My Redfin Internship
Seattle or San Francisco? Why not both?
By Kyle Wong
As someone who was born and raised in California, avocados are staple food. On my first day of internship, after meeting all the interns, my amazing team (Agent Efficiency #AE), and a few other Redfin employees, I had some free time to explore the office. Out of curiosity, I checked out the kitchen, only to realize that there are so many avocados, even more than my previous internship in Downtown LA! This inspired my daily routine during work. When I arrive at the office around 8 AM, I make avocado toasts with different variations: with whole wheat bread or everything bagel, and any combination of the following: lemon, egg, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, olive oil, salt, and black pepper. Now, I can still be a Californian in the beautiful city of Seattle.
Besides the daily routine, I had a very worthwhile internship. Based on what I hear from friends in some companies, I enjoyed the fact that Redfin gives a lot of important responsibility to interns, treating them as full-time employees. For instance, my team encouraged me to take on the tech debt representative role during the Seattle Redfin Summer 2018 Hackathon, which was initially daunting since I only had knowledge in a small subset of the team’s codebase.
Regardless, no matter which Redfin office I was at, Redfin consistently has an amazing company culture.
Also, Redfin interns (aka Redfinterns) get the chance to work on something challenging. For me, I had minimal experience working in the backend, which gives my team more reason to give me a project that has a heavy backend component. While I struggled a lot, asked many questions, and getting roasted on code reviews, I ended my internship learning so much and became a better software engineer. I also ended up producing a working feature in the agent tools: New Mutual Notifications on the Deal Queue. This project provides notifications to transaction coordinators on what deals reached the mutual acceptance stage recently, so the transaction coordinators can quickly work on those deals. According to my mentor and manager, this project is impactful as it meets the quarterly goal of making the deal queue more efficient by reducing response time of new mutual deals by 10% and providing ways to improve the customer experience of buying houses at Redfin. I am grateful I got to make a real impact to the company during the short period of time that is 12 weeks.
I also enjoyed the work-life balance Redfin strongly encourages. While working, there are Slack channels that are meant to be entertaining such as the #donuts channel, where you get “donuted” if you forget to lock your laptop when you leave the room; in other words, you have to bring donuts if someone posts “I bring donut” from your unlocked laptop in the #donuts channel :woot:! In the office, there is a wonderful game room with a ping pong table, video games, and a huge selection of board games. There are also fun outdoor intern events such as white water rafting at the Sauk River and hiking with Glenn the CEO at Poo Poo Point. In addition, we also got to participate in the general company events such as the summer hackathon, “social hours,” and picnic.
Personally, outside of work, I visited many places in Seattle, from the typical Space Needle and Chihuly Garden and Glass to hidden gems such as Chophouse Row and sunset at the Volunteer Park “donut” (It’s actually called the “Black Sun”). To satisfy my wanderlust, my manager even allowed me to work at the San Francisco office for a week (they have fewer avocados, ironically), so I got to experience the best of both worlds! Regardless, no matter which Redfin office I was at, Redfin consistently has an amazing company culture. I met amazing and brilliant people at both places; without all the people I met at Redfin, I honestly would not have learned as much and would not have gotten a lot out of this internship.
