I thought I got unlucky with my interviews.

In the first one, the interviewer didn't paste the question and was an ESL speaker, and I thought I could have done better if it weren't for that.

The second interview the question they gave me was pretty insane for an internship and not being able to run your code. Again, I thought I got super unlucky getting it. I wasn't able to solve it, but my code showed I understood the solution with hints.

I thought at most I was going to get a third interview or a slim chance of a redo, as I complained to the recruiters about the first one.

I should add that the first interviewer brought up my school, so there's that.

It was for a small local company. They said, “you can use ai.” They wanted me to build a FastAPI server on a SQLite 3 database, and I forgot how to use SQLite3, so I used ai for that, and nearly every other endpoint because I hadn’t worked with it for years and didn’t know the structure of the query responses. It’s like they expected you to know everything off the top of your head and I got the sense that “you can use ai” was just a joke.

Like what the hell is the point of “you can use AI” if they expect you to code everything by hand? Also, how do they expect you to familiarize yourself with a technology in just 30 minutes, and write validations for 8 difference scenarios?

I’m sure someone else coulda done it, but nope, not me.

No jokes. My family has their own business (non-tech) and I was offered to work there for probably any position that would be made for my skills after graduation. It seems like a no brainer but I do hate mixing family and business together because my family is complicated enough lol.

Title? Ive been in Tm for a week but haven't heard anything is it gg.

Seriously, if you don’t talk to people outside of CS, go and do it ASAP because it gives you perspective on the bloodbath that CS is right now.

I have an aerospace engineering friend who got a good internship at a defense company his freshman year, and all they asked him about was the projects on his resume and a couple behavioral questions (Why do you want to work here)

I also have a nursing friend who interned at a hospital last summer (paid, and they call it an externship), and he got asked just behavioral questions.

And btw, this is not to say that these other majors are easy because they are extremely hard.

But when it comes to the hiring process for CS, legit no one would be surprised if the standard for internships 2-3 years down the line is like 7 rounds of 2 hour long technicals, and interns are then expected to show system design proficiency….

😞😞😞

Hi I need help choosing my internship for 2027. I plan to join the company full-time too. These are my main ones.

Main goal is job stability, but at the same time growth.

Role/Job Title: Software Engineer Intern

Company: Morgan Stanley

Location: New York City, New York

Hourly Rate: $52.89/hr

Duration: 10 weeks

Housing/Stipend: $2,500 Role/Job Title: Software Engineer Intern

Company: Datadog

Employment Type: Internship

Location: New York, NY

Hourly Rate: $57.80/hr

Relocation/Housing: $7,500 one-time stipend

Benefits/Perks: Free food/snacks, PTO, office perks, intern events/programming, relocation assistance, travel reimbursement

Role/Job Title: SWE Intern(through special link from an event)

Company: Bloomberg

Location: NYC

Base Salary: $52/hr

Housing/Stipend: $9400 or corporate

Relocation: $2000

Benefits: free unlimited snacks and drinks

Experience: 3 Internships, 2 were SWE, 1 FAANG

If you have any questions about the interview process. Please message me. I'll be happy to let you know. And give you tips.

Would love some insight from people on how to really get better at technicals. I'm a junior who has done about 3 live technical rounds and a handful of OAs. I'm also about halfway through the 150. I started doing my interview prep rather late as I emphasized my classes and good grades in those without any foresight for what recruiting would look like. I also had 1 previous internship at a small company but it seemed kind of "fake" in my mind. I can get past a decent number of resume screens but I'm just awful at leetcode and technicals.

I've asked my friends who have secured offers about their advice on how to get better at rounds and it seems that I get the usual "just do more questions" or "recognize patterns" but I'm not really sure where to go from there. Is that it?

I've had technical rounds where I often try and write solutions to questions, think they're right, and then have the interviewer poke a counterexample at me before I try and stumble across why my solution is wrong. At this point I've genuinely become scared that I can't think for myself and independently come to solutions without assistance. From what I've seen, all the questions tend to be perturbed versions or variations of generic leetcode questions (have yet to seen a question word for word). In my experience the interviewers aren't super helpful and usually just let me do whatever I want unless they realize that I'm completely lost. I pretty much get minimal guidance, so getting in the right direction and trying to realize my errors becomes quite daunting.

It's become really humiliating and at this point if the rest of my interviews go this way I can't see myself passing any. Advice would be appreciated. Thanks

Will respond to as many comments as I can later

For context:

I have a bachelors of science in medical physics(don’t really want anything to do with the field, I have no interest in it), and I got extremely lucky last year and scored a swe job full time (I studied and got it through connections mainly). This upcoming January will mark 2 years for me, but I’m wondering if growing and getting other jobs/promotions is something realistic for me. Layoffs happen basically every other day now, and I don’t want to find out later on down the line that even though I have some experience, I can’t get any jobs due to the degree requirement. Any help would be appreciated!

How long do you usually have to wait after the OA before you get news of whether you passed or not?

I did the OA about 2 weeks ago but still no response, so I am just waiting and wondering whether I passed.

I have an interview with IBM for a Software Developer Intern role and the posting has been taken down so I can’t see any information about it. Do they allow for people to push from summer to spring?

Wondering incase the role is for summer and not spring.

Im a cs major in my junior year searching for internships. While I have applied to many companies my concern is with the technical portions of the interviews(if I ever make it that far). While I do have a basic understanding of data structures, algorithms, basic code and what not. I feel like the courses I have taken haven't prepared me enough that my coding is up to par on a technical level and I often find myself using ai tools to fill in those gaps on my knowledge. Any advice or guidance on the matter eould be helpful thanks!

I just got an email from a Google recruiter to schedule my SWE intern interviews!

I feel like I need more time to prep, so I was thinking of scheduling them about 2 weeks out, which would put me around mid-November.

Would that be too late considering Google hires on a rolling basis? I'm worried about headcount filling up, but I also don't want to rush into the interviews without feeling prepared.

Would it be better to schedule earlier and risk being less prepared, or take the extra time to prep?

Also, does anyone know if it's possible to move a summer internship to fall? Is that something I can ask my recruiter about now, or would I need to wait until after receiving an offer?

Would appreciate any insights from people who've gone through the process!

Hey everyone,

I just received the HireVue invite for the 2027 Engineering Summer Analyst program (Americas, Dallas Metro Area)

Questions for anyone who’s done it:

1. How many questions did you get, and how long was the prep and answer time?
2. What was the technical question, and how deep did it go?
3. Was there any finance or markets question for the Engineering track?
4. Is the camera recording during prep time, or only when you answer?
5. How long did it take to hear back afterward?
6. Anything you wish you’d practiced more?

and just general advice is welcome as well!

Hi,

I got an interview for a cloud and DevOps internship, and there is a section for reviewing Bash or Python scripts.

I haven't touched this for so long, do you guys know any guide to refresh my knowledge and prepare for this?

I started my first full-time job as a fullstack developer two months ago. Before that, I worked for about 1.5 years as a working student, mainly in frontend development. I'm currently working on a project with one other developer. We don't have a product manager, which gives us a lot of freedom to shape the product ourselves, make decisions, and experiment with new ideas. Honestly, that's an amazing situation to be in, especially as someone just starting their career.

But the way we actually develop software is making me increasingly concerned. PRs with 30,000 lines of code aren't unusual for us. Neither are functions that are several thousand lines long.

My typical workflow looks something like this:

I pick up a ticket, hand it over to Claude, and let it implement the feature. Afterward, I try to go through the generated code and understand what's happening. But I find that incredibly difficult. Partly because I simply lack experience as a junior developer, and partly because the code itself is extremely hard to follow when individual functions are thousands of lines long.

If I'm being completely honest, I sometimes don't even understand half of the code I'm committing to the codebase. Eventually, all the tests pass, I run several review loops with Claude, fix the issues it identifies, and manually test the feature in the UI. If everything works, I open a PR, which usually gets approved with little to no feedback.

I brought this up with my boss. His opinion is that Clean Code isn't really necessary anymore because Claude has no problem understanding huge, messy functions. According to him, with PRs of this size, you have to accept that certain parts of the code will essentially remain black boxes. What matters is being able to identify which changes require closer inspection.

However, I feel like you first need a pretty solid understanding of the codebase to make those judgments in the first place. His other argument is that AI models are improving so rapidly that, within six months, we might have models capable of refactoring our entire codebase on their own whenever necessary.

And honestly, maybe he's right about some of this. After all, our application has been working fine so far, without any major bugs.

But if this really is the future of software engineering, I increasingly find myself wondering what my role as a developer is supposed to be. My biggest problem is that I feel like I'm barely learning anything with this way of working. Even when I take the time to understand the generated code, I tend to forget most of it pretty quickly. There's a massive difference between simply reading through an existing solution and actually working through a problem yourself, exploring different approaches, making mistakes, and eventually writing the code on your own.

To me, it's similar to studying at university. I could read through lecture slides five times and still learn far less than if I actively engaged with the material and tried to recall what I'd learned from memory. Basically, active recall.

Of course, I understand that companies want to develop software as efficiently as possible. And I'm definitely not against using AI for programming. But I genuinely wonder how I'm supposed to build the experience and technical understanding required to become a good software engineer under these circumstances.

I've honestly reached a point where I'm seriously considering leaving software engineering altogether and moving into project management or consulting instead. Luckily, I've already completed two internships in consulting, so that wouldn't be a completely unrealistic career move.

I'm genuinely curious what you guys think about this:

• Is this becoming the normal way of working in software engineering?
• How are junior developers supposed to build solid technical skills when AI writes practically all the code?
• Does my boss have a point, and am I just holding on to an outdated idea of what software engineering should look like?
• Or should I try to find a different company before giving up on software engineering entirely?

I'd really appreciate hearing your thoughts, especially from other junior developers who also started their careers this year.

Which internship offer is better for quant swe recruiting next summer?

I have an interview with amd tomorrow. Any advice on anything? Any small thing would help a lot.

I recently got invited to interview for Morgan Stanley’s 2027 Summer Technology Analyst Intern Program and I have a mix technical ans behavioral interview coming up in a two-hour virtual session, and I’m a little lost on what to expect and how to prepare. Does anyone who has done this before have any advice or tips from your experience and what I can expect? I’d really appreciate it. Thank you!

title

I have a hirevue online assessment due soon and wanted any advice going into this. What to expect, content, style of questions etc. any help will be massively appreciated.

Hey guys I have a first round interview for single family swe internship. I wanted to know if anyone did the interview, and what their overall experience was, and the type of questions they normally asked.

Also, does everyone receive this interview? Not sure how if it's just an auto OA, so I wanted to check. Thanks!