Interns at Microsoft

One of my favorite times at work is when the interns in my organization present the projects they have been working on for the past 10 or so weeks. It is amazing to see what they have accomplished during that period, and its impact on the business.

 

In my groups, I always make sure that everything the interns work on makes it to production and has visible business impact. The interns enjoy that quantifiable sense of accomplishment and seeing that their work lives in a launched product and improves some aspect of it.

 

After the interns demo their projects, I schedule follow-up 1:1 meetings with each of them. During the meeting, we go over their experiences during the internship, what they have learned in the process, and how can we make the experience better the next time around.

 

Their suggestions are always on point, constructive, and actionable. The conversations invariably drift to learning more about Microsoft, and what advice would I give them to have a successful engineering career after graduating and joining the workforce.

 

I always give them the same advice I give to seasoned software engineers be curious, collaborative, and develop your communication skills.

 

In our field, curiosity is very important. The field changes very fast, and curious engineers adapt and learn new skills that help them in their career. Technologies that are hot today are obsolete tomorrow, and curiosity and learning guards against that.

 

I have hired many an engineer that had no formal education in machine learning, distributed systems, or language runtimes, but were curious about the area, and their curiosity drove them to do the legwork, and learn from textbooks, online courses, open source codebases.

Curious engineers are also not shy at asking questions and using these to elevate their knowledge about the subject matter, or help others articulate a design or idea better, which is a big win for the whole team.

 

In our field, collaboration is also very important. Software development is a team sport, and today’s large codebases are seldom developed in isolation by a single developer. They usually involve multiple engineering teams, and multiple disciplines such as design, product management, testing, and operations. Learning how to navigate that maze and collaborate within and across disciplines is a valuable skill to have and pays off later in one’s career.

 

Finally, we come to communication skills. Most engineers dedicate an inordinate amount of time to learning new technologies, and forget to develop, and exercise their communication, presentation, and influencing skills. These skills are important even at the beginning of one’s career, and become deal breakers as the career progresses, both for individual contributors and managers.

 

After our conversation, the interns spend the rest of the week off-boarding, and go back to school. I am always pleasantly surprised when they reach out to connect later, and doubly happy when they decide to join my teams after graduation.