Software Engineering Intern Career Development Videos, Forum, and Q&A

Hey all,

I am about to have a conversation with my manager for asking me to convert into full time.

I am an international student in USA and I have tried to search for FT’s but in current job market where a lots of companies are on hiring freeze i dint get a lot of opportunities and very few opportunities i got wanted to hire me at lower salary than I am earning in my current internship. So, I want to stick with the company am working with. Also, I loved the team and work culture there are strictly no complaints. All the team and my manager are impressed by 2 projects that I did in my duration of internship.

So in my next call what all things I should include/highlight to make the transition from an intern to full time?

Constantly struggling with recognizing my contribution and promoting my work, as an introvert it almost is like my mind rejects self-appreciation and promotion. What are some small first steps I can take to get comfortable with self-promotion?

Preface: I might sound a bit critical at some points, but I’m asking this question with the intention of learning, not to demean others as this question has been on my mind for a while.

A big reason why people join startups is that at startups you learn faster than you would at big tech. What’s not clear to me though is how this actually translates to having a successful career (especially when transitioning to big tech). Specifically, how does “learning more” in startups/getting more scope in startups translate to “materialistic” rewards such as TC, getting into big tech, getting senior swe faster etc.?

I've seen Seed’s presentation about . He’s clearly achieved amazing things at Klaviyo, but at least from his LinkedIn profile, he joined Meta as an L5 (senior swe) with 4 yoe - couldn’t you achieve this result simply by working at Big Tech for just as long? If that’s the case, then what’s the point of joining a startup?

I’ve watched Taro’s masterclass on choosing a good company (and many other startup-related videos on Taro), and for the pros for startups - specifically getting more scope - seems very superficial. Similarly, the cons for big tech (the inverse of startup pros- harder to find scope) seems also superficial.

I had an internship with Amazon last summer and was lucky enough to have the return internship offer for this summer. I am quite nervous because my tech stack skills are so weak. I am just good at technical interview because I do competitive programming and leetcode a lot, thats why I land my internship offer with Amz.

I forgot almost everything from my last internship. I have to admit that I was a very bad intern, not to say the worst intern. My mentor and the senior engineer of my team did the most of my last project so I got the return offer.

Please suggest me any sources to improve my tech stack skills, projects, open sources, ... so I can perform well at this summer. My team last year used Kotlin for backend codebase.

I'm an incoming SDE intern and will be joining the team at the end of this month. I'm eager to get started and make the most of this opportunity. Last summer, I feel like I didn't perform up to my own expectations and left some room for improvement. I was fortunately to have a return offer but I think I don't really deserve it. This summer, I am committed to learning from my past experiences and striving to do my best. As part of my preparation, I'm planning to have a meeting with our manager to discuss my goals for this summer.

1. Are there any key topics or questions you recommend I should raise in this initial meeting?
2. How can I best communicate my summer goals to our manager?
3. Is there anything you wish you had known or asked when you first joined the team?

I joined SAP as a Data Strategy intern. I have one - one calls scheduled with my manager and the rest of the team. One of my team members advised me to have goals, and expectations of the internship ready before going on to 1:1's.

Questions:

1. How can I be realistic and not desperate in explaining my goals and expectations as an intern?
2. Is there any video of the first 1:1 meeting with the manager and team regarding setting goals and expectations out of the internship?

With learning other languages do you go straight into building or you have to learn some stuff first? I saw a video and the guy was like he just used Go getting started and just built as he go and learned way more from that than a tutorial. Cause there’s a CLI tool I wanna make with Go but I’m tired of the tutorial I just wanna build.

So i'm a entry level engineer and was reading some post on twitter about getting deeper in CS to be taken seriously. The post mentioned learning a lower level language and I always wanted to learn C++. But when i asked my friend who is senior that then went on to become a CTO at his own company he told me I should learn java since it's low enough that a lot of systems are built on it which in return means more jobs. When I looked at job listings for both languages there were fairly the same amount of job postings but he's saying it would be easier to get in entry level with java and that C++ is more for mid and higher levels. also i always wanted to learn C++ because i saw that with python is mainly used at hedge funds which eventually in my career i always wanted to join one, so which one should I choose? And please make a choice for me lol and not respond with "whatever you feel like doing", because i'm kinda indecisive with this choice.

I've begun to notice that some companies are starting to ask less leetcode-y type questions and are asking more OOP-type questions. So for example, a classic question is to ask you to design a class hierarchy for an elevator system or a parking lot. On the scale of abstraction, it's not nitty gritty like Leetcode questions where you need to write the logic for every part of your code and actually run code, but it's not super high level like L4/L5 sys design where you're talking about scalability. It's something like the questions you see or . How do you approach these problems? How are you evaluated on them?

Do you have to have 1:1 with intern manager weekly or is it okay to just send them an email talking about what you accomplished during the week provided you meet with mentor daily.

Does anyone know if Applied Intuition is a good place to start a career for a new grad? When I look at what I want in my career, I want:

1. Career growth
2. Brand
3. Compensation

Career growth at this company is quite good. The blogs, and the people who I’ve talked to throughout the interviews consistently echo that there’s a lot of learning and growth that happens.

The reported TC is around 190K. The equity is paid in options and the package between 30-40% equity. Compwise, it’s around big tech levels - higher than apple, competitive with Meta, and slightly lower than Google, Amazon and Netflix. Compared to pre-big tech startups, it’s on the mid to  lower end - 5-10% higher than Asana and Slack, but also 5-10% lower than Stripe and Databricks. Maybe someone can comment if my analysis is reasonable?

The only thing I haven’t touched on is brand. Compared to other offers in the valley, like big tech and pre-IPOs like Databricks and Notion, how does Applied Intuition stand? Can someone evaluate it from a brand perspective? The main brands I have are T5 CS masters, T5 CS undergrad. Would it be worthwhile for someone like me to join Applied Intuition?

I'm heading towards the end of my internship and I'm starting to regret not taking an R&D intern offer I had with an F1000 (think of Dell, SAP, Autodesk, etc.). I signed an offer with a startup and then received the opportunity to do some cool GenAI stuff with the F1000. Looking back I feel like I should’ve reneged the startup for this F1000, but I was too scared since I was going to work with my closest friend group (they’re the ones who pushed very heavily for my case and the ones who sent the offer) at the startup and I didn’t want to burn a bridge by reneging. I also wanted to try doing a software engineering internship since many of my past internships were R&D oriented, where things like code quality and other engineering practices didn’t matter as much. The startup, though young, has reputable investors, an industry veteran as the founder and a successful MVP, so I thought it’d be a good place to grow. The return offer is still up in the air due to visa issues.

I regret declining the F1000 because I feel like I could’ve specialized even more at GenAI, which is what my most recent experience has been. Furthermore, being a F1000, getting an RO might’ve been easier since my visa issue wouldn’t be as big of a problem. Looking at my resume, it’s now a jumble of robotics, machine learning, GenAI, academic publications and now software engineering. While each portion of my resume is individually strong, when you put them all together, it feels like I’m suffering from an identity crisis.

However, I think the internship went fine. I built a distributed database and message streaming system for my internship. The project was pretty open ended so I got to own the whole project following a set of stringent performance requirements. My friends at FAANG considered my intern project to be FAANG mid-level scope, which is pretty cool. I learned a lot about good engineering, system design (read the entirety of DDIA), diving into large codebases to make changes and more.

I think the right answer is just to accept that I can’t change the past and just keep moving forward, but I can’t stop thinking about what could’ve happened if I had taken that F1000 offer. I’ve had trouble sleeping the past couple of nights thinking about it. This is my last internship so it’s pretty important, and I feel like I squandered it by making a poor choice.

So how do you get over mistakes you make in your career? Any different perspectives?

Hi everyone,

I’m currently interning at a top-tier company (think small size, FAANG-level in terms of engineering prestige) and fortunate to have offers from multiple top companies. I’m trying to decide between two software engineering roles: Meta (Menlo Park) and Tesla (Autopilot team, Palo Alto).

Just to clarify, this is a software engineering position on the Tesla Autopilot team, not a machine learning or research role.

Meta

• Tons of publicly available data points.
• Top-of-market pay.
• Opportunity to work with some of the smartest engineers around.
• Fast promotions and clear growth opportunities.
• Amazing perks: free food, fancy office spaces.
• Overall, a safe and reliable choice where I know what to expect.

Tesla Autopilot

• This is where I’m a bit confused. There isn’t much information available online about Tesla’s engineering roles, likely because their teams are smaller.
• Surprisingly, their New Grad compensation is an outlier, double that of Meta, which already pays very well.
• However, I have no idea how compensation at Tesla evolves over time (e.g., after promotions) compared to Meta.

My Dilemma

With Meta, I feel confident about what I’m getting into, as there’s a wealth of information online. I can reasonably predict my total compensation (TC) over the next 1, 2, or 5 years. On the other hand, Tesla’s Autopilot team is appealing, especially with the high starting pay, but I’m uncertain about their pay scale for higher-level roles or how career progression looks at Tesla.

The perks at Meta like free food, a fancy office, and great benefits are definitely tempting, but Tesla’s compensation makes it hard to ignore.

Does anyone have insights into Tesla’s Autopilot team or their long-term compensation structure for software engineers? Any advice or data points would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance!

My manager made it clear that my org is not offering return FT offers, but that he would put "incline return" for an internship position if I stayed another year in school (or somehow delayed graduation until 2025).

I could just take random classes or another major to extend my time in school. I also could do a 1-year Masters program which I have already been admitted into. But I am an older student and would rather not stay another year in school. I also feel like I am learning very little in school (I go to a small state school). Compared to the ridiculous amount I learned this summer in the industry, I feel like staying in school for another year would be a huge waste of money and time.

I could potentially work Fall/Spring internships for the next year (so basically a gap year) to artifically delay graduation by a year as well.

Becuase I go to a small state school, getting interviews from Big Tech is extremely hard. We send about 1-3 kids to each FAANG+ company each year and I was only able to get 2 FAANG+ interviews even with refferals to every top company, a 4.0 GPA and relevent experience. Even getting actual SWE engineering jobs is really hard with most CS grads getting jobs labeled "SWE" but that involve very little coding.

Because of that, my worry is this might be my only chance to break into Big Tech for a long time (if ever).

So is it worth delaying my graduation for a shot at big tech? Or should I just graduate and start my career, even if its at a non-tech company (with potentially very little actual engineering work)?

Hi fellow Tarodactyls! I'm preparing for a call with a hiring manager which it'll be behavioral & my fit with the team; and, at my level (new grad), there are definitely work situations I haven't faced.

That said, I'm wondering how I should prepare for questions on things I technically haven't done (i.e., "Tell me about a time you built a cross-functional feature that influenced other teams"). How do I frame my answer so that it doesn't trigger my interviewer's liar detector, but also open doors for further conversation (instead of an "I don't know" response)?

Hello Community,

I've been struggling to get interviews for a while now. Here are some things I've tried.

• Cold Applying
• Cold emailing recruiters
• Applying with referrals
• Networking

Nothing seems to be working. What can I do/improve to land more interviews?

First of all, thank you guys for making these wonderful courses on Taro. The courses on Onboarding, Internships, Code Quality, and Promotions really helped me shine in my internship.

After my internship, my manager gave me "Strong Hire"; however, I was scared that headcount will be an issue so I applied to some other internships from different companies as "backup" (I planned to graduate an year later if I didn't get the return offer).

Luckily, I received a full-time return offer from Amazon. Now, I am in the interview loop for Google Internship. I am wondering what I should do:

1. Tell my Google Recruiter that I got an Amazon offer and don't waste their time.
2. Do the Google interview, and if I get the offer, go to Google for an internship before joining Amazon full time
3. Do the Google interview, and if I get the offer, reject the offer.

Additional context:

• My team at Amazon is amazing. I love working with software architecture, and the hours are really good. However, promotions are on the slower end. It seems like people from my team are getting promoted in 2.5-3 years.
• The location of Amazon will be in Vancouver (where I grew up - I don't need to pay rent), the location of Google is either Toronto or Montreal (where I will need to pay rent)

I'm grateful to have received a return offer as a backend engineer. However, my long-term career goal is to transition into a machine learning engineering role within the company.

• As a recent graduate, what are the most effective strategies to prepare for this transition?
• While I understand that my immediate focus should be on excelling in my backend engineering role, I'm keen to explore how I can simultaneously build my skills in machine learning during my free time. Could you offer any advice or insights on balancing these two objectives effectively?