Meet a Facebook Engineer: Haiping Zhao
Q: What advice do you have for other engineers?
A: As a senior engineer, I have been through the programmer ranks and have distinct advice for each stage.
For junior programmers, I highly recommend spending time with a wide variety of technologies, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, C, C++, Java, and SQL. This can help you identify your interests and potential directions for career development. Knowledge-wise, it is also extremely beneficial to have broad understanding of different problem solving methods.
For intermediate-level people, I think Facebook is one of the greatest places for having impact. By taking on challenging tasks, you can make changes that affect millions of users. Nothing is more exciting than seeing your code change the world. Facebook counts on our talents to come up with genuine ideas, respectful communications, and great implementations.
For senior people like me, it's really our job to coach young engineers on how to approach technical problems systematically and how to resolve disagreements gracefully. The job comes with the great responsibility of supervising the entire engineering force to move in a direction that we as a company are happy with. I hope senior engineers are willing to spend their time helping other people grow instead of just focusing on their own work. By putting ourselves into "sharing mode," we can help build a great software community within our respective companies that will proliferate for long, long time.
Haiping Zhao, a senior software engineer, writes code...for fun.
