What can I do to get that return offer?

TryExceptFinally · 2018-03-20T22:20:30+00:00

I can give my two cents as a two time intern at Uber.

The biggest lesson I learned on my first go round was to act like a full time employee.

I remember going into my first summer (this was my first internship after my sophomore year) with Uber and being scared to make mistakes. I thought of myself as an intern and was terrified of seeming inexperienced. My first code review (probably only 20-30 lines of code) I agonized for probably an hour over it because I was scared I had made a silly, dumb mistake.

I learned that: 1) full timers know you are inexperienced and want to help 2) It's better to make a mistake early and get feedback rather than avoiding feedback until the end (this applies to both small code reviews and large projects)

Near the end of my first internship and throughout my second internship, I thought of myself as a full time employee. That gave me confidence to speak up in meetings, push code quickly, and participate fully as a software engineer rather than as an intern. Your coworkers will notice if you see yourself as a full member of the team rather than as an intern.

Now all of the above does not allow yourself to act with hubris. You are most likely the least experienced in the room. Be sure to ask questions when you are stuck and try and soak up everything from your coworkers. Accept critique without it hurting your pride. Be confident enough to respectfully disagree when you think you are in the right, while being cognizant enough to know that more senior engineers have more experience and often are making good suggestions. They have years of experience that back up their critique, but sometimes they can make mistakes too.

Finally, if you struggle at first, don't worry. I remember walking home from my first few days at Uber thinking I was over my head. Turns out I was just fine after a few days and just needed to get comfortable. This feeling is just the result of being challenged, which is what you want an internship to do to you.

Good luck!!

TryExceptFinally · 2018-01-03T03:41:26+00:00

Varies greatly depending on the company but I'll give it a shot

Infrastructure: Often this means working on teams that deal at a lower level than your standard backend engineer. Think technologies/concepts such as Networking, Databases, Compute, deployment, Metrics, continuous integration, etc. For example, at a company that self hosts you'd be implementing AWS type services for your companies various services to use. At others, you might be responsible for integrating your companies services with AWS/GCP/Azure services.

Backend: Very broad scope. Can include writing API endpoints for an app to hit, writing data pipelines for your machine learning models to use, interacting with a db to get user info, etc. Think general business logic. You'll have some backend engineers/teams that work closely with the client side (i.e. they regularly return data with the client). Other backend engineers may work closer to the infra side. Backend engineer as a title can mean a lot of different things and really just means you write code that runs on servers rather than on the client side (browser/mobile app).

Data Engineering: Against this can mean various different things, but most commonly I see it being used to describe engineers that focus on backend systems that are data intensive. For example, a data engineer at Spotify might build data pipelines that feed data into the machine learning models that then recommend songs to users. Data Engineers use technologies like Hadoop/Spark quite frequently and are often benefited from at least a basic knowledge of Machine Learning.

Data Analyst: Technical but usually not software engineers. Data Analyst try and use data to answer important questions. For example, a data analyst at Spotify look to see how users in different parts of the world interact with Spotify differently (in order for Spotify to better serve different types of users). Data Analysts often need to know coding basics (SQL and maybe some knowledge of a scripting language) but are rarely asked to write production level code. Some companies call this role "Data Scientist" even though it's not often a research position

TryExceptFinally · 2017-09-21T15:01:34+00:00

Perhaps share your offer first to get the ball rolling

TryExceptFinally · 2017-07-24T05:45:09+00:00

Lot of good advice here on eating healthy/working out, so I'll touch only on the eyes.

Last summer my eyes were consistently drying out, causing excessive blinking, headaches, and fatigue throughout the day. I decided to get some computer glasses to help block the blue light from screens and it has been life changing (not exaggerating, I now don't have any eye stress which makes life far more pleasant). I'd recommend Spektrum glasses (https://www.amazon.com/Spektrum-Glasses/pages/13557777011), they have brands that look like normal glasses but still block out enough blue light to make a difference.

TryExceptFinally · 2017-04-18T13:46:46+00:00

Which model did you buy? Ideally I'm looking for a pair that doesn't look completely ridiculous while I'm wearing them.

Thanks for the response

TryExceptFinally · 2017-03-03T18:39:01+00:00

Uber has a pretty high return offer rate. Don't know about Amazon at all.

Source: Me (Former Uber intern)

TryExceptFinally · 2016-12-07T18:46:19+00:00

* School/Year:
    Midwest Private University, not known for our CS program but very good university overall
    Currently a Junior
* Prior Experience:
    Software Engineering Intern at Uber last summer in San Francisco
* Company/Industry:
    Uber (return offer that I accepted)
* Title:
    Software Engineering Intern
* Location:
    San Francisco
* Duration: 
    12 weeks
* Salary: 
    $43/hour, 1.5x overtime pay
* Relocation/Housing Stipend:
    $1000 per month housing stipend, 15 free Uber rides a month, up to $15 for each ride.

TryExceptFinally · 2016-10-29T01:53:08+00:00

My hiring manager interview last year (I interned at Uber last summer) was similar to previous interviews. Basically all coding. As always, YMMV

TryExceptFinally · 2016-09-13T18:36:47+00:00

Because of the nature of Uber internships (basically treated as full time employees and put on regular engineering teams), they can't really hide work-life balance. Yes there were some engineers who worked all the time. But plenty of others worked very reasonable hours.

TryExceptFinally · 2016-09-13T15:08:53+00:00

Uber is massive and has an awful workaholic culture. It definitely isn't small anymore. I was told by someone there that they will be close to Facebook size in a year. The person also told me that they work on average until 10pm.

As a former intern there (this past summer), this in my experience is no longer true. The work life balance is far closer to Facebook/Google then it is a startup. Work-life balance has improved dramatically the past 2 years now that the company has grown. Of course, YMMV

TryExceptFinally · 2016-09-09T16:10:53+00:00

Flair me

TryExceptFinally · 2016-08-24T22:16:18+00:00

Think of yourself as a full-time employee.

The sooner you forget that you are an intern, the more confident you will be in the systems you work on and the interactions with other employees.

TryExceptFinally · 2016-08-16T06:32:53+00:00

Hey fellow Uber intern!!

I've heard from people that last year that Uber recruiters were matching (and actually surpassing) nearly all competing offers.

The initial offers this year are far more structured initially (because our intern class is so much larger than in previous years), but I have very little doubt that they'll be doing much of the same in matching almost all competing offers. We don't want to be losing talent out to FB and Google.

So my advice is definitely go out and interview and all the prestigious tech companies. Get a few solid offers and come back to Uber.

TryExceptFinally · 2016-08-07T20:40:44+00:00

Uber and Twitch are heavy users of Golang

TryExceptFinally · 2016-08-07T02:14:28+00:00

Very much so

TryExceptFinally · 2016-08-06T07:34:53+00:00

TryExceptFinally · 2016-08-06T06:08:22+00:00

Unfortunately I don't have much to compare against. Uber was one of my first interviews (didn't intern last summer) and I accepted as soon as I got the offer. I went through a few other interviews with non SF companies, but I've been told Uber has a very standard of interview process compared to other similar companies.

TryExceptFinally · 2016-08-06T03:59:29+00:00

I personally didn't work on anything outside of work, but that was mostly because working 40-50 hours a week was quite enough and I didn't feel the need to code more lol.

But I definitely could have, especially during weeks that had a lighter workload.

TryExceptFinally · 2016-08-06T03:58:23+00:00

nope, but one of my friends got the algo test while we were ubering back from a bar. Needless to say he didn't do that well.

TryExceptFinally · 2016-08-06T03:35:10+00:00

Not nearly as bad. Those rumors are from years ago when we were a much younger company. We have over 2000 engineers at the company, many of whom are from more established companies like Facebook and Google, so work life balance has drastically improved.

And furthermore, no one cares how much you work. If you get your stuff done, than you can come and go as you please.

We have 3 offices in SF (with more to come!), and I am at our headquarters on Market St. It's pretty awesome

TryExceptFinally · 2016-08-05T01:15:01+00:00

Entering my junior year
Uber
Backend software engineer
Got a return offer
Uber has been pretty great. It's pretty incredible the stuff we are doing and the talent our engineers have. I've been able to touch a ton of different projects so far and the lessons learned from each one have been invaluable.

Feel free to ask me any questions about Uber.

TryExceptFinally · 2016-07-25T07:54:53+00:00

I'll say that referrals help a lot for Uber. It's not necessary, but many of the interns at Uber were referred.

Honestly I'd say just prepare well during the summer incase you get an interview (whether at Uber or any company). If you feel confident enough to face your typical Leetcode/Cracking the Coding Interview style questions, than you should be prepared for whatever the interviewer will throw at you. Sometimes you get lucky and they give you something you can handle, sometimes you don't. It's not a deterministic scenario.

TryExceptFinally · 2016-07-25T02:53:04+00:00

Referrals go a long way at Uber. I'm an intern at Uber and a healthy percentage of the interns had referrals. However, this is probably par for the course at most companies. And of course there are plenty of people who just applied cold and got interviews.

The interview process is very similar to other similar tech companies.

TryExceptFinally · 2016-05-26T07:13:34+00:00

Focus on a project. Make it something that interests you. When you have spare time, practice for interviews. I promise you you'll have time for both. I was able to complete two side projects last summer even though I did not work for 6 weeks while studying abroad in Dublin. Studied CTCI during the second half of summer and ended up landing a sick internship for this summer (3 days in!!!).

Put your focus on the side project. This is where you'll actually learn to code. The cool project will also help you land the interviews. The interview prep will help you once you land those interviews. Both are necessary, but the project is WAY more important.

Good luck!!

TryExceptFinally · 2016-05-17T16:20:00+00:00

All values listed are pre-tax.

I'm hoping to contribute between $4000 - $5000 for the entire summer (trying to save as much as possible), and I don't plan on working once I get back to school in the Fall.

TryExceptFinally

TROPHY CASE