How to go on an internship to a large IT company

    If you have long wanted to go to a foreign internship, but do not know how to approach this, then this article is for you.

    Fedor Kitashov ( kitashov ), 4th year student of the Faculty of Physics and Technology, MIPT, told what needs to be done to go on a full-time internship, work on a speech recognition system at Cisco, see 20 US states, and why go back.

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    Find a Referral
    Pass an Interview
    Preparing for a Trip
    Internship in Cisco
    Conditions
    Who Has Communicated
    What Remember
    What Next?
    Hyde You can

    go for an internship after the second year, but few people know about this. VKontakte is the group “ Foreign internships and full time in IT"In which they google the tablet. It reflects current opportunities: which companies have already opened the set, when it will close approximately, whether people with a Russian passport can apply or not. Google and Facebook, for example, usually open the kit in October.

    Find a referral


    The main problem is that hundreds of thousands of people are served on Google. If you overslept, your resume simply will not have time to look. Therefore, everyone is reinsured and looking for the so-called referrals - company employees who directly throw your resume into the system. Such resumes first of all get to the table to recruiters, but at the interview stage this does not give any privileges.

    You write on a social network to a person who works on Google:
    - Hi, I'm Fedya. Can you refer me to Google, please?
    - No problem. Throw CV.
    After that, the e-mail you threw him before came a message: “You were recommended on Google. Our recruiter will contact us within a week. ” They contacted you and as soon as they said: “It seems to us that your resume is good enough for you to come to us,” they immediately called the date of two 45-minute telephone interviews. They go either one after the other, or with a small time difference. In contentious situations, Google may schedule a third interview to make a final decision.

    Now the system has been changed. The referral throws your resume into the system, after which you have 30 days to apply for three vacancies on the site. This makes the waiting process somewhat uncertain, but still much more transparent than when submitting to the site without a referral.

    Pass the interview


    Algorithmic interviews are about coding problems. As in programming competitions, it's just easier. Two tasks are usually given for one 45-minute interview.

    If a person has completed a basic course on algorithms, then it is realistic to prepare for two to three months, if every day to solve several problems.

    Such interviews are more or less similar for all companies, but there are different topics and solutions. Google is very fond of dynamic programming and recursion.

    In general, the process looks like this: you call up with the interviewer via Skype or Hangouts. You are asked to tell about yourself in about three minutes. In response, the person introduces himself: “I am developing advertising on Google. Let’s go? ” You code in environments where syntax is not highlighted. For example, you have Google Doc open so that there is no autocompletion and one that you don’t know how to spell while.

    The interview lasts 45 minutes. Usually the prologue is about five minutes, and then two tasks, about twenty minutes each. If you tightened the first, they may not give the second. Tasks are often formulated so that you need to ask additional questions to finally understand the condition. You specify the condition, explain your decision out loud, write it in Google Doc, and come up with test cases. Ideally, you should be sure that the code will work.

    Some companies like to put in front of this the so-called behavioral interview: for about 25-30 minutes they ask you questions from the series: “And tell us about a case in your life when you were at odds with your bosses. And why? How did you try to resolve this issue? What would you do if the person working next to you started doing this? ” Amazon and Microsoft love this.

    Some banks love interviews so much that they automated them. The robot asks you questions, and you record the answers on camera.

    Travel preparation


    In mid-October, I went to Cisco, at the end of November, they called me for the first time to clarify my plans and check the level of English, in December I was contacted by a manager who was interested in my resume. At the beginning of January there was a coding interview, at the beginning of February they said that I was accepted. I went in July. Usually by the beginning of spring you already know where you will work in the summer.

    All interns travel to America on a J1 student special visa. There is a separate line for it, even in Moscow you can sign up for it. A month or two before the interview, you can really find a slot.

    At the interview they ask about your occupation, why are you going to the States, who pays and what keeps you in Russia. In essence, your task is to prove your connection with your homeland.

    Sometimes you are sent for administrative verification for another 60 days to check your history. This has not happened to me.

    Internship at Cisco


    I was engaged in improving the speech recognition system. For example, the same Siri still does not work very well with accents. She recognizes Australian, American and British, and if you are from a very distant region of India, where only 50 million people speak your language, then most likely you have a very strange pronunciation in English, and the system may not understand you.

    We took data from the accent database, where several thousand people of different nationalities read the same piece of text, and tried to “bring” the sound of complex accents to American English. We ended up weak, but it was fun.

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    At the beginning of the internship, we and other interns participated in a lot of hackathons. There are many companies interested in engineers in the Valley, so competitions for programmers take place almost every weekend. At the hackathon from the International Air Transport Association, we won a prize with a project for the smart selection of neighbors on board an airplane - we seated sleeping people and screaming children in different parts of the airplane, filling the space between them with people who like to talk. In the vicinity of San Francisco, important events from the world of technology often occur. You can safely participate in the TechCrunch Disrupt conference or come to the Apple office after the presentation of the next iPhone to talk with engineers. All this within an hour's drive.

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    Much of the internship depends on the manager, for example, the schedule. Sometimes I warned my manager: “This is a cool festival, maybe I won’t work on Monday, but will work on Saturday instead?” Let go without problems.

    Often everything is ok: no one will fine you for coming at 9:02, not at 9:00. But usually on fast-paced projects such a pace that if you fall out for a week, then most likely you will not have time to catch up. You really work because you work with older guys, professionals. And if this is your first working experience, then you need to fig. Some teams set up stand-ups (meetings where people from the team take turns telling about what was done yesterday) at 11-12 in the morning, so at this point you should at least wake up.

    I know a girl who interned in the summer on Facebook in the search department. She always came to work the first month at two in the afternoon, because she slept until one. After some time, her manager said: “You have time for everything, everything is cool, but it’s not very convenient for me to manage you, because I leave myself at seven in the evening. Maybe you can come at least by noon? We have no restrictions, just a request. " Here in this format.
    You need to keep in mind that the internship is an interview, just stretched over twelve weeks, where the company looks, whether you are suitable for them or not. Your task is to learn as much as possible.

    Conditions


    Internships cover absolutely everything. You are paid a visa, money is given for tickets. In some companies - the same Google or Facebook - you do not spend money on food, because it is always in the office. All interns have health insurance.
    People usually return from internships in the United States with cash accumulations for which you can safely live in Russia for a year. In Europe, they usually pay less.
    With housing, it happens in different ways: a company either rents apartments for you during the entire internship, or you can take extra money and look for housing on your own. Cisco paid me an apartment. It was a large apartment, where once every two weeks they changed clothes, took out garbage, and washed dishes.

    America is fun. Huge portions and cars. Cheap flights, good roads, which are tracked much better than public transport. I sincerely tried to rely on the subway at the beginning of the internship, but then I scored and started everywhere to take a taxi. And Americans embellish most of what they say. This is unusual, but in terms of service - space. When a person tries to be your friend for at least the three minutes that you rent a car from him, it’s very high. In real life, you get tired of the incredible delight, which is completely fake, but this is the style of their communication.

    Who I talked to


    Companies are trying to interns communicate with each other. They not only hunt new people - they are also a reputably very cool story. If a person likes to work on Facebook, he will come and tell everyone how cool it is to work on Facebook, and more people will want on Facebook. So with every company. Therefore, usually at the very beginning small summits are held: they collect all the interns, take them together, do everything so that people get to know each other, that they have their own group in WhatsApp or anywhere, so that you can always always communicate with people. First of all, the circle of your communication is your colleagues and other interns; at least you sometimes have lunch together. By the third month of the internship, we had formed a company of five people, with whom we traveled together for a year. We looked in the format “drive away for the weekend” 20-25 states.

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    I was also interested in talking with people who have been living and working in the Valley for some time. I searched for cool guys from various companies on LinkedIn, wrote to them and drove them to dinners. But so few who do, probably.

    What is remembered


    I did not expect such a stratification of the population. American cities are about neighborhoods.

    Expensive neighborhoods like Beverly in Los Angeles or Pacific Heights in San Francisco are located far from the city center, which is usually a much less pleasant place. You can walk around an expensive area and in five minutes on foot accidentally end up in something much less well-groomed. For example, a district may be cheap because the school is bad there and the school is bad because the district is cheap. When you pay a tax, where you live, this tax also goes to the maintenance of all structures around, including schools. The more expensive the district, the more money schools receive, the better they get. This is an endless circle. Therefore, the center of San Francisco, the center of Los Angeles, is scary at night. There are wonderful bars there, but I was not very comfortable walking around San Francisco in the evening and I probably would not have parked the car in the center at night in some blocks there.

    What's next?


    I am interested in data analysis. In the West, if you have just completed your undergraduate studies, you will most likely not be allowed to do something super-complex related to research, because there it is accepted that PhD students are already doing this. After four years of undergraduate studies, another five years of postgraduate studies can go, during which in the summer you will be able to train on interesting data analysis projects. There are separate internships for graduate students.

    It’s much harder to get into an interesting project with computer vision, complex word processing, because there is a queue of a couple of dozen PhD students from Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, with whom it’s hard to compete with your resume. If you are good enough, for example, you are Kaggle Grand Master, you will spend time on interviews and you can calmly prove that you are quite experienced for large research projects.

    3 months before the end of the internship, I started looking for projects in Russia that I could work on in my fourth year.

    If by this time I had already driven Google twice, maybe it made sense for me to leave now, because when you are 21 years old and you are already developing YouTube, it’s fun. Or you develop something really interesting on Facebook: you programmed something of your own, run a test for 5% of Facebook users, watch how 110 million people react to this new feature.

    I think that for the next three years I will be in Russia, because here it is easier to get to the data analysis projects that are of interest to me. I don’t know yet where I will go to the magistracy, I choose. Most likely, it will be Fizteh or HSE. But I still plan to go on internships in the summer, and throughout the year I will probably work on large projects in Moscow.

    Hyde:


    Add to the group “ Foreign internships and full time in IT ” and track interesting internships;

    Find a person on LinkedIn or in Telegram channels who will upload your resume to the internal system of the company;

    Start preparing for an algorithmic interview. The sites leetcode.com , pramp.com , hackerrank.com , topcoder.com , code.google.com/codejam/resources , projecteuler.net and the book “Cracking the Coding Interview” will help .

    And it will also be useful to read the blogs of various interns and the Internship FAQ .

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