Personal Reflection on jeffyang.io

My Story - Growth from IC3 to IC5

Mon, 06 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been a while since I last wrote here — work and life have been full, and writing fell off my routine. A lot has changed since then. Over the past three years, I’ve gone from an IC3 engineer to IC5 at Meta.

It’s been fast, chaotic at times, and full of learning curves.

This post isn’t advice — just a few honest notes on what that journey looked like for me.

First 3 Months at Meta

Sun, 23 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been over 3 months since I started my first job out of college - and I wanted to leave a blog post about it. A few things I’ll cover in this blog post: my bootcamp experience at Meta, and the onboarding process after team selection.

Bootcamp Experience

Most of you are probably wondering what I mean by bootcamp. Isn’t that a military thing where new recruits go through weeks of basic military training? Well yes, but that’s not what I’m going to write about here (thankfully).

Navigating a Computer Science Degree

Sat, 19 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I just completed my degree in computer science at Northwestern University. Coming into college, I hadn’t written a single line of code. Not even a line of “hello world”. I never saw myself majoring in a science/engineering field. Throughout my middle school and high school life, I always considered myself more gifted in things like public speech and debate - so naturally, I considered going into law, although it was more just a mere stream of thought than a decisive opinion. I came to Northwestern thinking that I’d study economics (because it seemed like the safe major to go with, for some reason) and international relations. 6 years and a half later (I took 2 years off due to mandatory military service in Korea and another half a year off due to COVID-19), here I am, with a degree in computer science and a full-time job at Meta (Facebook) secured. It wasn’t easy, but I truly had an amazing experience at Northwestern. In this blog post, I want to jot down a few notes on how I navigated my transformative adventure into the world of computer science and technology.

My Facebook Internship

Wed, 08 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I started my journey in computer science as a freshman in college. Little did I know, this journey would take me to the heart of Silicon Valley.

In this blog post, I share my experience as a software engineer intern at Facebook. For those who are trying to gauge if Facebook is the right fit - I hope this post will provide valuable insight. For those who are on the grind for an internship - I hope this will serve as a source of inspiration to keep going. Facebook seemed like a pipe dream, but through grit and little bit of luck, I’m really happy to have made the impossible possible.

Working at an Early Stage Startup (Pt. 2)

Sat, 13 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Disclaimer This post does not in any way represent the views of Fumi as a company, but is solely my individual opinion and reflection on my experience as a software engineer at an early-stage startup

I was a software engineering intern, after all - so let’s talk about things from an engineer’s perspective. To give you context, I was part of a small engineering team of 3, and did not have a direct report (i.e. no “manager”). Although my title was a “software engineering intern” I was more like a full-time contractor. I was (for the most part) expected to do things on my own, as the other 2 engineers did not have enough time to be taking care of an intern.

Working at an Early Stage Startup (Pt. 1)

Sun, 28 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

COVID-19 brought an abrupt stop to my studies in the United States, leading me back to Seoul. As I was always interested in the startup scene, I could not turn down the opportunity to intern at an early stage startup when it presented itself. Following rounds of interviews, I landed an internship at Fumi, a Korean e-commerce startup catered to the senior fashion market. Fumi had recently raised $3M in Series A funding and was rapidly growing its team. Over the past 4 months as a software engineering intern at Fumi, I was able to grow not only as a software engineer, but also as a future entrepreneur. In this blog post I would like to share my takeaways from working at an early stage startup as a software engineer.

Shipping Code for a Business – Is Your Application Scalable?

Mon, 09 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Reflecting on 2019 Summer Internship @Knowru

This summer, I had the privilege of returning to and working at Knowru, a startup that primarily focuses on helping loan processing companies through a suite of innovative software. I had worked at Knowru in the summer of 2017 before enlisting in the Korean Army, and over the next 2 years of my military service, the company saw remarkable growth (most notably, the backing of a multimillion-dollar investment from Hong Kong). Back at Knowru as a software engineering intern, I had to navigate through problems that came from the company’s rapidly growing customer-base: writing code with scalability in mind.