Ask HN: Advice for a software engineer intern at a big Silicon Valley company?
2 comments
Great advice. I especially like the advice on upping your communication skills and work-life balance.
Look to how you can become more valuable, not how many crazy hours you can do. Many people can work long hours, it's what you do with them that will make you stand out.
This is the advice I give to all new folks to the industry
Find a mentor. It probably won't be your manager, but someone on your team. They may not be senior, or a 10xer, or what you'd expect. They're the person that will show you how to work and more importantly, communicate effectively.
The job of a SWE is firstly to amplify value, secondly to create it, and lastly to write code. That means your job is to serve the business and product, not to write beautiful code or fast code. Sometimes they overlap, but the people who do the best work are the ones that balance that tertiary goal with delivering the product.
Make it work before you make it right. Right can mean pretty or fast. Shitty code that works can be fixed. Great code that doesn't work is useless.
Ask questions, especially from your mentor. No one expects you to know anything, and interns are in the best spot to fail and find guidance to improve. A senior that can't get stuff done gets fired, but an intern that asks for help to fix something they don't understand will be guided. Nothing you work on is mission critical and it's not a big deal if it breaks.
Don't take code review personally and don't get territorial with anything that you make. You can be incredibly happy and praised for work you do today and in a month feel like it needs to be rewritten.
Longer term, it's normal to feel shitty or stressed about work. It's not normal to feel that way all the time. If at the end of your internship you feel like you just did a tour of duty on the front lines, with sleepless nights and dreams of things going right or wrong it's ok to walk away. An internship at a big tech company is a great achievement and you will be successful wherever you land. It's important to make sure that the place you spend 40 hours a week is one that makes you happy, or at least not distressed. Don't feel like you have a duty to be loyal anywhere that you feel crappy.
And lastly on a personal note, something I was told by my high school calc teacher that I didn't internalize until I had years of professional experience under my belt was this: "your priorities in life should be family, faith, friends, and career." Now I don't care for the faith part of that, but I moved to a city I didn't know without family or friends for money. And it was the greatest regret of my life. People are more important than anything you do in an office.
Find a mentor. It probably won't be your manager, but someone on your team. They may not be senior, or a 10xer, or what you'd expect. They're the person that will show you how to work and more importantly, communicate effectively.
The job of a SWE is firstly to amplify value, secondly to create it, and lastly to write code. That means your job is to serve the business and product, not to write beautiful code or fast code. Sometimes they overlap, but the people who do the best work are the ones that balance that tertiary goal with delivering the product.
Make it work before you make it right. Right can mean pretty or fast. Shitty code that works can be fixed. Great code that doesn't work is useless.
Ask questions, especially from your mentor. No one expects you to know anything, and interns are in the best spot to fail and find guidance to improve. A senior that can't get stuff done gets fired, but an intern that asks for help to fix something they don't understand will be guided. Nothing you work on is mission critical and it's not a big deal if it breaks.
Don't take code review personally and don't get territorial with anything that you make. You can be incredibly happy and praised for work you do today and in a month feel like it needs to be rewritten.
Longer term, it's normal to feel shitty or stressed about work. It's not normal to feel that way all the time. If at the end of your internship you feel like you just did a tour of duty on the front lines, with sleepless nights and dreams of things going right or wrong it's ok to walk away. An internship at a big tech company is a great achievement and you will be successful wherever you land. It's important to make sure that the place you spend 40 hours a week is one that makes you happy, or at least not distressed. Don't feel like you have a duty to be loyal anywhere that you feel crappy.
And lastly on a personal note, something I was told by my high school calc teacher that I didn't internalize until I had years of professional experience under my belt was this: "your priorities in life should be family, faith, friends, and career." Now I don't care for the faith part of that, but I moved to a city I didn't know without family or friends for money. And it was the greatest regret of my life. People are more important than anything you do in an office.