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

I will be interning at Meta for a summer internship. After watching the intern success series videos on Taro, I learned that there will be a midpoint and final review for interns. I would appreciate any specific advice regarding how to best approach the midpoint review process. Is there anything in particular you would recommend I emphasize during the review meeting? I believe it is common for interns to write a self evaluation of their performance before the review meeting. From what I have heard, impact is something that is highly emphasized during the evaluation. Besides highlighting the key metrics, I was wondering if you had any tips regarding how to sell my impact and express it in a way that is easy for others to understand.

I completed an internship at a bank last summer. During the internship's end, I received positive feedback from my manager and had expressed a clear interest towards returning. The recruiter informed us that headcount will not be finalized until January. She said we can contact her after then regarding return offers. In the past year, all the interns received return offers after the new year. My question is: in January, how should I best approach the recruiter and my internship manager regarding return offers? I am thinking of writing something along the following lines to my manager, but I am not sure if this is appropriate: Dear [Internship Manager's Name], I hope you are doing well! Thank you so much for the opportunity to intern with [Company X] last summer. It was a truly rewarding experience, and I learned so much during my time there. I genuinely enjoyed working with the team and contributing to [internship project]. Given how much I valued my time at [Company X], I am very interested in exploring the possibility of returning for a full-time role. Could you let me know the best way to discuss the possibility of returning to [Company X]? I’d be happy to provide any additional information you might need. Big thanks for reading through all of this - I know it is a very long post and I really appreciate your time!

Hi there Taro people! I want to mentor an intern, but in order to get one my manager asked me to come up with a few project proposals. I’m finding that hard to do because I have no idea what could be good intern-level tasks, and to be honest I don’t have many ideas coming to me at all. Have you ever been through that and could give me some advice?

I went through Taro’s networking course and I noticed that a lot of the advice on deepening relationships are geared towards colleagues. I was wondering how you can effectively deepen relationships with people (ie friends) outside your company? I have a lot of friends in SWE and I’d be comfortable asking them for a referral, but since I haven’t worked with them personally, they wouldn’t have enough ammo to vouch for my professional experience. I love hanging out with my friends but I’m wondering if there are ways I can get more out of my relationships from them from a professional standpoint?

First, I would really like to thank Alex for taking the time to record the video series regarding the Meta Intern Success Series. I just watched the section regarding working with my intern manager. I understand that it is important to have a weekly 1:1 with my IM. I am wondering if it is necessary to also have a weekly meeting with the engineering manager as well. If so, what would be some good topics to bring up during the meeting? Topics I am thinking of include: project updates, feedback, career advice/planning. I would love to hear any thoughts on this.

I recently started working as an SDE contractor at a FAANG. This morning, I wasn’t feeling well (I had a bad cold and a mild fever) so I asked my advisor if I could skip our call. I took some medicine and a nap, and after about an hour of rest, I felt much better. Since I didn’t want to fall behind, I decided to go to the office. The problem is, I forgot to let my advisor know that I was feeling better. When he saw me at work during a team meeting, he assumed I had lied about being sick. I tried to explain what happened, but he didn’t seem to believe me and said it’s not possible to recover that quickly. I feel terrible about this because I really love working with my team and want to prove myself here. Is there anything I can do to clear the air and fix this misunderstanding?

I want to go the extra mile as an intern and build out additional projects on top of what I've already been assigned. Right now, I'm proposing opportunities and ending messages with "If you want more info, let me know!". Is there anything else I can do?

I’m joining a late-stage startup in August. I talked to a bunch of people in the company but this upcoming chat will be my first with a tech lead. This startup’s levelling system is similar to Palantir’s - the only titles are SWE, tech lead and eng. manager. My goal in this conversation is to better understand the company’s promo culture, the expectations of each level and how to get to tech lead. What are some questions I should ask to get a better understanding? Are there any other topics that a tech lead is well-suited to answer that I haven't considered? If so, what are some questions I can ask?

I was very fortunate to have received internship offers from both Meta and Microsoft for summer 2025. Would it be better to: try asking the recruiter to move Microsoft intern offer to spring 2025 send a very polite email reneging Microsoft internship opportunity Based on what I've seen, Microsoft historically has very rarely offered to move a summer internship to another season. I was wondering if it would still be worth asking the recruiter.

I have an accountability buddy who I met online. We've been reporting each other on a weekly basis. While I've been able to make progress on the goals I've set each week, I still feel that I'm not getting the most out of the relationship (not his fault though). I think the two failure modes are: Whenever I only partially hit a goal, I come up with excuses like "work's been really busy" or something similar. He's quite understanding and says it's ok to catch up next week. I have a tendency to make really easy goals, like "do a leetcode problem every day" or "apply to a job every day". Like sure, I probably wouldn't have done them without an accountability buddy, but I feel like I could go so much further if my buddy pushed me to set higher goals. So I'm wondering how I can make it such that I get away with less bs, or have him be "meaner" to me? I've thought of some solutions like sharing my job app tracker with him, my leetcode practice diary, etc. But I can definitely think of some things that are harder to share (for example work related stuff).

I had an interview with a startup which I got an offer from but I declined it. I would say I developed decent rapport with the recruiter. I have a friend who’s now applying to the same startup with slightly more YoE than me and for a different role but I don’t know if the recruiter also manages that role. I think my friend’s background may be a good fit for the startup since the startup regularly hires out from my friend’s current company. This friend also previously interned at FAANG. The startup hires for forward deployed engineers (an uncommon position) which is what my friend currently is, but my friend is looking to transition to SWE at the startup. I’m wondering if it’s appropriate for me to introduce my friend to the recruiter? I’m worried that if they bomb the interview it’ll reflect poorly on me and affect future job opportunities with the company.

Is it appropriate to ask the recruiter what are projected RO rates for the summer before the internship actually starts? How might I go about doing it?

I am starting my SWE internship soon in one month, and my mentor was nice to offer me a call to get to know the team more, what kind of insights or questions I should ask to make my internship onboarding process and in general fruitful since I don't think they will go in depth or have decided on the project I will be working on before I start, thanks in advance

This summer, I will be joining Meta as an intern. Suppose during my internship, my intern manager is extremely busy and is fighting off PIP. Due to this, he/she does not have time to answer my questions and I will need to figure out most things on my own. I understand being at Meta right now is very stressful, and it is best to assume good intent. I was wondering if you had any tips on how to best handle this situation and secure a return offer.

When I was in school, I’d always deliver work with high quality when there was a grade on the line. Digging deep into this, I realize that the dopamine rush of getting an A in a class was really satisfying for me. However, this backfires against me when I don’t have grades to keep me accountable. If a class has a very easy grading scheme, or if I’m pursuing a side project, the quality of my work (measured against past projects I’ve done) is noticeably lower. I do a crappy job, mark it as done ASAP and move on to the next thing. I’ve come to realize that grades have been the only motivator for me since elementary school. I’m a little worried that the workplace doesn’t have “grades”, and I’ll lose motivation to do good work. While performance reviews serve as a proxy, they happen every quarter/half/year and I don’t think the feedback cycle is quick enough to give me long term motivation. Furthermore, performance reviews evaluate your performance on multiple projects rather than a single one, which cuts my motivation even more. There are two ways to solve this: make work feel like school or find something else to be motivated for. How have people found motivation to do better without fighting for a grade? Have people found strategies or internal frameworks to do better?

I will be joining Meta this summer as an intern. After watching the Taro videos regarding the intern success series, I learned the importance of making it clear to the manager about my intention to return to the company for a full time job. I was wondering about the appropriate time to first mention this topic to the manager. Assuming a 12 week internship, would somewhere around Week 4 be a good time, or is it necessary to bring it up even earlier? I was thinking that it would be better to at least make some nontrivial progress on the intern project beforehand, but not sure.

I’ll be heading into a recruiter screen for a company that my friend referred me to. I’m pretty sure the company will ask me something like ‘why this company’. I feel that I can leverage my friend’s experiences to craft unique responses to the behavioral questions. For example something like ‘my friend did X Y and Z in the company and I feel that this aligns with my goals as I’ve done A B and C’. So I’m wondering what questions I should ask my friends to get ‘ammunition’ for the recruiter screen? On the top of my head I’m thinking: What they worked on Learning opportunities Team culture Not sure if anyone can add more to the list. The goal is to come up with the smallest set of questions that provide the most amount of value, since I don’t want to be too bothersome with my friend.

I think this is the classic question of “less interesting work at prestigious company vs interesting work at less prestigious company” I am debating between Anduril and Meta for new grad. I am leaning towards Anduril because of everything else other than prestige: my coworkers are very smart, there’s a ton of scope for new grads and work is interesting. I’m only considering Meta for prestige and predictable career growth. Anduril is a hot unicorn but I was surprised when none of the recruiters I talked to knew what Anduril was. When I think about exit opportunities, Anduril feels limited. The defense sector is growing slowly with many reports indicating a 10% CAGR at most. This means it’s unlikely there’ll be many good companies that’ll hire me in defense and opportunities feel limited. I’m not particularly excited about other companies in defense besides Anduril. While I haven’t been team matched at Meta, I can imagine Meta having many more exit opps than Anduril as they work on AR/VR, AI, robotics and other trendy technologies. With the tariff situation in the current administration, I can imagine that the job market will become even more competitive down the line. This means that Meta’s brand value will be even more important. To me, Meta is a means to get a better job, whereas Anduril is said better job. So should I take Meta for better future exit opps or go to Anduril? When does it make sense to sacrifice interesting work to set yourself up for more exit opps, versus going to a lesser known company? Should you trade off learning, ownership and scope to go to a more prestigious company in a bear market? PS. Here’s how I measured exit opps. I went on LinkedIn and found the % of people who go to big tech or top unicorn after working at Anduril and same with Meta. Unsurprisingly Meta beat out Anduril by a mile.

I just declined an internship offer from a big tech company after previously accepting it. In the email, I emphasized how I hoped to have the chance to work with them in the future. The recruiter replied "Thank you for keeping me updated, and I wish you the best in your future endeavors. As I inform the team, would you feel comfortable to share with me a little more context to your decision?" Would it be a good idea to reply to the recruiter, or should I just leave things as is? I am not very comfortable sharing the specifics of the opportunity I ultimately chose to accept, and I am concerned it might trigger unpleasant feelings from the other party.

I got an offer from a company I’m excited about. I spent a lot of time talking with engineers at the place but their reviews naturally skew positive. The recruiting process was pretty drawn out (3 month process) and in that time frame one of my interviewers left the company for another opportunity. I was wondering if it’s appropriate to reach out to them (and in general people who just left) to get a better take of the company? Personally I want to ask why they left the company, whether they got what was advertised from the company and whether they felt happy with their choice. If so, here’s a draft of the message I’d like to send on Linkedin: Hi XYZ, My name is <name> and I interviewed with you at ABC Company back when you were there! I’m happy to share with you that I got the offer and would love to ask you more your recent experience at ABC! Happy to send over a few questions. Looking forward to hearing from you! And a more general message to people who recently left: Hi XYZ, My name is <name> and I recently got an offer at ABC Company. I saw you recently left the company and would love to hear about your experience! Would it be okay to ask a few questions? Happy to send them over for you to answer at your convenience. Looking forward to hearing from you! Here are the questions I plan to ask: Why did you leave ABC Company? Why did you initially join ABC company? Did you get what the company advertised? In what ways have you grown while working at the company? What other choices were you thinking about when picking XYZ company and did you make the right choice? Would you recommend picking xyz to a friend?

What would be the best way to answer a question "What are you hoping to get out of this internship?" during a 1:1 meeting with my manager? I heard it is common for interns to be asked this question during the Meta internship. Some ideas I can think of: To secure a return offer, as I really enjoy learning and growing from the team I would love to learn as much as I can, collaborate with talented engineers, and hopefully make an impact while I’m here. To get to a level where I can review another team member's code and approve it

I’m in the interview process with a robotics company that asked me to prep a 9min self introduction that can include anything. I’m in the process of drafting my self intro. My intro consists of lightly touching upon 10 robotics/SWE experiences, then wrapping up with why I want to join the company and how my skillsets align with the company’s trajectory. I realized that summarizing 10 experiences makes each experience a little superficial. On the other hand they each contribute a little to my story of how I’ve been involved in robotics over the years, so what’s the best way to go about this?

I recently joined AWS as an SDE intern. One of the onboarding tasks is build network by inviting some suggested L6/L7 software devs/managers. I know this is a valuable opportunity to speed my growth as an intern. However, I am pretty stuck on what I should be asking in these meetings/conversations. Any tips on how to engage in a good conversation with people with much higher position than you are, especially on what to focus for these conversations? Thanks!

When I come up with a solution to an unfamiliar DP problem, I usually start with a decision tree, identify its subproblems, and draft a brute force approach that can easily be memoized, making it a top-down approach. Since the time complexity for top-down and bottom-up is in the same magnitude, would most interviewers be satisfied if I stop there?