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

I recently declined an offer from a company and the recruiter is asking me why I declined and where I’m heading to next. I’m wondering if there’s any benefit (or harm) to disclosing this info? I would love to talk with them again in the future but I don’t think this company is the right choice for me at this moment.

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”

Wanted to know if anyone here has purchased and was it worth the $90?

I recently interned at Microsoft, and I was able to get a return offer for another internship for the same team. I'm back at school now, and my goal is to nail the return internship so I can get a return offer to work full-time. In my spare time while at school, how can I best prepare myself to hit the ground running for my return internship? For context, I worked with Azure APIs during my internship, being more of a back-end developer.

I've seen Taro's videos on building side projects, and Alex's advice was to not monetize and focus on getting users.

Prior to joining Taro, I've been running a B2B startup for almost half a year. Recently, I've been able to get clients who are multinational corporations. Think of places like the Four Seasons group, Coca Cola, Mercedes Benz, etc (and I got clients just by cold emailing). If I keep pushing, I should be able to rake in at least (this is conservative) 50K in ARR by the end of the year. My startup also got interviews at YC and Sequoia Arc - I got passed on since the market I'm working in is quite small despite having everything else right (funny that both Sequoia and YC gave the exact same feedback).

So essentially, I've done the complete opposite of what Alex advises - build a product where big companies are willing to pay you big bucks for your product. I'm wondering if this would still be as impressive as something like Alex's random name picker? What percentile of applicants would this project place me? Is it good enough to stand out? If not, should I change my approach (though my gutfeel is to keep doing what I'm doing)?

As a new software engineering intern who recently subscribed to Taro Premium, how can I effectively leverage the platform and its available services? What internal and external resources should I familiarize myself with to ensure a successful and productive start to my internship?

PS: My internship begins this week.

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’m choosing between three different options for organizations to join as an undergrad in CS. I’m an incoming Amazon SDE Intern and looking to focus on maximizing prepping for the internship and future opportunities.

First, a group working (paid part time, associated officially with college) on a student facing grading tool used actively by 8000+ students. Java/Spring Boot tech stack. Large code base with full-on github style pull and merge contribution style. Ex TikTok SWE told me it’s the closest they’ve experienced to industry style SWE at my college.

Second, various student-led groups with focuses in quant finance, data science, etc. Some doing projects with companies like quant companies like Millennium, Sig, etc. Some doing app projects used by thousands of students on campus (dining hall, game tracking, etc)

Third, focusing on my own growth and development. Setting more time aside for interview prep/side projects.

I believe this discussion would be very valuable to any undergrads because this dichotomy of choice is common. Personally, since Alex emphasizes the importance of contributing to large codebases like in open source then I see the first option as the leading candidate. But I’ve been running with the third option of solely focusing on my interview prep and it seems to have yielded well.

I have a new grad final with Meta and I had a mock interview on . I did pretty badly on the interview as it took too long for me to arrive at the solution and write down the code. The interviewer suggested that I try purchasing a dedicated coaching package for 5 lessons, which is perfect since my Meta interview is in 3 weeks (I take 2 lessons/week). Issue is that it's quite a heavy price tag at around 2.8K. I'm wondering if anyone else has used the service?

Breakout startups are basically startups that have found product-market-fit and are growing at an incredible pace. So think of the OpenAIs and Databricks of the world. Back in the day these would've been baby Google and baby Facebook. Here's a link for more examples:

Sam Altman, Dustin Moskovitz and a few others strongly suggest people in any stage of their career to join these startups.

I revisited Taro's course on picking a company, and there doesn't seem to be much info on them. The course does talk about startups but I feel that startups have so many stages that it's hard to make generalizations across them.

From my understanding, it seems like breakout startups are a great place to join:

Pros

1. You get incredible career growth since you're a part of a rapidly growing company
2. TC is usually pretty competitive with FAANG (with a caveat)
3. These startups usually have very strong engineering culture and network, with most people being Ex-FAANG

Cons:

1. Work life balance seems to be worse than big tech on average since there's so much stuff to do (like 20-30% worse on average?)
2. The equity portion of your TC is still paper money, so there's a chance the IPO flops and your TC basically halves
3. Brand name is not may not be as good as big tech, though this is heavily dependent on the company (like you'd definitely interview someone from OpenAI, but I doubt many have heard of Helion). A question I have is how big is the difference in the brand value between your average breakout startup and a big tech? Is it negligible?

The Taro course suggests new grads to pick big tech. Funnily enough Sam Altman laments that someone picked big tech over a breakout startup. I'm not saying that these two pieces of advice are contradictory, but what factors should you consider if you're deciding between big tech and breakout startups?

I got offers from Meta, several top hedge funds (Citadel, Millennium, etc.), Series E unicorn and a series C robotics startup and I want opinions on who to move forward with.

From a SWE’s perspective, Meta wins, but 10 years down the line, I don’t see myself as a SWE. I see myself doing (1) a startup, (2) going into VC or working in (3) product management or a more business-focused role. For the first 3-4 years of my career I want to get engineering training, position myself to do interesting and impactful work, networking with a talented team and building the skills that’ll set me up for the 3 career paths that I’ve discussed. I’ve listed companies in order of preference :

1. Series E Unicorn
   1. Company is customer-focused (engineers always talk to customers) and engineers wear many hats. These are skills for building startups.
   2. Getting startup experience is great for going into VC.
   3. I’m working on one of their core products, so there’s a lot of chances for growth. High performers become PMs in 2-3 years
   4. 30-40% ex-FAANG and lots of MIT, Berkeley and Stanford alum
2. Meta
   1. Meta trains you to become a great SWE, and you need to be a great builder for startups
   2. Meta doesn’t seem to prep me for the VC world, but the brand name alone will help get your feet in the door
   3. I have the optionality to climb the corporate ladder to do product management
3. Hedge funds
   1. Hedge funds don’t really train you to be a great SWE or a great VC, but the brand definitely helps
   2. I work really close to PnL for a division that is undergoing hypergrowth, so lots of interesting things to be done
   3. Can also break into management relatively quickly
4. Series C robotics startup
   1. I’m a SWE and the place that makes the money are the robotics engineers, so not really positioned to make a huge change

Unicorn > Meta/HF > robotics startup

I want to join the unicorn since it aligns well with what I want to do in the future, but the brand of Meta is really hard to pass on (only brands I have is MS from T5 CS and BS from T10 CS). On one hand I have a long career down the line, and this is one of many decisions I'll make, and if the unicorn doesn't work out, then it's not a big deal. On the other hand, I feel like if I don't choose prestige and the unicorn fails, I'd have a much harder time in life. It's like messing up an RPG build.

I’m curious what people’s thoughts are and what things I’m not considering?

Meeting with the hiring manager tomorrow and I’m pretty nervous. Any last minute advice?

Context: It was for a full time role with NYT.

The rounds are recruiter screening, meeting with the hiring manager, technical interview, system design talking about building an example system and what systems you've worked with in the past, then final meeting with recruiter and team.

My brother is very worried about getting a return offer at Meta - he'll be interning there this summer. He reviewed the videos on , but is still confused on who he would assign to review diffs/vouch for his performance other than his EM.

Hey Taro community. So I saw on and Alex touched on seed startups being not really good for early careers. I wanted to ask: So I met this person at a tech meet up and we exchanged twitter names over the summer. She’s currently building in health tech now. She made a tweet asking if any engineers wanted to work at a seed stage AI devtools startup (round led by top tier technical firm) and to DM her if you were interesting.

Should I do it or just leave it? Knowing how the climate is now just thought about beggars can’t be choosers.

I have 4 main tasks that I have this summer but I don’t know if I’m allocating the right amount of time into them and I’d like some help on figuring out what to prioritise. 

Before we get into them, I want to list my goals this summer to motivate the 4 tasks I came up with (from most to least important).

1. Get a return offer - pretty self-explanatory. It’ll take a lot of stress off this next job-searching season. I'm working at a small startup and amongst all early-mid stage startups, I’d probably take this one over them (assuming pay is around equal). With that being said, I’d much much rather be in big tech, which leads me to…
2. Be interview and resume ready for the upcoming season. I think this decomposes into 2 parts
   1. Have very strong resume points about what I did. My project has reasonable scope and I think I can push to expand scope. Not sure if a recruiter cares about impact though. (Especially for new grads), would appreciate any insight on this (e.g, would a recruiter really care if you built a fully distributed KV store that helps the company store terabytes of data/day vs building a simple CRUD app)
   2. Be interview ready. Grinding Leetcode right now and I feel like I have a long way to go. On a good day I can pass a phone screen but I have trouble with on-sites. 
3. Have research output for grad school - I’m in a grad program right now and I need to do work for the summer. During the Fall I have another research internship lined up with a well-known company (wouldn’t really call it big tech though). Part of this internship is showing my supervisor that I can handle the load of doing research while maintaining internship responsibilities. I also need to finish up my thesis.
4. Personal project - I run a startup and I have a few big corporations reach out for a trial. Product is mostly built so mostly the work is talking to customers and fixing bugs

When is the best time to quit software engineering and pursue an influencer career (like Rahul did)? Do you recommend having a decade of corporate experience first before becoming an influencer?

I really want to build a personal brand and build a coaching/info product business. I am not a big proponent of working for someone else; I am in my job just so I can pay my bills, not necessarily because I love the job (which might be detrimental when I will be pushing for senior/staff promotions because my "passion" will be lacking?).

I have seen influencers making six figures (if not millions) in 1 - 3 years of starting their business. That is what inspires me - as the growth is exponential compared to a SWE career.

(Context: I go to a top university, and have done few internships. Thinking if I should pursue SWE full-time after graduation, or just create an influencer business right away. My long term goal is to have my own startup and I believe having a personal brand will help.)

How early in the internship do you make your intentions of wanting to get a return offer clear and how would you go about doing so, do you just talk to your manager or your mentors as well?

Hi everyone, I'm about to graduate from a pretty rigorous computer science program at a top university (University of Waterloo), but my results haven't been stellar. I often struggled to keep up with the workload, and I’d sometimes skip parts of assignments just to manage everything. On exams, I’d usually be around the mean/median of the class rather than at the top, and I’d rate my overall performance in the low 70s out of 100. I also didn’t do much coding on the side, so I worry that I didn’t build the same technical skills or ‘grind character’ that a lot of people in top tech roles seem to have.

My goal is to start at a top company, but I’m concerned about whether I’ll be able to handle the workload and thrive in a rigorous environment like FAANG. I know people who started with lower GPAs but did really well in these roles, usually because they did a ton of coding outside of class, which I didn’t.

For those of you who’ve been there or have mentored new grads in similar situations, do you think I’d still have a shot at succeeding in a top tech role? If you were in my shoes, what would you prioritize in these last couple of months before graduating to set yourself up for success?

Another question - should I still target FAANG as my first job, or build my way up by first working at a startup? I am afraid I might not have the technical skills to thrive at a FAANG, yet.

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 have 2 core goals:

1. Learn from the best engineers and pick up as many skills from them as possible
2. Become a founder

Given that, should I work on side projects full-time and apply to incubators or continue doing internships like my current one and doing side projects on the side?

Hi, I have a Meta new grad interview coming up and I got LC premium for the first time. I wanted to ask what filters you recommend using.

I am thinking of this - Filter the list by past 30 days, sort by frequency and then do the top 30 from there.

What do you think? You can also filter by past 3 months, 6 months, all time. Thanks!

I just had my onsite interview for Meta and I found it really strange that my interviewer only asked me behavioral questions for 30 mins. I used the STAR approach when describing my projects and experiences and I couldn't catch any red flags when talking about my experiences, so I'm surprised that it only lasted for 30 mins and I'm a little worried as to why it was so short. I cross referenced my answers with the junior level interview performance and it matches up with what Alex described. I did fill the remaining 15 mins with questions based on what Alex suggested. Does anyone have any thoughts?

In the resume course, Alex mentioned doing great work is a prerequisite to having a great resume. I would like to see some examples of great work.

Let's say my domain is frontend web development. What would be considered "great" work -

a) in side projects
b) in my internship/job

One obvious one is a high number of users using the product. What are some other examples?

Would also appreciate if you could include some low effort, high ROI examples as well (if they exist).

Thanks!

A company (startup) asked me to provide a few reference checks as a formality and one of them was my manager from this summer. I asked her if she was willing to give me a reference. She agreed and even called me assuring she'd say good things about me.

After the reference call she follows up with me and said the reference call was short and said it went fine. Most of what she said was fine except she mentioned a weakness of mine and she poorly showed that I actively worked on it. They said something like:

XYZ moves really fast and his project evolves really quickly, which sometimes keeps stakeholders out of the loop. However, we managed to align expectations and complete the project with high quality

Normally, reference checks should be perfect and this clearly isn't. I'm not sure if that would appear as a red flag to a manager. I don't think my manager meant ill will, but since this is her first time giving a reference call, she probably was inexperienced. I feel really nervous and dejected because there were other people who might've been able to give reference, though they'd be from multiple summers ago. Is this something I should worry about, or is it minor?

The company has yet to call my second referrer, who also assured me that they'd say good things about me. What should I do with this one to absolutely make sure they say the right things?