Internship Final Review and the Offer Process - How the decisions are made?

How interns are evaluated in Big Tech and how can you do your best work to get the return Full Time Offer?

Pahalgam, Kashmir

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For an Audio Summary, click the Play button below:

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Getting the internship offer is a great accomplishment and a stepping stone to a career in the Tech Industry. The internship role gives you a glimpse of what working within a Tech company looks like. You are able to experience the technical as well as the cultural sides of engineering. So, if you find yourself with this opportunity, and really like what you experienced as an intern, how can you ensure you are able to come back as a full time engineer. Let me take you behind the scenes and share a couple of decades of experience in observing both successful and unsuccessful internships, and how you can ensure that you are able to deliver your best work and secure the return offer.

I was hired as a Software Development Engineer Intern and the expectations of the role involved a good amount of technical work. For my intern project, I had to follow the complete lifecycle of a typical Software Development Engineering project - review Business Requirements, create an Engineering Design, identify Task Breakdown, write the Code, Validate and Test, present the Final Demo. I remember authoring 3 engineering design documents for my project, one for the design changes I made to the datasets for backend business logic, one for the API design for Project Server, and the last one for the Project Web App (PWA) UI and how I integrated with the APIs.

“Spending time on the engineering designs, not only helped me in achieving the goals of my project but also helped me in demonstrating a key skill of the software engineering discipline, taking business goals and converting them into software”

The bulk of my time was spent coding and integrating my changes with adjacent components. In the development phase, there were some issues that required me to dive deep and go into uncharted territories and unblock myself, sometimes with limited help.

“Dealing with the ambiguity of a large code base and delivering your features while integrating with a larger system, is another strong software engineering competency that you have to demonstrate”

The Final Internship Review would involve your mentor and manager taking a close look at the technical deliverables you produced, whether it is the engineering designs you wrote or the code changes you implemented. Raising the bar on the technical level is the single most important factor in determining whether you would get the return offer or not. During your internship, keep documenting your work and remember to review it with other engineers to raise the level of quality of the artifacts you produce. This will help you demonstrate the key competencies of a Software Development Engineer.

Tip #1: Demonstrating key Technical Skills, both design and implementation, is the single most important factor in determining the outcome of your internship. Focus on writing bar raising engineering designs and solid code.

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