My Experience Transitioning From Intern to Full Time
Growing up in an immigrant family can sometimes be difficult, and my parents worked tirelessly to both instill a strong work ethic in me and maintain our family while I was studying in school. Although education is not the only path to success, it was the clearest path for me to pursue my American dream. During my time as a computer science student at the City College of New York, I was exposed to numerous computer programming languages and eventually figured out that I wanted to build software that can help millions of people.
On the date that I received my offer letter from WW for a summer internship before my senior year, I knew I was on track to a new chapter in my life. During my internship, I worked on the back-end team for WW Studio tech. The Studio tech team is responsible for the systems that members interact with and employees use to create meaningful, personalized experiences in WW Studios across the globe. Prior to joining, I expected to work on some intern projects that might not have major impact on product delivery. However, I was wrong — we weren’t treated differently. We worked closely with engineers, product managers, and QA to deliver our product on an agile workflow. I eventually owned a big feature that was later delivered to our Studio coaches and members. Not only did I have a chance to work on something fun and valuable, but I also attended several lunch-and-learn sessions with our executive-leadership team and learned about their life lessons and experiences.
Lunch and Learn with CDO Michael Lysaght — Summer 2019
(I am right next to Michael)
Post-graduation, I returned to WW as a software engineer on the wellness experience team during the peak of the pandemic. Early in 2020, the pandemic hit hard, and it has caused many problems globally. WW has taken well-planned actions to keep employees safe and productive: We were allowed to work from home for the remainder of 2020 and continue to do so. Working from home is much more than just the benefits of getting to work in pajamas and having extra sleeping hours. It also means that I can learn to rely on self-motivation and concentration. Just like in the office, my team does daily and weekly meetings. We will gather on Zoom and report what we did yesterday and will do today.
During my time with the wellness experience team, I was responsible for building a new service in JavaScript and PostgreSQL to support the delivery of a new weekly weigh-in experience in the WW app that moves beyond weight as the sole measurement of a member’s success. Currently, if you open the WW app and go to your profile, you’ll find “My weekly check-in,” the feature that my team worked on for the whole year. A good thing about WW engineers, which I appreciate, is they tend to follow best practices, so our code can easily be refactored. We spend time and effort reviewing one another’s pull requests, allowing everyone to contribute to the knowledge of a certain codebase. Once any production defect comes up, any of us can take care of the issue and resolve it quickly and efficiently.
While ownership is an important concept that engineers should have, innovation and creativity are also both relevant. Fortunately, WW engineers are given opportunities to learn and use cutting-edge technologies, as well as free access to LinkedIn Learning and O’Reilly courses for personal development. As an example, I was encouraged by my team’s lead to build a new job that utilizes TypeScript, Kafka, and New Relic to process events in real time. This job processes all member events in the app from a Kafka topic and calculates the badges earned by the member, which then produce back to another topic for other consumer groups to consume.
Entering the year 2021, we had a successful launch of our product, and my team expanded our scope from the weekly check-in to onboarding. As we are still in the process of figuring out the road map for onboarding, I was temporarily moved to another team to assist on a higher-priority feature. Quick note: We are not restricted to a single product area; we have the flexibility to change teams and products. Currently, I am responsible for building a project that is developed in JavaScript and MongoDB. This project is an automatic tracker in the app that tracks the amount of veggies a member consumes through meals, recipes, and foods.
Overall, the company and my coworkers have been very supportive and provided all the resources that I need for my career growth. I am excited to see what my future will look like.
— Songren Zhao, Software Engineer, Fullstack, at WW
Interested in joining the WW team? Check out the Careers page to view technology job listings, as well as open positions on other teams.
