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8.1. Maximizing Internships

Starting your first internship is a huge milestone, but it’s just the beginning.

Just like how university is a means to an end, internships are stepping stones toward a full-time role. But unlike school, there’s no syllabus or grading rubric to follow. It’s up to you to make the most of the opportunity.

This chapter is about making sure your internships move you forward. Whether it’s your first or your fifth, there’s always a way to extract more value.

  • Evaluate internship opportunities and avoid dead ends
  • Build strong relationships with your team early on
  • Ask better questions and onboard faster
  • Advocate for meaningful work and broaden your skillset
  • Avoid common pitfalls that limit growth

Internships are Extended Interviews​

At their core, an internship is an extended interview for a full-time role. It’s not just about completing tasks or projects; it’s about demonstrating that you can be a valuable team member.

For companies, it’s essentially a probation period to evaluate whether you have the interpersonal traits needed to gel well with their team and the technical skills to operate at the level of a full-time junior developer.

But it’s a two-way street. Just as the company is evaluating you, this is your chance to evaluate them. Are there signs that the company prioritizes career growth for junior developers? Are they giving interns and junior developers meaningful work? Are you surrounded by people you can look up to, learn from, and see yourself working with in the long term?

Remember, an internship is more than just getting experience. It’s a chance to test-drive a workplace and team. Use this time to determine if it’s the kind of environment where you’d want to invest your energy and grow into a full-time role.

Try As Many Environments as Possible​

When you are an intern, it's totally ok to leave a job after 4 months, whereas as a full-time employee it will reflect poorly on your resume if you don't work somewhere for 6 months to a year.

While you are an intern, try to work in as many different environments as possible:

  • Different company sizes: Work at a startup, a mid-sized company, and a large corporation. Each has its own culture, processes, and challenges.
  • Different team structures: Experience working in cross-functional teams, feature teams, and platform teams. This will help you understand how different teams operate and how you fit into the larger organization.
  • Different tech stacks: Work with different programming languages, frameworks, and tools. This will broaden your skill set and make you more adaptable.
  • Different technical domains: Work on teams that focus on different areas: authentication, payments, messaging, etc.

Remember the workplace variables discussed in chapter 4. Each internship is an opportunity to explore these variables in different contexts.

Having experience with different company sizes and team structures will help you on a personal level understand what kind of environment you thrive in, and what kind of team structure you prefer.

When you are later looking for a full-time job with different tech stacks, and different technical domains will extremely increase your ability to get hired. We'll discuss this more in chapter 8

Corporate Ladder Climb​

With each internship, you should aim for greater pay and greater prestige.

Even if you know you don't care for working at a big company, saying you did work for a big company on your resume will help you increase your chances of getting hired later on.

There are some companies that just "having the name" on your resume will look lucrative to the hiring manager looking at your resume.

If you decide you do want to work at a bigger company, it's harder to climb the corporate rungs if you only start to care about this as a full-time employee.

As an intern, you can climb a prestige rung every 4 months.

As a full-time employee, you can only climb a prestige rung every year, and even then it looks bad if you're spending such a short time at a company. It's also significantly more effort to land a full-time job, they require more interviews, and are significantly more rigorous in their hiring process to unsure their candidates are a good fit for the company.