Career Advice About Samsara

Samsara’s a great company, so I would love to receive a return offer and be regarded as a "superstar" intern. What high-level tips do you have to accomplish this?

I try to learn by breaking stuff, but I think that stops working for larger and more complex systems. I also do a lot of grep-ing (e.g. figuring out where a function is called).

I've been able to steadily build my understanding of the Samsara codebase, but I would like to move faster as I have high goals for my internship.

I've been asked to write a design doc for my project; Samsara even has a structure to follow for these. After I understand how the overall system works, I will tackle. I want to make sure that there's a strong storytelling element in my doc, avoiding as much jargon as possible.

I’ve had trouble with this historically, my output per day is inconsistent. I’ll have days where I grind for 12 hours, and other days where I don’t really do anything.

Here are some of the ways I have unproductive days:

• “I’ll just watch this YouTube video”
• “I’ll just grab this snack”
• “I’m blocked by this person”

Here are my Top 3 priorities:

1. Career growth - I want to become a senior/staff engineer as soon as possible.
2. Exciting product space - To have challenging work and growth opportunities.
3. Compensation - If I’m truly achieving the Top 2, this should come naturally.

Here are the options I'm thinking of:

• A medium sized public company like Samsara
• A pre-IPO company (e.g. Airtable)
• A Big Tech company like Meta or Amazon

I want to go the extra mile as an intern and build out additional projects on top of what I've already been assigned. Right now, I'm proposing opportunities and ending messages with "If you want more info, let me know!". Is there anything else I can do?