Leveraging a Big Tech Internship to Bootstrap a Top Tech Career
Even if you want to end up as a remote worker in a LCOL low-tax place.
If you’re a CS student, the highest leverage activity you can pursue is
Getting a Big Tech internship.
Yes.
This is a pretty safe advice I can give.
Why:
1. It's relatively easy.
Barriers to entry for internship big tech positions are much lower than for full-time positions: easier to get an interview, easier to pass the interview.
2. Getting a junior full-time role in big tech is very hard without an internship in big tech.
The company would need to make a substantial bet on you, without knowing if you can perform at big tech levels. While also being junior (so in general needing more guidance).
3. Spending the first few years of your career in low-paying tech jobs can hurt your career.
I mean, noone is gonna die if you do so, but the further you part ways from top careers, technically the harder it is to rejoin them. Ageism is a bit real in big tech IMO.
4. A big tech internship is a very liquid commodity.
Even if you don't want to do big tech long-term, having some good brands on your CV will pay dividends when looking for all kinds of roles in tech: startups, contract jobs, remote gigs, business opportunities, etc.
5. As a student, you have a lot more time to prepare for interviews.
If you're in uni, you can buy yourself time more easily than when having a 9-5. Moreover, you can somewhat freely tune how much effort you want put into your uni commitments (for example, you might be ok with taking average grades if this allows you to have more time to prep and interview).
6. As a student, you're more likely to be dealing with theoretical CS on a daily basis.
Things like algorithms and data structures classes, theoretical distributed systems classes and so on. All things that for some reasons nowadays are key to big tech interview processes.
7. Corollary of above: the more you're in the industry, the less you remember theoretical CS.
And the more time you'd need to spend LeetCoding on the weekend to stay sharp for interviews (which will also be harder interviews because you'd be interviewing for full-time and potentially senior roles).
8. Big tech internships are a cheat code for networking.
You usually are surrounded by many other students in your position, and you can easily mingle with them as peers and create genuine connections. Most of them, will end up doing pretty well in their careers, and this can positively contribute to your network. Also it's a good way to make like-minded friends.
Here's how getting a Big Tech internship in 2020 changed the trajectory of my career. 👇
Today I'm gonna share the story of how I pursued this activity myself and how it paid off over time.
In 2019, I was working as a software engineer in Zurich making relatively good money.
Yet, I felt like I could do something cooler with my career.
Big tech was in its prime, and I thought it could be a good option.
I didn't have too much time for LeetCode outside of work.
Since I was also curious to try out research (in math and theoretical CS/ML), I decided to
Quit my job and start a master's degree in Computer Science.
I ended up liking research but also realising I would rather join big tech as a SWE.
I had a lot of time to study algorithms and data structures and practice big tech interviews.
Fast-forward 2020: I secured about 5 to 7 big tech internship offers.
Then Covid happened, and most of these offers got rescinded. Eww
Amazon was one of these offers, and as a company it was doing great with all the people moving their spending online, so they didn't rescind my offer and I joined them.
Here's how this whole thing accelerated my career:
1. First of all, I became a "LeetCode expert" and learned a lot about big techs' interview processes.
I did a lot of practice (I don't know how many single interviews I did, but probably in the order of 30-70) and even up to this day, I know perfectly well what to expect and feel comfortable in a big tech interview loop.
2. My CV got more legit.
Branding is a thing. And putting a big tech stamp on your SWE CV is quite huge.
3. Expanded my network and learned from super bright people.
4. Learned a lot about high-performing organisations like Amazon.
5. Being in a position of getting a full-time return offer from Amazon Barcelona, allowed me to leverage my position to get a well-paid job in Zurich afterwards.
6. Later on, my CV was ready for me to get a full-time big tech offer from Oracle Zurich.
So, again: if you're a CS student, you might want to consider trying getting a big tech internship before you graduate!
Hope this helps 🙂
