Comment by toast0 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by toast0 | Hacker News Reader

People who are in CS for the money are probably not going to stay in CS long term. There's plenty of ways out for people who don't enjoy the work (management of people or products, technical writing, possibly design).

Certainly some people come for the money and stay for the experience. My best advice for internship applications is try to have some interesting project on your resume --- preferably one of the things you've been working on outside of class, but mention interesting class projects if you can speak to the whole thing. And get the interview basics down -- clean clothes, appropriate clothes (ask recruiter/scheduler what people wear to work and match the fancier end), arrive 10-15 minutes early, try to be relaxed, etc. For video or phone interviews, if you can find a quiet place with no distractions, that's best. It helps to do practice interviews, which could be for local companies you might rather not interview.

You didn't ask for interview advice, but I just mention it because I've interviewed some intern candidates, and it's always unfortunate when the candidate seems very unprepared or having a bad day, but may have been a good fit.

I'm almost certain I'd never do an internship. It's not a way to optimize for learning and personal growth. And definitely not a whiteboard generic software engineering. Lots of things about internships in the tech field put me off. If it is a startup, I have had a startup, high chance it's a shitshow. FAANG, don't think so. Also what meaningful work can you really get done in 3 months?

I feel like internships are a good way to learn if you haven't already been coding in the real world or on the subject matter and a good resume item, but if you have a good resume already and coding experience there are much better alternatives.

It’s partly about working in a professional environment. You can get a 4 year degree and never use git, never work on a single codebase that has existed long before you came and will exist long after you leave. There is so much experience from just working in a professional setting that can greatly boost your resume. We take caution hiring people without this experience as it can be impossible to teach this to someone when teaching them tech skills is easier.

agree for exactly the reasons above. the internship i did helped me understand so many things, from version control and unit testing to larger / longer-lived codebases, to the interpersonal dynamics of corporate settings... To this day I feel like I went through a relatively strong CS undergrad based on what I learned there vs. what my coworkers report having learned, but I also learned just as much via internships as I did in school.

> You can get a 4 year degree and never use git

Having graduated about a year ago, this is the craziest thing I noticed about so many of my classmates. It'll be trial by fire for sure.

I understand the sentiment. But before I did an internship, I was also in the same position as you where I had been coding a lot. However, like others have mentioned, an internship is very helpful for the following reasons:

1. You get experience working with important concepts that exist in production like proper git usage, technologies like Kubernetes and Docker, managing differnt build flavors on the client, unit tests, how to review other peoples code professionally, etc

2. You learn the soft skills part about building software. More often than not, software is a team effort and learning how to navigate different peoples egos and personalities and trying to get your ideas across are very important. Even if you're the best coder in the world, if you can't get your ideas across, it doesn't matter

3. 3 months is actually a lot of time to get meaningful work done. Even full-time employees will have feature development that takes around 3-4 months from ideation to shipping (in high velocity companies). As an undergrad, you have 3 summers and I would consider at least allocationg 1 of those summers to an internship to see how you like it

> Also what meaningful work can you really get done in 3 months?

It really depends on where you are and how seriously they take their interns. I've seen interns accomplish a fair amount in 3 months where I work (Mozilla). As a concrete example, we had an intern propose and implement a new devtools feature that lets you see what your site design looks like to users with various visual impairments.

Still depending on where you are and what you have already done, some things that one can learn from an internship that one might not encounter otherwise during college:

* Working with a large codebase.

* Working with a distributed team.

* Code reviews, both as the recipient and actually doing them yourself.

* Dealing with large existing suites and writing your own tests, then dealing with the intermittent failures.

* Finding out what various people in the industry are working on.

* Finding out what jobs actually look like in practice on a day-to-day basis.

It's possible to pick some of these up via various open-source project involvement, of course, even without doing an internship.

As a personal anecdote, during the one internship I did I learned a lot about the concept of "just because it's a spec doesn't mean you should implement it", ended up fixing a ship-stopping bug for the product I was working on, made some friendships that continue until today (nearly 20 years later), learned some hard lessons about the failures of corporate IT provisioning in a large corporation, plus some of the things I listed above.

> As a concrete example, we had an intern propose and implement a new devtools feature that lets you see what your site design looks like to users with various visual impairments.

That sounds like an interesting feature, where do I find it?

1) Open devtools.

2) Select the "Accessibility" panel. See https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Accessibility...

3) In Firefox 70 or newer, if WebRender is enabled, there will be a "Simulate" menu next to the "Check for Issues" menu. See https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Accessibility... for details. Note that WebRender is not enabled across the board yet, so you may need to force-enable it, depending on your operating system and graphics card, to use this tool.

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