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Choosing the Wrong SWE Commitments in College?

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Software Engineering Intern at Amazon6 days ago

I’m choosing between three different options for organizations to join as an undergrad in CS. I’m an incoming Amazon SDE Intern and looking to focus on maximizing prepping for the internship and future opportunities.

First, a group working (paid part time, associated officially with college) on a student facing grading tool used actively by 8000+ students. Java/Spring Boot tech stack. Large code base with full-on github style pull and merge contribution style. Ex TikTok SWE told me it’s the closest they’ve experienced to industry style SWE at my college.

Second, various student-led groups with focuses in quant finance, data science, etc. Some doing projects with companies like quant companies like Millennium, Sig, etc. Some doing app projects used by thousands of students on campus (dining hall, game tracking, etc)

Third, focusing on my own growth and development. Setting more time aside for interview prep/side projects.

I believe this discussion would be very valuable to any undergrads because this dichotomy of choice is common. Personally, since Alex emphasizes the importance of contributing to large codebases like in open source then I see the first option as the leading candidate. But I’ve been running with the third option of solely focusing on my interview prep and it seems to have yielded well.

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Discussion

(4 comments)
  • 5
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    Helpful Tarodactyl
    Taro Community
    6 days ago

    I think we come from the same undergrad so I think I can better advise you. My guess is Cornell? I'm an alum so I can give you a lot more detail into each one. Just lmk.

    Also, you should mention research. You won't get many opportunities to publish in industry unless you're in a research-oriented role, and if you're interested in ML, then a publication to NuerIPs or ICML is probably much more impactful than doing an ML role. In fact, if you're doing something specialized (robotics, ML, OS), a publication in that field is a very good way to differentiate yourself. I remember one time during an HM interview where my HM was so impressed that I did a robotics publication as an undergrad that they accidentally said I'll be expecting an offer.

    For the third point, you're better off spending that time for interview prep over side projects. I was involved in engineering-focused student orgs back then and I listed those as my side project.

    One thing with student orgs is that you want to make sure that:

    1. Your growth is uncapped and your team is motivated. Sometimes with student teams, not everyone is super motivated, and sometimes you'll feel like you're putting a lot of effort but you don't get anywhere because your teammates aren't putting in as much work.
    2. You're building new features as opposed to maintaining existing ones. This depends on the student org and product maturity, so get a sense on what the product roadmap looks like
    3. You're actively growing the user base. This means going and talking to users, listening to feedback and implementing it. Not offloading product development work to someone else. Whenever I talk about my startup in interviews, HMs and interviewers were most excited when I talked about scoping out features with customers, how I measure success and respond to customer feedback. The surprising thing I learned when talking about my startup is that HMs aren't interested in implementation details, but are interested in the soft skills necessary to listen and iterate on customer feedback. This is much, much more interesting and harder to do.
    4. Probably the most important aspect is culture. You can work on the sexiest project but if your teammates are unmotivated or you're doing unimpactful things, then you might as well have not done it at all. Make sure you ask about team commitment before you join.

    Reflecting on my own experiences, I suggest you try as many activities for one semester, see what works/aligns with your interests, then go deep into one. The reason I suggest this is because the time frame for college is extremely short, and you need to balance exploration/exploitation. Trying all three in a semester gives you plenty of time to explore, and that'll give you the necessary signals to go deep into one.

  • 4
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    Tech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
    5 days ago

    Dang, your career path looks pretty good so far, far better than mine when I was in school hehe:

    • Cornell student
    • Upcoming FAANG internship
    • Multiple opportunities to build legit software as part of school

    The first option looks awesome IMHO, and you should do it if the group behind it is good and you have the time. 8,000+ users is almost 5 digits (i.e. should be impressive to recruiters), and you are uniquely positioned to build a good product there as the tool is student-facing (i.e. part of your life organically). It's sort of like a super-leveled up side project.

    Just go build cool stuff!

    Check out this thread as well (also from an Amazon intern in school): "How to make the most of my time in school?"

    • 1
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      Software Engineering Intern [OP]
      Amazon
      5 days ago

      Thanks Alex! I saw that thread too and I took a lot from it. I also finished your course on Taro about securing the RO for meta interns, found it great but do you know how much transfers to the Amazon SDE internship program? Especially because some of the more valuable insights there seemed specific to Meta’s SDE intern program.

    • 1
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      Tech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
      4 days ago

      I also finished your course on Taro about securing the RO for meta interns, found it great but do you know how much transfers to the Amazon SDE internship program?

      Probably ~70%. FAANG internship programs are generally fairly standardized and well-run, especially among the modern Big Tech triangle of Google, Meta, Amazon.

      Outside of Big Tech, it drops precipitously as most companies are lazy and don't invest much in the development of their junior engineers. I was an intern mentor at PayPal and holy hell, they were just doing random stuff with no real structure. YMMV for sure with this course if you're not interning at a FAANG or FAANG-adjacent company.

      Amazon is known for pushing engineers hard, but I've heard that for interns, it's more chill. There's less pressure to land your first commit and land code in general. The main difference between Meta interns and everyone else is that Meta's internship program is pretty cutthroat and focuses on raw code output a lot (quality needs to be there too).

      Meta's intern program is also very formal as you literally report to your intern mentor (they are called "intern manager" at Meta) in the org chart and you go through both a half-cycle review and a full review. You really are almost getting the full FTE E3 experience as a Meta intern, which I really respect. Most companies don't go this far.

      I recommend checking this out too: "Internship Metrics For Conversion?"