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Awful internship program, great team

Software Engineer
Former Employee
Worked at Block for 1 year
October 20, 2020
San Francisco, California
3.0
Doesn't RecommendPositive OutlookApproves of CEO
Pros

Wonderful manager who understood people on the team and genuinely cared about them. Absolute best part of the summer.

Got to have the full software engineer experience, doing code reviews, pushing PRs for the first time.

Great feeling empowering small businesses.

Cons

There are a LOT of cons with the internship program. The recruiters didn’t make much of an effort to accommodate us remotely other than keep our housing stipend, which was then slashed in half. Then, we were only given our housing stipend biweekly because “what if an intern decided to quit midway through,” making it incredibly hard to afford rent. If you're wondering, it was $1000 a MONTH before tax so ~$600 after tax, barely anything to survive on. When asked if we could get a sweatshirt, one of the interns had to personally spend time out of their workday creating it and trying to secure funds for us because the recruiters didn't and weren't willing to. Hack Week also showed me how backwards Square’s priorities were: we created an app that everyone outside the company considered incredibly groundbreaking and useful, and the judges didn't even give us the time of day. Overall, I was incredibly unsatisfied with the intern program and I strongly discourage you from being an intern. Oh, and this was all while Square was rebounding after the COVID crash (stock price was rising so quickly) and there was no need for them to cut corners anymore, but still essentially no budget for making the intern program meaningful at all. Very bad experience with the intern program, highly suggest avoiding.

Advice to Management

Stop cutting corners for interns; there's a reason why none of them come back. The engineering quality around me was also a bit lacking at times.

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