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

Hey all, I am an intern at my company (where I want to return full-time). My work is fully remote and I am meeting my team members in-person for the first time this week for lunch + games (and with some of them I have not even talked with virtually). Want to get some tips on how I can create a great impression (e.g. what things to talk about with them, etc)

A recruiter is offering to interview with me in-person since they happen to be in the area, but they are happy to take the meeting online as well. I’m wondering what would be the better option? I’m leaning towards online but it seems that they’re pushing for an in-person interview.

In my case, I wouldn’t need to travel too far to meet with the recruiter. Wondering what the pros and cons to an in-person interview are, and how it compares to a virtual one?

Every time I work on a project, the amount of progress increases logarithmically. This means I start off really strong and I end off really weak. I’ve noticed this for a majority of projects that I work on.

I think a big reason why this happens is because when my project is able to get 50-60% of cases (ie it works but don’t touch it), internally my brain feels like it’s done and I don’t want to work on it anymore. When I start off a project I get huge boosts in dopamine when I finish a part and get it to work. Over time there are fewer and fewer things to do and I don’t get as big a dopamine hit when I gradually finish up remaining features. This gets really ****bad when I try to think of edge cases, because it’s not entirely clear what needs to be done, and I don’t even know what edge cases exist.

This has affected the quality of my work and I would like some strategies of keeping high output even towards the later stages of a project which involves less excited parts of work.

I think this somewhat relates to Alex’s video on “”, but I feel that the hard part is that I don’t even know where to begin. I don’t know where edge cases may. On a component level it’s not too bad, but when you’re doing integration testing and when the space of possible inputs is extremely high, it feels like you’re put in the middle of the ocean.

As an example, recently I was tasked with writing a bot to draw an ordered set of lines, curves and arcs on a canvas. The input a vector representation of the drawing and the output is an mp4 recording.

First 3 days went pretty well. In fact, I pretty much built the entire system and integrated everything. The annoying part comes to solving edge cases from integration testing. For the next 7 days I spent days kind of just sitting around, testing my system, and getting bored. I was waiting for my partner to finish his part of the system.

What strategies are there to make my output more consistent? I tried doing a test plan but they tend to be really shallow because I don’t know how the system looks like/what edge cases look like until I’ve actually built the product.

tldr: I have an offer from Meta and a niche growth-stage (series D+) startup. My gutfeel is telling me to go to the startup even though it’s all against conventional wisdom to go to big tech, and I don’t know if I’m making a mistake.

I got into a growth-stage startup that’s relevant to my background and aspirations to be a founder.

• Engineers talk to customers, work with sales and scope projects with PMs. These tasks are important skills for me. Meta is more siloed until E5, and even then it’s still not quite end-to-end.
• I talked to over 10+ engineers (including 2 friends) and all of them love working there despite the long hours. I’ve heard both the pros and cons and I know what I’m getting myself into.
• I aggregated all of the new grads’ starter projects and compared them with my friends at FAANG. My big tech friends say that the new grads at the startup are doing FAANG mid-level work as their first project.
• The team I’ll be matched to aligns very well with my strengths and interests. Whereas I won’t know team matching with Meta until later.
• Business is doing well. VC friends said there’s a strong growth trajectory in a hot space. Cap table is all the top VC firms and angels.
• It’s a stable company and few performance-based layoffs, in contrast my friends at Meta are all stressed about PSC.
• If I don’t take a risk now then when will I?

However, it seems like every forum and well-regarded figure (Interviewing IO, Ryan Peterman, Dan Lu, even Taro, etc.) in the SWE space advises the opposite: join big tech over a startup for career growth and brand. Brand is especially important and is what’s holding me back. I don’t have any name brand companies on my resume. My friends with big tech have a 20-30% callback rate whereas mine is 5-7%. I might learn way more at the startup, but won’t be able to transfer these acquired skills if I can’t find a job in the future to transfer them to. Throwing away Meta feels like keeping myself trapped.

This makes me question whether I’m being overly optimistic (even delusional) of the startup. I feel like I did reasonable due diligence and, reasoning from first principles, it seems like this is the better opportunity for me.

1. I’m wondering if someone was in my position and regretted not going to big tech?
2. Is there any more due diligence/questions I can do to reach a more definitive decision?
3. Is Meta’s brand name worth more than career alignment or goals?

Hi everyone, my name is Aiden and I’m currently interning at a bank as a software engineer. I’m have switched major from biomedical science to computer science and currently in the process of getting the degree. I am self taught and looking for internships at MAANG company. As I am very new and have little knowledge in terms of growing in my career. I will appreciate any mentorship I can receive from this amazing community. I also enjoy getting to know new people happy to chat with anyone. Feel free to reach out :)

I recently got a full-time new grad SWE offer from Amazon. I'm obviously really happy about getting this offer because of the all the things that are going on with the tech job market. The only issue is that the range of start dates they gave me is April-June, and this conflicts with my schedule because I actually signed a offer to intern at another company this summer. I've reached out to Amazon and they've said that I would "need to select a start date in Quarter 2 if possible." Does anyone have any advice on how I can push my start date back?

Hi Taro community,

I will be starting my Meta internship next month. I have just received my team assignment as well as the name/email of my intern manager. I am thinking of sending an introduction email to my IM to ask more info about the team as well as recommendations for learning the team's tech stack.

I was thinking of sending something along the lines of the following. I would gladly appreciate any advice on how one can make this email even better. My goal is to make a good first impression to my IM.

Dear [Manager name],

I hope you are doing well! My name is [insert name], and I’m very excited to be joining [Team name] this summer as a Software Engineering Intern. I was recently assigned to your team, and I’m really looking forward to learning and growing from you throughout the internship.

As I begin preparing, I would love to learn more about the team’s focus and, if available, any details you can share about the intern project I’ll be working on. If possible, could you also share what technologies the team primarily works with, and any resources you’d recommend I review beforehand? I’d love to get up to speed so I can contribute effectively from day one.

Thank you so much for your help! I’m truly excited to be joining the team and learning from you this summer.

Some specific questions I had:

• Is it appropriate to ask for more details about the intern project at this stage, or should my ask be limited to just the team's overall focus and what they do?
• Is the length of the email appropriate, or could it be made more concise?
• Do you see any glaring issues with the overall wording or tone of the message?

I know a few companies that have pretty flat corporate structures. A pretty common example of this are quant firms - they usually only make a distinction between regular and senior SWE, with no higher levels. But this also happens at tech. For example, my friend at Palantir said that the hierarchy is pretty flat, so there’s no level distinguishing between them.

I’m currently interviewing with a rocket ship startup and they seem like a great place for career growth, but everyone’s title is SWE. Most of their engineers are ex-FAANG, so talent is top notch. Having talked to multiple engineers there, they all agree that by their first 1-2 years, they’ve taken full ownership of a vertical in their respective teams and some even leading cross-team collaborations. Would this be considered top-end E4/E5 level scope?

My worry with these flat hierarchies is that you’re able to demonstrate scope but you don’t have the title to match up to what you show. And while title is just a string, I worry that recruiters will use your ambiguous level against you? For example, if you’re an engineer with 2 yoe demonstrating E5 level behaviors without the title, how would recruiters level you?

And a more general discussion: how do recruiters figure out how to place you in the correct interview loop? Is there a way to ask the recruiter to move up or down a level?

I completed an internship at a bank last summer. During the internship's end, I received positive feedback from my manager and had expressed a clear interest towards returning.

The recruiter informed us that headcount will not be finalized until January. She said we can contact her after then regarding return offers. In the past year, all the interns received return offers after the new year.

My question is: in January, how should I best approach the recruiter and my internship manager regarding return offers?

I am thinking of writing something along the following lines to my manager, but I am not sure if this is appropriate:

Dear [Internship Manager's Name],

I hope you are doing well! Thank you so much for the opportunity to intern with [Company X] last summer. It was a truly rewarding experience, and I learned so much during my time there.

I genuinely enjoyed working with the team and contributing to [internship project]. Given how much I valued my time at [Company X], I am very interested in exploring the possibility of returning for a full-time role.

Could you let me know the best way to discuss the possibility of returning to [Company X]? I’d be happy to provide any additional information you might need.

Big thanks for reading through all of this - I know it is a very long post and I really appreciate your time!

I will be interning at Meta for a summer internship. After watching the intern success series videos on Taro, I learned that there will be a midpoint and final review for interns.

I would appreciate any specific advice regarding how to best approach the midpoint review process. Is there anything in particular you would recommend I emphasize during the review meeting?

I believe it is common for interns to write a self evaluation of their performance before the review meeting. From what I have heard, impact is something that is highly emphasized during the evaluation. Besides highlighting the key metrics, I was wondering if you had any tips regarding how to sell my impact and express it in a way that is easy for others to understand.

Hi there Taro people!

I want to mentor an intern, but in order to get one my manager asked me to come up with a few project proposals.

I’m finding that hard to do because I have no idea what could be good intern-level tasks, and to be honest I don’t have many ideas coming to me at all.

Have you ever been through that and could give me some advice?

I will be interning at Meta for this summer. I know Meta engineers collaborate via a tool called Workplace. Based on what I have heard, it seems to be normal for engineers to work over 50 hours a week.

I was wondering if there is a preferred time window when I should be online and engaged on Workplace. More specifically, should I be active on Workplace during the evening hours after 5 pm, or is this unnecessary for an intern?

Thank you for your help!

I am new to react and .net and sql. The codebase in my internship uses all 3 for front end, backend and server side.

Now, I saw some videos on how react works. But I keep on struggling with even fixing the smallest problems like styling one component inside another.

How do I learn the languages and technologies in an unfamiliar code and what would you do do learn fast and create impact in the codebase (solving the tickets assigned to you). What are some things I should be doing daily/hourly and what questions should I be asking?

I feel like I do not understand anything as I am overwhelmed with how the codebase works. Also how do I understand it in a way easy to relate to and remember what the components inside the codebase does and also learn the languages?

Thank you for helping with this! 🙏

I will be interning at Meta for this summer. After watching the videos on Taro, I learned that Meta engineers are evaluated according to four axes: project impact, direction, engineering excellence, and people impact.

I was wondering if a similar criteria is used to evaluate the performance of interns. From what I've observed, I feel the direction axis may be less relevant for interns since it involves setting the roadmap for the larger org.

If possible, I would also appreciate any examples of common failure modes to avoid for each criterion, as they would help us better understand potential pitfalls.

Thank you so much for your help!

I recently started working as an SDE contractor at a FAANG. This morning, I wasn’t feeling well (I had a bad cold and a mild fever) so I asked my advisor if I could skip our call. I took some medicine and a nap, and after about an hour of rest, I felt much better. Since I didn’t want to fall behind, I decided to go to the office.

The problem is, I forgot to let my advisor know that I was feeling better. When he saw me at work during a team meeting, he assumed I had lied about being sick. I tried to explain what happened, but he didn’t seem to believe me and said it’s not possible to recover that quickly.

I feel terrible about this because I really love working with my team and want to prove myself here. Is there anything I can do to clear the air and fix this misunderstanding?

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?

First, I would really like to thank Alex for taking the time to record the video series regarding the .

I just watched the section regarding working with my intern manager. I understand that it is important to have a weekly 1:1 with my IM. I am wondering if it is necessary to also have a weekly meeting with the engineering manager as well. If so, what would be some good topics to bring up during the meeting?

Topics I am thinking of include: project updates, feedback, career advice/planning. I would love to hear any thoughts on this.

I am assigned a project with a teammate and their code is really bad - lots of duplication, many 100+ (even going to 200!) line functions all over the place, unreadable variable names, hard-coded values and the list goes on. I don’t even know if their code works (I’m assuming it does because it compiles and his outputs make sense) but it’s really frustrating when I have to read through their code or integrate changes. Whenever we merge changes together, we always have to sit together to go through every single merge conflict. Recently I’ve started to notice regressions in our codebase that are extremely hard to debug. In these cases I’ve had to ask them to fix the problem.

It’d be one thing if they wrapped their code into some interface that I can call and it works like a charm, but they literally put their code into some of the main classes I built, and I’m getting really annoyed by it. Partially because they “ruined” a class that I built by turning it into a god class and also because it’s hard to debug.

I know that their code is refactorable because I’ve refactored smaller scripts they built, and it became much easier to change the code.

I’m working at a research lab, so code quality isn’t a huge deal as long as you get results.

1. I’ve mentioned several times to them to refactor the code but they don’t seem to listen (even after explaining that it’s hard for me to contribute since I can’t understand their code), though they seem to acknowledge their code is bad. I think they don’t come from a traditional CS background which is why they don’t care (or know) that much about proper engineering. How can I convince them that quality is important? How do I tell them (politely) that it’s because of their quality that we’re iterating much slower than before?
2. It’s likely that I’ll have to deal with bad codebases at some point in my career. When do I suck it up and when do I actively address it to the team to do maintenance? What are some heuristics?

I was very fortunate to have received internship offers from both Meta and Microsoft for summer 2025.

Would it be better to:

• try asking the recruiter to move Microsoft intern offer to spring 2025
• send a very polite email reneging Microsoft internship opportunity

Based on what I've seen, Microsoft historically has very rarely offered to move a summer internship to another season. I was wondering if it would still be worth asking the recruiter.