Another internship has come to an end, and this one felt very different from the ones I had before. It was my first real experience inside a multinational company, and in an e-commerce business I had barely understood beforehand. A lot of what happened there was unexpected, and I came away with much more than I anticipated. Even the name FBA sounded impressive before I joined.
Quality Comes Before Speed
The strongest impression I left with was how seriously project quality was treated.
In some of my previous internships at domestic companies, the dominant pressure was always speed and visible results. Here, the priority was clearly quality. That difference hit me hard.
There were no separate testing engineers or operations engineers on the team—only software development engineers. One of the internal ideas there was that an SDE should be able to do everything: write the code, test it, and handle production issues when things break. If something goes wrong in what you built, you are the one who has to respond. And because the work often serves a global system, a problem might mean getting up in the middle of the night to fix it.
The coding standards, round after round of code review, and the care given even to specific wording in documentation all left a deep impression on me. In that environment, I often felt clumsy and immature.
What I took from it was simple: slow down and raise the quality bar.
That means defensive programming. Every variable name, every line of code, every sentence in a document should be written with the next reader in mind. Will someone else understand this? Under what conditions could this fail? And if it can fail, then sooner or later it probably will—and you may be the one waking up at dawn to patch it.
Rethinking the Leadership Principles
A lot of the company’s leadership principles looked ordinary when read as short statements on paper. After the internship, many of them felt much more concrete, and I also became more aware of how much I still lacked in those areas.
Customer Obsession
This is closely tied to quality.
What you build is not for yourself. It is for the people who are paying for the product, directly or indirectly. That changes how you think about your work. You have to ask whether what you are doing is actually valuable enough for someone to spend money on.
And “customer” does not always mean the end user sitting in front of a screen. Sometimes your customer is another internal team in the same company. In either case, the point is the same: before doing anything, you should think from the other side’s perspective.
Dive Deep
Before this internship, I often worked in a very shallow way. If a feature behaved correctly in the end, I considered the job done. I would repeatedly tweak things, using trial and error until I found a version that worked, instead of understanding the underlying mechanism first and then building on that understanding.
That approach can make you look fast at the beginning, but over time it actually slows you down. More importantly, it does nothing for code quality, because all you really know is that one particular combination happened to work.
I came to believe much more strongly that it is better to move slower at first, get the fundamentals right, and then build on top of them. The tech industry is obsessed with speed, but the old idea still holds: sharpening the axe is not wasted time.
Frugality
At first I thought the company might just be stingy. Printing had to be double-sided. There were no piles of snacks, no entertainment corner, no abundance of office supplies for people to casually take away.
But after a while, I started to think differently. Frugality is not necessarily a corporate quirk. It may simply be a more sensible way to live and work.
Insist on the Highest Standards
This one hardly needs explanation.
A Kind of Corporate Conscience
In many companies, “put the customer first” is a slogan. But I had rarely felt it in a real way before. What I usually saw was urgency, promotion, and the race to move faster.
Here, one small detail stayed with me. The company sometimes held internal sales where employees could buy certain items at very low prices. These items were either close to expiration or had been returned by customers. I later learned that once goods had been shipped out from the warehouse, they could not simply go back into inventory and be sold again through the normal channel. To reduce losses, they were sold cheaply to employees instead.
In earlier years, employees had even been able to buy Apple laptops at a very steep discount because of system issues; after reinstalling the operating system, the machines were reportedly fine.
Thinking about that, and then thinking about how some e-commerce platforms in China occasionally end up selling counterfeit goods, refurbished goods, or returned goods as if they were normal products, I found myself respecting this company more.
To me, earning money cleanly matters far more than simply earning a lot of it.
The Technical Side: Strengths, Limits, and Tradeoffs
After saying so many positive things, it is only fair to mention what felt lacking.
I had heard before that the company’s strongest technical work was in areas like recommendation systems and AWS. I did not get to feel much of that in China, though. Those teams were probably still concentrated in Seattle. Still, the fact that new internal projects were already willing to build on AWS says a lot about how capable that platform must have been.
The FBA team I was on also did not work with data at a particularly massive scale, so there was not much room for grand “big data” analysis to matter in practice. That said, I did hear that some teams were already planning to build things around larger-scale data analysis.
I had also hoped to quietly learn something about browser technology while I was there. But after spending time around that area and then casually looking through Chromium documentation afterward, my impression was that Google was still far ahead. Then again, there probably are not many companies that can really compete with Google on browsers.
Overall, the work in China felt more business-driven than innovation-driven. There was a stronger focus on concrete business needs and less on exploratory technical work. So for someone who wants to go very deep into technology for its own sake, this environment did not seem ideal.
That said, the work pressure was not overwhelming, and that created space to study on your own. For an engineer who cares about technical growth, having some protected time may matter more than people usually admit.