My name is Ryan. I'm 25 years old and I just moved out to California this
year to work for Facebook. Now, this is a story all about how my life got
flipped, turned upside down and I'd like to take a minute, just sit right
there, I'll tell you how I became an Facebook engineer.

Have you ever been involved in a pyramid scheme? I have. It was a side job of
mine for a long time. I knew it was a pyramid scheme going into it, but I
figured it was a good way to make a bit of money, and after all, some people
make money off pyramid schemes, and I could be one of those people. The
particular scheme I was in involved selling catalogues, and I was damn good at
it. So, I did make money, but I lost it all. Let me tell you how.

My side job was catalogues, but my main job was working at a call center for a
research company. That basically means they call you during dinner and ask you
your opinions about how your senator or representative is doing, that sort of
thing, just surveys. If you've ever thought your job was boring, you have no
idea. This place was mind-numbing. It's basically you getting hung up on by
dozens of people, then taking one person through a 15 minute survey, and
having them get tired and hang up on you 8 minutes in. That's not so bad, but
your performance is evaluated on how many completed surveys you submit. So the
natural conclusion is to answer the last half of the survey for them. From
there, it's only a slight jump into completely forging entire surveys,
especially if you're nearing the end of your review cycle and you have only
filled half your quota.

Well, if you haven't caught on yet, I starting exceeding my quota every month.
That didn't net you any extra pay or anything, but it looked good to managers.
I also had a lot of free time on my hands, and a lot of phone numbers. What
would any good entrepreneur do? I picked up a side job.

Except I already had a side job: catalogues. I started using my phone calls as
an opportunity to sell these things to people. The rate of return was about
the same as surveys, but I made commission on each one. This went on for a
while. Eventually the project ended and we handed the results over to the
organization who requested it. A few months later I found out they had noticed
an anomaly in the results, had done an audit, and found that my surveys were
almost entirely forged. 

Turns out that forging political surveys counts as perjury. I was prosecuted
by Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa. Getting prosecuted costs a lot of money,
did you know? The court proceedings went on for a while until eventually I was
found guilty and had to pay a little bit in damages. Between the lawyer costs
and the damages, which I'm still paying off, I more that lost all the money I
had made from my catalogues. I ended up taking a year off from college as a
result.

At that point, I decided to look for more honest work. I was taking the time
off school anyways, so I may as well recoup some of my legal costs. Being a
convicted felon, however, makes job searching a little bit more difficult, as
you might expect, but I applied to Facebook for an internship. As it turns
out, Facebook doesn't run background checks on interns, so I was able to score
one.

I applied to Facebook in November of last year, and heard nothing from them
until mid-March. I had pretty much forgotten about applying, and I purchased
my first car in March of this year. About a week later, Facebook got back to
me, interviewed me, and offered me a position. Since I had just gotten a car,
and I wasn't about to not drive it for the entire summer, so I decided to
drive across the country from Philly to California. For my trip, I wanted to
have one of those new-fangled smart phones, so I picked up an Android phone
from one of my friends who had just upgraded his. I picked it up because I
wanted to be able to stream music over the trip, but that phone turned out to
be one the the most life-changing purchases I've made.

At the time, the Facebook app for Android was pretty abyssmal. I realized this
after using it on the drive up, and I decided to work on it on the side of my
regular intern project. I contacted the team working on it, got onboard, and
worked on it for about 20% of my time. It was lots of fun working with those
guys, and it enabled me to get a full-time offer to continue working on the
mobile apps. I took a month off to drive back home and party like it was 1999.

Driving cross-country is fine once or twice, but I wasn't about to do it a
third time. On my way to Facebook this last time, I flew in and had my car
shipped. When I landed in San Jose, I whistled for a cab and when it came
near, the license plate said "fresh" and it had dice in the mirror. If
anything, I could say that this cab was rare, but I thought "naw, forget it.
Yo, homes, to Bel Aire" I mean "Facebook!" I pulled up to boot camp about
seven or eight weeks ago and I wrote to my family, "yo, homes, smell you
later!" Looked at my kingdom, I was finally there, to sit on my throne as a
Facebook engineer.