[crazypyro]

As someone who just went through the internship process with a few different companies, I find this fascinating. This is pretty much what I expected going into the experience (multiple interviews, at least 1-2 coding questions/examples to do, a test maybe). Out of the few companies I interviewed from, I had nothing as intense as this. The majority of them didn't even test coding/theory knowledge at all. They were just simple interviews that lasted 2-5 hours. The hardest part of any interview was a freaking mental acuity standardized test I took at the company who I'll be working for that wasn't hard, so take the term "hardest" lightly. Good news is I accepted an offer at that smaller engineering company! A good portion of my interviews were for engineering companies because of the employers my university attracts, so that could also have affected the technical parts of the interview.

I'm not sure how I feel about how many interviews and how long this process is. I know some of my fellow students would be completely blindsided by such a long process unless it was clearly laid out. The compensation seems nice from the companies that hire around here (I go to a predominately STEM university in the Mid-West and all the companies I interviewed with came to our career fair in February, which is pretty late in the process). I'll make just over half that much monthly, but it'll be June-December and in STL. The highest I've heard from my classmates is 7k/month, but that was from Exxon Mobile and there was very little technical parts of the interview. He did have to take a hair test for drugs though. Ideally, I believe most of the larger corporations, like Boeing, Monsanto, etc, (like the article said) start interviews after the fall career fair.

Another side note about compensation: Seems to be pretty wide spread between 13-30/hr (without adding in housing) at companies around the Midwest. I don't exactly have the greatest academic credentials though (3.0 gpa), so some of the more selective companies may pay more, especially for graduating seniors. Exxon-Mobile being the highest, Boeing right in the middle of that range, and a local ISP looking for a non-coding cs major on the low end for the curious.

edit: Just adding in details as I get time.

FORGOT THE MOST ANNOYING THING

I was given the offer on Friday and he needed an answer on Monday, else he was going to extend the offer to other candidates. This was pretty obnoxious to me, but I ended up taking the offer because I was interested in it more than my other potential offers, but seriously, recruiters, a weekend is not enough time to get back to you with an offer, especially when other companies are asking you to keep them notified with enough time that they can either speed things up or not waste time on a candidate.

[chimeracoder]

> I was given the offer on Friday and he needed an answer on Monday, else he was going to extend the offer to other candidates.

This is known as an "exploding offer". In fact, Joel Spolsky (founder of Fog Creek, the company featured in this article) has a great post on this practice[0] (spoiler: he's against it).

[0]http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/11/26.html

[crazypyro]

Thanks for the link. I was tempted to make a post asking for advice before my search back in January or so, but I decided not to. It would've been nice to have some strategies against this kind of offer, but the nice thing was the company was my first choice, so it didn't end up being a huge deal.

[scrumper]

> MOST ANNOYING THING

A weekend is plenty. You're an intern: there are many, many more of you to choose from. As you pointed out, nobody wants to waste time. The person that offered you the placement wants someone who wants to be there, not someone looking for an backup offer.

[asafira]

I am going to respectfully disagree. Just because the company can do it doesn't mean a weekend is plenty. You are given a weekend to decide where you might spend months of your life, potentially in a place you've never been. On top of that, who knows if that weekend was going to be extremely busy for you? Just because you take one week to decide on an offer doesn't mean you don't want to be there. It's also not at all an industry standard to give such a short timespan for the decision; if anything, it's a reflection of how little the company will care about the intern when he/she is there.

All in all, a weekend is certainly not "plenty". I sympathize with crazypyro.

[scrumper]

Thank you for the respectful disagreement (vs. 'smug'.) You make good points and I have some sympathy too - I understand that it's not easy being forced to make a quick and major decision. That being said, you don't always get to set the pace, and being confident in making decisions on the basis of imperfect or incomplete information is a valuable life skill. I can think of no better time to make a low-risk, snap decision about where to spend a few months than in the middle of college.

With regards to the decision around where you might spend months of your life, it's not like the location of the internship was a secret before crazypyro interviewed. The question about whether the company will treat the intern well is more nuanced, and you'd have to go with your gut.

Given the competitive nature of the market for CS interns and the quick decisions needed, the Secretary Problem might offer a good solution for crazypyro and others in that situation.

[crazypyro]

Just to re-iterate how quick the turn around was, I interviewed on Thursday, got offered on Friday while I was at an interview for a different internship and then had to accept by that Monday.

[_pmf_]

> You are given a weekend to decide where you might spend months of your life, potentially in a place you've never been.

Well, I tend to think a bit about these matters before applying.

[mwfunk]

This is actually true, nothing smug about it. It's an internship, and a lot of companies look for people who might be interested in working for the company after school's over. If someone has that much to think about that they would need more time, then they clearly have no interest in the company itself- they're just looking to get the most money, regardless of who it's coming from.

The differences in compensation aren't that huge, and it's just a summer, and the interns themselves are usually still living off of their parents. So, usually anyone that's agonizing over nickel and dime stuff that early in their career likely has no enthusiasm for what they would be working on (which by itself is reason enough for not taking an intern), and might be super entitled on top of that, also not a good thing. Because, again, we're talking about mostly CS undergrads here. A very small number of them might have a big impact over the course of a summer, but for the majority of them it is practically charity for these companies to take them on- they're not getting anything out of it other than giving a potential future employee some hand-on experience.

And, it's an employer's market- there are plenty of equally qualified interns to choose from in many cases, as well as a small window of time in which they either have to pick an intern or not get one at all. If they gave everyone weeks to make a decision, they could easily end up taking so long to even find an intern that they would run out of time in which to do it.

[army]

There's a difference between being enthusiastic about working for a company and being so keen to work to them that you're not even going to consider alternate offers. But seriously, you think that someone is going to be a bad employee just because your company isn't their one true love in the world?

I don't really think there's a justification for exploding offers that prevent people from considering alternatives, it's mainly just a way for employers to attempt to get the upper hand. From what I've seen it's often a) arrogant employers who can't comprehend that they're not the only attractive place to work b) game-playing employers who know that most college-age people aren't going to stand up to unreasonable demands and that these sort of gambits can prevent them from having to actually compete directly with other employers c) employers who do have an urgent need to fill a position (i.e. who aren't hiring an intern).

[Taylorious]

That's simply not true. CS internships vary widely in compensation and often approach entry level wages. I know interns making 7500 a month at Palantir, 4800 at Intel, 6500 at Amazon,and others. All of them have different relocation, housing, and other benefits on top of salary. None of these interns are from where they are interning, they all are flying out to live in a different state off of their own dime. Some of them even had to fly in to interview (as a freaken intern!). The CS job market is weird right now.

[fecak]

Actually, the differences in compensation can be much more substantial than one might think. I spoke to a few interns last year who were entering the job market, and compensation ranged from fully paid housing and nearly 100K (annualized) to numbers less than half that in the same geography. For college students, the difference between earning 10K or 20K in a summer is likely a decision that could require more than a weekend if the 10K comes with external upside.

[Taylorious]

There aren't necessarily "many, many more" quality interns to chose from for these companies. There is labor shortage in the tech industry right now and some interns are quite capable of contributing real work. That makes them valuable and gives them leverage. It is not unheard of for interns to pit big companies against each other for a better offer these days.

[crazypyro]

I don't know if you haven't been on an internship search lately, but I'd say CS interns, especially ones that that are going to be seniors and with prior experience, are in high demand. Even with my less than stellar resume, I got a high offer rate from everywhere I interviewed.

[ampersandy]

The most annoying thing about internships are smug comments like this about interns.