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

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.

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?

I've had a lot of friends tell me that they didn't negotiate their offer, so I'm wondering whether it makes sense to negotiate. What are the costs of trying - Is it possible to lose anything if you try to negotiate and fail?

I'm currently doing my 2nd internship, and I have time to do another one before I graduate (I'm currently doing a traditional ~4 year university Computer Science degree). What can I do to lock in a great additional internship for that last slot?

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?

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?

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 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.

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?

Hi Taro Community,

I have been reflecting on my previous internship experience. I am trying to think of ways to make the onboarding process go smoother for my upcoming internship.

For example, I notice that I have some difficulty finding certain items on the computer screen (example: debug settings on the code editor). It takes me a while to look for certain buttons the mentor is instructing me to find.

I was wondering if you have any advice to help make the interaction go more smoothly in the future. Some ideas I have:

• find a way to use the technology on my own before the meeting with the mentor (although it may be difficult since the tools might be internal to the company)
• regularly ask mentor whether I am moving in the right direction (for example: is the button you want me to look at to the left or right of the "Save" button)

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.

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 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?

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!

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.

I will be joining Meta this summer as an intern. Would it ever be acceptable to ask someone other than my intern manager for help? If so, how should I approach this?

I understand that sometimes, my intern manager may be too busy to answer my questions? In order to unblock myself faster, I am thinking of asking someone else in my team. My concern is that I do not wish for my intern manager to feel sidelined, as the intern manager is my primary point of contact.

Sometimes I ask people for referrals and they take some time to respond. Some companies, like TikTok, have a referral link for people to apply, so I’m blocked on waiting a referral until that person responds. Wondering if it’s better to wait for a referral, then apply, or if it’s better to apply without a referral (even in cases like TikTok)? If the former, how long after a job posting should I wait before applying?

In cases of linked-based referrals, is it possible for the referrer to refer me after I applied? If so, how does that usually work? What should I tell my referrer?

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.