Pure Storage

1. Project Design:

You get a cool project to work in a team of 2 (sometimes 3). These projects are often more interesting than the work that your mentor does day-to-day.

1. Responsibilities:

You participate heavily in the architectural design process and get to understand cutting-edge tools/techniques. On the application side, many interns worked with Kubernetes, ELK, and AWS. On the system side, interns have gotten to use cutting-edge compression, encryption, parsing, and replication techniques. This can feel a bit daunting, but your mentor and other team members are willing to help.

1. Good work-life balance:

Managers are very reasonable with intern work hours. Even though you work on a challenging project, the expectations are rational.

1. Engineers and other interns are nice, helpful, and honest.

If you're looking for a place to really grow through working on an open-ended, technically-interesting project, Pure Storage is a great place to consider. I personally feel like I was able to gain a lot of experience with project scoping, architectural design, and managing expectations that will hopefully help me later on if I reach more senior technical positions.

1. Things are messy: Your project goals are not 100% clear. Internal docs are pretty out-of-date. Evaluation can feel opaque even with 1-1s.

This is an opportunity to grow, but the lack of clarity may feel overwhelming, even with mentors around.

1. The bad parts of an engineer-driven culture: Middle management are former engineers and are not often "people persons", so some don't see how certain behavior can undermine trust and communication. On the flip side, some engineers don't value communication enough (my opinion).

Overall, the engineering org as a whole tries to emphasize good communication, but it's not often that efficient (meetings can get sidetracked by the most powerful member(s) even in a mostly-flat org).

I wrote a lot here, but my rating is still 5*. An engineer-driven culture is mostly a good thing for many SWEs, and the problems that arise are tradeoffs.