Dev Spotlight: Charleen Wang
Here at Samsara, we love our people. To share what it’s like working here, we created a Dev Spotlight series to highlight members of our team. We’ll talk with a Samsarian to learn why they’re with us, what their work is like, and what they’re all about.
Meet Charleen Wang! Charleen is an engineer on our Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team. She first joined Samsara as a Full Stack Engineering intern in the Summer of 2019. During her internship, she had the chance to learn more about Samsara’s teams and culture before joining full-time in August 2020. Charleen took some time to share more about her intern → new grad experience and some of her favorite projects, learnings, and experiences so far!
Why did you decide to join Samsara?
As a junior at MIT, I was trying to navigate the Career Fair on campus for that internship that will help me launch my career. I went to the Samsara booth, and I was surprised to see a bunch of familiar faces as there were so many MIT alums. I spoke with a new grad firmware engineer at the time, Anubhav, about his project building a device that detects factory machine failure. He explained to me how factory machines are gigantic and when they break down, it sometimes can be very dangerous and potentially fatal to the people working there. Because of his project, we can detect and fix problems before they occur, which can end up saving people’s lives!
Listening to the projects that these engineers worked on at Samsara, I learned about this industry outside of our bubble of high tech, where engineering solutions can really make a big difference. This was an untapped industry with so many unique problems that the world of tech doesn’t normally encounter. I felt inspired and I wanted to help solve these problems, so I figured Samsara was the place to be.
Throughout the interviewing process for the intern role, I got to meet more engineers and learn more about the engineering culture here. In addition to just talking about the projects at Samsara, my interviewer gave me feedback on how to be a more effective interviewee and shared advice on how to make the most out of my time in college. Even though this was an interview and I was technically being evaluated, I felt like I walked away from the interview having gained something too. This made me feel like the people here would help me grow my career in ways beyond developing technical skills.
After completing my internship, this aspect of personal growth in Samsara culture was what really made me want to come back full time. Every time I’m stuck on something or need advice on anything, whether it be my supportive teammates, my mentors, or just random coworkers in the office, I feel like there’s always someone to reach out to. As I’m starting off my career, there’s a lot of self-discovery and uncertainty over the future. However, at Samsara I feel like I’m surrounded by a bunch of inspiring role models that I can learn from. I’m really grateful to work with such supportive and inspiring peers that motivate and challenge me every day.
How would you describe your internship experience?
On my very first day, my tech lead Kenny brought in a giant watermelon. We sliced it up and everyone in the office came by to introduce themselves and eat some fruit. It was a really cute way to start my full stack internship on the Assets team. Assets works on building tools that help customers manage their assets. Some examples of assets are truck trailers and construction equipment. Our devices track these items so that our customers can have insight into where they are and how they are being used. Samsara’s product teams consist of full-stack engineers, firmware engineers, designers, and product managers, so I got to work with a bunch of different people for my project.
My project was working on a report that helps customers understand the utilization of their trucks and trailers. Knowing utilization is super important to our customers because it allows them to analyze whether or not their trucks and trailers are being used efficiently. A lot of our customers rent their assets, so knowing their utilization can help them save money on what is not being used or redistributing the work to be more efficient. In order to gather research and ask for feedback, I sat in on a few customer calls, and we even went onsite to visit one of our customers! Going onsite was super interesting because we got to see all of our products being used in action. Physically being there and observing our customers’ day-to-day really allowed me to put myself in our customers’ shoes and reflect on the work that I was doing.
Outside of my regularly scheduled intern activities, I was pretty involved in the anime club. Once a week after work, we would all pile into a meeting room and watch anime together. At the end of my internship, a giant group of us went out to Japantown to get ramen together as a sort of going away party. After I started full-time, I joined back in as we started watching shows together remotely. We watch 2 episodes every Monday evening, and we’re currently watching To Your Eternity!
What is your current team responsible for?
When I joined Samsara full time, I joined the SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) team. We work on reliability, cloud infrastructure, and infrastructure efficiency. This means every time we have an outage, we look into systemic changes that we can make to prevent this issue from happening again. We also build tools to automate processes and help teams manage their services. I like to think of it as building infrastructure that sustains the infrastructure for all of our services. As an infra team, our customers are the developers at Samsara, so we work on projects to help make their work more reliable.
Even though my intern experience was on a full-stack team and my project was largely frontend focused, I decided to switch to SRE because I wanted to gain the experience of what it's like to work in infrastructure. Being on a product team as an intern, the world of infrastructure was a black box that I didn’t really have to touch. Yet because of this, I was curious as to how everything worked under the hood. My favorite class in college was Systems Security where we studied security attacks, learned how to use them, and also how to fix them. The practice of investigating issues and fixing them is pretty core to SRE.
Because our customers are our coworkers, my team spends a lot of time answering questions and helping other teams debug issues. This includes helping teams use AWS, investigating outages, and helping them roll out their projects. I really like helping other teams because I get to learn about what other people are working on and also get experience tackling a wide variety of problems.
What are you currently working on?
A big part of what SRE does is outage improvements. This means we work on outage prevention and long-term reliability improvements, but also we work on improving the process of outage response. In order to make sure that our outage mitigation runs smoothly, we have an internal Slackbot integration (called Sambot) that pages teams to get involved. Every time we have an outage, we need to get Product, Support, and all the relevant engineers involved to help with the issue. Because of COVID, good communication during outages is even more critical as everyone is working remotely. In order for people to understand and follow what’s going on, it’s super important that we document and send updates regularly.
In a previous quarter, we worked on building out an incident response slack flow using Sambot. Once an incident is declared and we will automatically set up a pinned post in slack where we can assign responders and include other important information (such as a zoom link, the status of the outage, etc). After gathering feedback and letting teams get used to this tool, we are revisiting this previous project and improving on it. Specifically, we’re working on integrating our internal tool to automatically create and update our Statuspage.
I really enjoy this project because I get to work with my teammate, Daniel, who is based in the UK! Samsara has 4 locations (San Francisco, San Jose, Atlanta, and London), and my team has members that live in San Francisco and London. It’s a really interesting experience to collaborate across different time zones because it really teaches you how to take ownership of your tasks and be good at communicating progress.
If you could give one piece of advice to future student applicants, what would it be?
Think of interviews as a two-way street! I think it is easy to get caught up in nerves or feeling like you need to “pass the test”, but you should make sure that you are getting something out of the interview as well. Interviews are also an opportunity that you get to meet people and talk to them about anything. In all of my interviews, I’ve talked to some super cool people and learned interesting things about their careers. Ask good questions, learn about what they are working on, and maybe you’ll learn something about yourself in the process!
What’s the best advice you’ve received from another Samsarian?
The best advice that I received is from my manager James! After I started full-time on SRE, I had a lot to learn. Everything I knew about systems engineering is from this one class that I took, but beyond that, all of my experience was full-stack, and mostly frontend. Being a complete newbie was definitely intimidating, and there was a lot of feelings of imposter syndrome. James told me that this is the process of learning how to learn. Although it feels difficult now, if you get used to this feeling and focus on a love of learning, it will be super easy to pick up anything in the future. For example, if you wanted to do a career change in the future or just wanted to try anything new, you will have to experience what it’s like to not know anything again. Being comfortable with not knowing everything is a skill that you can only practice when you are new at something.
Who is your favorite Samsarian and why?
Shout out to Edwin Zhang! When I was an intern, I asked Edwin a question and he ended up spending an hour teaching me how to create a new linter rule to prevent devs from introducing bugs to our codebase. Edwin is on a totally different team and I was just an intern, yet he took the extra time out of his day to teach me something new. He taught me that little things like a small linter rule can have a wide impact. All it takes is just questioning the status quo and just doing it!
You can learn more about our Early Career programs and apply to open roles here! Follow along on our Canvas page to learn about upcoming events to learn more about Samsara and our internship program.
