Prior to joining Facebook I was an iOS app developer at a company called SourceN in Bengaluru, India. After working there for 3 years, I moved to UK to pursue a MSc in Software Engineering at Queen Mary University of London. Towards the end of my graduation, I discovered the role of Developer Support Engineer at Facebook Dublin and applied for the same.

In my previous job, I had few junior engineers on the team and I felt satisfaction whenever I was able to help them with any of their issues, however big or small it may be. I enjoyed my role of a software developer but I felt that helping others gave me an even more rewarding experience. When I read the job description for Developer Support Engineer I thought it was a perfect fit for me. It had both aspects of engineering as well as helping out other developers.As a Developer Support Engineer, whenever our developers face issues with the Facebook platform, we are the first point of contact and this is an incredible opportunity to understand the sentiment of our developers and to help them. What makes the role unique is the fact that it consists of both engineering as well as support. So whilst you are delivering world-class support to our developers, you are also writing code at the highest standards, managing your projects and making meaningful impact towards your team and company goals.

Hmm... 'Login dialog is displaying a blank screen on iOS' reads the first bug report in my queue. I think to myself 'If the login dialog is indeed broken, it must be affecting every other app that uses our iOS SDK.' I quickly fire up my test app that I have pre-configured with our latest SDK and launch the login dialog. It is indeed broken! I look at my logs and find out what error is causing this and escalate this internally to the team who look after Login it with urgency since so many apps depend on this core feature. Meanwhile I confirm the bug with our external developers and assure them that we are working on a fix. Within a few hours, the fix is deployed and I update our developers with big relief that the issue has been fixed. That's the first bug report done! There are a few more that I will need to address through the morning, though not all as severe as this one and it may even be as simple as pointing out the right documentation. Some bugs are less severe and it may take a while to get a fix out but the process is more or less the same.As the day progresses to the afternoon half, it is time to switch to projects and coding. I have been added as a reviewer for a piece of code that has been written by my colleague. I review it, provide my feedback and point out any issues or areas of improvement that I can find. As for my own projects, I am working on building out a way for other teams we work with to allow them to analyze data on the work they do. This will help them monitor the workload among team members. I continue my coding for the same and when it is ready, I submit it for review. Whilst I wait on feedback, it is time to have the weekly meeting with our team in Menlo Park, so I head off to the final meeting of the day. This is more or less what a regular day would look like but there are times that we are engaged in essential trainings as well where the schedule would be different.

I would say "Focus on Impact". We set goals for our team each half and each goal is defined by a concrete metric. All the work that we do is aligned with the team goal and the impact is measured against that metric. An example could be - reduce the total number of duplicate bug reports by 10% by making bugs more discoverable. Impact is key to all the work that we do.

This half was particularly exciting for me as I got an opportunity to attend the F8 developer conference at Fort Mason in April. It was overwhelming to be at the Dev Garage booth representing our team. It was an immensely amazing experience to be able to meet and interact with our developers in person, listen to their feedback and issues and provide them with support. The opportunity to represent the team at such a prestigious event for Facebook developers is truly amazing and F8 is something we all look forward to each year.

When I applied for the job, my perception was that the role was focused mainly on support and engineering was something secondary that we did as an addition to the core work. However, once I joined the team I realised that engineering was weighed equally to the core role of support. The people in the team are exceptionally good in providing support and equally good when it comes to engineering skills. In fact our team goal has two distinct facets - one which focuses on providing world-class support and the second that focuses on engineering projects that are impactful to the team and the organisation. The code that we both write and review follow the same high standard as the one used by the rest of the engineering teams at Facebook. Also, our projects are not limited to internal tooling for Developer Support Engineering but also span across multiple teams as well as external facing products such as the bug tool itself.

I have been working on improving developer engagement rate with bug reports which is in line with our team goal of providing the best support experiences for our developers. It involves analysis of our existing data to get insights into how developers engage with bug reports and code new solutions as well as improve our existing ones to improve developer satisfaction. This will also help us gather more feedback and find areas of improvement that will eventually translate into improved experience for our developers. Throughout the process I am responsible for analysing the data, defining the metrics by which we can measure the success of the project, coding and delivering the solutions and communicating the progress to the rest of the team.

I was studying in London when I was made the offer. I was a bit nervous about the relocation initially but that feeling vanished rather quickly when I experienced the amount of support Facebook provided for relocation and how efficiently the whole process was handled. The relocation service provided by Facebook covered everything from the application for work permit and visa, booking flights, introduction to the city, application for a bank account to the accommodation for the first month in Dublin. The process was speedy and extremely efficient.My hometown is in Gangtok which is located in the Indian Himalayan region of Sikkim. I was concerned that cultural differences might be an issue for me, after all I had lived in London just for a year and I was a student then - it would be a whole different setting in a work environment. However, I couldn't be more wrong! The diversity that I saw at work was like no other and everyone was treated with respect and I never felt like I was missing anything. My team in Dublin itself includes people not only from Ireland but also from Germany, Italy, Lebanon, Netherlands and Spain.

The first one is the culture of feedback that makes working at Facebook a truly unique experience. We strongly believe that "Feedback is a gift" and when your colleagues regularly provide you with effective and constructive feedback, it helps you see those areas where you can immediately improve upon - which you would otherwise be oblivious to. The other most important and valuable thing I have seen at Facebook is that if something goes wrong, the first thing that we do is analyse the same to see what we can learn from it rather than find someone to blame. The questions that we ask are, what are the lessons learnt from it and what can we do to avoid it in the future. Lastly, there is a saying at Facebook "Nothing at Facebook is someone else's problem". So if you identify an area where you can bring improvements and impact, then you can raise it with the team and work on it. Everyone's opinion is valued and listened to which makes working at Facebook even more special.