.