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

I have an accountability buddy who I met online. We've been reporting each other on a weekly basis. While I've been able to make progress on the goals I've set each week, I still feel that I'm not getting the most out of the relationship (not his fault though). I think the two failure modes are:

1. Whenever I only partially hit a goal, I come up with excuses like "work's been really busy" or something similar. He's quite understanding and says it's ok to catch up next week.
2. I have a tendency to make really easy goals, like "do a leetcode problem every day" or "apply to a job every day". Like sure, I probably wouldn't have done them without an accountability buddy, but I feel like I could go so much further if my buddy pushed me to set higher goals.

So I'm wondering how I can make it such that I get away with less bs, or have him be "meaner" to me? I've thought of some solutions like sharing my job app tracker with him, my leetcode practice diary, etc. But I can definitely think of some things that are harder to share (for example work related stuff).

I’m joining a late-stage startup in August. I talked to a bunch of people in the company but this upcoming chat will be my first with a tech lead. This startup’s levelling system is similar to Palantir’s - the only titles are SWE, tech lead and eng. manager.

My goal in this conversation is to better understand the company’s promo culture, the expectations of each level and how to get to tech lead. What are some questions I should ask to get a better understanding?

Are there any other topics that a tech lead is well-suited to answer that I haven't considered? If so, what are some questions I can ask?

I had an interview with a startup which I got an offer from but I declined it. I would say I developed decent rapport with the recruiter. I have a friend who’s now applying to the same startup with slightly more YoE than me and for a different role but I don’t know if the recruiter also manages that role.

I think my friend’s background may be a good fit for the startup since the startup regularly hires out from my friend’s current company. This friend also previously interned at FAANG. The startup hires for forward deployed engineers (an uncommon position) which is what my friend currently is, but my friend is looking to transition to SWE at the startup.

I’m wondering if it’s appropriate for me to introduce my friend to the recruiter? I’m worried that if they bomb the interview it’ll reflect poorly on me and affect future job opportunities with the company.

I’ll be heading into a recruiter screen for a company that my friend referred me to. I’m pretty sure the company will ask me something like ‘why this company’. I feel that I can leverage my friend’s experiences to craft unique responses to the behavioral questions. For example something like ‘my friend did X Y and Z in the company and I feel that this aligns with my goals as I’ve done A B and C’.

So I’m wondering what questions I should ask my friends to get ‘ammunition’ for the recruiter screen? On the top of my head I’m thinking:

1. What they worked on
2. Learning opportunities
3. Team culture

Not sure if anyone can add more to the list. The goal is to come up with the smallest set of questions that provide the most amount of value, since I don’t want to be too bothersome with my friend.

I think this is the classic question of “less interesting work at prestigious company vs interesting work at less prestigious company”

I am debating between Anduril and Meta for new grad. I am leaning towards Anduril because of everything else other than prestige: my coworkers are very smart, there’s a ton of scope for new grads and work is interesting. I’m only considering Meta for prestige and predictable career growth. Anduril is a hot unicorn but I was surprised when none of the recruiters I talked to knew what Anduril was.

When I think about exit opportunities, Anduril feels limited. The defense sector is growing slowly with many reports indicating a 10% CAGR at most. This means it’s unlikely there’ll be many good companies that’ll hire me in defense and opportunities feel limited. I’m not particularly excited about other companies in defense besides Anduril. While I haven’t been team matched at Meta, I can imagine Meta having many more exit opps than Anduril as they work on AR/VR, AI, robotics and other trendy technologies.

With the tariff situation in the current administration, I can imagine that the job market will become even more competitive down the line. This means that Meta’s brand value will be even more important. To me, Meta is a means to get a better job, whereas Anduril is said better job. So should I take Meta for better future exit opps or go to Anduril?

When does it make sense to sacrifice interesting work to set yourself up for more exit opps, versus going to a lesser known company? Should you trade off learning, ownership and scope to go to a more prestigious company in a bear market?

PS. Here’s how I measured exit opps. I went on LinkedIn and found the % of people who go to big tech or top unicorn after working at Anduril and same with Meta. Unsurprisingly Meta beat out Anduril by a mile.

I just declined an internship offer from a big tech company after previously accepting it. In the email, I emphasized how I hoped to have the chance to work with them in the future. The recruiter replied "Thank you for keeping me updated, and I wish you the best in your future endeavors. As I inform the team, would you feel comfortable to share with me a little more context to your decision?"

Would it be a good idea to reply to the recruiter, or should I just leave things as is? I am not very comfortable sharing the specifics of the opportunity I ultimately chose to accept, and I am concerned it might trigger unpleasant feelings from the other party.

I got an offer from a company I’m excited about. I spent a lot of time talking with engineers at the place but their reviews naturally skew positive. The recruiting process was pretty drawn out (3 month process) and in that time frame one of my interviewers left the company for another opportunity. I was wondering if it’s appropriate to reach out to them (and in general people who just left) to get a better take of the company? Personally I want to ask why they left the company, whether they got what was advertised from the company and whether they felt happy with their choice. If so, here’s a draft of the message I’d like to send on Linkedin:

Hi XYZ,

My name is <name> and I interviewed with you at ABC Company back when you were there! I’m happy to share with you that I got the offer and would love to ask you more your recent experience at ABC! Happy to send over a few questions. Looking forward to hearing from you!

And a more general message to people who recently left:

Hi XYZ,

My name is <name> and I recently got an offer at ABC Company. I saw you recently left the company and would love to hear about your experience! Would it be okay to ask a few questions? Happy to send them over for you to answer at your convenience. Looking forward to hearing from you!

Here are the questions I plan to ask:

• Why did you leave ABC Company?
• Why did you initially join ABC company? Did you get what the company advertised?
• In what ways have you grown while working at the company?
• What other choices were you thinking about when picking XYZ company and did you make the right choice? Would you recommend picking xyz to a friend?

When I was in school, I’d always deliver work with high quality when there was a grade on the line. Digging deep into this, I realize that the dopamine rush of getting an A in a class was really satisfying for me. However, this backfires against me when I don’t have grades to keep me accountable. If a class has a very easy grading scheme, or if I’m pursuing a side project, the quality of my work (measured against past projects I’ve done) is noticeably lower. I do a crappy job, mark it as done ASAP and move on to the next thing. I’ve come to realize that grades have been the only motivator for me since elementary school.

I’m a little worried that the workplace doesn’t have “grades”, and I’ll lose motivation to do good work. While performance reviews serve as a proxy, they happen every quarter/half/year and I don’t think the feedback cycle is quick enough to give me long term motivation. Furthermore, performance reviews evaluate your performance on multiple projects rather than a single one, which cuts my motivation even more.

There are two ways to solve this: make work feel like school or find something else to be motivated for.

How have people found motivation to do better without fighting for a grade? Have people found strategies or internal frameworks to do better?

I will be joining Meta this summer as an intern. After watching the Taro videos regarding the , I learned the importance of making it clear to the manager about my intention to return to the company for a full time job. I was wondering about the appropriate time to first mention this topic to the manager.

Assuming a 12 week internship, would somewhere around Week 4 be a good time, or is it necessary to bring it up even earlier?

I was thinking that it would be better to at least make some nontrivial progress on the intern project beforehand, but not sure.

This summer, I will be joining Meta as an intern. Suppose during my internship, my intern manager is extremely busy and is fighting off PIP. Due to this, he/she does not have time to answer my questions and I will need to figure out most things on my own.

I understand being at Meta right now is very stressful, and it is best to assume good intent. I was wondering if you had any tips on how to best handle this situation and secure a return offer.

I’m in the interview process with a robotics company that asked me to prep a 9min self introduction that can include anything. I’m in the process of drafting my self intro. My intro consists of lightly touching upon 10 robotics/SWE experiences, then wrapping up with why I want to join the company and how my skillsets align with the company’s trajectory.

I realized that summarizing 10 experiences makes each experience a little superficial. On the other hand they each contribute a little to my story of how I’ve been involved in robotics over the years, so what’s the best way to go about this?

Does anyone have any insights on how much better their application to interview rate was after having an internship on their resume?

I currently only have unpaid startup experience and i got 5/100 interviews this cycle, but it felt extremely luck based and easily couldve been 0/100.

I'm about to do a SWE internship at Notion and wondering if things genuinely become way easier (assume I'm able to write about real impact I made at Notion).

When I come up with a solution to an unfamiliar DP problem, I usually start with a decision tree, identify its subproblems, and draft a brute force approach that can easily be memoized, making it a top-down approach.

Since the time complexity for top-down and bottom-up is in the same magnitude, would most interviewers be satisfied if I stop there?

I am currently interning at a mid-sized tech company for the winter season. At the beginning of the internship, I was informed by the recruiter that the manager will assign the intern project at around week 2-3 of the program.

During the third week, I politely approached my manager regarding the intern project. The manager replied that the details of the project are still being finalized, as it involves a lot of dependencies across teams.

As of now (fifth week), the project has not yet been assigned. In the meantime, he has advised me to continue working on Jira tickets in my team's codebase.

I really enjoy my assigned tasks and definitely appreciate this opportunity to make contributions to a large codebase. However, I am a little concerned that I will not have sufficient time to finish the project or that my project's impact may not be significant enough. If I understand correctly, the project impact as well as timely completion are pretty significant factors towards intern return offer.

My question is: should I let my manager know about my concerns regarding the project, or would it be a better idea to wait until the manager assigns me the project?

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

What would be the best way to answer a question "What are you hoping to get out of this internship?" during a 1:1 meeting with my manager? I heard it is common for interns to be asked this question during the Meta internship.

Some ideas I can think of:

• To secure a return offer, as I really enjoy learning and growing from the team
• I would love to learn as much as I can, collaborate with talented engineers, and hopefully make an impact while I’m here.
• To get to a level where I can review another team member's code and approve it

Suppose I am an intern on the team. If someone in my team helps me out, should I thank them directly, or would it be better to show the appreciation in a team meeting/team slack?

Hi Taro Community,

I will be interning with a team that has weekly meetings. There will not be a daily standup. How should an intern best behave during team meetings?

Some potential ideas:

• "" - intern actively listens to the conversations of other team members and asks relevant questions
• Speak less than the others in the team, but be humble, focus more on learning, and ask good questions

Hi Taro Community,

I will be joining Meta as an intern this summer. This is a very exciting opportunity, but one thing that concerns me is building good relationships with senior members of the team.

I have heard of stories of people new to Meta whose team was unwilling to help them ramp up. As a result, this made it difficult to onboard and get started. I believe it may be due to the competitive environment, as many senior employees are worried about their job security and may not be as welcoming to newcomers.

In the face of such a competitive workplace, how would you recommend I best approach more senior members of my team and gain their trust?

I was thinking of trying the following actions, but not sure:

• Show deep "thanks" - make people feel appreciated
• Trust by default - give more of my trust to others
• Make small talk during 1 on 1
• Use self deprecation to show humility

I am starting my SWE internship soon in one month, and my mentor was nice to offer me a call to get to know the team more, what kind of insights or questions I should ask to make my internship onboarding process and in general fruitful since I don't think they will go in depth or have decided on the project I will be working on before I start, thanks in advance