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Intern at a YC Company
- diegorbaquero 8y agoThe application process is really smooth! Kudos to whoever built it.
- snowmaker 8y agoThank you! That was all https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mattlong https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mattlong
- fakename11 8y agoI agree it was very nice!
- metalgearsolid 8y agoWhy do I have to be a student to qualify?
- snowmaker 8y agoWhat's your current situation? While exceptions exist, internships are usually designed for full-time students who are supposed to go back to school in the fall. If you don't have a hard commitment like that, companies would typically prefer to just hire you full-time.
- metalgearsolid 8y agoI've been working full time as a mobile developer for 2 years after dropping out of college nearly immediately and attending a bootcamp the subsequent summer.
- badfrog 8y agoWhy not apply for full time positions at these companies?
- metalgearsolid 8y agoI don't qualify. Edit: I should elaborate. There are companies out there offering internships that I would die for. I don't mean FAANG stuff or Big 5 or whatever. I'm talking small shops like Teenage Engineering or medium sized business like Ableton or Native Instruments. I have been put in an awkward position where I have experience working full time as a developer, but I'm not necessarily learning anything or developing my skills. It sucks not being able to qualify for a certain subset of entry-level opportunities because I'm not apart of the college/university institutions. I will be keeping my head up as the position I am in may just be what forces me to be extraordinary at what I do.
- sokoloff 8y agoI don't want to be too blunt, but I think the barrier you are seeing is 25% real and 75% in your head. Some of the best coders and ops people I've ever worked with either never went or never graduated from college. If you've been working 2 years as a full-time mobile dev, you're qualified for a full-time role. We pay our interns industry salaries, just for 3 months instead of 12. We do take a little bit of extra care to give them a good intro to the company and make sure we take them to a factory in their first (and only) 3 months and have a few intern events over the summer, but otherwise, it's 80-90% like having a software developer job. A few places will have some HR/recruiting drone 86 your resume because of no college. Many will not and most hiring managers who are/were programmers won't care. tl;dr: Apply anyway (for full-time).
- pmiller2 8y agoAlthough OP's situation is different in that they have 2 years of experience, I can definitely say that companies won't just hire someone full-time with zero experience anymore (even into "new grad" or junior positions). College internships weren't always a thing; a career switcher might not have any tech experience to put on a resume, and a lot of companies and recruiters don't even look at personal projects. It's a very tough row to hoe starting from zero and getting a job as a developer.
- somethingle234 8y ago> If you don't have a hard commitment like that, companies would typically prefer to just hire you full-time. I don't think this is true. The bar for hiring an intern is often lower.
- paxys 8y agoInternship programs at almost all tech companies are designed for students. Companies hiring interns are very likely to have full time positions as well, so you should look into applying for those.
- ronilan 8y agoYep. How about a “Senior Intern Program”? BTW: It’s a good and underrated movie (https://youtu.be/ZU3Xban0Y6A https://youtu.be/ZU3Xban0Y6A)
- moosey 8y ago> They’re all well-funded, growing rapidly, and have competitive salaries for interns. Excellent. Unpaid internships should be illegal.
- wbronitsky 8y agoIn California, at least, they are
- badfrog 8y agoThese are software engineering internships, where top firms pay interns around $10,000 a month. Ethics aside, it wouldn't be in a company's best interest to offer unpaid internships because they wouldn't get any good candidates.
- ttoinou 8y ago> top firms pay interns around $10,000 a month Source ?
- ampersandy 8y agoCheck Glassdoor if you doubt it. Numbers probably aren't including housing, which in Silicon Valley puts a ~$7500 monthly salary roughly up to $10k.
- notyourwork 8y agoThe # sounds about right, I work at a big well known company.
- alehul 8y agoIntern at a top tech company like Google or FB, and (I’ve heard as of this year) you’re looking at like $8-$9k/month plus housing and even your laundry taken care of for you (specifically FB here). Meanwhile, the top HFs and prop traders will pay the same or better (often higher pay, no housing). Jane Street is a big one (esp. if you go to Brown), Citadel isn’t even top-notch and will offer that, and then obviously D.E. Shaw, Renaissance, Two Sigma, and so forth.
- applecrazy 8y agoThis looks like a great opportunity! I am a graduating high school senior and will be enrolling in an undergraduate Computer Science or Computer Engineering program in the fall. Is it still possible to apply through this application? Thanks!
- snowmaker 8y agoYep! I did an internship at a startup after my senior year of high school - it was awesome.
- applecrazy 8y agoThank you so much!
- saagarjha 8y agoFebruary is a bit late for summer internships in my experience–most students have probably already accepted one already for fear of not having one over the summer.
- 2arrs2ells 8y ago+1. It's a little insane how early the internship "season" is these days (I know interns who signed offers in Aug/Sept 2018 for summer 2019 internships). Maybe YC & YC companies can bring some order to this internship arms race by establishing clear application/decision timelines for YC companies? My sense is February is too late, but September-October applications for November decisions might work well.
- 2arrs2ells 8y ago(Also, my company Clever still has one or two internship slots for 2019! https://clever.com/about/jobs/software-engineering-intern#gh_jid=6194 https://clever.com/about/jobs/software-engineering-intern#gh...)
- QML 8y agoCan we just push deadlines back to December? That's around the same time as most college apps are due, and they're basically the same process.
- saagarjha 8y agoFrom my experience, most of the August/September signings are return offers or chance encounters for people’s “dream” company, which they are happy to accept even if it limits their options. I think the bulk of internship hiring at large companies happens in November/December.
- dtrailin 8y agoThis is something I see startups miss a lot and I'm sometimes surprised they are able to get good interns. Usually by the end of October and especially by the end of November most good students already have an internship lined up at some big company and I see startups that I would consider pretty high caliber recruiting interns in February.
- protomyth 8y agoI really like this line: Finding summer housing in the Bay Area is usually a big chore, so we’re excited to be rolling out a program (more details soon) with some great YC companies to make it easy That will open up the internships to a larger group of students.
- DanFeldman 8y agoI interned at a YC company as my first internship (LeadGenius, YCS11) before they had this organized a program. I had no idea what YC was before I applied, and learned about YC and HN later. The YC dinner was great, ended up making some connections and eventually applied to YC Fellowship two years later and went through myself. The YC network has been great for me, and it all started with an internship within a portfolio company. I'm at another YC company, Starsky Robotics now, and we're open for interns! Come join and build self-driving trucks.
- lawrenceyan 8y agoVery nice recruiting method. Subtle, but powerful because of it.
- DanFeldman 8y agoOn behalf of YC or Starsky? For YC, it was pretty damn slick, but made possible only because a close-knit bond between companies exists to an extent. I remember being super interested in self driving cars, really wanting to work at Cruise and getting their founders email from a YC Partner at the dinner. I was just out of my freshman year, and extremely nervous about emailing the cruise folks, and some of my coworkers at LeadGenius helped me draft intro emails. They were just really great people. My managers at LeadGenius (YC alums themselves) were the first people I told when I got into the fellowship. There were a lot of signals along the way that the folks involved in YC, from the partners to the founders, were __good__ people. I wanted to be part of that. And still am, and still do.
- throwawaypls 8y agoI would ask people to stay away from Starsky. Terrible recruiting practices -- I met some of their senior staff and they assured me, well even guaranteed that someone will get back, but no one did. As job-seekers, we should start maintaining a black list of firms that treat prospective employees badly, and urge others to not apply.
- 8y ago
- kevindeasis 8y agoMy younger brother is in his second year of comp sci. I was wondering if has enough skills to be considered. If not, what do you guys recommend for him to work on? This is a copy of his CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1shLwzU4egTm-DSt9eBRfhun87_rVwGrF/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1shLwzU4egTm-DSt9eBRfhun87_r...
- aboutruby 8y agoHe could easily get an internship at Facebook (non-YC) or maybe Airbnb (YC). He definitely has enough skills to get a good internship.
- LawnboyMax 8y agoI would say he has enough skills to get an interview at those companies. Solving coding interview questions is a skill that has very loose correlation with any side project/real work experience IMO.
- fakename11 8y agoIt's hard to get the attention of the recruiters at those companies in my experience.
- barry-cotter 8y agoYour brother should remove 12 Rules For Life from the list of books read. It cannot possibly help and will plausibly hurt with HR. Don’t signal political views or cultural affiliation unless you’re going to signal you’re of the left.
- nomadiccoder 8y agoIs this purely for software development/engineering or does applied research still qualify?
- QML 8y agoThere should honestly be a Common App for internships: one application, a standardized coding challenge, and then interviews. TripleByte seems to be trying to do something similar for full-time, but they don't cover internships.
- HelloFellowDevs 8y agoSomeone's tried with https://www.internblitz.com/ https://www.internblitz.com/, I've never used it though and now I'm out of the university system.
- dumbfoundded 8y agoI think the Common App is awful. Many of my friends out of high school applied to a few colleges. I applied to 17. Why? The cost of a college app is ~$75. The Common App turns careful consideration of where you want to study into a monetary game. I was lucky to afford it. Most people can't. As for TypeByte, I think it's okay. My girlfriend went through it, passed with flying colors and got many interviews. The problem is jobs like colleges differ vasty. Perhaps a better solution for the problem is a meaningful certification. Then you can simply focus on the specifics of the role and company to see if it's a good fit. Determining qualification is a solved problem in many other fields.
- ascar 8y agoSo you are saying the current system is better, because rich students have better chances as they can afford more applications? The current college system in the US is entirely flawed. College education should be free and slots given based on merit and not money. What you pointed out is that this bad system already starts at the cost for an application. University education in Germany is basically free (~300€ per year) and application costs are printing 2-3 pages and sending them in or bringing them personally. And that's only for the final step, everything else is already online.
- igorkraw 8y agoSome slight corrections/comments (source, German who went through our education system) 1. Depending on the university, you might not even have to print anything out, I applied to TUM purely digital IIRC 2. While I was studying they abolished the study fees. What you pay is student unions dues, which depending on which state include a public transportation ticket, access to additional medical consultations and career services and other stuff 3. We can also apply for federal study aid, depending on need. I worked and had parents who could support me, so I "only" got around 6000€ for all of my studies (plus an additional 3000 for studying abroad in Switzerland for a while) of which I'll have to repay 50% interest free, less if I can pay it off in a lump sum. 4. This is a very social-democratic German perspective, but I'd argue education is a right and should be given to everyone, limited only by the available resources. Conditional on limited resources split it between prioritising need (e.g., increasing social mobility) and prioritising ROI (in a rough sense, merit) As an aside, I will be happily corrected if this is wrong, but I remember reading that in 2012 Germany graduated almost as many engineers (3 years bachelor plus master graduates, most of whom did a bachelor before) as the US (4 year bachelor with most people not going for the master of not as part of a PhD, if I understand correctly?). While I'm sure you can't exactly equate these numbers, with population numbers of 82e6 Vs 300e6 this seemed to me like the German system was doing something right - especially given German engineers seem(?) to be well qualified in the international comparison
- jonmarkgo 8y agoThis reminds me a lot of HackNY (https://apply.hackny.org/ https://apply.hackny.org/) - it's a non-profit in NYC that handles housing, activities, and placement for NYC startup interns
- imedadel 8y agoCan I apply from outside the USA?
- mesaframe 8y agoYes, few countries are listed in the blog
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]