Software Developer Intern at VMware | Canary - internship reviews by students

My experience

Overview

This was a return internship, and it was pretty similar to my last one. Worked on refactoring a Flink-based (micro)service by splitting into two parts, for one of VMware's rather large Telco products.

In the middle of my internship, VMware was acquired by Broadcom. There were... mixed feelings about this, and some concerns that Broadcom might make VMware a worse place to work. They have very different cultures; for example, VMware offers 12 weeks of maternity leave, while Broadcom offers 5 days. With $61 billion on the line, most likely VMware will given respect and autonomy similar to what it had when Dell owned it; it wouldn't make sense to cut up a successful company for scraps, but this is something you should be aware of if applying to VMware right now.

Pros

Last internship there weren't a lot of meetings, and this one there were even less. Meet with mentors once a week, had a team sync-up once a week, and that was it. Didn't really interact with manager much. Tons of autonomy, as long as you do your job. Intern program is pretty good, pay is pretty good too (though I wish I got my offer later, since it did not rise with inflation). People are good.

Cons

Having too much autonomy made me a bit distracted at times. Also, the technical task was difficult as times, and my mentors were not always readily available, so had to figure it out for myself. This being a return internship, they had higher expectation for me then for a new intern; I was pretty much treated as a full time employee, with the good and the bad of that.

VMware