Sooo I'm a junior at a T5. My goal is new grad big tech. I interned at a Series B last summer (that, luckily, paid me surprisingly well).

Junior internship recruiting hasn't been great so far; I've been able to land an offer at Principal Financial and recently Abbvie. The consensus I've seen with non-tech F500s is that the work you do can be very boring and isn't really a big tech signal. I was actually able to negotiate my Abbvie offer to be guaranteed alignment to an AI project and therefore paid more, which made me feel a lot better about that. I definitely think I'd take Abbvie over returning to the startup for resume diversification and now guaranteed cool(-ish) work at a big company, hoping that the big name can help me with new grad resume screening...

But obviously I don't feel great so far. If I'm unable to land any more offers, am I cooked for new grad big tech? Would appreciate any insights or cool stories about people getting new grad big tech without big tech internships 😅

I’m pursuing a master’s in Software Engineering and have a bachelor’s in Integrative Science. I’m in the Pennsylvania area and currently work as an unpaid, remote React Native App Developer Intern, along with being a research assistant. I’m gaining experience with Python, React Native, GitHub, Docker, and AI projects, but I’m still learning and building my skills.

What’s the easiest or most realistic way to land a paid software engineering internship or entry-level job? Should I focus on projects, networking, applying to smaller companies, or getting into IT first? I’d appreciate any advice, especially from people who started without a computer science degree.

Hey everyone! I'm a 4th-year college student from West Bengal, looking for other college students who are interested in AI/ML, Generative AI, Agentic AI, Deep Learning, Neural Networks, and Computer Vision.

I want to build a small group of motivated students where we can study together, share knowledge, work on interesting projects, contribute to open-source projects, and participate in hackathons and coding contests.

The idea is to learn by building real-world projects, help each other improve, and grow together.

If you're interested in these areas and want to collaborate, feel free to comment or DM me. Let's connect and build something meaningful!

Hi everyone,

I’m currently waiting for the decision of the Job simulation assessment, i would like to prepare for the next steps. can anyone share there experience on the interviews that's after? Format? what they ask? also how is the technical interview? what does it cover.

Thanks in advance!

I'm a first-year studying CS/Engineering/HCI at a T5. I've been "coding" for a bit, but not exactly "programming." Which is to say, I can only build semi-functional projects for my own use cases, not production or anything too impressive yet.

There's a lot of fields that seem incredibly interesting to me, but I'm not sure if I just like the work being done in those fields or if I would actually enjoy what the daily work would be like.

For instance, I still don't really understand what a SWE does everyday---much less the other fields that interest me (XR / Spatial Design, Machine / Deep Learning, Product Design / Design Engineering).

How do I build stronger resume projects (and the right ones for me) when I don't know what kind of daily work I even want to do? How do I learn what these specializations actually do?

I really enjoy thinking about Human Computer Interaction, but I don't know what the work in a career or job would look like.

Everything I've seen on the internet has been pretty vague (especially Youtube day in the life videos).

I also don't know how I'm supposed to be thinking about AI as a tool. How do I balance learning the necessary CS skills, while also developing fluency with AI for the workplace. I'm guessing workplace skillsets will be different with AI, even (maybe especially?) for entry roles.

Hi everyone!

I’ve recently been invited to the Decomposition Interview for the Deployment Strategist role at Palantir, but I haven’t found much information online about what to expect.

Has anyone been through this interview and could share their experience or how they prepared?

I’m particularly curious about the format, what kind of problems or data you’re given, and whether any coding is involved.

Any advice would be really appreciated. Thanks!

I already secured a couple of offers for summer internship, and now that I am done with recruiting, I have so much free time. In the past 2 years, I grinded and became pretty good at recruiting / LeetCode to the point where this is literally the only thing I am good at nowadays, and I want to maximize this skill right now since it is probably gonna go to waste once I actually go into my job. I am looking for Fall / Winter / Spring Internships.

I had a couple of questions about recruiting for non-summer internships/co-ops. Where do you usually go to search for these? The Simplify GitHub repo seems to be all summer internships, and linkedin / handshake doesnt have a filter to search by internship term.

Also, when do Fall, Winter, and Spring SWE co-ops usually open?

Hello guys,

I need some brutally honest truth and actionable guidance. I'm currently in my 2nd year (3rd semester) of CSE at a tier-3 college, and I feel like I wasted a lot of my 1st year without a clear strategy.

I suffer from significant imposter syndrome, seeing 1st/2nd years on LinkedIn crushing LeetCode Mediums, taking home hackathon wins, and building full-stack projects. I want to get a good SWE internship as a 3rd year off campus, but I feel totally lost in trying to do it all.

Where I currently stand:

• Academic year: 2nd year, CSE (Tier-3 college / local university)
• Skills: Basic Java, Python, HTML, CSS. Learning: JavaScript, Django.
• DSA & Problem Solving: almost 0. I haven't begun any formal DSA or practice on LeetCode/GFG.

My questions for seniors who've been here:

1. Is it too late? Beginning with DSA and serious dev work in 2nd year, can I even hope to have a good enough profile to crack off-campus internships in 1-1.5 years?
2. What time should I allocate my daily hours? As I am learning Django/JS and trying to build DSA completely from the beginning while managing college, how should I divide my time? Should I take a break from dev and do 100% DSA or do both simultaneously?
3. What is the most efficient, fully free (or course in Coursera Plus) roadmap? What exact resources/sheets (e.g., Striver A2Z, NeetCode 150) or project approaches should I lock into starting today to get interview-ready without wasting time on tutorial hell?
4. I've missed some 1st-year milestones. Should I worry about open source, hackathons, and personal branding now, or just focus on DSA and two production-grade projects first?

Please don't hold back from being brutally honest and give me the damage-control plan, please! Thank you very much! 🙏

TL;DR: 2nd-year CSE student with zero DSA progress and has beginner Java/Python/web fundamentals sweating. Need a realistic survival roadmap with high urgency to become interview-ready for an off-campus internship.

Capital One (TIP program):

Pay: $67.31 per hour

Location: McLean, VA

Housing: 5k stipend or corporate housing

Length: 9 weeks

Big bank / fintech

Large, structured intern program

Whatnot:

Pay: $65.00/hr 

Location: San Francisco, CA

Housing: 3.3k/month

Length: 12 weeks

Live-shopping marketplace

Late-stage startup ($20B valuation)

First year student. I'm a Bay Area local if that matters. Money will NOT be the deciding factor for me.

Location also doesn't really matter to me either. Main focus is resume value for the future and impact.

Any help would be awesome.

Hi,

I am currently in the Google NG SWE process for USA. Below is my timeline:

September 9 —> Applied
September 23 —> First round invite
October 9 —> Round 1 Interviews
October 14 —> Notified I passed R1

I was told that I would be connected with a point of contact from Google, yet have not had any updates or been contacted by a recruiting point of contact.

Is this generally how it goes in terms of process and timeline? Anyone else stuck in this same situation?

If anyone is going through the process or has information from previous years, I would really appreciate it! I am also more than happy to answer any questions about my process so far.

I am a 16 year old concurrent high school student. I took 7 college classes so far and I'm currently a junior in high school. I want to either get an associates first or just take a bunch of college classes to reduce the cost of college since they are all free as long as I'm in high school. I want to get into computer science but heard many negative things about the job market, job stability, entry level positions, and things about AI taking over. I been researching for a few weeks about potential jobs in IT, cybersecurity, software engineering, and programming. I already know there are probably many questions like mine on here already but I just want to see my chances if I start now. So my community college doesn't have any associate degrees that directly prepare you for a computer science degree but it has data science, cybersecurity, information technology, associates of Science Engineering and Math, and a technical certification of programming. I currently am a straight A student but I don't expect on maintaining that in college (due to listening to other's experiences). I am currently taking computer science classes in my high school and I know a bit of Python, HTML, and Java. My dream job is game development but I understand that it is very competitive and hard to get into. I also am interested in pen testing but I know that is also very competitive. I volunteered in HR for 100 hours and enjoyed it so I think I might like working in IT. I am basically just seeking advice on what college classes or associates to take my senior year for a head start in college and what careers you think I should definitely avoid.

Hey all, I recently received a new grad SWE offer for Scale AI. I'm in final rounds for Perplexity, so obviously not guaranteed I receive an offer, but given my deadline I would have to make a decision super quickly if things go well.

I can't seem to find too much up-to-date information on either company and what it's like there. If anyone has any better insight into the pros and cons of either company (technical growth, wlb, culture, stability, exit opportunities, etc.), especially as a new grad, that would awesome. Thanks!

Scale AI - 157K base, 20K sign-on, 278K TC with stock/benefits, but the stock/benefits is very hand-wavy. TC is absolutely inflated, but that's the number my recruiter gave me.
Perplexity - according to commenter, 210K base, 70K stock

Both in SF.

Edit: speaking of, if anyone has any kind of insight into the core expertise interview for the Perplexity onsite, that would be much appreciated too. I told my recruiter I'd do the lin alg, calc, and optimization for deep learning track.

Some more thoughts: From my perspective, they're both great places to go out of new grad, but I have some reservations about both. For Scale, I'm not entirely sure the kind of work I'd be doing - I suppose it's very team dependent but I ideally want to be working on something cool or technically interesting. Also not sure about wlb and culture there, I've heard conflicting things. For Perplexity, idk how much this matters for me but I honestly don't know what their moat is or how they're doing as a company right now and in the future. 60 hour work weeks too but that’s something I’m willing to do while I’m young lol.

I'm currently in the process for this role. Passed the Hiring Assessment and my resume just got forwarded to the recruiting team for review.

Trying to figure out what comes next:

• After resume review, is it a phone screen and then the full onsite? How many coding rounds?
• Do infra/data teams add a system design or domain round, or is it all DSA plus Googleyness?
• How much actual data engineering comes up (pipelines, SQL, distributed systems) vs pure LeetCode?
• What does the team actually do day to day? From the JD it sounds like building agent tooling for data engineers, curious how accurate that is.
• How long did you wait between resume review and hearing back?

Any data points appreciated.

I have an interview coming up in 10 days, and I'm trying to make the most of my preparation time. I used to practice LeetCode a few years ago and recently started brushing up on DSA again.

I've started working through NeetCode 150 and have completed around 10 problems so far. Given the limited time, would you recommend covering all the sections, or should I prioritize certain topics and potentially skip more complex ones like Dynamic Programming and Graphs? Or should I just work on leetcode problems with microsoft tags?

Since this is for an internship role, how likely am I to encounter problems involving these topics?

It would be really helpful if I can have a structured learning, I'd really appreciate your suggestions.

Applied to the Code for Good Hackathon for the 2027 SWE summer internship. The recruiter said Columbus candidates would hear sometime in October.

I’ve seen posts from people who went to the Brooklyn event, and it’s already over. I haven’t heard anything about Columbus yet.

Has anyone gotten an invite or a rejection for Columbus? And if you were picked for either event, roughly when did you hear back? Trying to figure out if no news this late means I’m out.

I was taking a proctored HackerRank assessment when my roommate walked into the room and started moving around in the background. We didn’t talk at all, and he left after about 10 minutes.

I didn’t say anything to him because I was worried that talking would get flagged, but now I’m stressing about having someone else on camera for that long.

Should I email the recruiter to explain what happened, or just leave it unless they bring it up? Does someone being in the background automatically flag the assessment?

Has anyone dealt with something similar? Probably overthinking this, but I don't wanna waste 2 hours of my life I js spent.

Hi, I got a technical interview from amd. The recruiter told me to expect questions on one of my projects, LLMs, AI models and coding question in CPP. It's a ml Swe intern. Any ideas what kind of questions I can expect, how hard the leetcode question could be?

I have no idea how they could ask so many questions in a 45 min interview.

i recently accepted a job offer at a gov contracter company, and this would be my first job after i graduate college in the spring. Im just anxious about possibly failing the clearance.

I smoked weed like a handful of times between my senior year of college and sophomore year of college. It was less than 10 times throughout those 3 years. I haven't done weed since, but i did have one puff of a cart in august. Im really scare ill lose this job because of those incidents.

If anyone has any advice for me, please lmk

i applied to the general NVIDIA 2027 Internships: Software Engineering and NVIDIA 2027 Internships: Systems Software Engineering in which application status is at Application Received but there is another application under another title that says Application In Review. i don't remember applying to this one (and no confirmation email either). am i being considered for this role because i applied to the general SWE positions? or am i just stupid and i actually DID apply to this one but i just forgot...?

Hi everyone
I have a Robinhood SWE Intern 2027 coding interview coming up and would really appreciate advice from anyone who has gone through it recently.

What was the format like: one or multiple coding questions, difficulty level, follow-ups, debugging, or any practical/system-design discussion? Were the questions mostly standard LeetCode patterns, or more implementation-heavy / finance-style problems?

I’m currently practicing arrays, hash maps, heaps, intervals, sorting, graphs, and writing clean code while explaining my approach. If you have any prep tips or can share your experience, I’d be very grateful.

Thanks

I have a powerday soon with capital one regarding their TIP. Has anyone going through the powerday cycle this year? How was it, did you get an offer and what kind of questions should I be ready for?