From the Archives asked
answered Apr 15
We talked briefly after class about my dilemma with internship offers, and I wanted to follow up with a bit more context and get your thoughts.
I am currently deciding between two internship opportunities for this summer.
One is with Meta, where I have been matched to [team] as a SWE intern. The work seems to involve large scale distributed systems, though I am still trying to better understand the exact scope and level of impact, since it could potentially be more focused on building dashboards. The other is with Amazon [team], on a team that works on large scale ML systems supporting product cataloging, with infrastructure supporting tens of thousands of models, also as a SWE intern.
In this situation, I see Meta as having higher upside due to company name, but potentially a weaker project, while Amazon seems like a stronger project but with less upside from a company brand name perspective. I would really value your perspective on how you would approach this decision and what factors you would prioritize.
As additional context, I do have a fall internship lined up with Google working on research for SecGemini as a SWE intern.
If you have any advice on how to approach this decision, or what signals I should prioritize when evaluating teams at this stage, I would really value your perspective.
Thank you again for your time. I appreciate it.
Philip's answer
I think you're absolutely right that the upside of Meta is better. It's hard to tell how the team will be, but I think what you're trying to do right now is build toward a brighter future for yourself.
Amazon on your CV is going to be nowhere near as strong as Meta on your CV. Since it's an internship, there's very low downside. Even if you don't like your team or the work, you at least get it on your CV. Honestly, even the most boring jobs can be made quite interesting if you set your mind to learning as much as you can.
The other thing about Amazon is that it is not anywhere near as focused on developer happiness as any of the other major software firms. To Amazon, I think software engineers ultimately still feel like a cost center. Almost any other major software firm views their developers as their key asset, not a cost to be reduced.