Software Developer Intern

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RemoteEmployed: Summer 2021
Format: Remote
Department: Telco
Overall rating

4.5

Culture rating
Work rating

My experience

Overview

Keeping it vague for anonymity: basically involved rewriting/transitioning something of a legacy system from using one framework to another, which ultimately fixed some bugs, improved speed, etc. This was in the realm of "big data" and "data streaming," and in telecommunication.

Pros

* Few meetings. At a minimum, I had to meet with my "mentor" twice a week, and my manager once a week, plus one weekly team meeting. This might sound like a decent amount, but the average "meeting" (sync-up) with my mentor or manager took probably 4 minutes (no exaggeration), and the weekly team meeting was around 30 minutes. Most other meetings/sync-ups were because I needed some help with something. * Lots of autonomy - I got to goof off a lot because of this, but only because I got each part of my project done on time. * Decent intern program with talks and so on if you want an official reason to goof off. Also people on other teams are happy to talk to you about what they're doing. * Great pay - $33/hour is probably not too impressive by FAANG standards, but felt great after being rejected from internships that would have paid less then half that. Pretty good for this being my first internship and being a 2nd year college student. * Flexibility in choosing a project * Interesting technical project with big ramifications - basically will end up handling (flex incoming) ~1 million messages per SECOND once put into production. The stuff I worked on was pretty domain-specific, but also transferable and non-niche. * People at VMware are pretty nice in general, and they don't have a workaholic culture or anything. You won't see any commits on the weekend, at least on my team. * It's not Google, but VMware is a big company with a lot of different teams, so you can potentially do a lot of different things, although there are limitations.

Cons

* Strong technical barrier - I am an absolute nerd loser who already came in with very strong technical skills; but if you've only taken a few CS classes, it's going to be a rough summer. Although, you might also learn a lot, and management doesn't always expect much from interns. * Decent amount of work, separated into a weekly plan. This isn't the kind of the internship where you can do nothing and just get paid, specific tasks _will_ be assigned to you. * Autonomy - it's easy to goof off and get side tracked. * VMware pretty much exclusively works on "corporate technology"; you won't be working on Microsoft Word or Gmail or something your parents or relatives have heard of/use directly, and since some stuff like the cloud is complicated, it may be hard to explain to others (including clueless recruiters). You can still make a big, "real-world" impact, just might be more behind-the-scenes kind of stuff. * Domain-specific stuff - fits into last bullet. I happen to be very interested in certain CS topics like PLs and compilers, but VMware does basically nothing in those domains compared to companies like Microsoft.

Impact of work

Time spent working

How did working remote affect your experience?

Hard to compare, since I've never had an in-person experience. I felt a bit autonomous though, but at the same time, a bit disconnected from the rest of the team.


Interview advice

How did you find the job / apply?

Interview Rounds

Interview type

Interview questions

Don't remember the specifics, but we did a Hackerrank involving some kind of rotating 2D arrays in the 1st interview, and then the 2nd interview was mainly talking about what the product was and my background. Both interviewers were tech people so there weren't any BS questions trying to trip you up.

Advice on how to prepare

Try your best in the interview, make sure to ask questions.


More questions? Send the reviewer a message!
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