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For school groups, you really want to find competent people and register for the same sections of team project classes as them, so that you can work with them. (This might be considered networking). My school's student body was pretty small, so I had a good read on people after one year, but you should have some idea after three. For Amazon, I dunno, maybe your expectations are too high. I have a bachelors in Computer Engineering, and took a couple courses in formal/academic Software Engineering. From my 20 year career in software at internet companies, I don't think anywhere I worked was even trying to be beyond CMMI Level 1. It's just not something anybody cared about; including me. You can't use formal methods without a comprehensive specification, and nobody is going to write a specification at all, let alone a comprehensive one, so there you go. If you work in aerospace or automotive, it would probably be significantly different. My experience with tests were that they were useful only for parts of the project that didn't change, but most of the project was subject to change; so tests were mostly wasted effort (twice: once when you write the test, and another time when you have to throw the test away because the requirements changed). Full stack local testing is nice, but it's not free and if it's easy to test "in the cloud" or in production, then that's what you're going to do. I would focus on reducing the cost of deployment so that it's easy to push small things to production, so you can test in the real environment and rapidly iterate; but again, I'm not working on anything close to life safety. As you gain experience, you want to be figuring out what kind of environment you want to work in, so that when you interview, you can figure out if the position you're interviewing will provide that environment. Having an internship somewhere where you didn't like the environment is great; it gives you a real anchor point to ask questions from. Of course, you have to work somewhere, so you can't be too picky, but you can at least be mentally prepared. |