Meet Gemma, an Engineering Manager in our London office. We interviewed her to learn about her experience working at Facebook, what she enjoys most about work and her favourite things about Facebook London.

I really, REALLY enjoy working on problems of scale and Facebook provides some unique opportunities to scale systems. I'm really happy to be in a space where I can work on problems of scale alongside doing work that has an impact on people, too. Often, working in infrastructure can mean being very detached from the users of your product, but that's not the case for my team.

I love the way that working at Facebook presents opportunities to try new things. When I first joined, I worked in product development, which I'd never done before. I learned a lot. Then I moved into my current team, and needed to learn Haskell and functional programming, which I'd never done before either. The sheer breadth of opportunity available internally is astounding.

I joined Facebook as a manager. I've been an engineering manager for six years or so at this stage, and so when I joined I thought it'd be similar to joining other companies as an engineering manager. I was so wrong. Learning about how engineering management works at Facebook proved to be a big challenge, simply because the standards Facebook has for engineering management are so different to what I've experienced elsewhere. For example, Facebook management is almost entirely supportive - you don't get anything done here by trying to tell people what to do. You get stuff done by talking to people. I've seen this at other companies but at Facebook that need for collaboration is pervasive throughout the entire company at all levels.

One of the biggest lessons I learned was the power of vulnerability. My previous experiences taught me to show no weakness and get everything done under my own steam. As I acclimated to the Facebook culture I learned that here, asking for help, being open about your own weaknesses and blind spots, and sharing your uncertainty helps you to get the feedback you need to do a really great job. That was a hard pattern to break, but I think I'm a lot more effective now that I've broken it.