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

Hello! I'm joining Meta as a SWE intern in the Summer of this year and would like to maximize my chances at getting the highest rating possible, alongside setting myself up for a high growth rate if I'm able to join as a New Grad. Sorry if this is really long, I wanted to bundle my questions to not have to give context multiple times.

For full context, I'm in my last year of University with 4 previous internships of experience (1 at a large bank and 3 at small-mid size companies) and I'm currently doing an internship until April at a SaaS tech company (think like public ~40B market cap, 8.5k employees) with a sizeable amount of ex-FAANG employees so it's much more relevant than my previous internships have been. The Meta internship is in the summer for 16 weeks and would be my 6th final internship - my University is big on internships and requires you to do 6 of them which is why I have more than usual.

Onto my main question, I want to try to go all in and get a GE+ rating at the Meta internship and do my best to grow as much as possible there (at both engineering skills and climbing the ladder). I've watched the series on securing intern return offers but I'd like some advice on what I can do to go beyond that.

I think I'm in a unique position where I get to do another tech internship right before, and would like some advice on what I can do here to practice some of the things Meta would also look for to achieve GE+. For context, I just finished my first month (1.5 weeks mandatory onboarding, 2.5 weeks actually working) and merged ~20 PRs, my manager and team says I'm doing really well here but I have no idea what Meta's standards are for code velocity and quality so doing well at Meta might look totally different. However, to be completely honest, I've also been pretty lazy at the current internship since I don't care much for a higher rating (+ tasks have been kinda boring lol) and only working ~20 hours/week so I could be doing much more, which I realized I need to change if I want to get into good habits before joining Meta.

Additionally, team matching starts soon for Meta and I was looking into what to select. By far my highest interest is within Reality Labs related work but I don't have much experience with VR. Would RL make a bad choice for my goals? At my current internship I'm mostly working on Dist Sys and ML Infra for abuse detection/prevention.

Thanks in advance and apologies for the really long questions.

I've seen Taro's videos on building side projects, and Alex's advice was to not monetize and focus on getting users.

Prior to joining Taro, I've been running a B2B startup for almost half a year. Recently, I've been able to get clients who are multinational corporations. Think of places like the Four Seasons group, Coca Cola, Mercedes Benz, etc (and I got clients just by cold emailing). If I keep pushing, I should be able to rake in at least (this is conservative) 50K in ARR by the end of the year. My startup also got interviews at YC and Sequoia Arc - I got passed on since the market I'm working in is quite small despite having everything else right (funny that both Sequoia and YC gave the exact same feedback).

So essentially, I've done the complete opposite of what Alex advises - build a product where big companies are willing to pay you big bucks for your product. I'm wondering if this would still be as impressive as something like Alex's random name picker? What percentile of applicants would this project place me? Is it good enough to stand out? If not, should I change my approach (though my gutfeel is to keep doing what I'm doing)?

Hi everyone, I recently accepted an offer for a Summer 2025 Software Engineering Intern position at Meta. I have about ~5 months before I start and want to make sure that I’m as prepared as possible by then.

Specifically, I’d like to improve my technical abilities as much as possible in ways that align with Meta’s ecosystem and expectations, so I have the best chance of succeeding and obtaining a return offer.

With this in mind, I was hoping to get advice for the most optimal learning paths to do so. Specifically, I was curious if there are:

1. Any Languages, Frameworks, Libraries, etc. that are heavily used in Meta that I am likely to encounter as an intern
2. If there are any Meta-specific or open-source technologies that are commonly used
3. What type of personal projects would help prepare me for my role at Meta

Thanks!

As a new software engineering intern who recently subscribed to Taro Premium, how can I effectively leverage the platform and its available services? What internal and external resources should I familiarize myself with to ensure a successful and productive start to my internship?

PS: My internship begins this week.

My brother is very worried about getting a return offer at Meta - he'll be interning there this summer. He reviewed the videos on , but is still confused on who he would assign to review diffs/vouch for his performance other than his EM.

Hi, I have a Meta new grad interview coming up and I got LC premium for the first time. I wanted to ask what filters you recommend using.

I am thinking of this - Filter the list by past 30 days, sort by frequency and then do the top 30 from there.

What do you think? You can also filter by past 3 months, 6 months, all time. Thanks!

How early in the internship do you make your intentions of wanting to get a return offer clear and how would you go about doing so, do you just talk to your manager or your mentors as well?

Obviously no one can predict the future, but there's a lot of uncertainty and a lot of my peers have fears that a recession could impact return offer rates. Naturally, since I'm interning soon, I have the same anxiety. I understand 2025 is different from 2022, but I'd appreciate input from others. Could RO rates scale back drastically?

When is the best time to quit software engineering and pursue an influencer career (like Rahul did)? Do you recommend having a decade of corporate experience first before becoming an influencer?

I really want to build a personal brand and build a coaching/info product business. I am not a big proponent of working for someone else; I am in my job just so I can pay my bills, not necessarily because I love the job (which might be detrimental when I will be pushing for senior/staff promotions because my "passion" will be lacking?).

I have seen influencers making six figures (if not millions) in 1 - 3 years of starting their business. That is what inspires me - as the growth is exponential compared to a SWE career.

(Context: I go to a top university, and have done few internships. Thinking if I should pursue SWE full-time after graduation, or just create an influencer business right away. My long term goal is to have my own startup and I believe having a personal brand will help.)

Hey Taro community. So I saw on and Alex touched on seed startups being not really good for early careers. I wanted to ask: So I met this person at a tech meet up and we exchanged twitter names over the summer. She’s currently building in health tech now. She made a tweet asking if any engineers wanted to work at a seed stage AI devtools startup (round led by top tier technical firm) and to DM her if you were interesting.

Should I do it or just leave it? Knowing how the climate is now just thought about beggars can’t be choosers.

I have 4 main tasks that I have this summer but I don’t know if I’m allocating the right amount of time into them and I’d like some help on figuring out what to prioritise. 

Before we get into them, I want to list my goals this summer to motivate the 4 tasks I came up with (from most to least important).

1. Get a return offer - pretty self-explanatory. It’ll take a lot of stress off this next job-searching season. I'm working at a small startup and amongst all early-mid stage startups, I’d probably take this one over them (assuming pay is around equal). With that being said, I’d much much rather be in big tech, which leads me to…
2. Be interview and resume ready for the upcoming season. I think this decomposes into 2 parts
   1. Have very strong resume points about what I did. My project has reasonable scope and I think I can push to expand scope. Not sure if a recruiter cares about impact though. (Especially for new grads), would appreciate any insight on this (e.g, would a recruiter really care if you built a fully distributed KV store that helps the company store terabytes of data/day vs building a simple CRUD app)
   2. Be interview ready. Grinding Leetcode right now and I feel like I have a long way to go. On a good day I can pass a phone screen but I have trouble with on-sites. 
3. Have research output for grad school - I’m in a grad program right now and I need to do work for the summer. During the Fall I have another research internship lined up with a well-known company (wouldn’t really call it big tech though). Part of this internship is showing my supervisor that I can handle the load of doing research while maintaining internship responsibilities. I also need to finish up my thesis.
4. Personal project - I run a startup and I have a few big corporations reach out for a trial. Product is mostly built so mostly the work is talking to customers and fixing bugs

Hey everyone! I just transitioned to software engineering. I got an internship at Meta and Tesla. What courses and projects should I focus on to develop my skills as a software engineer. I currently know basic data structures and how to solve leetcode problems.

I have 2 core goals:

1. Learn from the best engineers and pick up as many skills from them as possible
2. Become a founder

Given that, should I work on side projects full-time and apply to incubators or continue doing internships like my current one and doing side projects on the side?

have a new grad system design interview coming up. never did system design interview before, the only knowledge i have about system design is the distributed systems course i took in university

how do i prep for the system design interview in less time? what are the best resources?

A company (startup) asked me to provide a few reference checks as a formality and one of them was my manager from this summer. I asked her if she was willing to give me a reference. She agreed and even called me assuring she'd say good things about me.

After the reference call she follows up with me and said the reference call was short and said it went fine. Most of what she said was fine except she mentioned a weakness of mine and she poorly showed that I actively worked on it. They said something like:

XYZ moves really fast and his project evolves really quickly, which sometimes keeps stakeholders out of the loop. However, we managed to align expectations and complete the project with high quality

Normally, reference checks should be perfect and this clearly isn't. I'm not sure if that would appear as a red flag to a manager. I don't think my manager meant ill will, but since this is her first time giving a reference call, she probably was inexperienced. I feel really nervous and dejected because there were other people who might've been able to give reference, though they'd be from multiple summers ago. Is this something I should worry about, or is it minor?

The company has yet to call my second referrer, who also assured me that they'd say good things about me. What should I do with this one to absolutely make sure they say the right things?

I got a verbal offer from Applied Intuition and I’m really excited about the opportunity. It’s a good company with strong financials, and the many engineers I’ve talked to have all mentioned being able to attain E4/E5 level scope a year or two into joining the company. While it’s a good company, I know that it’s not as prestigious as the FAANGs or OpenAIs of the world, and I should keep on hunting, but this is where I feel conflicted.

Job hunting as been a major time sink for me. My focus and productivity has reduced significantly, and as a result, it has put quite a big strain on my professional relationships, such as my research advisor, coworkers and more. My grades have also took a hit, but I suppose that’s less important. My time sink and dip in productivity was at least somewhat justified initially - the job market is so tough for new grads, so it’s understandable that you need to put a lot of effort. But now that I have my first offer, it’s a lot harder to justify my loss in focus.

Right now I have final rounds with a quant firm and Meta. I’m planning to take them in early November. My understanding is that companies (FAANG and FAANG-adjacent) will recruit throughout the year, so should I keep applying to places, or should I stop? On one hand, I read the thread on how, and the overall sentiment is that it's “good but not great”, but it sucks to feel like I’m settling for something less. On the other hand, my gut feel tells me that I should stop.