I’m going to do something a little different. Because this blog has clearly been lacking some self indulgence, I’m going to talk about my personal journey interning at various places. First up is the job application process. Due to a few factors, I was lucky enough to start programming seriously in high school. I then took a gap year, which allowed me to intern at two different places. I then spent the summer after my freshman year working on a Google Summer of Code project (not an internship!). The summer after my sophomore year I was lucky enough to get an internship at Microsoft. Finally I just finished a round of internship applications for next fall and am interning at Cloudflare. I’m going to walk through how I applied, interviewed and got the offer from each place.

Overall I’ve been very fortunate in many ways: I’ve utilized family connections; I’ve had gambles work out and I’ve had some excellent mentors.

Internship #0: Lab Labor

My first internship, if you can even call it that, was at a lab over the summer. The job was basically pity-given to me via a family contact. I met the contact to ask about advice for research labs and he took it as me asking if I could intern at his lab. In retrospect, this wasn’t really what either of us wanted. I learned that asking someone a seemingly innocuous question can turn into an accidental imposition on them.

Internship #1: Finance

My first software development internship came about during the summer after my senior year of high school. I had lazed around on the couch for a month or so and my parents wanted me to do something with my summer. A family connection put me in contact with a hedge fund using a Ruby and C++ stack. I emailed them and they set up an interview in person. The interview consisted of them reading my resume, asking about some projects and having me write some SQL. Even though I didn’t know that much, they were very nice and helpful. It was probably the easiest job interview process I’ve ever been through.

They emailed me back within a few days and told me when to start. The job was unpaid, but completely geared towards teaching me instead of benefiting them. They taught me a bunch of massively useful skills and when I started to produce somewhat useful work, they started paying me¹.

Internship #2: Web Dev

I left my finance internship to go travel. After traveling for several weeks, I came back and started looking for another internship.

I looked around for jobs in various places, but I didn’t have my application game down yet. I applied to a few places on sites like AngelList, BuiltInNYC, etc. Since I was a high school graduate with little experience applying during an off-season for internships, I didn’t get a lot of responses.

This was honestly a very frustrating time. I spent some of it teaching myself Ruby on Rails, but it did suck to apply to jobs and get nothing back.

Eventually I got a response from a company with a VR product. I did a coding challenge with them, one question of which was to write a JSON parser. I remember I did it in Python with import json. Brilliant solution. In retrospect a JSON parser is a relatively non trivial exercise. I don’t know if they ever got a legitimate answer.

Looking back at my emails, I guess I had a phone interview with them. I don’t remember if it was technical but most likely it was not.

After the phone interview I don’t remember, I interviewed in person with them. It was 3 interviews, two with developers and one with an HR person. I don’t believe any of the interviews were that technical. The highlight, if you can call that, was one interviewer asking me what the dependency manager was for Rails. I answered Bundler, because that’s the answer. He then stared at me for a few seconds, clearly not knowing the answer himself, before responding that I was right. I don’t know what he was trying to accomplish with the question.

I asked a few questions about the company, such as their code review process or any style guides they follow. They didn’t give satisfactory answers but at that point I didn’t care. I just wanted a job.

They extended me an offer, albeit with a ridiculously short deadline, something called an exploding offer². I accepted it because eh, it was a job and paid (20/hr). Looking back, I should have extended it a little. I received an email from another company a few days later and it would have been nice to have options.

That place was an interesting ride. I learned a whole slew of modern front end at the job which has served me well in many ways. Unfortunately the codebase was not well written in many ways. The programmers were pumping out features at an unsustainably fast rate and had an “in the trenches” attitude closer to Verdun than Versailles. Which, honestly, I didn’t get. The product had a really fantastic niche. They didn’t have many direct competitors. They could have spent the time to refactor the codebase. Ah well. The entire experience deserves a blog post of its own.

“Internship” #2.5: Google Summer of Code

After my gap year I came into my freshman year of college extremely motivated. I applied to internships at a bunch of top companies. None responded. I was in a weird state where I wasn’t new enough to get into the first year programs like Google Engineering Practicum (now known as STEP) or FBU, but not good enough to get past the screening for the actual SWE internships. I probably should have tried alternative channels for getting internships, some of which you’ll see in the next few chapters.

After getting rejected from the top places, I considered going to intern at other companies. But I wasn’t sure about going back to a small company. My last internship was ahem an experience and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to replicate that³.

I was kind of content to work on my own projects over that summer. After my gap year, I wasn’t afraid of having extra time to work on my projects. On a whim I applied to Google Summer of Code.

Google Summer of Code is a program where Google pays students to work on open source. You get around 7k for the summer, which isn’t a bad salary for a job with flexible hours and demands.

I had developed an interest in programming languages, so I decided to apply with a project on the Ruby language. To apply to GSoC, you need to make a project proposal. I applied at the last minute with a project ripped directly from the suggested topics.

To my surprise, I got into GSoC. This was especially surprising since the project proposal was also explicitly rejected by Ruby’s creator and benevolent dictator for life, Matz. I was able to spend the summer ripping into Ruby’s internals and attempting to add type annotations. That turned out to be hard, as Ruby has some crazy internals. I did have a wonderful mentor who did his best to help me, but man, DSLs embedded in comments that generate C code that manually call Ruby functions by patching into the VM, which don’t even exist in the first place because they’re autodefined using alias_method are confusing.

What was bittersweet about GSoC was that it did take away time from my other projects.

Internship #3: Microsoft

At the start of my sophomore year, I was determined to not get rejected all over again. I made a plan: email everybody I could about getting an internship in programming languages.

This was moderately easy. A surprising amount of developers have publicly available emails. If I had a little more chutzpah, I would have guessed some more email addresses.

I asked my mentor from GSoC to help me with some people, but mostly I just sent cold emails. Some of the people I reached out to included Chris Lattner, the creator of Swift and LLVM; Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python and Anders Hejlsberg, the creator of TurboPascal, C# and TypeScript.

I got some responses—Chris Lattner and Guido van Rossum both responded—but no real success. However I had two major improvements in my job applications from last year: the Google Foobar challenge and a phone interview with Microsoft.

The Google Foobar challenge is something that happens if you search the right terms on Google. Your search results peel back and they offer you a coding challenge. I accepted it and started working on it. The challenge took a while but eventually I got far enough for a Google recruiter to reach out. However this only dumped me into the beginning of the actual Google application process. Which is a little dumb imo. I shouldn’t have to take another coding challenge after Foobar.

The Microsoft phone interview went kind of well. I was given a fairly easy question, but I didn’t get the answer immediately. I suppose it was clear that I was working through the question real-time and not pulling an existing answer out.

After that I had an on-campus interview with Microsoft which went fantastic. I solved the problem easily and the interviewer definitely seemed pleased.

Then came the Microsoft on-site. I was flown out to Seattle and put up a nice hotel. They gave four interviews in total. The questions weren’t too hard or unconventional. I did two of the interviews in Haskell which was quite fun. The first question I did in Haskell was a simple removing of duplicates in a linked list. The second was a slightly more complicated one involving trees. I’m not sure if Haskell was the right choice for either, but it was certainly fun explaining it to the interviewers. The final interview went fairly well, though I didn’t get the last part of the question. It was a quite cool question though—in binary search there’s a very particular edgecase related to integer overflow.

The last interview was quite odd as well because the interviewer simply lead me out of the building and to the parking lot. No ceremonial gesture or gift bag, just essentially “get out”. I assumed I didn’t get the job.

To my surprise, I got an offer. However it was an offer with a tight deadline, I believe 2 weeks. I tried to extend it but Microsoft wouldn’t budge. Alas when I told my Google recruiter about said deadline, hoping to speed up the process, they instead rejected me. At least they had the decency to reject me via phone call.

Putting the deadlines into perspective, I was able to apply to Microsoft, have a phone interview, an on-campus interview and get flown out to Seattle for an on-site, in the amount of time it took Google to schedule two phone interviews. Take that as you will.

When I got to Microsoft, I actually had a meeting already scheduled with someone who explained that the email I sent to Anders actually put my name in the application system and likely got me the phone screen. It gets even more interesting than that, but that’s another blog post entirely.

I also sent off applications to GitHub and Stripe but was rejected. In GitHub’s case it was due to a coding screen that was pretty unspecified and not well designed. I was supposed to write code in a repo that would then be subjected to automated tests. That I couldn’t see. Yeah…not great. Stripe autorejected me after I did their HackerRank screen. No clue why.

Internship #4

I blocked off this summer to travel (yeah…) and work on my own projects, so I purposefully did not intern anywhere. However with coronavirus and all, I decided to take the fall semester off and work instead of attending online classes.

While I did block off this summer, I did have one or two companies that I was willing to consider. I applied to Jane Street, a prop trading firm that is famous for using the functional programming language OCaml. Jane Street rejected me after a phone interview. I’m a little puzzled why—I thought the interview went well—but I suspect I just didn’t wow them.

I also applied to Citadel. I figured it was a shot in the dark. NYU isn’t a target school and I don’t have a 4.0 GPA.

I got a phone interview, which I was actually really nervous for. I don’t know why, but something about Citadel made me anxious. Fortunately the problem wasn’t too hard, my mind was in the right place and I had some nice tricks that I pulled off. I also used an unconventional language. The result was one of my most successful interviews.

After that I got invited to on-sites. Due to a miscommunication, I missed one of the interviews, but I managed to have three out of the four. Again I don’t think I did very well. I got the first interview fairly well, but I got stuck on the last question and claimed that the algorithm was O(n log n) and not O(n)⁴. I got the second question reasonably well since it was a more finance specific question, although I had a weird bug that confused even my interviewer. We did eventually spot it. The third interview wasn’t great. I didn’t get very far at all and missed a really elementary optimization. I got the feeling the interviewer was a little disappointed.

In a recurring theme, I thought I did badly, but somehow I got an offer.

Funny story, I actually forgot what season my Citadel application was for, so I asked the recruiter. She responded that she was going to ask me that question!

While I was waiting for the Citadel offer process to go through, I decided on a whim to apply to Cloudflare. I had read their blog posts and knew they were working in WebAssembly, Rust and compilers, all areas of interest for me.

I knew they had summer internships open still, but I wanted a fall internship. I decided to cold email the one person whose email I could easily get: the CEO. I got his email off of Twitter and shot off an email.

A quick disclaimer: I’m confident in sending cold emails because I have very particular interests that I have pursued on my own. I was able to craft a pretty convincing argument on why Cloudflare was a good fit. Please don’t do this if you’re just going to write an email arguing how you’re “really passionate about computer science”.

The CEO responded and I got into the application process. I’m a little hesitant to talk about this process because this was a very unique situation. I happened to have experience in a somewhat niche area that Cloudflare also happened to be working in.

Yadda yadda, I got an offer from Cloudflare. I deliberated a little bit: The Citadel offer was quite generous. The Cloudflare offer, while still quite good, was not at the level of a top hedge fund. However the Cloudflare offer was such a great fit in terms of technologies that I couldn’t resist. I’m really appreciative to both companies for taking the time to meet with me. And I’m super excited to be working at Cloudflare in the fall!

Conclusions

I’ve learned a few lessons from these applications:

• When you’re starting out, apply EVERYWHERE. Don’t be too proud. Anything that is paid and programming will help you immensely moving forward

• Once you get offers, be more particular. Vet the companies and push back against exploding offers.

• Try unconventional application methods. Send cold emails if you have something to say. Use family contacts. Be shameless

• Your goal is to get to a human being in the process. Once you do, everything becomes infinitely better.

• It’s okay to not have internships sometimes. Especially if you have your own projects. You may go from begging companies to give you the time of day to declining internships faster than you’d think.

• Getting good at a popular technology can be helpful. Knowing React and modern front-end has helped me a lot in various ways.

• Developing a niche can also be good. You don’t have to, but if you can honestly claim to be one of maybe 30 people who can do xyz, that makes you a waaaay better sell.

• Your perception of interview performance is not correlated at all to how you actually did. If anything it’s negatively correlated.