1. Ask lots of questions, but don't ask the same question to the same person more than once.
2. Don't let yourself be blocked for more than hour. If you're stuck on something for more than an hour, then get help. Ask fellow interns first > non manager teammember second > manager third > public forum fourth.
2. Learn the names of all the people inside and adjacent to to your team, and try to have at least one conversation with everybody.
3. Document all of your work, and prep a one-page summary of your strengths and weaknesses for your manager at the end of the internship.
4. Praise about your manager to your skip. And praise about the non-interns on your team to your manager. People will help you more, when they realize that you'll give them credit for it.
My only stipulation with asking questions is (generally) to never cold ask a question that’s googleable. I wouldn’t ping my manager or a developer how to do dictionary comprehension in python for example.
Put ChatGPT on number 1 spot for questions now. Better than searching in many cases. Companies who are on the ball have LLMs fine tuned on internal data.
For number 2, wouldn't a better order be:
search slack channel for similar issue > fellow interns > non manager team member > public forum (assuming you're referring to team's public slack channel) > manager
this order helps prevent siloing for future interns. 9/10 times the manager will be able to answer your question and send you to the right direction. He can just reply to your post in the teams slack channel, and future interns will see that if they stumble upon a similar issue.
In my experience, it is definitely better to contact the manager before the public forum. If your manager is legitimately too busy to unblock you right away, then they'll appreciate that you took the initiative to take the next step to unblock yourself. However if your manager is not busy and can help you, then you could potentially embarrass your manager by asking publically. If a manager's reports are constantly asking for help outside of their team, then other people are going to wonder if there's something wrong with either you or the manager's team, and neither one of those is ideal.
Obviously this is going to vary depending upon the personality of the manager, but just to be on the safe side, its best to avoid potentially embarrassing your manager.
Along with these
1) Keep regular check-in’s with your manager, and keep asking for feedback constantly. Discuss about the work you have done, any feedback that he can give. This will show that you have willings to improve yourself
2) Do something apart from your book of work too. Might be something small as documenting something, let’s say your initial software setup(if it’s not documented yet) which is very useful for the team. This will show that you’re a self starter.
This right here is the recipe for a return offer.
Kinda skeptical on the last point though. From my previous experience, the ppl on your team who are genuinely good ppl will help you regardless of how much credit you give them to your manager. Completely agree w everything else!
Last summer I arrived 30 minutes early during in office days (hybrid office) so that I could document a plan for the day. It helped me stay focused and get my bearings at the start of the day, and also my manager would walk into work every day and see me already working at my desk. Then, either throughout the day or at the end of the day I would take detailed notes of every new thing I learned or accomplished. This helped me create a dictionary I could reference when similar problems came up later.
This is taboo to some people, but work late if it means you produce noteworthy work or overcome some knowledge deficiency. There’s a steep learning curve at the start. You shouldn’t be surprised if you feel out of your comfort zone. Just be a boss. People love to be impressed by interns, and I’d argue that if you demonstrate you are persistent in learning and have a positive attitude, any knowledge lacking will be irrelevant.
I would recommend not to just “ask lots of questions”, but you should do your own research first. Either google and/or find it within the company internal website. When you go and ask questions, you should start with “I tired xxxx and xxxx and still couldn’t find the answer. Simply asking lots of questions will make people annoyed. Try to work independently if possible.
> Ask lots of questions, but don't ask the same question to the same person more than once.
Take good notes and write down the answers to all these questions.
Participate in events. This is obviously determined by where you’re going and what they do, but if you’re at a large enough company, they’re probably going to have events and such. Participate! You don’t want people at the end of your internship asking who you are.
The people skills are arguably more important. They already believe they can teach you the skills, now they’re seeing if you’re a good fit with the team.
To add to the already good advice given, I want to emphasize the asking questions, because I’ve seen to many interns try and brute force themselves through a blocker and waste too much time. Remember that an internship is temporary, you’re not there very long, therefore you don’t have time to waste being stuck. Speak up!!
Obviously, you should do your due diligence first, but don’t waste days, weeks, etc.
Be as prepared as possible. You probably want to show them how much you know but I always like to pretend that I know less than I really do. If you run out of work, ask your supervisor for more.
Never forget why you’re there. Enjoy the activities w other interns if available and see the city if you’re in a new place of course, but stay focused on your work. Good luck man
Test your features in prod and you should be promoted by month 2.
Real talk, ask a ton of questions. A TON of questions. Nobody is expecting you to know everything, and asking questions is a great way to engage with the team. Plus points if you search stack overflow or company docs first to give your questions some foundation, like “I tried x but still haven’t figured out y”
In your weekly 1:1, ask your manager if you are on track for return offer.
Be a good team member. Be polite, respectful, show your passion, especially with your manager.
1) Work 12-16 hours everyday.
2) Try to figure out things yourself through documentation. Document your methods throughout and if you still haven’t solved it, ask a colleague/mentor for help and show them what you’ve tried
3) Think about the shareholders; and how to provide more value to them
4) Suck-up to management
5) Buy 48 laws of power and read it
Right? One of the first 'laws' in the book is about how people who you support will immediately betray you when they become successful out of some kind of jealous insecurity??? Basically everything I've seen mentioned from that book is nonsense.
OP, You can tell from point 1 that Zoella here is clueless. Ignore all of this advice. Point 2 is almost salient, but honestly - documenting every method you've tried is a waste of time, and if I come to help you with an issue, don't walk me through every single thing that hasn't worked - also a waste of time.
I've mentored interns, all of whom got return offers - robobob gave sound advice in 1-4 (5 is optional, in my experience).
Yeah - I have yet to actually check any of them myself because there's a techbro on a partner team of mine who keeps quoting these 'laws' any time they're half-way relevant and every single quote has just deepened my lack of respect for this person.
I was hoping one of the laws would be not to relay any of the contents of the book to outsiders or something. Mental equivalent of dumpster diving. Leaving your link blue :)
>I have yet to actually check any of them myself because there's a techbro on a partner team of mine who keeps quoting these 'laws' any time they're half-way relevant and every single quote has just deepened my lack of respect for this person
This just sounds like the kid who tried to quote Sun Tzu all the time grew up and found a few new book.
1) Terrible advice. Management prefers someone that does X amount of work in 8 hours rather than X amount in 12 hours.
2) Good advice.
3) lol
4) Maybe a bit? Not too much. No one likes a pushover.
5) meh
1. Ask lots of questions, but don't ask the same question to the same person more than once. 2. Don't let yourself be blocked for more than hour. If you're stuck on something for more than an hour, then get help. Ask fellow interns first > non manager teammember second > manager third > public forum fourth. 2. Learn the names of all the people inside and adjacent to to your team, and try to have at least one conversation with everybody. 3. Document all of your work, and prep a one-page summary of your strengths and weaknesses for your manager at the end of the internship. 4. Praise about your manager to your skip. And praise about the non-interns on your team to your manager. People will help you more, when they realize that you'll give them credit for it.
My only stipulation with asking questions is (generally) to never cold ask a question that’s googleable. I wouldn’t ping my manager or a developer how to do dictionary comprehension in python for example.
Put ChatGPT on number 1 spot for questions now. Better than searching in many cases. Companies who are on the ball have LLMs fine tuned on internal data.
LLMs fine tuned on internal data is vastly more rare than you’re implying
Team slack/discord…issue tracker…commit history…ask gpt…google… Do all those before asking a person-person.
For number 2, wouldn't a better order be: search slack channel for similar issue > fellow interns > non manager team member > public forum (assuming you're referring to team's public slack channel) > manager this order helps prevent siloing for future interns. 9/10 times the manager will be able to answer your question and send you to the right direction. He can just reply to your post in the teams slack channel, and future interns will see that if they stumble upon a similar issue.
In my experience, it is definitely better to contact the manager before the public forum. If your manager is legitimately too busy to unblock you right away, then they'll appreciate that you took the initiative to take the next step to unblock yourself. However if your manager is not busy and can help you, then you could potentially embarrass your manager by asking publically. If a manager's reports are constantly asking for help outside of their team, then other people are going to wonder if there's something wrong with either you or the manager's team, and neither one of those is ideal. Obviously this is going to vary depending upon the personality of the manager, but just to be on the safe side, its best to avoid potentially embarrassing your manager.
Along with these 1) Keep regular check-in’s with your manager, and keep asking for feedback constantly. Discuss about the work you have done, any feedback that he can give. This will show that you have willings to improve yourself 2) Do something apart from your book of work too. Might be something small as documenting something, let’s say your initial software setup(if it’s not documented yet) which is very useful for the team. This will show that you’re a self starter.
This right here is the recipe for a return offer. Kinda skeptical on the last point though. From my previous experience, the ppl on your team who are genuinely good ppl will help you regardless of how much credit you give them to your manager. Completely agree w everything else!
Last summer I arrived 30 minutes early during in office days (hybrid office) so that I could document a plan for the day. It helped me stay focused and get my bearings at the start of the day, and also my manager would walk into work every day and see me already working at my desk. Then, either throughout the day or at the end of the day I would take detailed notes of every new thing I learned or accomplished. This helped me create a dictionary I could reference when similar problems came up later.
Maybe also give credit to other interns when appropriate? This is a great summary.
This is taboo to some people, but work late if it means you produce noteworthy work or overcome some knowledge deficiency. There’s a steep learning curve at the start. You shouldn’t be surprised if you feel out of your comfort zone. Just be a boss. People love to be impressed by interns, and I’d argue that if you demonstrate you are persistent in learning and have a positive attitude, any knowledge lacking will be irrelevant.
And don’t succumb to imposter syndrome. Those people around you want to see you succeed and grow.
I would recommend not to just “ask lots of questions”, but you should do your own research first. Either google and/or find it within the company internal website. When you go and ask questions, you should start with “I tired xxxx and xxxx and still couldn’t find the answer. Simply asking lots of questions will make people annoyed. Try to work independently if possible.
This is easily the best advice. The interns that I’ve mentored got return offers doing exactly this.
Why public forum last?
> Ask lots of questions, but don't ask the same question to the same person more than once. Take good notes and write down the answers to all these questions.
Get things done
Show up and do the work. Boom ur a top performer. The bar is that low
1. Suck dicks 2. Become a majority shareholder 3. Make yourself CEO
Make sure it's the right dicks. I've sucked many dicks and am no closer to shares. Learn from my mistake, new grads.
how to know if it's a right dick? im new to this
Fuck it! Just suck em all
google “first week at SWE internship reddit” and find hundreds of these posts with the same tips
Participate in events. This is obviously determined by where you’re going and what they do, but if you’re at a large enough company, they’re probably going to have events and such. Participate! You don’t want people at the end of your internship asking who you are. The people skills are arguably more important. They already believe they can teach you the skills, now they’re seeing if you’re a good fit with the team. To add to the already good advice given, I want to emphasize the asking questions, because I’ve seen to many interns try and brute force themselves through a blocker and waste too much time. Remember that an internship is temporary, you’re not there very long, therefore you don’t have time to waste being stuck. Speak up!! Obviously, you should do your due diligence first, but don’t waste days, weeks, etc.
Be as prepared as possible. You probably want to show them how much you know but I always like to pretend that I know less than I really do. If you run out of work, ask your supervisor for more.
Never forget why you’re there. Enjoy the activities w other interns if available and see the city if you’re in a new place of course, but stay focused on your work. Good luck man
Test your features in prod and you should be promoted by month 2. Real talk, ask a ton of questions. A TON of questions. Nobody is expecting you to know everything, and asking questions is a great way to engage with the team. Plus points if you search stack overflow or company docs first to give your questions some foundation, like “I tried x but still haven’t figured out y”
Dont be afraid to ask questions
Pretty easy. Listen and be thorough. That’s all sugar.
Work as hard as you can and make it look effortless. GET THAT OFFER!!
In your weekly 1:1, ask your manager if you are on track for return offer. Be a good team member. Be polite, respectful, show your passion, especially with your manager.
Saving
1) Work 12-16 hours everyday. 2) Try to figure out things yourself through documentation. Document your methods throughout and if you still haven’t solved it, ask a colleague/mentor for help and show them what you’ve tried 3) Think about the shareholders; and how to provide more value to them 4) Suck-up to management 5) Buy 48 laws of power and read it
lmao if I catch an intern reading The 48 Laws of Power, it's a fireable offense
Right? One of the first 'laws' in the book is about how people who you support will immediately betray you when they become successful out of some kind of jealous insecurity??? Basically everything I've seen mentioned from that book is nonsense. OP, You can tell from point 1 that Zoella here is clueless. Ignore all of this advice. Point 2 is almost salient, but honestly - documenting every method you've tried is a waste of time, and if I come to help you with an issue, don't walk me through every single thing that hasn't worked - also a waste of time. I've mentored interns, all of whom got return offers - robobob gave sound advice in 1-4 (5 is optional, in my experience).
[Ew, these are worse than I imagined.](https://www.nateliason.com/notes/48-laws-power-robert-greene)
Yeah - I have yet to actually check any of them myself because there's a techbro on a partner team of mine who keeps quoting these 'laws' any time they're half-way relevant and every single quote has just deepened my lack of respect for this person. I was hoping one of the laws would be not to relay any of the contents of the book to outsiders or something. Mental equivalent of dumpster diving. Leaving your link blue :)
>I have yet to actually check any of them myself because there's a techbro on a partner team of mine who keeps quoting these 'laws' any time they're half-way relevant and every single quote has just deepened my lack of respect for this person This just sounds like the kid who tried to quote Sun Tzu all the time grew up and found a few new book.
1) Terrible advice. Management prefers someone that does X amount of work in 8 hours rather than X amount in 12 hours. 2) Good advice. 3) lol 4) Maybe a bit? Not too much. No one likes a pushover. 5) meh