

Don't take your highest-paying internship offer - AlexeyMK
http://alexeymk.com/dont-take-your-highest-paying-internship-offe

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socratic
Is there a better signal than high-pay for choosing a technical internship?
Looking at Alexey's list, with the exception of hedge funds, Google, Facebook,
Twitter, Dropbox would be my top choices for where to do a technical
internship, and they're also the highest paying. I suspect this is because a
good engineering culture leads to engineers that cost more and get better
equipment which eventually filters down to interns. (Obviously, there are
exceptions, though.)

More broadly, is interning at a startup a good place to learn technical skills
(rather than marketing, networking, funding, etc.)? Most of the information on
running common web stacks, for example (nginx, rails, django, node.js,
varnish, postgres, mysql, redis, etc.), is either freely available on the web
or even can be bought as a service (heroku, app engine, aws). By contrast, the
only way to find out how engineers have solved problems (web serving,
analytics, etc.) at truly huge scale (e.g., 10+% of the human population) is
to actually see the solutions at a big company (though sometimes companies
will publish details of 3+ year old infrastructure). Big companies also tend
to have stricter code review cultures, while small companies tend to just need
code written now. All of this seems to point to learning significantly more at
a (technically excellent) big company, even though the "output" of the intern
might appear to be less.

In fact, doing a startup seems like it might be more like resume stuffing than
working at Google or Facebook these days. Working at a small startup, you get
to talk about your impact, how you built a mission critical piece of
infrastructure, whereas at a big company you're probably only trusted to write
some small features that are not in the critical path of full time engineers.
What's more, you get to say that you worked at a startup, which everyone
pretty much respects around California, even if the startup dies or wasn't
very technically interesting. But the potential for learning quality
engineering through code review and understanding the existing infrastructure
seems a lot higher at the big company.

~~~
tikhonj
Startups vary. Just because the majority of startups on HN are making web apps
at medium scales does not mean _everybody_ is.

I've looked around at a bunch of internship and the most technically
interesting ones have all been at startups. Now, I have to admit that the
majority of startup internships I've seen _have_ been in the bland web-based
software category. And, perhaps, larger companies have more technically
challenging internships _on average_.

However, average is not what you should be interested in. And the exceptional
startups I've seen are more exceptional than what you would do at a bigger
company. This makes sense--there are more startups, they are more varied and
less conservative than bigger companies and they cover more niches, so the
variance in technical difficulty is going to be greater. Bigger companies also
have more friction: existing processes, gigantic code bases, very specific
requirements, large investments in existing tools...

Also, it's much easier to find startups in your particular field of interest.
I've talked to companies doing interesting work in machine learning,
bioinformatics, robotics and even _type systems_ (I haven't seen any
interesting work with type systems at big companies at all). And these are
just things that happen to interest me in particular: there are probably
interesting startups in whatever field happens to interest you as well.

So I think startups are actually rather good for doing something cool and
novel, especially if it's something off the beaten path. You just have to find
the particular awesome startup that interests you rather than joining another
web/mobile-based company.

Now, there are some advantages to seeing how a bigger company operates as
well. Understanding how to organize hundreds of programmers, maintain gigantic
code-bases, use significant resources efficiently and survive in a larger
corporate setting are all very important.

Spending at least one summer at a bigger company would be is useful if only
for these, just like spending time at even a technically boring startup is
great for the non-technical reasons you listed. But for learning technical
skills, especially more specialized and advanced ones, I think a startup (but
not just _any_ startup) is a great choice.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
_I've talked to companies doing interesting work in machine learning,
bioinformatics, robotics and even type systems (I haven't seen any interesting
work with type systems at big companies at all)._

What start-up is doing work in type theory?

~~~
tikhonj
I talked to somebody from the Ashima group[1] about their gloc prsoject which
they just released a version of. Having thought about it, I suspect there are
some other companies working on it as well, like maybe Typesafe.

[1]: <http://blog.ashimagroup.net/category/ashimaarts/>

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nickbarnwell
While the article has a fair point it really would be better phrasing to say
"Take the highest yield internship offer."

This summer I had the opportunity to choose between a couple of YC-backed
companies at different stages, a Founders Fund/500 Startups-backed company and
Google. I chose the latter - not because of the pay, but because it was the
only offer that would be a truly novel experience. As one of the rising
freshmen the post mentions, experiences include:

\- A startup that didn't gain traction and went under

\- A startup that had its Series A and a liquidity event within 18 months

\- A startup that had turned into a scalable, profitable business

While I love the camaraderie with the team and the impact on the product it's
possible to have as an intern at a company where the only difference between
you and a fulltime engineer is age, it's possible, albeit unlikely, I may
enjoy working at a large company and would still be unaware of it had I passed
on the opportunity. More importantly, being able to put Google on your resume
is a strong signaling mechanism , and the concentration of wicked intelligent,
inquisitive people of your age is hard to beat.

~~~
jimboyoungblood
_More importantly, being able to put Google on your resume is a strong
signaling mechanism , and the concentration of wicked intelligent, inquisitive
people of your age is hard to beat._

The fact that you chose Google in favor of a number of legitimate startups
signals that you are more interested in stuffing your resume than doing
something actually interesting, challenging, and impactful.

I think the days of Google being the employer of choice for "wicked
intelligent" people are long gone. Personally I'd rather hang out in a room of
random startup employees (some of whom are probably ex-Googlers) than one full
of present day Googlers.

~~~
FaceKicker
> The fact that you chose Google in favor of a number of legitimate startups
> signals that you are more interested in stuffing your resume than doing
> something actually interesting, challenging, and impactful.

That seems...a tad judgmental? I don't know claim to what GP's reason was, but
I'm interning with Google this summer because I have an opportunity to work
with a team that's doing work which is relevant to the research I'm doing in
grad school, and I don't think such opportunities are as easy to find in
startups.

~~~
jimboyoungblood
Sorry- I probably should have phrased it more carefully. I did not mean to
disparage Google, but the OP's reason for choosing Google.

It sounds like Google is a great place for you this summer, based on your
research interests. However, if one's basis for being there is because it "is
a strong signaling mechanism" then I stand by my original statement.

~~~
nostrademons
Well, the point of putting "strong signaling mechanisms" on your resume is to
open up other interesting opportunities in the future. Yes, it's stupid that
you have to do this, and it would be awesome if everybody just had perfect
information about who all the good employees are and which would be the
perfect fit for your organization. But people don't, not even at good
companies. And in the absence of that, it behooves you to do things that will
shift people's perception of you in your favor, so that you have options and
aren't prevented from doing what you really want to do.

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jmduke
I'm confused.

I think most people in the position to receive internship offers from multiple
reputable companies are intelligent enough to discriminate on more than money.

Raw salary, too, isn't an indicator so much of 'how valuable the company
perceives you to be' as it is a function of competition and cost of living.
$10K a month working for a quant firm in New York sounds great, but your
living expenses are going to be much higher than, say, Seattle or Boston --
and your per hour is likely to be much lower as well, as you're likely
spending upwards of sixty hours a week in the office.

~~~
larsberg
> intelligent enough to discriminate on more than money

Depending on their background, these kids are often looking at more money than
they have had in their lives and, for many, a larger salary rate than their
parents. While there are certainly some students I see for whom the internship
is just an experience exercise and the money is for fun, most of them are
facing what seems to them a crippling debt load post-graduation and so
terrified of it that the prospect of a few thousand more dollars is very hard
to pass up.

~~~
AlexeyMK
Precisely. Thank you for stating this concisely. I'll need to add it in at
some point.

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robert_mygengo
This is not necessarily bad advice. However it's kind of arrogant.

While "the point of an internship is [...] to learn what kind of work or
industry you want to be in once you graduate, to try things out and live in
cool places." is partly true (especially in the current economy) it's a pretty
naive way of looking at yourself.

If you're doing an internship, you're probably not a fully-fledged and
employable person yet. You probably aren't ready to take on a huge amount of
responsibility. The internship is there to teach you some of the other aspects
of working with others in a real company (not a college project) that you
simply can't get from college. Most 25 year olds don't have those skills.
Don't forget that.

It's a lovely job market right now in Silicon Valley, but it won't be forever.
The individuals that have a bit of humility respect the fact they need to
learn throughout their career, and in the long run will do better.

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michaelbwang
This is definitely an interesting post. I'm curious how non-technical
positions measure up in terms of summer pay per month.

~~~
Volscio
Outside of finance and tech, what other internships even pay anything?

