The intern selection process underscores longstanding inequities in Silicon Valley recruitment and hiring. This year, layoffs and cutbacks at leading tech companies have only narrowed intern opportunities, students say, exacerbating socioeconomic disparities. In response to a callout from The New York Times, nearly 300 people — students, recent graduates and software engineers — shared their experiences applying for tech internships and jobs, with some describing the process as “brutal,” “unfair” or “disheartening.”
Inside the World of Big Tech
To try to compete, dozens of students spent hours applying for more than 100 internships, practicing for internship coding tests or working on personal coding projects to try to impress recruiters, they said. More than half of the respondents said they had never heard back from the firms where they had applied for positions.
Some students at lesser-known public universities said they felt at a disadvantage compared with their peers at computer science powerhouses like Stanford, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of California, Berkeley. A few students said they had quit part-time jobs or neglected their course assignments to devote themselves to applying for tech internships — only to receive no offers.
Some college students at higher-ranked computing programs reported more successful outcomes. Kien Pham, a student at the University of Minnesota, said he had spent much of the summer and fall intensively applying to more than 300 internships.
That included preparing for an interview with Amazon, he said, by spending the better part of two weeks writing down episodes from his life that matched the company’s guiding values, known internally as leadership principles. He later accepted a software engineering internship offer from Amazon for this summer.
Some students noted socioeconomic disparities throughout the application process.
Tech companies like Microsoft and Google have internal referral systems in which employees may recommend candidates. Those referrals can help distinguish certain students among tens of thousands of applicants. But students at lesser-known schools often lack the kind of industry, family or elite university connections that can lead to employee referrals.
Another concern, Ms. Farmer said: The intern selection process may overlook or underestimate college students who have jobs.
Natasha Singer
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