What I initially planned to do this summer

TL;DR : This is mostly going to be a post about how things have fucked up recently and how my plans of doing an internship this summer went into the dump and some extensions and pre-post thought process to that.

The master-plan

My ideal summer would be an internship at one of the best tech companies working and learning with/from the most talented people of the industry. Contrary to the fact that a lot would suggest to do it at a startup, I wanted to do it at a big company because I have never worked at one and wanted to learn from that experience. It must be magic to manage so many people, so many developers and still spit out the best of the products.

Dark Clouds

I applied to number of companies but I would like to comment on my experience with facebook, microsoft and mozilla. Facebook was kind of sad because I had an interview where I was asked some basic questions about JavaScript and we talked about how some things were implemented in facebook. Post the interview, they didnt reply for about a month and when I contacted the recruiter, got a reply that I couldn’t be offered a postition. Sad :‘(

Next was Microsoft. This one was really surprising because the interviewer asked me some really random question and two puzzles and eventually replied with a negative. Maybe I was supposed to not solve the puzzles.

A ray of hope

When all this action was happening, I had also applied for an internship at mozilla. This was one that I had some expectations from, mostly because I had been a contributor to mozilla for some time and luckily there was an open internship position for a project that I had already been contributing to. I applied and Kaboom, “we did not find a fit this time”. This was very disheartening, but I eventually talked to one of the project devs about it and he told that he’d look into it. About a week later, I got an email from a recruiter saying they’d like to interview me for the internship. Yay!

Well, that did sound awesome, I hopped into the opportunity and did some reading, sharpening that blade. I had 3 really interesting interviews and after quite a long wait I got an email which basically said that they’d like to move with another candidate mostly because he had more experience and I still had a year of university to learn from(o_O).

So, basically after this I was quite sad and felt really bad. I for one thought a lot about this and there were the times when I thought maybe I was not good at all. This brought me to think about some of my open source contributions as well. I used to contribute to open source mostly because I was learning a lot and learned a lot about good code, code review, processes and approach to some serious problems. But, with of all of this it also felt like why was I even contributing to a project where I was not even worth it. Sadly, I do feel that at times, but I like it when I learn.

My take on recruiting

I know recruiting is a tough work and there are some tough and quick decisions to make because of which a lot of factors come into play like where one comes from, where one is currently located, one’s name and lots of other tiny details. I dont say its intentional but everyone is judgemental when you have to make a decision. That is why I know lots of amazing people back in India and Nepal who have been rejected who I think are among the A grade talent and lots of people would agree to me. Maybe there’s a problem, one that seriously needs to be solved. But yes, this doesn’t change the fact that I may be useless as well (lets hope I’m not).

What next ?

Well, I have been conspirating on some secret schemes with a bunch of amazing people and I must say, I am enjoying it. Regarding contributing to mozilla, I would be (as a developer)inactive for a while, for sure, maybe a lot more. But I am still the guy who contributes to the open web and loves to see the web crossing it boundaries.